Painting Challenge entry 12: Adeptus Arbites

I'm really having trouble keeping up with the challenge posts here on my own blog :) Oh well, it's all over soon so no need to worry about that in the future :) At least until the next edition of the challenge...

If there is anyone in the Imperium with as large steel ball as an Imperial Guardsman it has got to be an Adeptus Arbites officer. Going up against alien scum might be bad, but at least you have some heavy back up. An Arbites enforcer will have to go down into the bowels of a hive city with little else than his weapon and badge to bring order into the world of gangers and mutants. So with the introduction done these are 5 of the 7 Adeptus Arbites sculpts from the early 90's. Still missing the last two, so if you happen to have them sitting unused I'm more than happy to give them a new home.

Arbites are at least for me some of the most iconic 40k models. Might have something to do with seeing the Stallone Judge Dredd film at a very impressionable age and getting my hands on some of the comics soon after. Beefed up cops with trigger discipline that would make US cops look like girl scouts somehow just seems to work brilliantly. With the same kind of characters in my favorite miniature universe I was instantly sold on the Arbites enforcers when I saw some in Necromunda. Now looking back at some of these older Citadel sculpts and how a lot of the aesthetics is completely copied from somewhere else, it's a bit funny that now they are going after everyone and their cousin for even the smallest IPR infringements.

I wanted the bases to be urban themed to show them battling in the depths of hive worlds with some corrugated steel, rubble and rusty barbed wire thrown in. For the colour scheme I chose the traditional black and red that features quite often on the older artwork and some studio miniatures of the time. It was bit of a tricky combination as I find both red and black quite hard to highlight as red easily tends to turn into orange and black into gray. In the end I ended up just doing a dark gray edge highlight on the black areas and a bit of layering on the red. Turned out rather nicely, though the black is a bit hard to see in the pictures. Taking photos of black minis against a black background wasn't too easy either. I might have to try get some other suitable background sheets for these occasions when the miniature colours are too close to the photography booths background.

With these done I guess it's time to play Necromunda again! I think the last time I played a game was in the early 00's with my old gang, that has sadly been sold with most of my other old minis when I quit the hobby for a few years in my late teens. Still it's never too late to get back in as it's a great game system. And what would be better than bashing in a few ganger skulls while dishing out the Emperor's justice.

Painting has slowed down a bit lately with a very busy schedule at work due to some unexpected visits from a customer. And when I've been painting I've seemed to have had a series of mishaps constantly. My air compressor is acting up with apparently the power button broken so I might have to pull that apart in an attempt to fix the issue or buy a new one. I've also been extremely clumsy as of late and have managed to bump things over on my desk multiple times. As a consequence a few minis have attempted to end their life by jumping on to the floor and I've managed to spill my brush rinsing water cup onto the table a couple of times over the last week. It wouldn't have mattered too much, but on both times I spilled it right on top of some half-finished minis that had their MDF bases soaked up. A couple of them were on sabot bases with cardboard bottoms that started to swell up very badly and were a bit of a pain to fix up.

Painting Challenge entries 6 & 7: Chainsaw Wizard and American halftracks

Last week I actually managed two entries, even if one of them was only a small one with one miniature!

First up is a limited edition Citadel Chainsaw Wizard sculpted by Aly Morrison in 1987. A suitably wacky sculpt that was fun to paint for a change! I've been buying up some of the old citadel limited editions whenever I see them going for sale on eBay or somewhere else for reasonable prices. Slightly embarrassingly most have been waiting for paint for very long times. With that in mind I figured I should prep a few of them for the painting challenge and paint them up between other projects every now and then. With the chainsaw wizard done I now really need to start looking for his long-range counterpart the submachine gun wizard!

The second entry of the week was 10 additional halftracks for Flames of War. 5 M3 tracks for the armored rifle platoon that was finished a few weeks prior, 2 M2 command halftracks and 3 M4 81mm mortar carriers. With these done I'm only missing 4 M10 tank destroyers and some odd weapons stands for when I choose to dismount the mortars or some of the MG's from the infantry half-tracks.

With the plastic infantry I was complaining about the appalling quality of the sculpts and moulding, but compared to them the plastic halftracks are actually a very pleasent surprise. I find them far better than the resin vehicles that Battlefront makes. Detail is very crisp, they go together very easily and all in all were quite a joy to paint. And I think the same can be said for most of their other newer plastic kits as well. Apparently even the plastic soviet infantry is quite nice. Practice goes a long way in helping improve the kits, and they seem to have gotten the hang of it by now. Hopefully they'll go around updating some of the first plastic kits in the future as well.

Painting wise I went with my trusted method of Brown Violet with dark yellow modulation. After details were picked and chipping applied, a liberal brown enamel wash was applied which was then wiped of when it had dried. Getting the modulation right really does seem tricky as before the wash I'm constantly thinking that I went too far and the effect is too stark. But now after the wash I'm almost wishing I had gone for even more contrast.

That's all for Flames of War US forces for a while now. I have nearly everything for my Mid War list as well and the only really missing pieces, the M10's, can easily be proxied with other TD's. I'll finish them up closer to the European Team Championships when I've gathered more motivation to paint olive green again.

Painting Challenge entry 1: Chaos Santa

Time to get started with the three months of madness that is Curt's annual Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge. It's the sixth edition of the challenge and the fourth time that I'm participating in it. Once again I'm aiming for the 1000 points as in the last couple of years. 2013-14 saw me pass it by a great margin while last year I only just got over the target. With real life interfering more with hobby time nowadays, it will be bit of a stretch to get that done. But we'll see how it goes! Might have to participate in one or two of the bonus rounds to make the points this time around.

