11/03/2024

To Infinity... and beyond!

 Quite some time since I didn't paint Infinity, but in fact the original project wasn't really finished, so about time I did something about it!

I had painted the Operation Kaldstrom core box, but my pal also got the "Beyond Operation Kaldstrom" expansion pack, as well as a couple of heavy units; here y ou have them all!

First of all, I had a mini still pending from the core box, Oktavia Grímsdóttir. I had painted her, but not taken any pics. She´s a mercenary (well, maybe a little bit more complicated than that, but the word covers it all for this post's sake), so she can provide some flexibility to your games.

Now with added snow

 Right, I've added snow to the bases (I have to fix this one!). The effect works fine at tabletop distance, but I'm afraid that if you look closer, it looks like the mini has just opened a box from Amazon and all the protecting stuff has spilled all over.

Anyway! The Panoceania team is made of  these guys, a Varg (spec ops), a Boyg Soldier (scary bloke in his uberarmour) and a Locust (a hacker, don't be fooled by his gun):


A Varg, A Boyg and a Locust come into a bar...

A Varg, A Boyg and a Locust come out from the bar...

I tried to reproduce the same colour I previously used on other Panoceania units, but I believe this time I got maybe a slightly deeper blue. Anyway I think it works. They all have interesting designs and are exquisite miniatures, but that's precisely what makes a challenge out of each one of them!

Let's move on. The Yu Jing team also consists of three members, a Shàng Jí ("superior"), which is a Hacker in an armour; a special character, Jing Qo, The Shadow of Huangdi; and a Ye Mao ("wildcat"), covering the spec ops role for the group.

Seriously, you have to be more careful when you open your boxes, look at the floor

Hey, no, I'm not done with you, come here immediately!

Once again I tried to reproduce the colours, but I think this time my orange is a little bit more vibrant than my previous work, which was slightly more yellow toned. However, I believe they all look fine when together.

I told you that besides the "Beyond" expansion pack, my pal also got heavy units. In Infitity these are known as TAG (Tactical Armoured Gear). Panoceania got this Cutter:

Well, this monster truly impresses

On the other hand, Yu Jing counts with the Blue Wolf Mongol Cavalry:

Looking for Red Riding Hood

For sure you can have quite a game with all this! Here you have a pic with this whole batch:

We could make the cover of a book with such a composition

And a final pic with all the stuff I've painted so far, with snow bases for all:

The whole project!

Fortunately the differences in tones are not severe and the new freshly painted minis match the previous ones, I'm relieved!

Well, of course now that the minis are painted, there's only one thing we can do... we have to learn to play! I'll let you know of my progress on that front!!

26/02/2024

These are not the droids you are looking for

 At least I'm sure they're not the droids you expected. If you ever were expecting droids. Oh, whatever.

I found this batch of Chaos Androids from Space Crusade and also found the willpower to give them a second chance of a new life. They were awfully painted (you know it was kind of 30 years ago...), so I had to start from the beginning.

I don't prime in white that often

I had originally painted them in metallics, kind of Terminator style, which was the closest reference (Necrons weren't yet invented at the time!). But this time I've opted for the truly classic scheme, or something close enough.

There's no way to see it on the pic, but there are three different whites there

I first applied a very, very light grey layer, then nulned it and then went again from the light grey to basically pure white. I discovered than the sculpts, though crude, are in fact better than I credited them for, and have some more details than I remembered, hidden here and there.

How would Mike McVey have highlighted those weapons? I tried my best

It's a very straightforward job, nothing complicated. From this point on it all was just a matter of metallics and little else. I've seen that the original paintjob includes some brass on arms and feet, but I didn't fancy the scheme, I think that plain white looks better.

Before I chose the classic pattern, I had some doubts. If these are Chaos Androids (for these are not Necrons at all!), which Ruinous Power should be their Unholy Patron? The obvious choice for me was Tzeentch, Lord of (forbidden) knowledge. I believe that an AI (Abominable Intelligence) should fall under the Lord of Change's domains. So I shortly considered using a blue and yellow scheme. But in the end I thought that the white, basic pattern was better and sticked to it.

Maybe in a future repaint

Here you have them all, alongside a couple of Dreadnoughts, which, now compared to these, would benefit from another repaint, it seems.

What are we doing on the open field? We need steel and wires

How come my pics with natural light look worse than the inside ones??

It's been a nice and short project, and I have to say I've enjoyed it more than I expected, even with the neverending layers of increasingly white. Not sure of what will be next, but I already have some candidates on the queue!

11/02/2024

The roar of the boar

 It's been some weeks since I don't post. Please insert regular excuses about real life here.

I took this old mini that needed some refurbishing. Silly me, as I'm currently working on different stuff at the same time, I totally forgot to take WIP pics of this until it was really too late to make any sense.

