Hobby Block - To Be Continued

I’ve been in a funny old mood recently and I’m finding that it really takes a lot for me to get around to painting anything - I can think of about half a dozen different reasons for this, so it’s not too worrying or anything, but I must start to take steps to rectify it and find my love for painting little figures again soon!

I’m going to continue with these ponderings in a future post, but in the meantime here’s my most recent projects, including one I’m working on for the “rescue” challenge set by my mate Lewis (his blog will be in the side bar and I’ll link this later!). The idea is simple, find a mini that needs rescuing - strip the paint, rebuild it, hit it with the hairy brush and pigment! I started off overly ambitious, with the thought of doing the batch of minis I’ve most recently stripped - a little group of Mordian Iron Guard which will round out my collection to approximately a command squad and infantry squad. I’d suggested that I could potentially get them all done in the month, but then things got in the way:

1. I can’t find the 12 other Mordians I have.
2. I can’t find the Epic-scale Land Raiders I’d planned on using as the basis for a tracked support weapon for the Lascannon for the Command Squad (one of the ones from Lewis is the Lascannon operator, who had a separate Lascannon on wheels like a field gun, with his little button to fire the pewpew.
3. Work has been busy (and I’ve been getting some other cool real-life stuff sorted out too!)

So, what to do? Mere days before the deadline!

There were a few other Necromunda minis that Lewis sent along too, donated by our friend Fraser. One of them got a mild conversion in order to join my Necromunda Slave Guilders - a bunch of gladiator-types and slave catchers (just the worst bunch of ingrates you’ve ever seen!). I dremeled away some of the old Goliath badges (which looked a bit Orky!) and severed his head - I repositioned this into a slightly more sensible pose (for a man with a chainsaw-mohawk…) and did some patching up with putty. I then decided that as he wasn’t really leader material (in my eyes) and he’d most likely just be a champion or what have you, I removed the barrel of the melta gun and replaced it with one from the Orlock upgrade sprue that matched in with some careful carving!

I started the rest of my gang with a metallic undercoat, so I went the same route with this guy - he’s now looked like this for a week, will I make the end-of-month deadline? Hell yeah!

Other stuff:

Megadroth Skeleton - a great kit from GW, I’ve always been a fan of the “omg that’s a huge skeleton!” terrain that we’ve seen in the 40K terrain collection (thinking of Space Wolves 3rd edition Codex, with terrain of some big Fenrisian beast’s skeletal remains!) and it’s nice to be able to buy one! Really nicely designed set without a lot of extra embellishment. I did do some slight changes though - I clipped away or dremeled off all the skulls and bones on the bases. 

- I filled any leftover holes with old greenstuff.

- Added gravel and sand to the areas that needed it with PVA. 

- When this was almost dry I took some PVA, watered it down and added a splash of washing-up liquid, thinly coated the parts I’d added gravel to. This step was to stop the gravel peeling away (I’ve had this happen on other terrain).

The reason for removing the skulls and bones isn’t because they weren’t nice and thematic, it’s just it would have directly tied it to the 28mm/32mm scale, but I wanted to keep it neutral and thus be able to use it at 6mm/10mm/15mm/28mm etc. (I know it’s themed around being in Ghur in the Mortal Realms, so the extra bones make sense there!).

Finally, I’ve also put together this squad of Necromunda Ironhead Prospector Squats. I’m currently pondering a scheme for them, but I’m thinking black/grey/yellowish-green like the Ryobi power tools. Call them the Riobi Consortium or something? They’ll likely be rather inep

Let me know what you think :)