But without further ado it's time for my first entry. I wanted something really fast to paint up for the first miniature and while rummaging through my lead pile I found a bunch of old citadel sculpts that I'd bought from eBay a while back and more or less forgotten about them. With Christmas around and me coming from the land of Santa Claus I figured that this old limited edition christmas special was the perfect choice! What we have here is a Citadel Chaos Santa sculpted by one of the Perrys and being available during christmas sometime in the mid to late 80s. Last year I had plans to paint this up and make a small vignette inside a christmas decoration with it, but that never materialized so this time I just went with a normal base.

Coming up next in the challenge are some Saxons and then I'll probably finish off the rest of the Flames of War Americans. Plus some miniatures themed christmas decorations :)

Painting Challenge entry 9: Toilet Humour

Entries for the Comedy themed Bonus challenge are now up for voting so head over to the Challenge blog to view the other entries and cast your votes! Comedic themed entries

Time for another entry to the bonus challenges. I've been planning to do more, but time has been quite limited and I wanted to focus on things that are actually needed or at least remotely useful in gaming. However with this mini I just couldn't resist the temptation and as I had just finished the Beutepanzer and had a few days time so I decided that some change from painting historicals was needed.

Enter the fabled Chaos Toilet sculpted by Aly Morrison and produced sometime in the 80s by Citadel. This is by far the most random miniature that I've ever owned and I have no idea what went through the sculptors head when he figured this would be a good miniature to make. Still I am grateful for the use or lack of performance enhancing drugs that lead to the creation of this as it's a wonderful little piece. Plenty of character and this thing is guaranteed to be an eye-catcher with the absurd theme. Too bad they don't make stuff like this anymore with all this business nonsense coming in the way of good old fashioned laughs.

I'd seen the miniature before on some Oldhammer blog and it caught my eye back then. Fast forward some time to last summer when I was browsing Ebay for some Oldhammer chaos warriors and spotted this guy up for auction. I didn't need much encouragement and placed a bid, eventually winning the miniature at what I'd consider a bargain price of about 20 euros after shjpping to Finland. Unfortunately it did get pushed to the back of the painting table to wait for inspiration and some idea of where to actually use the mini. With the second last bonus round being Comedy themed I figured a man-eating chaotic toilet would be the perfect thing and with it only being a nice single mini it wouldn't take too much time to paint up, but would provide enough change from the normal historicals.

The base was done quickly with greenstuff to resemble a stone floor suitable for the toilet of some deranged wizard. I wanted to paint this with brighter candy colours, partly because with the WW2 stuff I've been doing I have to stick to quite dull colour pallets and partly because everything from the 80s just has to be so colourful that it's on the verge of hurting your eyes. I went with a mix of light greens to make it look sickly and added reds and pinks for contrast. As an afterthought the snotling probably should have been painted with some different colours as the purple tinted green isn't different enough from the arm of the toilet. But otherwise I think the scheme works great. To add some extra detail I used the newish GW effects paints to do blood splatter and streaks and add some slime streaking down the water basin.

Great little bugger to paint up and provided a nice little change before going back to more WW2 stuff. And with only one evening of painting needed after the base was done it also didn't take up too much time. Now that I got it finished I'm really starting to feel like painting some more Oldhammer stuff though. Gotta fight the urge as I really need to finish some Germans and there's still 8 Napoleonic battalions to paint before June.

First Oldhammer minis done

I managed to finish up the first few Oldhammer minis. Nice 'desserts' between other projects. After this I'll have another break in painting as I'm off to Germany for a week on business and can't really take any minis and paints with me.

I painted the two leftmost guys with a few metallic drybrushes followed by violet and red washes with a final edge highlight with a silver paint. Works quite nice and is really fast to do, but I guess I'll still paint the rest with solid colours and highlights. The beastman mini turned out quite nicely and it was a real pleasure to paint as it's a really characterful sculpt. The red could maybe have had a bit more contrast, but still it works quite nicely.

My ventures into Oldhammer

Still not much going on on the painting front as I have really big problems finding motivation to paint the last moderns on my table. Might have to switch subjects for a while as these things just don't seem to go forward at all. At least now I've managed to sort of get back on track with reading other blogs and forums so I'm sort of getting back on track with hobby stuff.

Meanwhile I have been a bit busy shopping on Ebay. Not much else to do in a hotel room, which can be a blessing and a curse at the same time. My credit card got put through it's paces and now one of my longer projects of gathering an Oldhammer unit for my Chaos forces took a giant leap forward. I previously had 8 old castings from the 80s that were just begging for reinforcements that have now arrived during the last two weeks with the final bunch arriving today!

This puts me at 26 castings that are probably all older than I am :) There are still a few duplicates so I might have to buy a couple more to make a unit where no single miniature is the same, but still quite a nice collection that actually ended up costing less than I feared. Nearly all of them are from Citadel, but at least the command team is from Marauder Miniatures which was later acquired by Citadel/Games Workshop. There are also some pretty old castings with the oldest ones having stamps from 1974. Surprisingly good condition too and not much paint stuck in the crevases. I'm still waiting for bases for most of them, but at least I've got the first 6 washed and ready for primer so I should have some updates soon!

As a final addition I had to get myself one of the most random sculpts Citadel ever produced. One of the sellers also had a Chaos Toilet model up for auction so of course I had to go and bid on that bugger too. I have no idea what I'm going to do with it, but it was just so epic that I couldn't pass on the chance to acquire it. Might make for a nice objective piece or something. Now I just have to find the other toilet series miniatures :)

(c) Stuart Thomas. Picture from Stuff of Legends.