Alpha Legion Squad Bravo

My slowly growing 40k army gets some more reinforcements with another regular Chaos Space Marine squad. As I was planning on building roughly a 1800-2000 point army and keep it at that this should be the last regular Core choice, at least for a while before I've played some full sized games. Still a Havoc squad and Terminators to do as well as character models, but outside of that it's mainly just vehicles and Daemon Engines from now on.

As with the previous unit plenty of kitbashing with pieces from different plastic kits from three decades and some 30k Forge World Alpha Legion bits thrown in for flavor. Some minor conversions as well pieces cut off and mixed between kits to vary identical parts somewhat.

Like with the previous unit main colours were done with an airbrush followed by picking out details. I cut down a little on the edge highlights compared to the previous unit as they are just a pain in the **s to do and getting clean  edges just seems nigh impossible at times. Concentrated on the most visible areas  now to save a bit of time, while still keeping the same look as the other minis. Worked out rather nicely so I'm going to continue with the same on the final minis as well.

I bought some new paints in late spring from a fairly new company from Cyprus called Warcolours. I've been tinkering with them lately, but haven't really painted proper until now. They seem to be more gel like compared to the Vallejo I normally use and dry a lot slower as they are meant more for wet blending etc. compared to traditional layering painting styles. I decided to try them out on the banner to see how easy  it would be. Smooth blends are something I've always struggled with, but boy these paints really seemed to make it easy. As they dry slightly slower and are more translucent than Vallejo it was really easy to feather out the edges between layers. In real life the contrast differences are a bit more stark than on the photos, but hopefully they still show the effect. Considering that I did that with 4 different shades in less than 10 minutes the results are pretty nice. With more practice and time really smooth highlights shouldn't be too hard to achieve. I'm really starting to like these paints more and more, the colour selection is aimed more towards fantasy and sci-fi with strong vibrant shades so not that great for historicals, but for other subjects should be amazing. Especially on larger smooth surfaces these are superior to Vallejo and so much easier to handle once you get used to the different properties compared to more traditional paints.

Decal wise I used a combination of Games Workshop and Fallout Hobbies decals as well as a 30k Alpha Legion decal for the unit's Icon. Everything else went on smoothly except  for the Forge World one. I've had issues with their decals previously as well as they are extremely thick, but still somehow they seem to be quite brittle and crease easily as well. Getting that hydra decal on the wavy flag took me nearly an hour to get it to sit straight and set into every crease. It seemed that the moment I though I had gotten everything to stick correctly some corner had moved  and lifted from the flag. With massive amounts of decal softeners and setters I finally got it to sit straight and covered it with a thick varnish layer that smoothed the surface out to remove most of the creases.

With these guys finished I'm probably going for a Daemon Engine next. I have a Helldrake and a Maulerfiend prepped up so going to start with one of them unless something else grabs my attention. We also have a Flames of War escalation league starting in September so I really need to start to prep and start painting for that as well. I'm going with a Soviet Tankovy so plenty of T-34's in store throughout the autumn.

Chaos Decimator

Back to 40k and blogging! Painting has still been slow with computer games like Steel Division and Battlegrounds taking much of my free time lately. But with the 8th edition of 40k coming out and massive hype at my club and online it's really rekindled my interest for my Alpha Legion project so I dug them up and continued from where I left previously!

I started by continuing on the Rhino which was left in a WIP state previously, but like last time I wasn't completely sure about the aesthetics that I went for. Originally I thought a rust base coat and chipping fluids would be a cool idea, but now the vehicle just feels too 'messy' compared to how the rest look. So I put it aside until I figured what to do with it. I hate removing paint, but with an airbrush job covering some of the chipped areas will be a pain in the ass. Luckily most of them are on the lower areas and will be covered by mud anyways, but I'll let that simmer for a while until I get  some inspiration.

So with the Rhino pushed out of the way I went for what is probably my favorite Daemon Engine, the Decimator. It's like a massive mean version of a regular dreadnought that really looks chaotic, but doesn't go overboard like some of the funkier dinobots. Like many Forge World models, fit wasn't always perfect and it was extremely fiddly to put together as it's really top heavy and connection points were tiny. Plenty of pinning and green stuff helped though and now it feels pretty sturdy.

