Another Space Marine, Dagnammit.

As I stated in my last post, I used to be a lazy painter. My days of playing warhammer was all about the game rather than the painting, so my armies didn't look that amazing on the table. I had a Skaven Army that included a massive slave unit of sixty models. All I had done to paint them was spray them brown, paint each nose black and the end of their spears silver. Oh and flock the bases, jobs a good'un. My first 40k army was actually Blood Angels. They were so badly painted I have actually overpainted or sold most of them, so apart from a terrible Mephiston Librarian on a Bike conversion I still have I technically don't have any Blood Angels.

I recently ventured into the town centre for a visit for the first time in a long while for my first Covid Vaccination (Yay!!) Whilst there I decided to get some hobby supplies. I still haven't touched my Stargrave plastics as I don't want to waste them, I am saving them as a treat. We have a small independent store in town that mostly sells airfix type kits so I picked up some Tamiya plastic cement from there. I have good memories of that brush on poly that GW had back in the nineties that just bonded the two surfaces together without getting any gloopiness everywhere. Apparently this stuff is just like that, so my Stargrave plastics will get the same VIP treatment. I really want to get these plastics right, almost to the point where I am scared to actually build them. Not having definitely decided on what any particular rule system I am using them for (I didn't actually buy the Stargrave book) I'm not sure what I'm going to arm each model with. Do I go for lots of variety for a skirmish type games or do I make whole units of models armed with similar weaponry? I also grabbed a few new texture paints to try out.

I also thought I would pop into my local GW store to get some paints and another painting handle. When I first saw these painting handles I thought they were a waste of money, but then I got one for my youngest as he was struggling when painting to hold the models. Then I'd actually started borrowing it myself and found it really useful so now we have one each. (Never too long in the beard to pick up new techniques.)

Whilst in there I showed the store manager a picture of my latest Space Marine paint job and he was impressed (I know, I know, it's his job to be nice.) and he asked what I was going to paint next. Well the store is having it's anniversary soon and they are having a couple of competitions including a conversion competition. GW only bits or green stuff allowed. So, I decided to go right back to the beginning and have a play with some green stuff. Could I make a new style Primaris Marine look like an old school Blood Angel. Well, I don't think it's gonna win the competition, but I had fun making him.

Oh and of course it had to have an old school green trim on the base, nothing else would do.

Paints used:

Coat D'arms. Blood Red, Bone, White, Grass Green, Ink Wash Armour

Citadel. Abaddon Black, Caliban Green, Eshin Grey, Retributor Armour, Grey Knights Steel, Steel Legion Drab, Flash Fitz Yellow, Baal Red Wash, Brown Ink

Painting Space Marines

So regular readers will know I'm no longer a GW fan, I am definitely not up to speed on the current rules, or background of their systems. I'm not anti-GW at all. I buy their paints and I will peruse their shelves to see if anything jumps out at me, although I'll be honest, a lot of the new style models with their insistence of using lots of negative space and delicately balanced "stringy" bits isn't to my taste. (just me, I know I have no reason not to like it, I just have no idea how anyone transports any of it safely!) 

There are a large number of people who look back on the nineties as the "Golden Age" of Warhammer, whole groups of people look back with tinted glasses on what was once my teenage years and the "best of times" rather than the "end of times". (Okay seriously, that is enough with the quotations.) There is an excellent fanzine out there here dedicated to those days of goblin green edged bases and cardboard standees for that larger model in your army you just can't afford. 

There is an argument to be said that us Longbeards need to let go, like the middle aged man with his car on his drive he had when he was a teenager, tinkering with it every weekend to keep it running because it is a classic. When in reality, it's just a piece of metal from the eighties. Things improve, technologies change. When I was a kid embracing the latest 40K rules coming out there were probably Longbeards at the time tutting and stroking their facial hair, lamenting the lost days of Rogue Trader. So, maybe things have improved?

The last time I played Warhammer 40K the rules were in the midst of a trend that bigger is better. Apocalypse was the trend so all games had to be bring everything you have to the table. I had a Space Marine army and so had increased it to the size of an entire company and then some. I had a lot of Space Marines, mostly painted as quickly as possible to get them on the table. The game took all day for us to play, turns would last for up to two hours, the rules were basically skewed towards whatever the latest new models were, so my Space Marine army suffered horribly. I packed my lads away carefully in their foam trays and I was done with them.

