Here is my last fully painted 40K army -- an Ork Speed Freak gang. The picture below doesn't include twenty painted bikes.
This is an old army I painted about ten years ago. My original theme was that the army had a band of Meks in charge who brought their boyz to complete in an orky competition called "Junkyard Waa!" (Let's see who gets the reference). I later added a unit of nobs and a warboss so that I could buff-up its close-combat potential.
I haven't played the army for a while, partially because the new Ork codex rewrote the design of a Speed Freak force and partially because I've been busy with other armies. However, after going through my models I think that one of these days I will paint up a battlewagon (or two) and the Deffkoptas I got from the Black Reach box in order to update my force. Then the boyz will return to bash some heads in!
The march toward Origins continues. Here is another finished terminator squad:
Okay, here's the down and dirty of it. For those of you tuning in late, the goal here is to make 18 woods sections complete with flocked bases, 36 trees and 36 bushes... all for 39 $US. Today I cover the construction of the trees themselves.
Start by drilling 6 small holes in a GW round base, cutting 3 lengths of floral wire, and pulling 3 sprigs of greenery off the bunch you grabbed at a discount craft store. Take care to leave a section on the underside of the round base large enough to hold one of the magnets. (More on that later.)
Use floral tape to bind the 3 sprigs into a bunch as shown, and loop the 3 wires through the GW round base like so. The wires will hold the tree firmly onto the base so that even rough handling and ill placed tanks cannot damage the tree.
Place the bundle of greenery on the base and wind the three wires around it. I find that making one of the wires go the opposite direction from the other two adds stability to your tree, as well as forcing the smaller branches out and away from each other. Finish the top of the tree off by wrapping 1 wire around each of the sprigs of greenery, so that you get 3 large branches at the top of the tree going out in different directions.
Now take a bit of floral tape and wrap the tree trunk. It'll take a little practice to get the tape to go around the branches, but this too helps spread them out to make it look more tree-ish.
Tear off a bit of floral clay and cover the tree trunk. You can leave this step off if you're pressed for time or otherwise like the look of the floral tape tree trunk, but the clay allows you to texture the trunk a bit and allows you to create "roots" to cover up the wire and the slot in the GW round base. Give it a few days to dry so it's not sticky before you work with it further. It will never be as hard as sculpy or Green Stuff miniature clay, but it's a heck of a lot cheaper.
Fill the bottom of the GW round base (or the large half of the bottom if it has a slot bisecting it like mine) with more clay. Be sure to mush it in there real well, so that it flows around the wire in the base. once it dries, the wire will hold the clay in place. (if you find this isn't the case and your clay keeps coming out... superglue it.) BEFORE it dries, make an indent in the clay for your rare earth magnet, then glue the magnet in place once the clay is hardened.
Behold, one tree. And a very excited Kroot Mercenary for scale comparison.
Coming up in Part III... painting and flocking trees.
For the upcoming RTT at Origins, one of my tasks is coming up with enough woods sections to equip three 4x6 tables. Since we have no trees, I need to make or buy them. I could buy them, but each terrain base of trees would cost roughly 8 bucks if I use GW trees or a decent competitor, and that doesn't count the cost of prepping the base itself. Since I need roughly 18 sections of woods, that's over 130 $US... and that's unacceptable.
No, for this project, I'll be doing 18 woods sections, including 36 trees and 36 bushes, for a total cost of 39 $US.
Here's what we need for the project.
- 1 pack GW Round bases (37 count) - $8
- 1 spool Floral Wire - $2
- 2 spools Floral Tape - $3
- 2 spools Floral Clay - $4
- 2 bunches of small-leaf fake greenery, on sale 50% off - $6
- 2 buckets modelling flock, on sale 50% off - $7
- 1 pack 40 rare earth magnets - $5
- 1 tube PVA glue - $4
- assorted scrap sheet metal - free
The idea is that we cut the sheet metal and cover it in flock to provide the base of the terrain. Then I build up trees and shrubs on the round bases, and put a magnet on the bottom of the taller trees so they won't fall over.
Stay tuned for Part 2, the basic assembly.
Fast forward to sometime in 995.M02, or 1995 if you prefer. The Black Codex years of 2nd Ed are behind us, and while armor penetration rolls have gotten easier, everyone is still photocopying blast templates so they'll have enough blind grenade markers for a typical game. Meanwhile, Armorcast is making fantastic vehicles that we never thought would see the light of day in our favorite 28mm wargame. As a result, the battles are getting larger. We're still gaming every week, but now massed battles of 10000 points or more are happening regularly.
My own Space Marine chapter, the Distant Sons, are better defined now, and I've narrowed them down to a single paint scheme. The Distant Sons are unusual for a marine chapter at this time, since they're fielding marines in old-fashioned squads of 10. Better yet, I've got banners now, and they're starting to look like a proper force.
