Tactical squad nearly online, sir!

Hoo Boy!

I’m working my way deeper into the mound of miniatures, and now I’m close to finishing Tactical squad number one (of three)

finished

Ready for action!

It seems that Citadel Paints Mephiston Red really does the trick for tackling black primer; at least it’s working for me. Now what do I do about yellow when I get to the assault marines? (for their helmets!)

I’m certainly no Golden Demon award winner, but like I said, i can at least do a decent tabletop standard. Here’s the rest of the lads:

halfway-there

We’ll fight so much better once we’re properly based!

I stumbled across some Nuln Oil gloss wash, and thought I’d give it a try. Results are…meh.

shiny

You say shiny, I say oiled and ready for action! Wait a second…

NEXT time will be the battle report of the Crimson Fist marines vs the Iron hands!

Maybe.

It’s a lot of writing, and I’m somewhat lazy…

First Squad, we’re going in!

line-up

Have Lightning Claws, will travel. And then kill things when we get there.

Alright! The first unit is officially finished!

Well, except for the protective coat.

But you’d never know that if I didn’t just tell you, right?

Man, I really love painting Terminators! So much open space to work with! And guys armed with Lightning Claws?

Hell, that hardly takes any effort at all!

Altogether, I think we’re off to a fine start here.

I guess this means I have to start on the second unit, though. (This whole blog idea will be pretty short-lived if I don’t)

Next on the painting block will be…

 

Tactical Marines!

new-meat

Sure, we’re basic troops, but Goddamn we kick ass!

I was kind of torn here, to be honest, because normally I prime white, not black, and I was thinking about stripping and re-priming these suckers.

The main problem with that is my paint-stripper of choice, Goof-Off, will eat the plastic like it was nothing, and as those arms and bolt-guns are plastic…bad idea.

The other option was to just spray white primer over the black, but that covers up detail, so I’m gonna bite the bullet and paint over black.

We’ll see how that goes.

Next time will be a primer on primer!

By the Emperor! What heresy is this?

Pink Space Marines??

imgres

By the teeth of the living God-Emperor, it matters not what colour the power armour be; It is the might of the bolter and chain-sword that will prevail! Or, er, the Lightning-claw as well!

Okay, okay, okay. Not really.

Although, I imagine it would be great fun to curb-stomp some beardy power-gamer with Purty Pink Power-armoured Space marines, this is merely the second stage of painting the Blood Angels Terminators.

red

See? A nice manly red!

(not that any color is more womanly or manly than any other color. C’mon people, it’s 2017 here)

Actually, that red is still a few shades from being done. Our heroic marine here will look a lot darker when he’s finished.

Now, you may be wondering why these guys have been assembled as Assault Terminators, rather than the Tactical Terminators that were clearly on the box.

The answer is simple:

Our departed gamer already had a squad of tactical terminators painted and assembled:

terminators

We’re Flesh Tearers, by gum! Not some crummy unknown founding pink marine chapter!

So I instead went with the Lightning Claws that I had left over from my own Crimson Fist Marine army.

Yeah, I know according to the meta, Thunder Hammer and Storm shield are the way to go for Assault (because of that sweet 3++ save) but I like lightning claws.

More importantly, I had them just laying around, and even more importantly, there was a five man Tactical Terminator squad already painted.

contrast

LIGHTNING JAZZ-HANDS OF DEATH

Next time, I’ll post the finished squad, and figure out what to paint next!

Sons of Sanguinius, take heed!

Or something along those lines.

26b22d0c957f34ca61d9e047821db8f3

So the dream finally happened, the dream of every black-hearted gamer everywhere:

An unknown gamer died, and they were selling off all of his stuff.

…and this guy had a lot of stuff. Mostly Warhammer 40k stuff, but altogether a lot of different gaming ephemera as well.

I went to the estate sale with cash in hand, and greed in my soul, thinking “Man I bet I can score some really good crap here!”

But when I got to the basement of the house, and started looking through all of the piles of this persons former treasured possessions, a wave of great sadness broke over me. After a while of searching through the jumbled mess, I asked the seller (who was not a member of the family, but rather a professional estate-handler) if I could sort everything out into the proper places where it belonged.

He willingly agreed, and so I spent an hour putting Space Wolf miniatures with Space Wolves, Dark Angel miniatures with Dark Angels, and various other army factions with one another.

I ended up getting a rather large Blood Angels army out of the deal, at a significantly reduced price for helping the guy sort things out.

Honestly, that wasn’t my reason for putting the stuff in order, though. I just looked at it all, and felt so sad.

I thought “What if this was all of my stuff thrown willy-nilly into a sale pile?” I wouldn’t want that, and I suspect that this person wouldn’t either.

In any event, I’ve decided to chronicle the painting of this fellow gamer’s Blood Angel army, the only army that appeared to be mostly unfinished, and I suspect was his last project.

A journey of a thousand miles…

Well, you get the idea. It’s a metric shit-ton of plastic and lead to paint.

Now, I’m a pretty fair painter, and I can do a decent tabletop standard, but I’m not going to try and match the Flesh Tearers motif that the original guy was doing. Instead, I’m gonna paint them as straight-up Blood Angels.

I’ll post his painted work a little further down the line, so you can compare and contrast. First up for me will be a squad of Terminator marines.

Wish me luck!