Happy Birthday Space Marines!

This weekend Games Workshop is celebrating 30 years of their 40K Space Marine and have released a limited edition re-imagining of the original Mark VI power armoured Imperial Space Marine Mniature.  It is plastic, has the incredibly crisp detail that is now de rigueur for Games Workshop, it's a pretty impressive model.

Still, there is something about the original Citadel miniatures that I prefer, a little bit of the citadel character that's been lost as the sculpting and moulding technology has moved on.  Luckily I happened to find the original Bob Naismith scultped model in a box at the back of a cupboard, I think my brother bought him in around 1989/90 in a blister back from the Hereford Model shop, hopefully he won't notice that I swiped him.   The shop has since moved location and is still going, unfortunately you can no longer buy a blister pack of 5 lead marines for £2.99.  (Solegends.com have a scan of an old advert)

Space Orks I'm coming for you

He was a bit of a mess but after an overnight bath in Dettol to remove the old paint, he cleaned up a treat and was ready for an undercoat.  I've gone with the colour scheme of the Crimson Fists, straight off of the cover of the original 40K rogue Trader Rulebook.

The model has an amazing amount of detail and I may go back and try and paint a few more of the tiny screens and keypads he's adorned with.  Solegends.com have a nice page on him, I think the picture is from the original white dwarf appearance, he certainly appears in black and white pictures in the original 40K Rogue Trader rule book.

Here are a few more pictures:

What happened?

It's been a month since my last post and I've been trying desperately to scape together a reasonable showing for March but last months seven miniatures and four posts this month I have a grand total of two miniatures and they're not even Genestealer cultists.

First up a bit of heavy support for my Citi-Def  squad, Private Sponge and his Heavy Spit Gun

Ready for business

He will be providing plenty of covering fire for the rest of the squad.  I like the miniature but he was quite frankly a nightmare of trimming, gluing and random disintegrations.  The stub gun just would not stay attached.

Assembly problems

In the end a poorly concealed pin followed by plenty of padding with greenstuff seems to have done the trick.  The handle join remains a bit skewed but to be honest at that point I was just happy it stayed attached, especially as subsequently I managed to drill through his foot when attaching him to the base.

From the rear

Next up is another addition to my Rogues Gallery, Dredds Clone brother Rico and not the Armand Assante movie version, this one is complete with Titan treatment.

Rico Dredd

Instantly recognizable as the Mike McMahon original  as he appeared in "The Return of Rico" in 1977. (It's all in wikipedia)

Rico Dredd (drawn by Mike McMahon)

Go for your gun Joe

I really need to get Judge painted up so that a proper shoot out can be held.

Rise of the Machines

Today I have another robot, he's not quite a terminator but he's angry and he's armed.  I'm guessing he's some sort of maintenance bot and he has decided that the best maintenance he can be doing is bringing "Death to the Fleshy Ones!", after all they are the ones making all of the mess.

Death to the Fleshy Ones!

Another Mongoose Mini-bot, he was a bit of a test bed for painting red and for practising a bit of edge highlighting.  I was quite happy with the results but I'm struggling to keep the lines neat, more practise and keeping the paint thinned though should do the trick.  Keeping the paint thin when painting the highlights makes all the difference, the  finish on this is much smoother than I managed on the dustpan bot I used a similar number of layers but was much more careful about not letting the paint dry out on palette.

Not quite Rosie from the Jetsons.

Between him and and irate motorised dustpan and brush I've got the start of a robot uprising, hopefully Fido won't be tempted away to join them.

An uprising has to start somewhere

That brings me to 7 miniatures this month which is a vast improvement and hopefully I'll keep the momentum going.  I've been stocking up on undead for march but there's a real chance that the latest boxed offering from Games Workshop will throw up a it of a distraction.

Fido!

I decided Corporal Jones was probably a dog person, I also thought a Robo-Dog would be a very quick edition to the squad.  Then I thought that the Wargames Foundry have a very nice robo dog in their 2000AD range, Toby from The Ballard of Halo Jones which I thought would be a good alternative to the Mongoose Robo-Dog.

Toby, his time will come

As it turned out, Toby arrived from Wargames Foundry and turned out to be a bit on the large side for the resin bases I've been using, a new order of bases from  Tiny Worlds would be required, as would carefully removing his metal base.  Instead I stuck with the Mongoose miniature and painting him turned out to be not that quick and basing him was still pretty fiddly.  I think he's turned out all right though.

Robo-Fido

I stuck to red so that he fits in with the rest of the squad, the legs made him quite fiddly to paint  are to small to pin to the base, Instead when I cut away the metal tab I left enough to use as a pin.

Walking the dog on the mean streets of Mega-City 1 

Fido comes out of the equipment budget so corporal Jones gets his gun and 30 Credits worth of mans best Robo-Friend and some armour which sounds like a good deal to me.

Don't pet strange dogs.

He's a bit rough around the edges and I used Typhus Corrosion to cover up a bit of a mess around his paws that I made when basing him.  This instantly made it my favourite Citadel Technical paint, it will be just as good for muddying up boots to cover up unsightly basing errors as it will be for adding grime to metallic areas.

That puts me at six miniatures for February, by far my best monthly total and with a week still to go.

The Dark Lord

A short break from Sci-Fi Dreddy stuff, I wanted a bad guy to go up against Van-Halfling and who or what could be badder than a Dark lord?  As with Van-Halfling, the Dark Lord is also from Heresy Miniatures and under that cloak he could be anyone, a vampire, necromancer, Emperor Palpatine or just somebody who likes long black robes.  

