21/01/2016

All creatures great and small.

I had been intending to mostly work on my INQ28 stuff in recent weeks, but I seem to be more suggestible than I had thought, and a binge rewatch of Vikings over the holidays has it seems directed most of my modelling enthusiasm towards their two Warhammer incarnations.

Dwarfs are probably my second favourite part of Fantasy after the Empire, but their Mordheim outing has been stalled pretty much since I first picked out the models, when I decided I couldn't be arsed doing the required shortening work over other projects. I say required because while the Scibor and Avatars of War models are lovely, they're all too tall for my tastes, and so had to be reworked to bring them down to 20-ish mm to the eyes. Having done that for some of them now, it has the happy side-benefit of bringing them closer in appearance to the older "kneeless" Dwarfs I fell in love with as a kid.








The first five almost finished models are, left to right; Ranger, Hammerer, Thane, Hammerer, and Miner. I have another Warrior, two more Rangers, and an Engineer on the board at the moment based on more Scibor models, and the two Slayers are from AoW(but are proving a right fucking pig to convert given they're metal). A few individual shots(apologies for the blur):







The other Viking-esque force that's been occupying my attention of late are a band of Marauders from one of the Norse tribes. There's a fair few models in the works for these guys, but only a couple are pretty much complete, the first of which was a test model to see if I could make something decent out of the new Bloodreavers(probably the only thing to come out of AoS that's actually better than their Realhammer equivalents, although it still needed some help from the old Marauder Horsemen kit):





Most of my time on these guys though has been spent on one of the few new AoS models that's any good; Borg Jotunblod.





Mostly the conversion work is concerned with removing any obvious Khornate iconography and with making his armour look a bit more primitive. The full band will be based around seaborne Reavers, dedicated to the whole Pantheon with a slight overall bias towards Shornaal in its aspect as Loesh, the great serpent(as befits a band of sailors), and a few hints towards specific gods on some of the models.


A last wee addendum that's more of a recommendation than anything else, since really the only work done on the following model was gap-filling; I'd had a new idea for how to use my Nightmaw model that is presently doing duty as a Possessed in my Cult warband, which left them one short. Then I recalled the "Warper Alpha" miniature from Quantum Gothic, which actually had a nice resemblance to the old metal Possessed. I prefer the newer version seen in the Mordheim computer game myself, but now I get to have one of each, heh. If you're looking for a Possessed model, you could do much worse;












\\:++noospheric inload commencing++...

I've decided to keep my posts split up into different game systems for ease of browsing, assuming I ever amass enough posts and/or readers for that to be an issue of course.

The progress on my Explorator warband has been less than I'd hoped, the reasons why are in the other post, but I have managed to finish off the first member; Dagan-Calix 44, Logis Dataphant.







The shrivelled, half-blind remnant of his fleshface is the only remaining external sign of his baseline origins, the rest of his body entirely repurposed as a host for thousands of ultra compact meme-spindles and a powerful cogitator core.






So enhanced, he is a living reference library, capable of rapidly cross-referencing millions of datapoints to determine the STC provenance of the Archmagos' latest rediscoveries, or of sifting the datasphere of entire hive cities for new clues to help guide the next phase of their Quest.




I'm really pleased with how this chappie turned out, the whole thing having started as basically an excuse to bitz-order those lovely Helbrute heads, hah. Up next should be the Archmagos Explorator himself, Theomekhotokos, when the present Mordheim urge passes.

















02/01/2016

Intro[retro]spective.



So, blogs. I tend not to be very good at this sort of thing; I'm not particularly extroverted so I usually require the provocation of an existing thread or conversation before I put finger to keyboard, and then when I do I tend towards excessive verbosity, but I'm at the stage now where I'm(albeit infrequently and inconsistently) updating WiP threads on several different forums, some of them faction- or game system-specific, so consolidation seems sensible and blogs seem to be the done thing in that regard.

A brief warning for those of a delicate constitution; I tend to type how I speak, meaning I will likely be swearing here, frequently. I understand that's a problem for some people, so be ye fairly warned.

All that said, lets begin with a quick rundown of what folk can expect from this blog. These days I find myself much more enamoured of GW's presently defunct but potentially soon to be resurrected Specialist Games than I do of their "core" offerings, so the meat & potatoes of my updates will relate to Mordheim, INQ28, and Battlefleet Gothic, with occasional forays into Forgeworld's Heresy-era Tactical Strike system(ie, Kill Team done properly). Age of Sigmar will find no purchase nor favour here. The content of said updates will mostly focus on modelling, sculpting, converting etc over painting since I enjoy and feel like I've much improved at the former and don't tend to have much fun with the latter, although I am trying to do better in that respect. You might also find yourself subjected to my fluff writing, for which I sincerely apologise.

I'm presently clearing my desk and sorting all my half-finished projects, so to close out this opening foray I'll include a few older pictures.

To begin, we have Confessor Barnabas Holt, an INQ28 character based on one of the FW Nurgle priests;




He will eventually see service in a Puritan Hereticus Inquisitor's retinue. Next we have the partially-completed Master at Arms, also a member of an incomplete retinue, this time for a Rogue Trader;




Next is a simpler model, not even a conversion really just a weapon-swap, but still one of my favourites; an old Necromunda model I'd missed out on when I was younger but managed to finally swipe off ebay for a reasonable price;




He's part of my INQ28 Adeptus Mechanicus Explorator team, which I hope to be doing substantial work on in the coming weeks.

I'll close out with a few shots of a Mordheim warband, The Possessed, who are almost ready for paint(I will be rebasing them on squares as a petty act of defiance in the face of AoS, heh);











I can make no promises about the frequency of forthcoming updates, but the plan at the moment is to focus down on three main projects; Adeptus Mechanicus(the completion of my 40K Explorator Team and also of a 30K Magistratum Strike Force), Adeptus Arbites(a 40K INQ28 project that is still in the concept phase), and more dark denizens for Mordheim this time in the form of the bestial Northmen(a warband based on the Border Town Burning supplement rules for Chaos Marauders, likely the Norse subfaction).

I hope that eventually a few folk will find some inspiration in the work I post here, as I have from the blogs and plogs of others.

Cheers,
Yodhrin.