I was thinking about different variations on the green accents with more realistic highlights, random splotches etc. but just ended up going with highlighting panel lines and corners. Outside of that it was a fairly simple job of painting all the steel areas, picking out some cables in different colours and highlighting the demonic features on his armor. I added some dusting and rust effects with pigments, but didn't want to go overboard so left it pretty light. Likewise the base was kept simple, partly not to take too much away from the model and in part, because there  really isn't much room even on a 60mm base as the model really is that huge.

Outside of that I started applying paint on another squad. All the airbrush work is now done, next up it's all the steel pieces and then some edge highlights. That will have to wait a few weeks though, as I'm starting my summer holiday in a few days with a trip to Canada to visit my parents and tour Quebec for a little over a week. Might squeeze in a bit of hobby time before my departure, but that will probably go into some nearly finished Flames of War things. After the trip I'm going to try to get back to more regular painting and blogging, but we'll see how I'm feeling after a short holiday period.

Renovation news, secret santa and painting challenge entries

Phew it's been quite a busy 6 weeks. Apologies for my absence and lack of comments on other blogs as well. We got the keys to our new apartment in the middle of January and since then I've been there every single day after works and all the weekends except for a Flames of War tournament. Finally there's light at the end of the tunnel and our renovation is starting to be finished and we are moving in on Friday. Practically every single surface in the apartment has been redone except for the bathrooms which I'll do later on in the year when we've settled in. Walls and ceilings were painted, I've installed new wood floors and redone the stairs. In addition we tore down a wall to open up our living room and gotten a brand new kitchen. We ended up hiring a company to do the kitchen, but I did the rest myself with help from friends along the way. Quite an exhausting experience with practically no free time for a month and a half, but still quite rewarding to see the whole thing being finalized.

Now that we've been packing things away the whole scale of my hobby seems to show itself as well. I was actually pretty surprised myself as well with just the board games taking 5 large moving boxes straight away and the miniatures even more. I ended up taking some to the new place already to put them on the shelves to make space for packing dishes, clothing etc. I'm starting to think that thinning out the collection might be a good idea sometime...

Also I ran into a slight issue with transporting all my painted miniatures! Normally I store quite a lot on showcase shelves and when I started to pack them away found that I ran out of foam trays to pack them in. So I had to empty one tray out in my new wardrobe to make space for more stuff from the shelves ;)

With that out of the way it's time for some of the Painting Challenge entries that I managed to finish before our renovation kicked of properly. First up a pair of King Tigers and Wirbelwinds for my Flames of War Germans. The later model without Zimmerit was my Secret Santa gift and definitely came in handy as I needed one for the tournament in late January. So thanks to my mysterious benefactor once again! The other one was dug up from my lead pile. It was bought used as part of an eBay auction. One of the only minis that was actually useful from the lot as most were put together wrong, missing parts etc. Definitely the last time I'm buying anything just looking at a tiny picture online.

They were all painted with colour modulation using 4 different shades going from dark yellow to an ivory shade. Camouflage was added on top of that with some further modulation on the camo shades on the later Königstiger. Enamel washes, chipping and mud were the used to weather them.

As my final Flames of War German entry for the challenge I painted up some Sturmgewehr armed infantry. I'd originally planned to field Panzergrenadiers, but in the end ended up switching to Volksgrenadiers so I need to paint up a few more stands armed with assault rifles. I still haven't really figured out how to get camouflage clothing to work at this scale, but from your normal gaming distance you can't really see it anyway.

And finally some refs for Blood Bowl. When I saw Forge World bringing out limited edition referee sculpts I couldn't help myself. I'm a sucker for everything that says limited and with them being such nice sculpts I immediately placed an order for them. They were a nice little side project to paint up. Certainly refreshing between the Flames of War stuff.

With this post done it's back to packing our stuff. A couple of more days to endure and then I can hopefully have some desperately needed hobby time for myself. At least at the new place I'll have a small room for myself and all my things so it's an improvement!

Alpha Legion Marines

Time to break another few weeks of silence!

These guys have taken a while to finish with some of the minis built around a year ago and the first painting steps taken during summer, but they are finally finished. As I said a few posts ago I had a mishap with varnish leading to all of the minis having paint stripped and redone. Suffice to say I've learned my lesson and won't lazy out by using a spray can if I have the airbrush available and using spray varnish outside after rainy weather is definitely not a good idea.

