PoTM: Raven guard Captain

Hey hey.

Here's the latest addition to my Raven Guard force. A captain. As you can see it's an Emperor's Champion from the Black templars. I like the miniature so much that I had to paint one for the Raven Guard also. Paintjob was pretty straighforward because I wanted to keep color palette to a minimum. Here's some pictures.

Next I'll be steering away from the Raven guard for a while mainly for two reasons; I'd like to use some colours while painting and secondly the rumours tell that there's going to be a new Codex for Space Marines in autumn. So the summer is a good time to break up the routines. I have an Imperial guard sentinel and some chaos cultists on my desk now. Let's see what can we make of them.

This is Tatu signing out.

PoTM: Raven guard Terminators

Hello! It's time to update yet another Painting of The Month chapter. As I promised is update consist not one but two new squads to my ever growing Raven Guard army.

First the scouts:



These fellas were coated with thick layers of old paint and as a lazy painter I did not bothered to scrap the old layers off. The result is somewhat poor. Cleverly I took only one picture in shady lighting so the illusion of me being a good painter does not fade. Close combat weapons and bolt pistols there.



Sergeant is converted to carry a power fist for a little Uumpf. I don't expect them to survive very long. The main reason for their existense is the teleport homer which allows me to deep strike my brand new terminator squad down to the battlefield with pin-point accuracy.

*** EMPERORS FINEST REPORTING***



Boom! Here they are. 8 of the finest. Sergeant is an old captain model. He's sword arm was missing so I had to make a new one from the terminator box. Bit of green stuff and gluing there. Other equipment consist a pair of chainfists and of course all the special weapon options are available.



Assault Cannon



Cyclone missile launcher



Heavy Flamer

And here are few detail pictures





The terminators were incredibly fun to paint. Also being able to paint white surfaces for a change was very pleasant. I'll be definately making another squad of them probably with assault weapons.

Next month it's time for the Captain. I'm also making a report about the assembly of my new paint station which arrived from Poland last week.

Stay tuned nerds.

PoTM: Raven guard Predator

Hey hey. It's yet another Painting of The Month update from Tatu. This time it's the predator. It was quite a quick tank to paint mainly because my skills with highlighting black have been improving. The turret and the crew manning the storm bolter took most of the time. As you can see this one is a destructor pattern predator. Quite a cheap solution and very good against lightly armoured infantry. When stationary it can unleash 10 S4-7, AP4-5 hits in a turn. Not bad. Next month it's going to be a double-whammy surprize-update and it has something to do with this gizmo. It's been beeping on my desk for few days now. I think it's sending a signal of some sort. This is Tatu signing out

PoTM: Raven guard assault squad with Chaplain

Good news everyone! It's mid-moon madness with another Painting of The Month update. Here's the solution for my ever growing strike forces lack of punch. Ten-man assault squad with some nice hitty upgrades.

 
As you might have already spot there's an eleventh member in the group. A Chaplain! I found this chap when I was going through my collection of pairless socks. There he was at the bottom of the box, half-painted and looking very angry. A suitable addition to my squad. As all Marine players know a Chaplain is very handy when the fight gets ugly. This fella gives a nice little boost in hand-to-hand combat. With his Liturgies of Battle I can reroll any missed hit the turn when I assault. Now that's good news when you're assaulting with 10 marines. The angry man himself is not a bad fighter either. Armed with power weapon and having 4+ invulnerable save he is a tough one to beat. Also the squad he joins in turns fearless. Respect the mans authority!


Sergeant is armed with Power fist and Storm shield. A costly combination, but a deadly one as well.


There's also a single flamer in the squad as my regular opponents are usually either Dark Eldar or Orks. A little barbeque never harmed anyone with good armor. Oh wait! Orks and Eldar don't have very good armor. What's that smell...?

 
To sum it all up here's a picture of the whole force so far. I was actually quite pleased with the result so far as I was taking pictures. I starts to look like a proper army. A quick calculation gave about 1100 points for whole lot.

