Painting, Painting, and Painting some more.

Anyone who knows me can tell you the two following things in regards to Warhammer 40k and other miniature gaming like Fantasy, Warzone, etc.

#1. I play a damned good game.
#2. I never paint my miniatures.

I'm not here to talk about #1, but instead #2.

I hate painting miniatures, I have hated painting them for years, which is why I have done it so infrequently. I mean, sure I have painted miniatures, my collection of old stuff I've done over the years proves it, as does my collection of old paints. That all aside, I never finished an army. For example, the Dwarves (Because I spell it like I want) that I have had for... phew... uh... almost 20 years are not fully painted. Sure, some of the squads may be fully painted, but that is mostly because those squads are like 10-20 in total. And truthfully my painting abilities back then sucked as much as the typical 12-15 year old gamer.

Not to knock gamers of that age, but truthfully I was horrible. I knew I was horrible, which is why I never really finished stuff, because while what I could easily visualize in my head was great and awesome, what I could produce on the miniatures was terrible.

So, because of that, as I got older I never bothered to paint. Sure I would convert miniatures, sure I would assemble them, I would play the various games, and I always did it with an army of either a various spray primer, or of just plastic/metal. I did paint the old Iron Warriors army I owned, but that was a labor of love, and in retrospect, while they may have been decent, they were far from good. The fact that the army was stolen was probably a blessing in disguise simply because it gave me a chance to not only rebuild them and get to actually painting something I wanted to paint. And lo did I discover, that I was actually a bit better than I used to be, at least better enough that the stuff looked good and received compliments. While I will never ever win a painting competition, I will be happy with how my stuff looks.

That said, I have more armies than just the Iron Warriors. For example, I own a collection of old and new Blood Angels, I own the afore mentioned Dwarves, some Empire, and a lot of Brettonian knights. But, other than my Iron Warriors, I love my Imperial Guard. Some of them are ancient enough to have once been named "Imperial Army". But the majority of them are bog standard Cadians. And most, if not all of them have been flat plastic in color save for a few individual pieces. That includes the tanks. But all that changed about a week and a half ago.

Despite over 20 hours of overtime in the past two weeks, I have somehow gone from no painted Imperial Guard, to 101 individual guardsmen, 6 Chimeras, 6 Leman Russ, and 1 Hell Hound, and this week I plan to paint my first Vendetta. So, somehow in less than 6 months time I have gone from no completely painted armies, to 2. The Mayans were right, the world must be ending.

What makes it worse, is that I have decided other than with the current Cadians I have, I will paint the rest of the guard, and convert the guard in full to be a heresy style army also. Which means... yep, say hello to the Olympian Planetary Defense force. Gotta keep up with the Iron Warriors theme don'tcha know.

Results

So, at Adepticon my Iron Warriors managed to go 9 wins, 2 draws, and 1 very narrow loss. That's counting both the Team Tournament where half of our army was the Iron Warriors and the other half was James's Pre Heresy Space Wolves. It looked really awesome to have two fully converted pre heresy armies fighting it out at one of the gates to the Emperor's palace, and it felt really really good for our team to take 4th place overall and only suffer 1 draw during the team tournament. 7 wins and 1 draw there is awesome.

In the championships however they did not perform quite as well as I had hoped. I drew Reecius from Frontline Gaming and had a very narrow loss to him, won my next two games against an all Death Wing army, and a 90 power armor body Iron Hands list with massive amounts of Lascannons. Then I got a draw with my buddy Mike in the final round of the Championships. Still I pulled off 47th out of 200+ there, so that leaves me a happy man.

And now, on to work with the ATC army, which will either be the Wolves with a bit more work added to them, or my Imperial Guard who are either going to be styled as the Olympian 7th, or the Caintuk 7th. Either way, there will be gray, there will be red, and it will hopefully start getting converted like crazy.

Because I've been bitten by the conversion bug, and it won't let go.

That does mean of course, that I will have to keep working on my Iron Warriors, because while having 6 full 10 man squads of regular marines and 15 missiles is nice, I want more.

I want a throng, a hoard, I want to be able to show off a full company level or more of marines, and by god, I will have it. So that's the goal, a full grand company. Minimum 100 power armor bodies, preferably closer to 150-175.

Best get cracking.

Iron Within, Iron Without.