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.