It's an old Rogue Trader Ork cyboar rider, which had the boar's head missing, so I had to sculpt it. The result is... crude, but fun nevertheless. Here you have the only pics I've taken:

Colour blast

I'm not particularly strict about Ork Clanz, as my current army is more Rogue Trader than 2nd Ed, so I felt more or less free about colours. Bone white for the armoured parts of the cyboar looked nice, and I built it colour-wise from that point on. You can see the army marking on the pic above, the horned skull over red field.

Alien boars look like that. Very alien boars

The sculpt didn't end up as well as I would have liked, but it can pass as some kind of furry xenos of the same family as boars, which is enough for me. In fact, as the whole body is mechanical, I could have sculpted literally any kind of animal. A camel would have been nice, now that I think of it.

Anyway, not a nice fella to mess up with

Even not using Snakebite Clan colours, I painted a snake on the boar. It's in a Celtic fashion, I guess, making a design and biting it's own tail. I wouldn't dare to call it Beithir nor Ouroboros, but it simply looked nice in that way, along the trimming on the rider's coat. I mean, there's not much more to it.

There's also another snake on his back!

I currently don't have more cyboars, so I faced this one as some standalone project, something feasible while I do some other stuff. I'm finding it fun to get these old minis back, so take for granted I'll be doing more RT in the near future ;)

17/01/2024

Large Shark beakies

 It had been quite long since I last visited my realscale Space Sharks project. I think it's time to get back to my grey large marines!

I recently bought one of these Horus Heresy Mk.VI Tactical Squad boxes. It was kind of love at first sight, I can't emphasise how much do I love the Mk.VI (I guess that as much as any of you. I hope so). It encompasses everything that has to be said about nostalgia. It brings me back to the RTB01 times, when I got on board of this Warhammer madness. When it was called Rogue Trader. I believe I could write a whole essay on the subject, but don't fear, I won't. If you share the feeling, there's no need of it. If you don't, there are no words that can make you understand how it feels.

No more digression. The Mk.VI Corvus armour. The beakies. The models are a little bit larger than the previous Space Marines, so I thought I could just assemble the models and make them fit in with my previous Carcharodons. However, they are not as large as the Primaris models (if you remember, that's what I used for my latest unit). So I had to re-scale these too! Below you can see a regular marine from this box and a converted one:

Little difference, but enough to be perceived

Funny thing, once you start to enlarge your marines, you cannot just leave it at the legs or waist. The lack of neck seems alarmingly obvious:

He didn't appreciate being called Brother Shorty

So I had to work on knees, hip and neck. There's no need to do anything with arms, shoulderpads or anything else. Well, unless you want some kind of conversion, like the Sarge here:

The gauntlet comes from a metal Chaplain. I prefered the classic sword instead of the new provided with the current kit

As I wanted to keep a relative old school vibe, I used this Missile Launcher from Space Crusade:

Looks like a heavy thing to carry

Once again I took the same path I used with the heavy weapons operator in my previous squad. In case you don't remember (you don't have why), I built a harness to help the marine to handle the weapon while not holding the whole weight solely on his arms, kind of the Aliens thing:


I did this to my previous marine:

Archive pic

And I did it again now:

The guys from Prevention of Occupational Hazards approved it

There's not much else to it. From this point on it's all a matter of smoothening the green stuff work and painting the whole thing in the very same way I've always done.

If I can bring something new is that I changed my mind from my previous works and decided to put a back banner on the Sergeant. Of course, if I was doing it with this Squad, I also had to do with the other one. So I came up with these:

A little bit smaller than I anticipated, but it works

The banner on the other Sarge

The Horus Heresy box comes with a back banner for the Sergeant, but instead I used it on my Captain, as I think it looks best there:

He didn't have any banner until now

Here you have the whole squad, in all their Mk.VI glory:




The only thing I regret is the breathing vents on the helmets preventing me from painting shark mouths. Trust me, I tried. But there's not enough room for that. Sigh.

They are missing the Chapter symbol on the shoulderpads. I have ordered some custom decals, but until they arrive, they look good to me :)

I really do have to work on a backdrop

What can I say. I totally love these models. They finally are what I was waiting for. I think these are the true evolution of the old miniatures. They keep the aesthetics, they are not over the top, haven't fallen on the gruesome baroque nonsense we sometimes see nowadays. It's simply an update of the old models and I love it.

The box brings enough sprues to build two squads, so you can bet I'll do some more stuff in the future (probably not more Carcharodons, but I'll see what to do).


BONUS! As I was painting grey and black, I thought I could work on something else too. I could have made a post of its own, but I think it really belongs here. I had a Rhino re-scaled and 3D printed, so it matches my realscale Space Marines:

OK, right, this is BIG

I'll be honest, I wanted it even larger, the size of a Land Raider. I made some rough numbers and it looked like the size it needed to be to make ten realscale Marines fit into. But I was finally persuaded and now on a retrospective I'm glad. Let me show you how I turned this from this tone of grey to a totally different tone of grey.