More recently GW did one of those magazine runs where part one is £1.99 to entice you in and the first issue came with three new style Space Marines, a brush and three pots of paint. As one of those colours was black and paint costs more than that per pot in store, I proceeded to buy three copies just for the paint. The Marines were packed away for a rainy day.

This week I decided it's been long enough and to see if I could paint Space Marines any better, also to see if it the models are any better. My painting style has changed over the years so I thought it would be an interesting experiment. I also read somewhere recently where someone suggested that we should try not to compare our painted models to others across the internet but rather our own earlier attempts. That way you can see your own improvement. So, here they are.

I've gone for an Ultramarines colour scheme for a mass appeal so I can use them to show my painting ability. It's amazing how many paints you actually use though for what initially seems a simple colour scheme. As an exercise I took note for once in the actual paints I used:

Undercoat: Coat D'arms white

Main armour blue: Citadel Macragge Blue, Citadel Blue wash (if you don't happen to have a twenty year old pot of this Coat D'arms do a similar ink blue wash), highlight with Citadel Russ Grey.

Helmets: Coat D'arms white with a wash of Coat D'arms light brown super shader, Citadel Eshin grey for the eyes.

Sergeant head: Coat D'arms horse tone brown, then drybrushed with Citadel Cadian Fleshtone. Hair is Citadel Sunburst yellow with a glaze of Coat D'arms Golden Yellow.

Boltguns: Coat D'arms gun metal and horse tone brown with respective washes of Coat D'arms ink armour wash and Citadel Brown ink. Citadel Abaddon Black for the middle body.

Brass trimmings: Citadel Retributor Armour with Citadel Gryphonne Sepia.

Purity seals: Coat D'arms Blood Red and Bone. Washed with the same Gryphonne Sepia.

Base: Vallejo thick Mud.

There you go, 19 pots of paint for a "simple" paint scheme. I think I've come a long way since I first started painting Space Marines.

What do I think of the models? Well they are a lot less fiddly to put together than they used to be, this might be partly due to the fact they are bigger but that is explained by the fact that apparantly they are a new strain of superior advanced Space Marine. I due wonder if the larger sculpts came first then the backstory was invented as an excuse. They do feel more like the genetically superior beings that I always imagined when reading the novels though. The original guys never seemed to tower over their guardsman counterparts.

I fished out a couple of my old guys to do the comparison. 

Well, they are clearly a lot taller, but these are Primaris Marines, an improvement on the original geneseed. Maybe the larger model came before the story, maybe not, who knows. I actually kinda like them. Has my painting improved? I'd like to think so, mainly not due to any increase in skill but in care and attention. I spent probably ten times as long on each model as I would have back the first time. I certainly couldn't paint another full company of Marines at this rate, not if I didn't want to go crazy. Nevertheless I don't think I'm going to go out and buy the latest 40K rules and get playing again, but to be honest, when I first painted Space Marines I think 90% of my hobby time was about the game, the painting was a means to an ends, these days, this old Grognard likes to take his time painting a model, if I get to roll some dice now and then that's just a bonus.

Talking of bonus content, those of you who did the maths, will know that if I bought three copies of the magazine I would have nine marines, well I first painted up just a five man squad, then I thought I would have a little play with a tiny conversion by fishing out an old power fist from my bits box. (Yep, I never throw any spare bits out.) I think it fits quite well, in fact in the old marine models I felt the power fist looked too big, here it looks pretty good.

Dwarven Blacksmith

I was lucky enough that a friend of mine with a 3D printer kindly produced the free sample from Loot Studios for me of a Dwarven Blacksmith. It comes in 32mm and 75mm scale and he generously printed both for me. I have finally got round to painting one of them. Printed on an Elegoo Mars msla printer it comes out as a nice sculpt. It printed out in four parts, base, body, one hand with hammer and finally anvil, sword and hand combined. Some of the detail is lost in the smaller print so I decided to paint the larger print.

I don't have much experience of 3D printing other than some scatter terrain crates I bought at a show a couple of years ago. Those had obvious layering in them from the print process (I suspect they were printed at a quickest rate possible) so as soon as I started drybrushing them the lines came out. I was therefore intrigued to see where printing has evolved to now. 