It's in the larger battles that Commander Qalsone (call-SOWN) loses his invincible aura once and for all. There's just too much armor-defeating nastiness roaming around now, and my typical opponant is now an Imperial Guard player, so I'm learning to despise battlecannons. It's because of all these imperial versus imperial fights and high body counts that we start to develop a storyline.
At first, Ranillon and I are just engaging in "war games". Qalsone and his marines attack an imperial guard garrison with "low power" weapons and they see how long it takes them to repel us. But the larger games played at the shop aren't buying that idea, so pretty soon we have our own Age of Apostacy going on, with marine fighting marine alongside IG players, and nobody is sure who is the traitor and who is the loyalist!
In the end, Ranillon's IG and my Distant Sons marines are on the winning side of the 60,000 point world-ending battle. [The game store closed down soon after.] Under Qalsone's leadership, the Distant Sons claimed the lives of a great multitude of loyal followers of the Emperor who had been led astray by their greedy commanders. A price was to be paid for this "victory", and our imperial forces were exiled and sent on an indefinate crusade. [Ranillon and I changed jobs and moved to Ohio.]
In 999.M02, Qalsone was given the opportunity to redeem his chapter's honor and return the Distant Sons to the Emperor's grace. Preparations were made to take part in a Great Crusade [the 1999 Chicago Grand Tournament], and new marines were drafted and prepared. Qalsone was promoted to Captain of the 3rd Company, becoming a Space Marine Captain at last. He was given one of the chapter's relics to aid him in combat, a weapon claimed from a fallen Inquisitor.
Onward...
Summer, 990.M02. (That's way back in 1990 for most of us.) Having been introduced to Epic scale 40K, my college friends convince me that to REALLY enjoy the hobby, I should get into the 28mm scale Warhammer 40K as well. Turns out, they were right. (Rob Elrick, wherever you are, I blame you for draining my bank account over the years in all the steady tithing to Games Workshop I have done since then.)
With a borrowed copy of the 2nd Edition "Black Codex" rules, I set out to create a Space Marine chapter. Rhinos are $15 for a box of three, but the plastic beaky marine sets have just gone out of print. So instead, I buy a box of Space Rangers minis for my first units of tactical and devastator marines. My painting skills are terrible, but I managed one decent model, an olive and yellow sergeant with a distinctive letter Q on his chest. He's the prettiest, he's in charge. So while he leads Q squad, this Veteran Sergeant is also in charge of R and S squads. I name him Qalsone. (call-SOWN)
For the next two years, Sergeant Qalsone leads his tactical squads against the worst my local gaming group can dish out. In the vast, futuristic wasteland that was the Craddock house's kitchen and garage, he and his men faced down Howling Banshees, genestealer cults, Goff and Deathskull ork clans, chaos marines of tzeentch, and even Squat warrior brotherhoods. Though the men he led often paid with their lives, Qalsone himself never died, his Refractor Field and Stasis Grenade were always just enough to keep him alive.
Thirty-seven consecutive games he survived, clearly blessed by the Emperor himself. The time had come for Qalsone to be promoted, and a two-wound lieutenant he became. He pioneered the new paint scheme that my Distant Sons marines would carry into the future as the game headed into it's 3rd edition, and he often assumed command of numerous squads of the newly minted 3rd Company. As armies got bigger and the stomping of Titans' feet could now be felt, grander things were soon to come...
As Origins approaches (and far too fast it seems) I am hurrying to get everything done. Top of the list is everything involved with the 40K Space Hulk and on top of that list are the terminators representing the good guys. Toward that end I present a bunch of close-combat terminators.
There are five lightning clawed and one thunder hammered terminators. In normal games I plan on mixing and matching the troopers with regular terminators as needed to beef them up for hand-to-hand. In 40K Space Hulk they get to enjoy the better Space Marine rules so I plan on painting more thunder hammer equipped termies.
Here is an old conversion I did last year -- a homemade Imperial Lightning Interceptor.
As I've stated before I sure like Forge World models, but I sure don't like the price of Forge World models. So, in this case I bought a $15 plastic aircraft kit and converted it into a close approximation of a lightning. Add in a scatch-built base and I think the final result was pretty good, especially for the price. It's only meant for Apocalypse, naturally.
When it comes to specialty and pricey models like a flyer I don't believe that it is necessary to buy the "real" thing, just that the model you do have had a lot of effort put into it. I personally think it would be bad sportsmanship to, say, just buy some snap-together plastic F-15, spend 5 minutes on it, and then bring it to an Apocalypse game. But, give it a good amount of effort to convert it over into something that fits the setting and it's fine by me.
Now back to painting more Space Hulk stuff...