AdMech Update - Skitarii Vanguard

I've been cracking away at the AdMech lately as I wanted to finish off the rehab of the last lot of models I got off kijiji. The latest ones to be completed are a squad of (eleven) Skitarii Vanguard. Why eleven? Well, there happened to be a squad of ten plus one extra special weapon trooper. So I figured I might as well paint him at the same time as the rest.
 

Here's the Alpha wielding an arc maul and arc pistol. "Phi" insignia added for his squad ID.
 

The rest of the boys (?). Painted in the normal style for my AdMech - cloaks Mephiston Red, Nuln Oil'd, then MR again highlighted with Evil Sunz Scarlet, insides of cloak Rakarth Flesh highlighted Ushabti Bone; bodyglove black highlighted with Mechanicus Standard Grey; metal bits Leadbelcher; brass bits Brass Scorpion highlighted Balthasar Gold; lenses and power bits Temple Guard Blue. 

The lads (??) carry spooky "radium carbines" that are not, shall we say, "Earth-friendly." The thing I find neat about the Vanguard is their utter disregard for Health and Safety standards. They don't really care that their weaponry is nearly as dangerous to them as it is to their enemies; I guess they just reckon that if something falls off them they can always get a mechanical replacement. Closer to the Crux Mechanicus, and all that.

Assistant squad leader carries the cool-looking "Omnispex". "Hey five-eyes!!"

Here's the whole lot so far - two Onagers, Sydonian Dragoon, Kastelan Maniple and datasmith, Ruststalkers, Infiltrators, Rangers and Vanguard, led by the Tech-Priest Dominus.

More AdMech Rehab!

One of the hobby things I love most is rescuing unloved models and getting them back up to tabletop shape. There are two reasons for this. One is the pleasure I have in taking castoffs and making them usable, but the other is a bit less altruistic: it's that the models are already (mostly) assembled and (sometimes) even basecoated, so that saves me valuable hobby time on tasks I find a drudge.

This Sydonian Dragoon came in a lot of AdMech models I came across on kijiji. It was actually reasonably well assembled and basecoated so the extra work required only amounted to a few hours replacing missing/broken parts, converting others, finishing the painting and basing, and applying decals and weathering.

Kind of a neat model, but not one I'd immediately be drawn to having in my army. Cool though.

The lot also included another Onager Dunecrawler. This one required a bit more work in ordering some of the missing parts, like ladder rungs. It was already basecoated but I finished it similarly to my other Dunecrawler.

 Turned out nice eh?

I've read that the autocannon/missile array thing was the loadout to have in 7th, not sure about 8th. I guess we'll see when it gets on the table.

The Sicarian Infiltrators required more work yet. Although some basecoating was done, the heads and some other parts were quite messed up and I was thankful that the seller included a large bits tub with my purchase.

I was eventually able to get them in a semblance of order and I think they turned out OK. I love the Matrix-like scary helmets and tentacle tubes.

No AdMech leader is complete without a servo-skull or two!

Sicarian Ruststalkers. Same kit as the Infiltrators but some different parts used. Again, required some head swapping and general tidying.
 

 This guy gets a laptop computer as well as a servo-skull. Spoiled or what??

Here's the whole lot so far. Still have a squad of Skitarii Vanguard and a few Rangers to finish up. Once they're done it will be high time to get them out on the table for a battle. I've been toying with the idea of an Adeptus Mechanicus task force fighting Tyranids in an underground complex (Space Hulk tiles) while on a search for some item of lost tech or other...?

Byron's 8th through 10th enties to the painting challenge

Well, once again I have fallen behind in posting my entries, so I will get up to date with a brief(ish) post that has a picture or two from each of my last few submissions and links to the actual blog entries over on the Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge site.

My 8th entry was a group of 6 30k Death Guard scimitar pattern jet bikes from the Horus Heresy era.  I fell in love with these when they were released a few years ago, but the price kept me from buying them until recently.  I didn't want to do a small squad of 3 since they would get wiped out too quickly like that, and I wanted them to have some staying power, so I did 6 of them.

The bikes are supposed to be mounted on the normal GW 50mm clear round flying stands and come with those along with 30mm tall mounting posts.  I thought both of these looked like crap with them, and the normal pill shaped bike bases are way to short at 50mm long for these behemoths.  So, I custom laser cut some 32mm wide (the new standard marine base size) x 100mm deep bases.