I must say I am very much impressed, the dwarf itself has no print lines. 

I initially finished painting the model with the sword being just plain metal, then realised that if he was working the metal it would be glowing hot. Luckily there is a wealth of videos on YouTube of people showing you how they paint glowy metal, so out came the paints again and I'm quite pleased with the result. 

Finally a bit of underlighting makes it look like the sword is the source of light and we get an awesome dramatic shot.

To think my first thought was I might paint it all grey as a statue and stick a bit of moss on it.

I think 3D printing is a really interesting new technology and has lots of great potential. I've yet to play with one myself but from what I understand it takes some work to get them to produce results. I think unless you get to the point where they are almost "plug and play" like a traditional paper printer they will never replace traditional techniques but nonetheless the technology is rapidly improving as we speak. I don't think we'll ever be buying a licence from GW to print out the latest 40k army in time for Christmas for the kids but I can see it becoming more popular.

No Salute Today

It should have been Salute today. So, a second year running I am missing you all, with you backpacks and your trolley suitcases. Getting up at a ridiculous time in the morning to catch two trains, then a walk across London, a tube, the DLR then a final walk to join the massive queue. The annual game of look at the other passengers on the DLR and guess whether they are a wargamer or a marathon runner, all good fun. To think that last year I genuinely was keeping my fingers crossed that this would all blow over by April so Salute would still go ahead, never mind still be going on a year later. On the plus side, start putting a tenner a week to one side for spending budget for Salute and you'll be drowning in lead by the end of the day by the time you get to the Excel.

So, what have I been painting this week? Well, one of the joys of blogging is you have a date record of when you obtain some items. So I know I got these models in June 2018. Painted in less than two years, that isn't too bad for a grumpy Longbeard wargamer. 

With the imminent arrival of Stargrave and Xenos Rampant, I thought I might have a little flutter with a bit of Sci-fi. 

These are Grenadier "Troopers with heavy weapons". They have a definite Aliens feel to them with what look like Pulse rifles and flak armour. I might even see if I can find some suitable Xenos for them to be swarmed by.

Bad Squiddo Special

So I was lucky enough to have a small parcel sent to me by Bad Squiddo games of master casts of just two of their new upcoming WW2 Soviets. Squiddo already have an excellent range available here, the new additions are in winter kit. 

For those not aware of the company, Bad Squiddo do not do gimicky female versions of historical uniforms, these are researched, genuine historical looks. 

As always, the models were well cast with no flash and took very little prep work before I painted. I have just treated myself to some brand new brushes from Black Hat miniatures so I had a dream painting these. All done with GW and Coat D'arms paints. The khaki colour was my own mix of GW death guard green and Zandra dust. Coat D'arms dark brown super shader did all the magic afterwards. (including turning what started out a redhead into a blonde.)

I wanted to do something different than my normal basing, so in front of the models you can see the test base that worked so well I had to put it in the shot. I used Vallejo Thick Mud acrylic, a pure white drybrush on top, then some light flocking followed by more white drybrushing. Hopefully that gives that frosty ground look.

The Kickstarter goes live this Wednesday and only runs for a week so look up Bad Squiddo on your usual Social Media for the links on Wednesday to get hold of these Soviets.

And in between painting these two (at what I might add a super quick pace for me.) you have to have something to do while the inks and glues dry. So I thought I should finish this mounted Freyja that has been sat half done on the painting tray since Christmas. 

I have recently learnt that this style of having a solid green trim on bases is a 90's style and not the done thing anymore. I couldn't for the life of me think of what people were doing now, so I had to actually look through instagram at some models to see what people are doing. Turns out, leave it black or paint it dark brown now is the done thing. It may be garish to some, but I think I'm going to keep with the green.

Frost Fang Cavalry

Well, hello there. How you been? Yep, I'm still painting fantasy, although I have an excuse. I actually need to order paints so some of my historical models are still on hold due to lack of the right colours. 

 So, the pastel painted fantasy that is my Barbarian Dragon Rampant Army gets another unit. One of the joys of non miniature agnostic rules is you can jump around companies and just pick and choose stuff that you like the look of. So from Mantic games I ordered these amazing Frost Fang Cavalry. My Barbarian army have a Viking/Northern tribe fur wearing feel to them, so they fit in very nicely.

