I finished my icon bearer for my Iron Warriors squad, and I remembered (I think) how I did the scorched barrel on my meltagun so my flamer wielding Iron Warrior should be finished up quickly enough. My icon turned out a lot better than I thought it would. Originally I was going to make it old and worn and use Bleached Bone and a Devlan Mud wash to dirty it up with a dark red or something for the eight pointed star of chaos on it, then I kind of thought it might be better to do like hazard stripes on the banner portion, but there isn't really enough flat clear space to do that easily. I finally settled on a black banner with a yellow star symbol and I think it works pretty decently.
Maybe Wednesday or Friday I can put the pedal to the metal so to speak and bang out the warsmith and the flamer guy in one go. Then maybe I can take some pictures with Heather's camera and post them here. It would be nice to feel a sense of completion or achievement in 40k, it has been a while. I wish the guys would get their butts in gear because even if I do get an army together (finally) I have no one to play against so it really doesn't make much sense to work hard or with any degree of regularity. I mean, I want to develop my painting and modeling skills because I get a lot of neat ideas (I think) for conversions and such, but I don't have the skillset necessary to actually implement them and I'm left holding a bit in one hand, a model in the other, and a confused look on my face. Like right now, I have some possessed chaos space marine weapon limbs where the hands have morphed into large pincers with like teeth and spikes growing out of them and I think it would be awesome to hack off the grabber on a servo-harness and stick a crab claw arm on in its place to represent the daemon weapon of my chaos lord. Now, I can hack pieces off easily enough, and gluing is easy too, I just don't know how to get it to look like it belongs there. I have an idea to use greenstuff maybe to represent muscle tissue growing out of the metal servo-arm and going for a techno-organic feel with the backpack, but I would need to do some heavy searching on the net for some idea on how to make it look right. I also decided I will not be using a full techmarine harness for the leader of my Iron Warriors. Those things are loaded down with too much crap, they're too busy of a bit for my tastes. I think with the conversion on a regular Iron Warriors backpack would look nice. I think I'll probably use a metal chaos lord model with the backpacks switched out, I've always had a fondness for the model I'm thinking of.
Back on topic. My friends haven't really painted anything in the past six months as far as I know, and this bums me out quite a bit. Shawn has like 500 points of Tau put together. Neat. I want to hurl 2k points of chaos at a like number of fishheads. Troops and HQs are cool, but there is also shit in my army list like oblits, vindies, and dreads. Those are what I think are cool and I want to field the suckers. I aso want to do enormous hazard stripes (and possibly pieces of bodies) on the dozer blade of my vindie.
Interlude: For those of you not immersed in the hobby: Oblits are daemonic fusions of armor, marine, and warp energy that can grow energy-based projectile weapons out of their arms. Vindies are big tanks with dozer blades and a big fat gun barrel the size of my thumb jutting from their front end. Dreads are monstrous metal walkers with half-dead space marines that have gone bat-shit crazy inside.
Like I said, troops and HQs are cool, they are the core of any list, and Chaos Space Marines have some damn neat stuff in it for both slots in the list, but the elites and other slots are where you find the really neat stuff. Same thing with my loyalist army. I have dreads and vindies there too, plus drop pods and vanguard vets and sternguard vets. I'd like to paint and field all of this "neat" shit someday. I'd be ok with just painting it all, because up to a certain point painting is very relaxing and kind of nice thing to do while watching a movie or tv show. That said, it seems stupid to have fifteen hundred points (roughly 37 models) of Iron Warriors and a similar number and point total of Lamenters if nobody will be engaging in epic battles with them. Maybe I can teach Heather to play the game and fight me, heh.
I think I have a plan forming in my head. I'll build my chaos and loyalist space marine lists to about the 500 or 750 point mark, then see where everyone is. If nobody is above that mark I think I'll work on my orks up to the 500 point limit (I should only have to spend another 60 bucks or so to get to the point after having bought the Assault on Black Reach set when it came out many months ago and a box of boyz). Then, once again, check and see where everyone is with their armies. If that's a no go, maybe, maybe, I'll toy around with a 500 point guard list. I like this hobby and I like painting and I only put five or ten bucks aside a paycheck for it, so its not like my three armies are draining the coffers or anything.
The ork army in my head is basically a speed freaks army. Lots of red paint and lots of ramshackle ork vehicles. LOTS of bikes. I think the space marine (loyalist and chaos) bikes look stupid. The ork ones look fantastic, all kinds of jagged metal and an overall jury-rigged appearance that gives the models a lot of character. Throw fifteen or so of those guys down with some trukks and a Wazdakka counts as and you're set to turbo-boost your way into a 3+ invulnerable save and assault. I'd probably throw in some Kommandos and Burna Boyz as well, because they're both kind of awesome and there is an ork kommando model that I really love. Apparently ork nobz on bikes are one of the most hated armies out there currently, that and double lash PN/KB/oblit spam chaos lists.
The guard army I'm not so sure about. I have a theme idea, but I'm not as knowledgeable about guard tactics as I am about space marine and ork tactics (not that I am beacon of tactical brilliance). The theme would be penal legionnaires, conscripts, and commissars. Basically a penal legion full of some rugged looking models with kind of a gritty look and a lot of browns, dark greens, and blacks. I like the fluff about commissars and penal legions, and I like ninety percent of the commissar models, and I like the rules of the penal legionnaires in the Guard codex. I dunno, this is just the glimmer of an idea right now. I like a lot of things and that is part of the problem. Vostroyans would be pretty cool too, except their models, though I love them, are all metal and fuck that. Metal is a pain in the ass to work with. Someday GW will go all plastic and that will be glorious.
Music: Immigrant Song - The Sword
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