 
 Next on the table is the Predator. It's going to be the not-so-often-seen destructor pattern. Autocannon and pair of Heavybolters added up with pintle-mounted stormbolter gives me a nice amount of infantry killing firepower. This is Tatu signing out

PotM: Crypt Ghouls

Hey how is it going people, this is Eto and today is the first day of the month which means it's time for another episode of Painting of the Month (PotM), a series where we'll nominate a unit at the start of the month and by the time it's the first day of the following month we'll showcase those units. For March's episode I had chosen to paint Vampire Counts Crypt ghouls. Back to the humble core units after last month’s massive Mortis Engine. Crypt ghouls are often seen in the tournaments as the bread and butter core units of Vampire counts, 2 poisoned attacks and toughness of 4 while being relatively cheap. Sounds good to me.

The problem I have as collector is that these models are extremely boring to paint. Basically these models just lack any form of enjoyable part. It felt like I was painting 10 models that were constantly stuck on the basecoat situation up until finished. However starting to mix in shades and highlights as you paint the basic colors in is a good way to break down that vicious circle.

Due to their ‘outgoing’ posture, trying to rank them up is a bit of a challenge. With the huge selection of available arms and the nature of these cannibals you can come up with a great squabbling theme.

The ghouls are quite charismatic if you compare them to other less fleshy undead units. So while they are quite a pain in the arse to paint, they look great once they’re finished.

For his high level of intellect Bob the Bright was chosen as the champion of his pack

Despite his best efforts to be in the limelight all by himself, Charles the Corpseswinger was photobombed

For April’s episode of PotM I’ll be painting Vampire Counts Grave Guard unit.

As a side note: I've also been thinking of continuing my 40k Ork army so there might be a few updates regarding those in the future (pun unintended.) At least for now there will be one additional Vampire Counts related update. So that’s pretty much it for today’s episode of PotM. I’ll see you guys in the next episode, this is Eto signing off.

PotM: Raven guard tactical squad

Hey hey fellas. This is Tatu with almost 2 week behind schedule. I was rendered into a slime-oozing idiot by numerous infections I manage to have few weeks back. Anyways, here it is: Raven Guard Tactical squad with Rhino transport. I decided to make it a full ten-man squad because you really cannot have too much troops at your disposal.

 

Rhino is basic version with no additional upgrades. Rhinos end up blowing up sooner or later in the game so with my relatively small task force it's really not worth to invest points on transport upgrades.

 

This squad has a heavy bolter as a heavy weapon and a flamer as a special one. This gives me a nice option if I decide to use the unit as combat squads. The other half with flamer and a sergeant armed with power weapon will embark in to rhino and surge forward while the other half, including the heavy bolter, will stay behind and offer covering fire.



As I said I armed the sergeant with a power sword for a additional close combat efficiency. Usually the troops end up holding objectives which means there will be a close combats.



The whole squad with transport costs about 220 points. Nice. Next month (or this month actually) I'll be making a ten-man assault squad with jump-packs. As I mentioned earlier, my force lack the punch in close combat situations so assault squad is a logical choice. This is Tatu signing out.

PotM: Mortis Engine

How you doing lads, this is Eto and today is the first day of the month which means it's time for another episode of Painting of the Month (PotM), a series where we'll nominate a unit at the start of the month and by the time it's the first day of the following month we'll showcase those units. For February's episode I had chosen to paint Vampire Counts Mortis Engine and I gotta tell you, it was something different!



At the beginning I was a bit skeptical how I’d actually approach this quite massive.. beast.. machine.. thing. I decided to go with the same style with the spirit horde holding the massive bone construction, as my Spirit Hosts; light grey and blue with white highlights.



After I was done with the ghostly parts I had to tackle down the Mortis Engine itself. I really liked the idea how they described the reliquary being inside a cage of fused bone, so I made the joints as obscure as possible. The reliquary itself and the stairs leading to it, as well as the half skeletons on fire were a lot of fun to paint as they offered something of a contrast to the bone parts.



The corpsemaster and the book infront of him got me stuck for a quite a while. Eventually I decided to go with black robe to slightly blend him in. I didn’t want to add more contrasting colors to the model by making his robes stand out too much. The blasphemous tome ended up with some scribbles, latin words and blood splatters on it.



Finally I added the banshees on top of the construct and they’re pretty much hanging there by happy thoughts and wishful thinking. GW has a tendency to sometimes make models where some parts defy the laws of physics.