My 9th entry was some long discontinued GW forgeworld terrain that I picked up at a Baltimore Games Day 14 years ago that has sat in their boxes since then!!!
 

 

 I also included in that a unit of Greek slingers to add some range to my Greek forces.

Next up was a theme week entry for BFG (Big F!$%'ing Gun) where I did a pair of Siege-Automata for my 30k Mechanicum force.

Not only is the gun on this thing freaking huge, the whole thing is!  To give a sense of size the base is a 120mm x 92mm oval base and a marine barely reaches to his knee! 

Overall, I am very happy with how they came out, and I placed tied for second that week in the voting for best theme week entry. 
 

My 10th entry was an Archmagos for the 30k Mechanicum force and some more Greeks.

The Archmagos Prime on Abeyant for my 30k Mechanicum army now makes it an actual legal force to play with an HQ, so expect it to hit the tabletop soon.

Now that it is a valid force, I have also provided an overall picture of the army so far.  This is in-fact all that I bought initially to do for the force, but I have of course fallen in love with them, and more are on the way....

This time the Greek unit was more unarmoured Greek hoplites that I did as a support unit of mercenaries or militia for either side that I am working on.

This brings me back up to date as of the weekend, but there are 3 more entries up this weekend so expect another update early this coming week.  

Now we just need to setup a game to blood in the Mechanicum force!

Byron's 7th Post and Flight theme week entry

7th Entry

For a 7th post last week I painted up more Greeks and 30k Mechanicum.  First up this week are 4 more Castellax Battle-Automata, these ones armed with the much more basic mauler bolt cannon.

The gun is essentially an upgraded heavy bolter, so not great, but not bad either.

Also painted last week was another unit of 16 Greek hoplites.  Once again these are the very poor Warlord (Immortal) figures, but I have been forcing myself to work through the pile of these before going onto the better Victrix and Foundry figures that have been arriving from various orders, as I don't think I could force myself to come back to these things after working on better figures.

This batch I painted up in white and blue in various patterns and am picturing them as an Athenian unit.  I realize that most units would be more mixed with colours and styles historically, but am choosing to simplify at least a few units so that they look like units and are easy to keep straight on the battle field.  I know, not very historical, but I play more for the look and tactics than any real historical recreation reason, I don't have a burning need or desire to be 100% accurate.

 

Theme Round - Flight 

For the first theme round this year I picked something that I have wanted to paint since I got it almost a year ago, but kept delaying as I was not sure I could do it justice until I had some more practice with my super fine Harder & Steenbeck airbrush.

 

Well, I've had some practice the last few months with the airbrush so, may I present my take on the Dropfleet Commander UCM Beijing Battleship.  Now, it's not the normal version, this is the kickstarter exclusive all resin 2-up version.  Meaning it is not playable in game, and is bloody huge, measuring a whopping 11"+ long, 5" across, and 4"+ tall!

Once the base colours were setup, I went in with a 0.15mm H&S airbrush and worked each upper hull panel up to a lighter grey in the center, careful to leave the edge of each panel dark.  This took a while as I put the lighter colour on as a glaze of probably 1 part paint 4 parts glaze medium and then thinned down and applied with very low pressure. Once all the panels were highlighted, I masked off the ones to be white and gave them a few coats of flat white.

With the airbrush work all done, I went to the bottom of the hull and used a brush to glaze highlights onto each little bump and part.  I didn't want a chalky drybrush look so had to do it this way which was time consuming but simple.  I then clear coated the model for handling and the next step.

With that done I used thinned down black oil paint to create a pin wash.  I did it this way for two reasons.  Firstly, a thinned oil paint wash wicks through the cracks and details 100x better than any wash I have ever used.  Secondly, Greg showed me a great product that is essentially a hardened q-tip used by Japanese mecha modelers, that you dip into thinner after the wash is done and then wipe it over the model.  It cleans up anything that comes out of the details instantly and completely (assuming you clear coated first).  This has made doing models like this far less stressful than using a normal wash.  I don't know that Greg has ever actually used the product himself, but I LOVE it and have used them MANY times to great effect.

