Forgeworld the class A drug of the Gw hobbyists world

So I've been woefully neglecting this blog in favor of doing work, sleeping and very little else (I havent even had much time to play street fighter x tekken, which saddens me)

I did however amass a large amount of money in my sleep, work, sleep, work pattern of suck.. and ended up splurging not once.. but twice on forgeworld goodies... so im now the proud owner of a caestus assault brick.. which so far has dissapointed in game terms but i do love how big and bricky it is.. (i raised my points with Alan Bligh about the ram in comparison to the other things out there.. theres a fair chance that ceramite shielding may be in its future  due to how willy nilly its been thrown about with storm vehicles and the such.)

the kit itself was easy enough to put together and only needed minor gap filling to make it look right..

on top of this i also bought a storm eagle, asterion moloc and his mate, a deimos executioner (im expecting the rules to suck.. its a predator afterall.) some mk 5 marines because theyre the coolest mark of power armour purely for the heads alone.. sevrin loth and his mates (waiting on some replacement parts.... grumble) 2 rapier laser destroyers because theyre nuts and look cool, a mk4 ven dreadnought and 4 autocannon arms...

essentially i spent more money than i should've and was trying to stop myself from buying a thunderhawk on top of it all (need to get one eventually.. im currently outclassed by blindhamster over on B&C in this respect)

work on the army itself has been slow, mainly due to a lack of enthusiasm for the game itself.. the marine codex is lack lustre and can be easily beaten upon by the shinier newer dexes and so most games are an uphill struggle at the best of times.. doesnt help that i cannot be bothered to do the competitive thing at the moment.. its something i did in the past and did well at. i have no need to prove myself in an environment where 90% of the armies will be from 4 dex's.

ill post some pictures up soon hopefully when the storm eagle and a load of the other advanced stuff appears from fw... im getting impatient now.

Now with added psyker!

Oof! this place is dusty.. the neglect shall last no longer.. honest!

i thought id start with the picture this time.. afterall its the shiny bit that may potentially mean people read what i write. ive been busy doing night shifts of late.. they kill hobbying.. ive played like one game in about 2 months.. its horrible.

anyhoo, im going warhammer world tomorrow to buy myself lots of forgeworld goodies (assault ram, heresy era armour sets, dreadnought autocannons.. and anything else that i decided i want on the day whilst trying to resist a titan or a thunderhawk) hoping to breath some much needed life into my hobby atm thusly i decided that id actually.. you know.. pull my finger out and do some sculpty sculpty stuff and make a librarian i actually like rather than just hack at existing stuff until it looks mediocre.

now some of you (if there are any of you left) may be thinking.. "but he has no storm shield.. you're clearly insane!" and my response would be poetic, convincing and would definitley not start with "go fuck yourself" honest..

essentially i wanted to make a model that looked cool.. and as termie armour doesnt really fit with 2 handed sword wielding poses of badassery he got a magical halberd with a skull on the end of it.. and the tiniest shield in the world just so i can be a dick to people who go "but he's not wysiwyg" because he like so totally is.

in the fluff world that i live in though its psychicly attuned armour in a similar vein to sevrin loths.. just without a psychic test and a bit less powerfull.. but then in the fluff he wouldnt be using one power a turn and would be less shit.

I'm back for more, Here to set a worse example..

Honestly the title is just because im listening to hollywood undead whilst i type this and i couldn't think of anything else to call it.. But as a bonus i do have those pictures i was threatening this blog with a while ago.. more alclad wonders for y'all.

Now it may not look like a huge difference, but thats kindve the point.. theyre still meant to look like my other marines, its just a whole crap tonne easier to produce in a short period of time that it was to do them the other way.. plus theyre shinier and stuff. (you cant really tell in the pics.. they look badass irl though, ill show sorrowshard next week and make him attest to how shiny they are)



























Now this pic is a comparison for you.. new vs old.. i prefer the new ones, because the old ones caused me psychological pain, and tbh.. outside of that 1 tac squad ive been showing a fair amount.. generally arent very good (didnt strip them properly so obscured details etc... currently sitting in brake fluid waiting for the alclad happy funtime treatment)

oh and just because its worth noting.. my camera is a panasonic g3 compact slr...running on manual focus on 1/25s shutter speed and 16f for the aperture.. in iso800 with a daylight bulb and flash in a lightbox with a 2 second timer on the camera..

