They are Legion

well not quite, but they are getting there. As the weather was bad and I had some time off yesterday I decided to assemble and base all my imperial guard infantry units. All I they need now is a nice spray of basecoat, which will also help securing the materials I used for basing, and then I can start painting them up. I think I'll stay with my frosting technique but first I'll get all guardsmen ready and will probably have a big drybrushing session when they are all painted and done. If i get the time I might even try airbrushing my Sentinel and Trooptransport Chimera. So all is well and as long as I am confined to indoors due to bad weather the I should make some good progress and might be able to provide you with some nice pics of work in progress within the next couple of weeks!

April depression

This month has not been productive at all as I was not able to make a single brushstroke. Assignment dates are due and I have been working non stop on assignments regarding international sales contracts and banking regulation. Two to go more weeks of this and I should be finally done for this semester. However befor I get started on my Imperial Guardsmen, I'll probably go out and get sloshed to celebrate the end of the great April depression. At present 10 guardsmen are asembled and painted, so that's another 10 to go plus heavy weapons team plus command squad plus a centinel walk and the transport tank. Then I've still got the Marcovians that I'll still need to do.
I've also been thinking about gaming tables and have been flirting with the idea of getting the big realms of battle modular system from GW. On the other hand 200 Euros is a lot of money and I don't realy have the space to store it. The other alternative is making some terrain for my grassmat, I'll probably need to get some trees and make some hills. If anyone has seen the "beasts of war" table that they sometimes use to make their videos you can get the rough idea of how a gaming table using a grassmat and terrain can look. And their table looks awesome! Anyway got to go and get cracking, painting will proceed in a couple of weeks!

The freezing Guardsman

I have finally been able to start work on my Imperial Guard! The first five models are almost finished. I made the decision to go for a classical Cadian Regiment in the typical green and khaki. However the army is going to be winter themed and I'm not quite sure how this will effect the models. At the moment I have two differnt types. The first is a normal Cadian with a snow base.

As you can see the decal is still drying as I am writing, but that is not the point. There are still some points that need to be cleaned up, but in general this would be one of the options to settle a model on a winter base and call it day. I'm happy with the model but I can't get over the feeling that something is missing. The test model I did has been weathered with brown on the boots and trousers to give him a muddy dirty look. These guys are frontline soldiers after all and I'm pretty sure that they'd get pretty dirty and grubby in the process of fighting the universal terrors of the fourty-fist millenium. Furthermore I have "frosted" the poor chap up a bit to give him a winter appearance. I basically did this by gently dry brushing the armour and the helmet in white. I also gently touched up his face and rife. I kind of like the look but I'm not sure if it looks "authentic" or if I might want to use a differnt technique to weather my Cadians. I'll still need to give weathering some thought and might check out the web for some more pics of weathered winter minis. Now I'll better get cracking on with a bit of Uni work!

Decals and Basing

Over the last two weeks I was able to find some time to try out my Decal Solutions and apply them to my models. Overall I must say that I was very impressed by the outcome as the decals really look fantastic. I would of never been able to get the insignia to look as good if I would of tryied to paint them on. I found a tutorial on miniwargaming.com that got me interessted in using these solutions. Here's a brief explanation of how they work: The System uses two solutions, one called micro set, the other called micro sol. I presume that Micro Set makes it easier to place the decal on the model, whereas Mirco Sol makes the decal soft and therefore it will adjust itself onto the model. So following the tutorial, the first thing I did was cut out the decal and place it in warm water, while it was soaking I applyied Micro Set quite thouroughly onto the area where the decal would be placed. As soon as this was done I retrieved the decal from my bowl of water and used the brush, that was still wet from the solution, to push the decal from the transfer sheet onto the model. It was pretty easy to bring the decal into place, after I was satisfied I used a paper towel to gently soak up the remaining solution from the model. After waiting for roughly a minute I then applyied a layer of Micro Sol onto the entire decal. The Decal started to wrinkle but as was said in the tutorial, this was supposed to happen. After letting the Solution dry I keept reapplying Micro Sol a couple of times. It took about a day to settle perfectly. I did however face some Issues when applying the insignia to the shoulderpads as these where round. The tutorial stated that if the decal won't fit propably the the edges needed to be cut with a sharp knife. I ran into some trouble doing this, after the decal was on the model. So I pre-cut the decals before soaking them which worked pretty good. So here are some of the results.

As you can see there is a slight shiny rim next to the decal, I might apply a matt varnish over the decals and see if this might help. I'm still looking for a good matt varnish however as GW's has caused me some trouble in the past.

Here's an image of the shoulderpad, in this case I slit my knife from the opening of the U into the middle, so the folds at the top and at the round part of the pad where able to overlap.

On this model one can see that there is a slight wrinkle in the insignia. This happens when the decal is not entirely flat when applying Micro Sol. So this one was my bad, and I'm pretty sure someone with more patients and calmer hands could do a better job of it.