I really enjoyed painting this model, and I’d go as far as saying that I only spent 1/3 of the time painting it, and 2/3 of the month wondering what color combinations would work out best. Surprisingly, it was pretty easy to construct even though the total amount of bits in this model is a whopping 90 parts. Eventually it turned out pretty neat, staying true to the rest of my army’s color theme (pictures for those will be added later).

For March episode of PotM I’ll be painting a pack of Ghouls for my Vampire Counts army.

So that pretty much wraps it up for today’s episode of PotM. If you have questions or comments feel free to drop them in the comments section below, and subscribe to our blog if you want to hear more! I’ll see you guys in the next episode, this is Eto signing off.

Time trial: Marauder horseman

Howdy fellas. This time I'm tackling miniatures from a bit different point of view. You see I had quite a long lazy period in painting and in that time only a few minis ever end up finished. Nowadays I'm more active. Getting the painting routine up and running is not easy, at least not for me. I was struggling with my new Mordheim warband (pictures come later) for a quite some time. Painting was hard, it seemed as I wasn't as skilled and fast painter as I used to be. Lack of routine, I know. With my Mordheim warband I just started gluing pieces to together and then painting. This might be perfectly okay to most people but not for me. I quickly lost interest to the warband because of the lack of planning I usually do with new minis. That got me thinking. With good planning and preparation, how fast could you paint a tabletop-quality mini? Enter the Raakhafargar the Humourless, Champion of the smallest northern village and the Incinerator of three, yes three, outhouses. Raakhafargar had recently suffered a minor flu and sees this as a sign from gods. He is planning to make a big deal with Nurgle next tuesday.

The fella in question is marauder horseman from my vast collection of unpainted miniatures. Picking up the parts and cleaning up the mouldlines took about 15 minutes.

Horse took about 30 minutes to finish. Decent tabletop-quality at least on my standard. Not perfect, but that wasn't the point.

Raakhafargar himself took about an hour to finish and I spent about half hour making small corrections and basing the model. So my marauder took total of 2,5 hours to finish. Not bad I thought. Lesson for me was this: Make plans. Paint on daily basis and with coherency. With groups try to apply the same colour to every mini before moving on to next one. Don't get stuck with hard or boring stages of your miniartures. The result is usually worth the trouble.

PotM: Now you're a Devastator, brother!

Good evening all. Here's Tatu with some brand new PotM(Painting of the Month) stuff. I'm adding some more firepower to my Raven Guard strike force with a squad of Devastators. These fellas are armed with multi-purpose missile launchers to counter all sorts of threats. Anti-air is the key to success in the current edition so the squad got some hot new flakk-missiles from armory. The squad has a dedicated transport, a Razorback, which I have painted some months earlier.

And here's the whole strike force so far.

During february I'm painting a tactical squad with Rhino transport. Also my force seriously lacks the punch in close combat so I need fix that thing real soon. This is Tatu, signing out.

PotM: Skeleton warriors regiment

What’s up people this is Eto and today is the first day of the month which means it’s time for an episode of Painting of the Month (PotM), a series where we’ll nominate a unit at the start of the month and by the time it’s first day of the following month we’ll showcase those units. For this episode I decided to add another 20 skeleton warriors to my Vampire Counts army, armed with spears and a full command group. Now as you can see from the pictures below we’re talking about the old school bunch of skellies here, which I have to say I find somehow more charismatic with their wonky legs and downright weird hand structures.

20 new skeleton warriors ready to kick ass and send bones flying

Like the rest of the army I wanted to have a nice, solid and coherent bunch of undead warriors so I used the same shield ornament for whole regiment. I also made the spear points stick up high for the 1^st, 3^rd and 4^th row as to further bring up the idea of being led by one eternal will of the Vampire general. 2^nd rank has their spears in between 1^st row to make it look like they’re ready to take an enemy charge upfront. 

 

As for the command group, I always paint one even though I rarely use champion or musician with skeletons. Old school painter me always wants to have an option for WYSIWYG. I’ve always enjoyed painting banners as you can put your imagination and skills to the test and really come up with a nice detail for otherwise regular and boring units. 

Hanged man, or a skeleton rather

For the February’s episode of PotM I’ll be choosing Vampire counts Mortis Engine.

So that’s pretty much it for today’s episode of PotM. If you have questions or comments feel free to drop them in the comments section below, and subscribing to our blog would be much appreciated. I’ll see you guys in the next episode, this is Eto signing off.