Painting for Others

I love painting miniatures.  It's an activity in which I can lose myself for hours on end.  This fact combined with my current state of persistent poverty has led me to start painting miniatures for my friends in place of purchasing them gifts.  So far, this has worked out wonderfully for everyone.  I get to paint something away from my norm, and my friends get a well painted miniature to add to their force.  These models also give me a chance to experiment with new techniques in a setting where they aren't required to perfectly match with an existing force.  I will usually be given some color guidelines and then let loose on the project.  I have pictures of some of these that I'd like to share.  Hopefully I will eventually be able to get photos of the others so I can share them as well.

Speed Painting IG Veterans

My Imperial Guard force is my longest standing army.  It was started back in 1999 with the Steel Legion boxed army that was released with the Armageddon campaign, and still consists of mostly all metal figures.  I have begun slowly adding in plastic minis between working on my other projects.  The main additions are the veteran squads which provide me with much needed melta fire, since a meltagun was never released for the Steel Legion line and I have no interest in converting some.  I chose to use the cadian plastics to represent them, but swapped out the heads for ones made by Pig Iron Productions that have gas masks.  I dislike the helmets on the stock cadian models.  They are much too large for their heads in my opinion, and the gas masks fit much better with the ash wastes theme of the Steel Legion.

Ork Wierdboy

I picked up the Ork wierdboy model back when GW released it in January of 2008 purely based on the look of it.  I loved the thought of grots trying to hold back the rampaging Ork Psyker as warp energy courses through his body.  It's a shame his rules are so weak.  The total absence of consistency makes him virtually unfieldable in a competitive environment.  Some of his powers are quite useful but even with the re-roll you can never reliably get the power you need when you need it.  I'd consider him to be a lot more useful if one of his ability let him use the power of his choice.  As it stands he's mostly just a bench-warmer that sits in my display cabinet and get ogled by the kids whenever they are in my office.  I am pretty pleased with how he turned out however.

The largest modification I made to the model was to chop off the grot swinging off his right side.  While I appreciated the thought of one of his keepers failing to hold him back and getting swung about by the enraged psyker, I felt the execution was rather lacking.  The grot looked rather silly and the position of the chain looked extremely artificial.  And so, it had to go.  My original intent when I bought this model was to add some lightning shooting out of his right eye, but after drilling out the eye socket and screwing around with various wires trying to make something that didn't look retarded, I gave up.  Hence the gaping hole where an eye should be.  I plan to eventually replace the socket with a glass bead painted bright green, but that's a project for down the road.

I painted him primarily for use in a 500 point casual list I put together when I first started on my orks.  Over several games he performed with adequate mediocrity.  He killed a few things, but never really managed to do anything all that impressive.  It was a lot of fun to set off his random powers though.  I figure I'll continue to field him in casual games just for the joy of teleporting around the board and occasionally blasting stuff with auto hitting weapons.

And the Warhound is Finished

The Warhound Titan is now officially complete.  I'm quite happy with the end result, especially considering when it was handed to me it had a rather crummy paint job and had just been knocked off a shelf by the owner's cat.  It's impact with the ground had left it in rather poor condition.  In addition to the expected chipping and general damage from have never been sealed or primed, several parts were broken.  The spot where one of the weapons connects to the arm had been broken out and lost.  I rebuilt that using epoxy putty over an armature of heavy gauge wire to give it strength.  This required a fair bit of care to ensure that the arm would still be movable.  The Vulcan Mega-bolter arm had been snapped in two, so I put a pair of two inch brass rods in it for support and glued it back together.  Two of the spines on top of the main body were broken off completely.  I'm not sure if they were lost or not, but I didn't have them when I put the beasty back together so they were left off.  I also built a circular base for it out of 3/16" tempered hardboard, and pinned it's feet to the base in the interest of it not taking another tumble in the future.

The Orks take a Field Trip

I brought my Orks to their first tournament this past Saturday.  It was a 1500 point event.  I chose not to take any pictures because with my limited experience with the army and its large numbers of infantry I was worried about having enough time to complete games.  In the future I think I'm going to try to take photos in the interest of learning from my mistakes.  I ended up finishing fairly poorly, but had a rather good time.  It was, if nothing else, an excellent learning experience.

Shoota Boyz

I've been spending a lot of time painting Orks for the last two months and I've made some good progress I think.  My currently completed force consists of:

Big Mek with kustom force field
Wierdboy
30 shoota boyz
19 slugga boyz
3 killa kans with rocket launchas
11 grots with runtheard

And I have nearly completed a further 11 shoota boyz, 8 lootas, and 3 more killa kans.  Overall good progress and I'm very pleased with how they are turning out.

 

I've chosen to go with an olive skin tone and lots of rust effects to tie the army together as a cohesive whole.  My photography skills still need some work, but I'm getting better at it.  Future posts will discuss the logic behind my color selections and discussions of the techniques I've used to get the army painted quickly.  I've finally gotten a small photo booth set up in my home office so I can get pictures of units as I complete them.

I'm currently working on an old Warhound Titan for a friend of mine.  It's the old armourcast version.  I'm trying to make it look as good as I can, but it's a rather cartoony looking model and looks rather dated.  I'll throw up some pictures as I get it a bit closer to completed.

My First Post

I suppose my blog title deserves some explanation.  It's based on a quote from the Ork codex that I found hilarious. Apparently the Meks need to keep the Burna Boyz busy so that they won't set the other boyz alight to watch them do "the burny dance".  Since Orks are one of my major ongoing projects I decided that a title referencing them would be appropriate.  I'm looking forward to sharing my progress on this and other armies as time goes on.