Here you can get a ruff idea of how shiny the decals can get. Wrinkels and other issues concerning the adhesivnes of the decal seem to be shine brighter.

As you might have noticed I have also tryied something new in regards to basing. These are jsut some stones which I base coloured codex grey and then drybrushed in Astronomican grey. So a pretty straight forward method realy and I'm happy with the look. The bits and pieces ling around are from the GW basing kit and I will be using a lot of it for my Imperial Guard Army.

Here are some pics to show of my bases:

I have no idea who's heretical head may have been in this helmet, maybe its from GW Fantasy or something. Nothing I recognize anyway. It almost looks Lord of the Ringish. That will teach you Rhohanian Bastards to invade my Universe!

This clearly is an Eldar so everything is in the right place here. No Mordor Trolls and Santa Elves or whatever under my Flamer!

Strike from the Sky Brothers!

Here's a little update on what I have been up to. Although I've not had time to do any painting in the last couple of weeks, I thought I might upload these pics as I felt guilty not posting anything new into my blog. Anyway I have scavanged my Spacemarine Battleforce box and can proudly say that everything is built. Almost everything that is, as I could still build two more marines but wouldn't know what to do with them so they will be in "reserve" for some kind of honour guard project or something like that. I might even paint up an Imperial Fist Marine as I realy like their paint scheme. Anyway, I still had 5 jump packs left so I decided to reinforce my Assault Marines to a total of 10.

These are the five new models:

This is the first Marine in my army that is equiped with a power axe, I used a technique that I found in a white dwarf magazine to paint the axe. I built up a number of layers starting from a very dark blue up until pure white for some lighting effects on. I'm quite happy with the way it turned out, however I used the same technique on a sword and it does not have the same effect as on the axe. I'll show you the sword in one of my next postings.

I didn't want all my Marines to be posed in the same way so I tried something a bit "radical" at first I found I had gone a bit over the top with it but the more I look at it I actualy thing the model looks pretty cool. A kind of "Matrix" "Max Payne" bullet-time pose. Or maybe he's aiming at some nasty dude flying over him or what ever. I might even weather him a bit and give his armour some battle damage.

This is "Rugby-Guy"! He's charging into the enemy shoulder first, at least that's what he's supposed to look like. I don't exactly know why but the effect of his violent charge is missing something.

And this chap has got a flammer and a different type of shoulder guard. He's got a different set of legs as I needed one pair of the running legs for my other squad that I'm working on at the moment. That's why this Marine has the luxury of noting having to run and he get's a gun that spits fire as a Bonus! I actualy think that a flamer in an assault squad can come in very handy.

I actualy didn't want to post pictures of these models until they where completed, however at the moment I can't say when that will be as my assignments are coming up. As you can see I still need to do the bases, for these models I will make a little more effort when it comes to basing. So there might be some dead xenos or traitors or what ever else your day to day marine likes to kill. In one of my last posts I was talking about decals. Well these models will be getting some decals, however I plan on using decal solution on them as I hope that the solution will make the decals look more real. I'll need to apply some kind of varnish before hand, however I made some very very bad expierence with GW varnish and ten marines a while back. So I'll still need to decide what to do in this point. Anyway this is the solution I bought, I'll put up some picks on how I worked with them and you can see for yourself how it worked out. I sincerly hope it does work!

Grounded

Due to the bad weather conditions, predominantly the cold temperatures, my imperial guard army has yet to be base coated! As I cannot use my spray cans inside my flat I usually do my base coating outside on the balcony (which has left a somewhat telling black mark on the wooden tiles I painted last year, during a midnight drunk base coating session of my ork flamers and looters). However with temperatures being at around about -15 degrees I am reluctant to use the spray cans as I fear that the resulting base coat may be comprimised.

So I have stuck to assembling and painting the rest of the Space Marines. So they will be getting 5 more assault troopers and an entire tactical squad. I would post some pics but I am still waiting for some supplies to be delivered as I want to try and use my decals on these models. I have seen a great tutorial on the miniwargaming website that should lead to some pretty neat results. I will be using decal solutions in order to apply the squad markings. If they turn out allright I might consider remarking all of my Marines as my free hand skills are pretty poor as you may have seen on my banners.

Anyway as soon as this stuff arrives I will show you what I did and how it worked out and I'll have a look if I can find the video tutorial over at miniwargaming.

The Marcovians are here!

After weeks of waiting I have finaly received my Marcovians! These are my first non-GW minis and I'm not quite sure what to think of them. The detail will probably be more vivid after base coating them. They do seem to be very soft though, the weapons bend pretty easy, however they also bend back pretty easy so that's no big deal. Pricewise these minis are unbeatable. I'll probably try to make some long coats for them with green stuff, which will be interessting, as I've never "made" anything with Greenstuff. Just stufft it in to some gaps and holes, which didn't turn out quite as well as I hoped, anyway here are the Marcovians: