Of Paints, Blogrolls and Terminators.

I've had a rough 48hrs with work, so bare with me as some of what follows descends into a rant. Only some of it mind, because not everything under the sun is bad.

1. New Citadel Paint Range.

I know these have been talked about to death across the blogsphere, so I'll keep this brief. I'm not amused. I don't mind a new range of paints. I don't mind a new formula. I don't mind that the names have changed. But I DO MIND THESE AWFUL PLASTIC POTS! They really are the most hateful little containers.

Now, I'm not short of paints by any stretch of the imagination, so I'm hardly going to fall over myself to buy this new range in the first place. Aside from the washes (where they annoying pots are less of an issue) and the glazes (because I'm curious), the plastic pots really do put me off trying the rest of this range.

Seriously Citadel, all it would take is a better storage medium for the paints and I'd be buying these. Hell, I'd probably by the full range with the carry case. As it stands, I'll stick with the far more sensible sotrage of my Reaper and Vajello droppers and the far more sophisticated pots of P3 and Cote D'Arms.

2. New Forgeworld Terminators

 

I love Forgeworld's stuff, I really do and their order logs + my bank balance should be a testament for this. But I really don't like these new Tartaros (Tartar Sauce?) Terminators. I've looked and looked at these, trying to find that little glimmer of love in my heart and it just isn't there. I can see what FW have tried to do with making thise consistent with the MKIV armour, but the end result doesn't work me. I like the styling of the MKIV armour and it does look "advanced" as that particular Mk is supposed to do, but it just doesn't carry over to these Terminator kits.

The things which bother me most are the shoulder pads. They're just not big enough. I think if they extended into a proper half hemisphere like the standard Terminator armour does, I'd be a but more enthused. 

Also, I'm a bit fan of the aggressive "look" of the standard Terminator armour, especially the current plastic range from Citadel. For the first time I'm feeling a bit "disappoint" with something from FW.

3. From the Warp Blogrolls

You may have spotted that I've removed the FTW blogroll widget from this page. As you may know (and if you're on the blogrolls you should), Ron has done an overhaul of the blogrolls and is starting afresh. One of the policies of the new rolls is that the blogs must be 40k focused, accepting that occasionally people will have non-40k side projects.

Right now, I'm in the middle of making a Gundam kit, which is evidently not 40k. As a civil servant, I'm a big fan of being consistent on a policy position, especially when starting out a new system. So for the time being, I won't be part of the blog rolls. This is Ron's decision (obviously), but I fully agree with him on this, because it would look very odd for him to say "blogs that focus on 40k" and then on the new blog rolls have "random Gundam stuff." It just wouldn't look right and if I were Ron, I'd make the same decision.

Once I'm back to painting 40k stuff and have a few weeks worth of material on this page, this may change. I hope. :-)

I Don't Like Black Reach

I've got my three Solonavi themed figures nearly complete and hopefully will get those up later this week with a few explanations as to how I did various bits. I plowed through them in about 5hrs at "paint club" on Sunday.

While I was painting for paint to dry, I started tinkering around with my Black Reach Terminator Assault Squad, on which I'll hopefully start doing a step by step guide in the next week or so once I'm back from Scotland. However, I wanted to say now just how much I dislike them and hadn't realised until last night why I'd not touched them in weeks.

Yes, I want an assault squad to mix in with my more detailed Deathwing figures so that I have some more conventional figures to accompany my growing legion of character models. The Black Reach squad is ideal for this purpose as they are pretty bland, although I've had to do some custom ornamentation to ensure consistency with my established theme. The blandness of the squad I don't mind, but does the plastic and assembly really have to be so awful?


I know there isn't a lot to assemble, but the Torsos simply do not glue into place properly. Every last single one of them I've had to trim, adjust and variously fiddle with in order to get it to fit properly. Something which isn't a problem with the regular Terminator kits.

Specifically the bits highlighted in red here. Yes they click together just fine when the model is dry but the moment you apply glue, the hydraulic pressure of the liquid works against you. It is very annoying.




I've little experience with the rest of the Black Reach set, but if the Terminators are any indication of quality, I'd certainly warn anyone against buying it as a "starter set" for someone new to 40k, as the quality is not representative of the rest of the brand. I'm certainly not convinced the set represents VFM of any sort and I am very glad not to have purchase it in its entirity. £5 for the Terminator assault squad seems about right to me.

Sculpting - Not Easy Being Green

This week, in my post Gen-Con/pre-Gathering haze, I took it upon myself to try a little bit of sculpting with Green Stuff. Mostly as a result of watching the excellent Jason Wiebe in action at the Reaper stand and thinking to myself "I can do that" despite knowing full well that sculpture has never been my strong point.

So rather than ease myself in with a bit of gentle painting on familiar terms, I got distracted first by these guys

They're from Reaper Miniatures Warlord range and the level of detail on them is silly, given how much smaller they are than Marines or Terminators. I was drawn to these guys because they reminded me of the Solonvai heroes from Mage Knight Pyramids.

Pretty sure that is a Wizkids stock photo of Seeker Mock, so all credit to them for this. Anyhoo the facemasks and weapons of the Warlord miniatures reminded me of the Solonavi and I've gone with the whole purple/black/darkmetal colour scheme. How I'm going to achieve a crystaline effect on the weapons I do not know, especially as I can't get the purple on their clothes right yet. They are gorgeous minis though, especially the assassin with her very dynamic pose.

The relevance of this to green stuff is that I did sculpt the bases with green stuff to create a fairly basis stone floor pattern. Which came out okay and inspired me to do something similar with the Black Reach Terminator Assault Squad I won on ebay.

The results are better than I'd hoped. Well at least the skull looks like a skull, but I understand skulls very well so that was perhaps an easier sculpt. The right hand one was supposed to be a sword, but it came out as more of a cross. Learning how to effectively work green stuff is going to take some time but I'll plug away with and hopefully improve. Vaseline as a lubricant to make the stuff easier to work was an important step, as I'd just been using water previously and that didn't turn out so good.

For example this guy, one of my many Deathwing w.i.p and companion piece to the Angelus Mortis, has had a fair bit of green stuff work done on him. The right arm is reposed and the inside shoulder joint reworked with green stuff. The bottom right leg is from a different set of legs altogether and I rebuilt the knee joint with green stuff. Not perfectly, but well enough. For giving your miniatures more dynamic poses and a more personal touch, green stuff is hard to beat.