My comeback into 40k started about a year and a half ago when I dug out some old plastics that I had lying around from early 00's and found my old bits box. I like kitbashing stuff and slowly found myself with an assortment of miniatures that didn't really have any use for gaming for me so probably wouldn't get painted. I remember loving 40k as a youth playing tons with my IG and later on Death Guard armies. So I figured it might be a good idea to build a small army to kind of have a target to strive for. Sometime late last year and early this year I put some smallish guidelines for myself about what I wanted to do with the force and what to aim for when putting together models.

I don't know what it is about Chaos that always pulls me in, but once again I couldn't resist it's lure. What I originally put together was mostly renegade guard and some mutants with a few Chaos Space Marines thrown in for good measure. However I figured that I'm not going to be painting a few hundred renegade guardsmen to get into gaming so I decided to build a smaller CSM force first to get into gaming faster. Choosing my legion wasn't going to be easy though. I had a reasonably sized Death Guard force previously, but it's been sold long time again. I did have an urge to build a new one with the modelling opportunities, but decided otherwise as I've done multiple Nurgle armies over the years and  always seemed to lean towards the loving caress of Papa Nurgle. Khorne worshippers were out of the question as I find them a bit dull and I didn't fancy painting all that red armor. After days of research I finally decided Chaos Undivided is the way to go and what better Legion to go for than the infamous Alpha Legion.

The Command team with a Power Sword and combiplasma wielding Sergeant, two Plasma gunners a standard bearer and the squads very own Rambo going at it with dual-wielded pistols.

With Alpha Legion's mysterious past and and slight doubts about their allegiances even after the Heresy offered a nice backstory to pick from. The fact that they are operating as small cells outside of the Eye of Terror would open some possibilities to differ from the normal add spikes to chaosify approach that is predominant with the official Chaos miniatures line. After all the legionaries would have to somewhat blend in to achieve their tasks and aid in subterfuge.

With the Legion chosen I set about choosing some design guidelines to have somewhat of a plan regarding my building process.

• No spikes!
• Every miniature must contain parts from at least two different kits or have some clear conversion done to them
• Equipment from different eras should be used when possible to achieve a look of a veteran unit that has kept whatever equipment worked best for them.
• Every model must have something distinctively chaotic equipment
• Regular Space Marine backpacks instead of the weird looking Chaos ones.

The first unit that I did were the cultist and there I did cheat a bit as the push fit minis were quite tricky to convert. Only some weapon swaps were done on them. Maybe sometime in the future they will be replaced by some suitable Planetary Defence Forces models. However with these guys I more or less stuck to what I'd planned and I'm quite happy with how they turned out. I'm not even sure from how many different kits they are built from, but the major parts come from the CSM box, Horus Heresy box and some Alpha Legion 30k resin parts thrown in. On top of that there's parts from a few different loyalist space marine boxes, some early 90s CSM stuff. I counted at least 8 different kits used, but with stuff scrounged from a bitz box that I've collected since the 90s and which also has bitz lots that I bought from other people it's quite hard to keep track what's from where!



Painting scheme wise I went for a look similar to the one in the mid 90s Codex with a blue base colour and light green highlights. The base shades were painted with an airbrush and light green edge highlights were done with a brush. With details being picked out I decided to try Tamiya Panel Line Accent to define the edges. Not sure if I'm totally sold on the product as results were a bit mixed. On areas of the newer kits which had sharp detail it worked great flowing into creases and corners to make them pop out, but on the older ones with soft detail like the Chaos Space Marine plastics it had a tendency to just run everywhere and had to be cleaned up using mineral spirits. A thicker satin varnish layer would also be required to help the wash flow and make cleaning up easier. Now I had practically no varnish in some harder to reach areas as I only did a thin coat to protect the minis in between.

The regular Joes of the squad.

I finished painting them a few weeks back, but only got around to basing them now as I had a few days of from work. Basic rubble themed basing with some tear plates and discarded imperial equipment thrown in to spice them up. Plenty of different coloured pigments were thrown in to add variety to the otherwise monotone finish.

With them out of the way I have the squads Rhino up next. Though with the speed I've been painting these guys it will be 2018-19 before I have a whole army together so don't hold your breath.

In other news it's the Finnish independence day today so a busy evening ahead filled with the traditional spectacle where we watch our president shake the hands of thousands of guests at the Presidential Independence day party. Plenty of judgment will be dealt out with most of the nation tuning in and admiring and berating the dress choices of guests. At least the afternoon papers will have plenty to write about for the next few days.

With Putin in charge of our neighbouring country our President has also had to step up his game with photoshoots. Being a classy guy he at least has his shirt on unlike Putin :)