Ta-daa. Easy. I collected some useful bits too

Now to the fun parts. I planned to use decals too, but the hatches don't really allow it. So I had to make it the hard way.

If it goes wrong, I'll have to name my Chapter the Space Herrings

Space Eels will work too

A thing I was missing was some lights. I cannibalised an old Rhino and did this:

Fortunately the size difference wasn't an issue

I faced some issues when painting the decorations on the side hatches. The separation between the two doors didn't allow me to paint the Shark, as the awful hollow space in between really ruined it all. At first I toyed with the idea of three stripes with Maori style symbols:

However it looked weird at tabletop distance

Then I moved forward and painted the rest of the empty spaces:

Too much. Looks like the blackboard at my school when I was a kid

It wasn't working. Sometimes less is more. I realised I had to take what I call the Epic approach. When you see a Rhino at a distance (i.e., little Rhinos in Epic), you have to understand what you are seeing. If it's all a blur, you are doing it wrong. And this was exactly what was happening here. Whatever symbol was to be depicted on that door, it had to be readable. I could only breathe and take the wise decision. Paint black again over it and start again.

It was a hard decision, but it brings peace and joy to my hart

As a compensation, I painted some of my Maori mandalas on the upper hatch

The final touch was to add a couple of banners on the back. If there's something more Old School than that, I don't wanna know. It's still missing some symbols here and there, but I plan to use decals for that. When they arrive I'll take more pics, but for now this is it:





Just in case, another size comparison pic, with a regular Rhino (the donor of the lights and some bits):

Daddy?

So a realscale Rhino to meet my realscale Marines:

At this pace I'll soon need a realscale board

I promise an update when I get the decals. Until then, let's keep on moving forward!

04/01/2024

New year, old mini

 Happy new year to everyone!

I hope all of you are doing fine after the season excesses, I'm coming bact to normal too.

First of all, a (not so random) tought about Blogger itself. I've been experiencing annoying issues when trying to comment on other blogs. Either the system doesn't allow me to publish anything or directly doesn't even allow me to sign in. I suspect it has something to do with cookies, but I'm experiencing it randomly and on different browsers, so I cannot say for certain what the problem is. I sometimes write the comment and try to publish it for ages, until I have to give up. That's why I'm commenting with such delay on some of your blogs, or even I cannot comment at all. It has also happened on my own blog when trying to answer your comments. I know I'm not the only one, but well, it sucks anyway.

But enough rants! You came here for minis!

These holidays I made a trip through nostalgia road and I rescued this monstrosity from oblivion. The infamous Manticore from the Dark World board game:

Painted in... 1992?... 93?

I had this beast totally forgotten for literally thirty years. I had it in a bits box and these days I decided to tidy it up a little. I don't think that WIP pics will add much to this post, but anyway I made just this one:

Still hurts at sight

I honestly couldn't be bothered with stripping it, so I have to confess I simply primed it again and painted over it. The pics below are quite overexposed, I'm afraid, but will give you an idea of what I achieved:


That's all I could get out of this mini!

Glorious 90's hair!

It has clearly working out at the gym

The tongue remains a mystery to me afrer all these years

Of course the sculpt is what it is. I believe (I have no proof, but also no doubt) it was an attempt to reproduce the Manticore by Citadel (I may be wrong, haven't checked it, but I believe it's a sculpt from 1987 or so). Well, there was an attempt. The head obviously doesn't belong to a lion, but some other kind of anthropoid monster. I tried a lighter colour on the snout, yet not fully reproducing a lion.

There's some kind of convention about painting the lion's mane darker than the rest of the fur, but after checking some reference pics I have to say I've been fooled all my life, manes are quite in a similar colour to the rest of the animal. Anyway, I went with the convention.

The same goes about the scorpion tail. There's some kind of convention about scorpions being red, and I haven't ever seen an scorpion other colour than black. I've seen pics of some other colours, but definitely not bright red! So you can see I went mostly for red, but turning into darker tones, almost black, on the upper side. And this is it!

I don't have any immediate use for this beast, but I'm pretty sure there were homemade rules for Manticores in HeroQuest, for example, so I may try those.

Random encounters in the wild

Well, this feels weirldy calming, after three decades! I think I still have some other Dark World minis somewhere, so who knows, I may try to recover some of them!

I don't think I'll buy the current model from the Cities of Sigmar ranges, but I'll leave it here for your own consideration, if you want to compare this mini with my own Manticore.

Find the seven differences. I dare you

Well, I guess I can declare that 2024 has officially started! Let's see what projects does it bring!

Cheers!