I highly recommend it. =P

Fire Angels: How doing a fully metallic army breaks your spirit and how alclad saved me from alcoholism

The title is a little dramatic, but to be honest i found myself eagerly painting up wolves and looking at my templars thinking "i could paint you up all nice and shiny like" because the silver dudes with their silver ways only ever seemed to evoke a "meh" from passers by and my efforts to paint them were getting lazier and lazier at the expense of quality.

So with a new job.. less dedicated hobby time and a knowledge that the current marine dex is either mediocre or boring (and sometimes both) i was finding my hobby time to be directed at other stuff.. Now seeing as i have a whole bloody companies worth of marines waiting for the Fire Angel treatment this was a really bad position to be in, but the effort the painting took (prime, spray, zenith spray, gloss, wash, gloss.. for just the silver with no highlights) wasn't worth the end result after id slacked off..

Now i've spoken briefly about Mark Bedford and his Astral Claws.. for the few of you who dont recognise the name hes one of the head honchos at forgeworld.. I asked him how he'd painted them after getting vague answers from the fw web team at gamesday and sat on the recipe for a fair while waiting for a time when i A: had all the stuff i needed to try it and B: felt the need to do some fire angel stuff.

now this wall of text may seem like over indulgence but im just painting a picture of where im coming from..

in my search for the best method to obtain the results i wanted for the silver armour of my dudes ive explored damn near everything.. every combo of gw paints, the vmc metallics, revells aquacolour metallics, the vma metals, oil washes, every type of varnish and their effects on metallic paints and in the end i found out that i should have just bloody well listened to Mr Bedford.. stupid ass guy who does it for a living!

so i bought me some "dark aluminium" alclad because dark makes it sound cooler and because my dudes were ment to be all aluminium looking according to my brain.. I also got me some Rubb n Buff which sounds more sexual than id like.. especially when you're asking some old dear in an art shop.

So the experimenting went as such... gloss black primer, alclad, wash, drybrush with sexualised metal crap... look at results and go "Ah fuck.. i'm gonna need to order more of this stuff"

ill be uploading some more pictures of stuff thats been sprayed with the liquid miracle that is alclad soon.. but for now i need to go shopping.

alclad 2: the revenge

rightio.. i said id post a pic of my messing about with alclad.. so here it is.

This is alclad dark aluminium with a quick dirty black wash (with added klear) then a quick run over with some silver rub n buff (ie based entirely on mark bedfords astral claw paint scheme) due to the nature of the alclad it means a whole lot less pissing about with metallics, is an incredibly fine layer of paint.

the legs look a little too drybrushed for my liking atm.. but that will be sorted out with some weathering etc.. overall im very impressed and need to buy more (and more gloss black primer too)

back to the primative

only because back to the shiny doesnt sound good.. and its from an era from "days gone by"

yeah shut up.

This is khiros pretending to be an ironclad.. hence the massive hammer (its siesmic dont you know!) its also a bit self indulgent as ive not reduced the size of the image to see if uploading here is better than photobucket (who auto resize my stuff.. grrr!!!)

okay so this also reduces image size apparently.. god i hate the internet sometimes.. heres a 1:1 of part of the pic of khiros just for examples sake then.

wolfy mc wolf wolf on his wolfing wolf armed with a wolf wolf and a wolfing wolf.

im quite liking this whole space wolf painting lark.. so heres some more.

also.. doing non metal coloured armour with an airbrush is a cake walk.. i honestly reckon i could get a 2k wolf/dark angel/blood angel force done in about a week.