Saturday, December 10, 2022

Return of the GunSchwarm!

 A while back Greg moved and had to find new homes for some of his vast collection of painted models. One of these included his GunSchwarm which were based on the GW Steel Legion models. They saw fairly heavy use during the Space Krieg days. I always wanted to do a Steel Legion army, but the cost always stopped me. When Games Workshop finally retired the Steel Legion Imperial Guard I ordered a couple of boxes. This was followed by a third box from the secondary market at slight mark-up. On Ebay I managed to source 3 Steel Legion Plasma gunners and metal Kasrkin at an eye watering price (so much for cost being a factor). 3rd party manufacturers supplied Ogryns, Rough Riders and some heavy weapon teams. Vehicles are a mix of GW and Mortian. I love the paint job Greg used for the GunSchwarm and I decided to emulate it as close as I could. Greg and I have slightly different scales, so I knew it wouldn't be a seamless match. I've managed to complete one squad and I'm fairly happy with them. We'll see how many more I complete for the painting challenge.



Here's a mix of Greg's models with mine. Main difference is the brown for the gloves and mask. I used my standard go to leather formula which is quite a bit redder.
Greg's on the left
The next difference is less obvious in the pictures, but the great coat color is slightly different from Greg's. I sued Vallejo German Uniform which is the same Greg uses. I picked up two new bottles of it within the last year and even a comparison of the new bottle to an old one I had bought 10 years ago were noticeably different.
New on the left, old on the right

Not sure when they reformulated the color, but there was nothing I could do about it, so I just forged ahead. Luckily, the two groups blend in ok. I suppose it represents fresh recruits in their shiny new uniforms being brought in to join the depleted and battle-worn vets.

Thanks for visiting


5 comments:

daveb said...

I had the same thing happen recently when I bought a new bottle...certainly makes matching old figs more challenging.

irishserb said...

The figs look great, and that's a pretty remarkable job on the color match. I've had similar problems with Vallejo with several colors.

James Martin said...

Brilliant to see GunSchwarm return, always loved your SpaceKrieg games

Greg B said...

Fantastic work Mike, so glad the old GunSchwarm figures are getting some attention and reinforcements! The old Armageddon Steel Legion figures are indeed top shelf castings, and in general it is too bad that GW seem to continuously muff the sculpting on their plastic Imperial Guard figures (with the exception of the plastic Death Korps, those are amazing).

Great work on the painting!

Dallas said...

Those look great Mike! Tough to match the paint colours but you did a great job!