Add caption

I've kept the colour scheme very simple, the black robes were highlighted with Dark Reaper  and then Thunder Hawk blue which I then glazed with Nuln oil to keep the robes suitably dark in colour, to keep the flesh pale I used a base of Rackath Flesh with a thin wash of Reikland Fleshshade.  The highlights were Pallid Wych Flesh and then White Scar white, he has not been catching much sun.

I recently came across Frostgrave and I think he would fit quite well as a Necromancer, now I need to find him an apprentice.

#7 - Total Block Lock Down

February is off to bit of a flier, for the first entry of the month I have four members of a block Citi-Def Squad.  The Citizens Defence are generally volunteers from the block and supposed to be mobilised during emergencies.  Only very occasionally fulfilling this role, I can only remember them appearing as competent during the Apocalypse War, they are instead more prone to turf wars with local gangs, rivalries with the Citi-Def units of other blocks and various random acts of incompetence and general nuisance making.

Gillian Anderson Blocks Citi-Def

The colour scheme is perhaps a bit of a Christmas hangover but I also had an unused can of Citadel Mephiston red to hand and didn't want to use a more traditional military fatigue, black helmets and padding adds a nice contrast and I think stops them from appearing to gaudy.  For the first four Squad members I've kept a very limited palette and stuck rigidly to using the citadel paints as they come straight of the pot, base, shade and two highlights, this should make the scheme easily repeatable when I add more squad members and allowed me to paint them relatively quickly.  With a good solid scheme in place I think future squad additions can have a bit more variance without breaking the coherency of the unit.

It turns out that the spray can Mephiston red is a different shade than the paint from the pot, it's a bit more muted with a less glossy finish. I'm not sure whether there is a genuine difference in the paint formula to make it more suited for spraying or if it's just a result of being sprayed.  As an experiment, one of the miniatures was base coated from the pot to see whether the difference was still noticeable at the end and I'm not sure that is.

What I'm still finding is that I'm not thinning the paint enough, the black in particular does not have the most even of finishes.  I could probably add less highlighting too, picking out all of the folds in the uniform is perhaps a bit much.

The bases came from Tiny Worlds, the casting quality was good and they needed very little cleaning up.

Captain Mainwaring

First up is the leader, in 2000AD the Citi-Def often remind me of Dads army, I think this Captain Mainwaring has by hook or by crook taken command of the unit to improve his social standing in the block. He's a little bit podgy, a little bit pompous and probably keeps notes on his neighbours so that he can quietly inform on them to the judges.  Despite tales of his time in the resistance he most likely spent the entirety of it holed up in his closet with a stash of canned goods and bottled water.

Sergeant Wilson

Every Captain Mainwaring needs a Sergeant Wilson to act as a foil.  No doubt he's the real brains of the unit, well regarded by the men and the only member of the unit to have ever had a job, mopping the floor of the local Hottie House before a local Juve gang fire bombed it.  Here he is striking his most dashing target practise pose.

Corporal Jones 

Of the four figures this one strikes a pose that looks like he knows what he's doing.  Corporal Jones has seen action and has the stubble to prove it.

Private Frazer

Of the four this one had so many mishaps while being painted, the arm falling off a couple of times, splashes of paint appearing and needing patching up, she is clearly doomed.

As a unit I think they are ready to take on their arch rivals, the Citi-Def from David Duchovny block, I'm sure they'll stick to non-lethal ammo.

#6 - A Late Christmas

This is a desperate attempt to not drop below one post a month, not boding well at all for the original plan of one miniature a week.  I'm sure January is not too late for a Christmas themed miniature either.

Plague Santa

I bought this guy from the Wargames Foundry, a company set up by Bryan Ansell of Games Workshop fame.  This was definitely a bit of Christmas painting fun, mostly done between wrapping presents.  I was short of festive decorations and I like the miniature a lot, this is not a santa that makes it on to very many Christmas cards.  He was one of four scary santa's from the Foundry, I'll post the others at some point if I manage to finish them.  In the meantime, a picture from the Foundry site, I'm sure they'll be back on sale in November.

Wargames Foundry Scary Santas

The Plague mask and corpse in a sack makes for a suitably odd Santa, I'm guessing he's visiting or possibly already visited somebody on the naughty list.  Doctors genuinely wore these masks in the 17th century, they stuffed the beak with herbs which were supposed to protect them from the plague, I checked Wikipedia  and so it must be true.

One of the more easy going images from googling "16th century plague doctor mask"

The number one thing I learnt from painting him was that slotta bases were a really great idea, I relied on just the tiny metal base initially, I glued it to an old pot so that I had something to hold and it fell off, repeatedly.  I then thought I could rely on the base alone only to find that stability was a problem and in the end to stop rubbing the paint off I pinned him to a slotta base and I think he looks all the better for it.  All of the fiddling around before I finally pinned him down did lead to the white trim ending up a little grungy due to all of the handling but I figure that he has a corpse in a sack and so a dirty trim is appropriate.

Meet Ivan

Ivan is probably what happens after one too many 'Bah-Humbugs'.


The second biggest lesson I learnt was base the miniature at the start, it so  much easier, cleaner and it is impossible to damage the paint work.  For the snowy base I used Citadels Mourn Mountain Snow, I've been dubious of the benefits of the textured paints but to be fair, applying it with a little scoop and spreading it with a brush worked quite well, it was very quick.

I'm not sure about the blue tinge to the dirty snow

I was a little surprised how at how much textured paint shrank when it dried but I did apply it very thickly.  I tried a blue wash first and wasn't impressed so then I used Agrax Earthshade to dirty it up, followed by drybushing it with grey and white.  Next time I might just apply a white drybrush.