They are full resin, multi part kits. The beasts have two loose legs on one side and the riders have a loose head and both arms. The resin needed a good soapy bath as always. (I must recommend you must do this with any resin model kit otherwise you will find the primer layer won't adhere well at all) One model had suffered a missing foot as well, possibly an air bubble in the mould. A bit of green stuff however and my amateur sculpting skills and you couldn't tell which one.

 

 (I did have to resculpt it a couple of times though as I kept trying to hold the model by the foot when painting it before the green stuff had hardened, rookie mistake!)

The beasts were super fun and easy to paint, I only used washes on the riders, just relying on a couple of layers of dry brushing first and the painting in the details on the face and claws for the beasts. There is something so satisfying about drybrushing layers of paint on fur on a model. The sculpter has basically done all the hard work for you and with some careful selection of shades of paint you can get an awesome looking model. The riders had a choice of two different heads and two sets of arms in the kit, so to make my third guy not look the same as another (sadly there was nothing much I could do about the beasts all being in the same pose) from my bits box I grabbed a bow and arrow arm set left over from the Frostgrave plastic box set. I loved the idea of a barbarian letting loose an arrow while charging into the enemy on his roaring mount. In hindsight I realise he doesn't have a quiver now, but maybe I will find a way to add one to the saddle at some point.

 

So, as you can see, by keeping to a similar pallete and painting style models from different companies can appear as if they are from the same army. Why be beholden to one company's models? It's like a super expensive pick and mix that I can guarantee will make you feel very ill if you eat it.

Oh and finally, please do admire the background painting in my photo's. It was done by my youngest and with his permission I decided it would make an excellent background to my photo's. He came home from school clutching the A3 paper to show off his painting skills and I immediately decided it was far too good for the usual magnetic mounting to the fridge. It would be put to far better use here.

Welcome to Marwencol

There comes a point in a comedy actor's career when they decide they want to do some serious acting. You may or may not be a fan of Steve Carell, you may remember such awesome performance as Brick in Anchorman, or Michael Scott in the American The Office. Well, recently I was intrigued by the trailer of a film call Welcome to Marwen. A true story of a victim of a brutal attack who finds therapy in photographing 1\6 scale depictions of a fictional town in Belgium during WW2. After watching the film I decided to investigate further and purchased the above book by the inspiration of the film, Mark Hogancamp. Mark chose such a large scale during the early days of his recovery for mainly practical reasons. His injuries meant he suffered from shaking hands and couldn't initially cope with the smaller scales that regular readers of this blog would expect.

Mark's excellent photographer's eye coupled with his attention to detail makes a book of remarkable scenes. Uniforms are left out in muddy puddles for days to obtain that lived in look. What appears to be a quirky affectation in the movie of his life of Mark constantly pulling along a jeep filled with dolls and soldiers as he goes about the town makes complete sense when explained. He is creating genuine wear on the tyres of the vehicle.

Mark's 2004 prize winning photograph - Rescuing the Major

The book covers Marks story, his recovery from the attack and the trial of the perpetrators. It then goes into detail of how Mark made Marwencol and the characters that populate the town. Mark has his own alter ego "Hogie" as well as a population of strong female characters populating the town, some named after friends in his life. When Hogie first arrives he is the one that needs rescuing, like Mark, the town has been his redemption.

Mark and Hogie

The last part of the book is made up of Mark's picture stories. Almost comic strip type stories, they show the efforts of hours of painstaking work.

The ladies of Marwencol mete out their own brand of justice

Mark has since begun working in smaller scale again and now like the rest of us has his own stack of projects he is working on. I recently had the unique opportunity via the wonders of Facebook live of joining a Q&A with Mark and asking him about his work through his representatives, One Mile Gallery. Mark has recently discovered acrylic paints (he has always used enamels until now.) and he himself has admitted he is always learning new techniques, mostly from Youtube!

 

Mark is an inspiration to me that crafting and modelling is such a good tool for mental health and although I am no expert at all I am sure I can confidently say he is evidence that it's not just playing with toy soldiers.

 

If you would like to help out towards Mark's crafting costs you can donate to his fund here.

 

Mark will be doing another Q&A via Facebook and One Mile Gallery later on this month.