Warhammer 40,000 Open Day - Exhibition - Armies on Parade Display

More pictures taken while I was at the Warhammer 40,000 Open Day at Warhammer World. This time, the exhibition of Armies of Parade entrants.

First up is an internet famous one! This is an amazing Dark Eldar display piece done by James Taro. I think it's a bit of a shame that there wasn't a national Armies on Parade competition last year or this year, as I think this would have been a serious contender for winning last year.

I like Orks, and I'm very fond of irresponsible giant land ships. This board has both. It doesn't look great from a distance as the multi-coloured metal plates break up the outline a lot, but it's really nice.

Here's an awesome chaos board, with a lot of work gone into customising the board to add the chaos star.

An awesome chaos daemons board, invading an Imperial city. Some of the daemons have had some green stuff work done to change their faces.

This Ork board is apparently inspired by the old Deff Skwadron comic.

Nice little Grey Knight force working alongside some Storm Troopers. Coteaz supervises from the building on the back.

A nice simple Adeptus Mechanicus and Skitarii board - really like the rusted pipes and weathering.

This is a Tomb Kings / Nagash Age of Sigmar board - the idea of the column of skeletons coming out of the Realmgate is a really nice one.

If you look closely, you can also see some spirit hosts just behind the portal, painted in the same colours. I really like that effect.

Bit of a Space Hulk vibe going on here...

An oldie but a goodie - one of the White Dwarf team's Empire board.

How my brain works

So, this weekend I was away at No Rest for the Wicked, which is a Rogue Trader style 40K LARP. As such, aside from getting my weapon phys reps done (see above) my hobby has been sparse, as has my time to blog about it.

Until I get caught up, here's a little example of how my brain leaps from idea to idea in very quick succession.

• I saw a post on G+ from someone asking for advice for kit in No Rest.
• My general advice is to focus on costuming the top half of the body, as Sensible Boots are a very reasonable costuming compromise if you're running around in the wet and the cold.
• I then thought about how cool a good pair of LARP pirate boots would look.
• Maybe it would be cool to play a pirate in the 40K LARP.
• I'm reminded of how I think there's a very specific difference between "Renegade Space Marines" and "Chaos Space Marines", and how often, but not always, that line slowly and gradually blurs and Renegades become Chaos worshippers.
• I then start working out how to do a (human, not Space Marine) Renegade captain in the LARP, with Orks, Eldar Corsairs and even a small unit of Renegade Marines as part of his warband.
• Halfway through this, I realise it could be a really, really cool 40K tabletop army.
• I then sit down working out which forces to use for which sections, settling on the Lost and the Damned army list for the human pirates and renegades, with a formation of Ork Freebooters, an Allied Contingent of Eldar Corsairs and Chaos Space Marines as the Renegades.
• Realising this is, mechanically, a Chaos force, I'm reminded of the cool background and ideas I came up with for the Iron Warriors force I already own models for and have been planning on painting for a while.

So, in this particular case, this crazy run of logic (which took a single afternoon) has resulted in a new army idea to be queued up after I finish my existing armies, but has gotten me a little enthused about one of my existing projects.

Rogue Trader Era Space Ork Designs

I was sorting out a few boxes of old miniatures for a friend who was selling them on eBay. I noticed the old box design for the Space Orks, and decided that the flavour text, example paint jobs and glyph designs might be of interest to people...

Rainy bank holidays: helping me be a less terrible person

This bank holiday weekend, I decided to try and do at least some of the things I have sitting in my queue for other people.

Codename: Oberon is not for other people, but I've found I get more done if I don't focus on a single project at once. Oberon was finished in between the main project of the weekend.

And here's the the big job from this weekend. These are five Runtherd kit-bashes for Sim's Ork army, as one of her second hand purchases included many Gretchin, but no Runtherds to push them into battle. A recent bits sale at one of the sites I used provided me with five Freebooter bodies and an assortment of gun arms and heads to make them into full models.

As a cautionary tale for those doing Ork conversions - if you're buying bits separately, you need to buy the neck component as well as the body, or you're going to have problems. I found that non Freebooter heads went on just find, using the bottom of what should be the throat as an Adam's apple instead. They do end up a little long necked, but I think they turned out fine.

I intend to continue on with Operation: Finish Off Everyone Else's Stuff over the coming weeks.