After the wash I clear coated again so that the oil paint was sealed away and then went to more detail work.  I added some sparse metal work areas (mainly pipes and pistons) and then painted a few hundred (at least is seems like it) blue lights all over the model.  These were done with a simplified gem pattern of only 4 colours (dark blue, med blue, light blue, white) due to being so damn small.  Of course that hardly shows in the images, so it was not really worth the effort, but oh well.

 

So there you go, a huge spaceship that is not even usable in a game, all done just for fun.  That said, I bloody LOVE the scale and wished they had done more than just the UCM and a PHR ship in this scale.  Surely it isn't just me that thinks that it would be amazing to do a fleet battle on a gym floor with ships like this!

Oh, and just for comparison, the small ship in the last picture is a normal DFC ship that is 4" long on a 50mm base.

All the work was well worth it on this model, as I ended up winning the Theme week with the most votes!  A pretty damn good way to start the theme challenges off!

Byron's 4th, 5th and 6th Painting Challenge Submission - Greeks, Death Guard, and Mechanicum

I promised myself that this year I wouldn't fall behind in keeping up the cross posting to my home blog here for the painting challenge, but have once again fell behind anyway. So, time to catch up with everything...

The 4th entry I put in this year was more 30k Death Guard to expand my force so that I can contribute more to our groups rather large number of 30k battles that rage at least monthly.

I have a pile of figures to get done for the 30k version of the Death Guard this year, including several transports as my force so far has been almost exclusively foot based with little mobility.  However, before getting onto that, I needed to get some more infantry done (mainly due to the fact that I want to do all the vehicles at once and ran out of chipping solution so am waiting for it to arrive).

 

My 5th entry was a continuation of my Greek project, with another unit of Warlord (Immortal) Greeks, as well as a command stand of Spartans.

The command stand is made up of a pack of metal Spartans from Warlord and the quality is much better than the plastics.  Even though they still managed to get the arms wrong.  The arms are once again in a throwing motion, rather than an arm over spear for thrusting motion.  Oh well...  since I am painting a lot of the figures that have leather armour as if they had bronze armour, I probably shouldn't complain that much about things that most people wouldn't notice anyway.

I spent a lot more time on these, doing more blending and more highlights, which don't really show up in the pictures, but show up in person.  My thought being that the command stands will be looked at closer than the mass infantry units and should therefore get a bit more attention.

I then moved onto a second unit of Greeks, that are un-armoured.

Once again since they are meant for mass effect on the tabletop, they got a fairly basic treatment.  I blocked in colours, washed, then highlighted.  I then went over the shields and painted various colours and then applied decals.  After that is was a simple matter of basing them and they were done.  Not fancy but effective I think. 

So another 18 Greeks done, only about 200 left to go...

My sixth submission was more Castellax Class Battle-Automata and a transport for my 30k Death Guard. The Castellax were armed with multi-meltas, flamers, and close combat saw blades this time around.

The bases are hand made using liquitex, cork board, cut up sprue, guitar wire, and copper pipe bits.  I tried to give them an urban rubble look without going overboard as I find a lot of cast resin rubble bases have too much on them and you wonder how the hell the model is moving through it.

I also kept with the blue glow as a colour accent to keep in theme with the last batch, even though I tend to think of melta as a red/orange glow.  My thought being that it just would look like more of the same base red armour colour if I did that.

Next up is a Death Guard Anvillus pattern drop pod that I had started doing up for this weeks "flight" theme just in case I didn't get the piece that I really wanted to get done completed.  I did though, so here is the drop pod as a regular submission.

The drop pod was painted the same way I have been doing all of my Death Guard vehicles, making heavy use of Mig products.  I base coated it black, applied chipping solution, painted the off white colour with an airbrush and then once dry wet it with water and started chipping the paint off.  It gives a completely random and organic look to it, you just have to give up control though as you can go light or hard on the brushing to control it a bit, but sometimes it just comes off in big sections and sometimes it sticks and you can't get any chips, so you just go with it.  I then apply decals and clear coat it, then come back with Mig streaking products and oil brushers and make it a mess with multiple different browns, blacks, and rust colours.  Apply a bit of each, let set for a bit, then use thinner or white spirits to spread it around and cause the streaks, or to clean up areas that got to much.

There we go, a whole pile of stuff off my painting shelf, but I already have it filling up again as stuff comes in to replace it.