Another week and another wholly different subject! This time back to even smaller scale than before with some Epic 40k minis!
I've always loved the idea of Epic as at least for me it represents what the battlefields of 40k should look like. Massed forces with tens if not hundreds of vehicles per side all going at it over the battlefield. Regular 40k has lost quite of it's appeal with the additions of larger and larger vehicles that just seem out of place. They do look cool as miniatures, but the scale just seems odd when you throw in a few Imperial Knights to battle against some other big monsters. However as a kid I never really got into Epic as most of my mates weren't interested in it and with a limited youths hobby budget I couldn't really get into multiple different rules and scales! I still bought some Epic minis like Gargants, but never really anything even close to resembling an army.
Luckily with a looming 30s crisis and a much improved financial situation I've been able to indulge on many a miniature that I was drooling over 10-20 years ago. Not very surprisingly one of the subjects that I've been drooling over was Epic. Like a lot of my Oldhammer acquisitions my Epic failure/adventure started by being bored on a business trip and wandering into eBay. Spotting a good deal on an Imperial Guard force is what got me started, which lead me to acquire some Orks to bolster the couple of gargants that I found in my stash of old models bought when I was a teenager. I'd been planning to build the IG and Ork forces, but then I ran into a good deal selling an unpainted and unassembled Space Marine force for roughly the price of a single 40k tank. It would already yield me nearly a full army and with a few additional tanks later I came into possession of yet another force.
The Guard and Ork forces have been a bit of a more daunting task as there's a lot of paint stripping required as well as clipping minis off their bases and basing them again. So it would be the men in power armor that would get paint on first! I'd already decided to paint the Guard as Steel Legion and Orks as Kult of Speed and Goffs, so sand, red and black were taken. Add to that my hatred of yellow and those blue smurfs being boring as hell. So I didn't have too many colour choices left. Going through the Armageddon campaign forces there weren't many chapters with suitably simple colour schemes that would fit the bill. Luckily one of my favorites, the Salamanders, were very active in the campaign so the choice was rather easy in the end! I mean who can resist the purifying flames of justice!
This entry represents the first half of the army with a solid core of 3 tactical marine units representing roughly a full company of Marines with their Rhinos. There's also stands for the Supreme Commander, a Librarian and a Chaplain. Miniatures wise this will be roughly half the army, but points wise only a small portion. There will be a few Terminator units coming, as well as heavy support in the form of Predators, Dreadnoughts, Devastators and a mighty titan! But those will have to wait for another time.
I haven't painted 6mm in a while again so there was bit of a learning curve again. The minis were still very nice to paint as they are quite nicely and clearly detailed especially considering that these are the plastics from '91 or '92 if I recall correctly. I went for a basic green and picked out some details. To make them look like Salamanders I decided to paint some flame effects on their shoulder pads as well. Worked out quite nicely, but as the missus pointed out some of them do tend to look a bit like German flags :) Basing was a bit tricky as my normal flocks were far too long for this scale and in the end I used a few different model railroad turfs products as well as some saw dust to represent burnt grass.
With these done I'm sitting at 751 points out of my 1000 point goal. So still a bit behind schedule, but with about two and a half weeks to go it's still achievable. So with that done it's back to the brushes in a mad rush to the finish line!
