DKK Progress.

Greetings from Kuala Lumpar, all things being well. 

These boys are the first Landsers of 262 Line Infantry Regt.  Like many other Imperial Guard Regiments, the DKK 262 Line Infantry Regt probably does have an illustrious past; a previous iteration of 262 Line Infantry Regt may still be out there somewhere, but as far as the departmento munitorium on Krieg are concerned, the number has not been used for two hundred years and so a new founding has been issued with the number.

All of these pictures are from Possum Painting.  Who are doing all the hard work with these fellas. So unlike my photos, hopefully these show off his handiwork, as well as higher standard of photography.

I asked for the first small squad to be sent on ahead so that I could covert them from the comfort of my own sofa.  I did individual photos of the little bunch at the top but the piccies are rubbish.  The issue with a lot of the photos I have blogged recently is that they were taken in daylight and waiting a bit (until it was dark) would enhance the effect of the spot lights etc.

Anyway, these guys look good and Comptroller Bellormus has done well to divert another Krieg Regiment to Devos IV from where ever it was originally destined to go.

Anyway, I had a quick email conversation with Col Scipio about organising a regiment that was easy to keep track of (ie built of blocks of 1000 men) and also fitted the DKK fluff.  We went for the easiest iteration of a DKK Infantry Regiment; no engineers, no vehicles, no Death Riders, just riflemen, Close Support Field Arty and heavy weapons.

Many thanks to Col Scipio for this.  If it needs further explanation, just let me know and I'll break it down.

Machinas (not really)

OK, then, If you have not been following Carmen's Fun Painty Time and his amazing work with large cowboys and samurai, you've missed out.  But the coolest thing on his blog (and he has retro 1950's space ship racing there somewhere) is the Machinas post apoc car thing.  Which has even spawned a kickstarter card game.

Now this is not actually anything to do with Machinas.  What 'Evil Cartoonist' has done with some toy cars to turn them into post Apoc cars is innovative and well executed.  Which is something you'll not see here:

These are the cars with which I whiled away the endless summer holidays of my youth, building roads around my grandparents flower beds: When I found a place that did not cause any conflict (at the bottom of the garden under the apple trees) the roads and little mud walls stayed there for years.

So you can see, a lot of the cars ended up with alternative paint jobs.  I probably stopped playing with these about 31 years ago (at a guess) and started crashing BMX (short-lived) and soon embarked on decades of AD&D and MERP.

And then festooned with decals, mostly left over from airplane kits.

Now, I spent years keeping these clean(ish).  Now I spend ages trying to get my 40K models to look this weathered.

You can tell the age of the car by how many times I re-decorated it. These two range rovers are my favourites.

And you can see the newest car there is the 1982 car show XJS.  Sheesh.

Now, as a car owner who has cars that looked like this (not teeny tiny, but obviously old and battered to heck), I'd hate to think what these would look like inside.  My W reg golf (old W, Scipio, you do the math) was never clean, it looked like one of those awful Topgear experiments.  IRL, these toy cars are full of dirt.

Now call me sentimental, but these cars are a link to a very happy childhood now long gone.  So they'll be lovingly hidden away in the loft.

And these plastic men were all dug up from the flowerbed in the few years after my grandfather died - when he was still gardening, he left that shady corner alone.  There's a shop in the town I grew up in which used to sell models and toys as well as art supplies (it only does the art supplies, the last time I was back there).  It was a brilliant place and I have fond memories of going there with my dad.  All of which leads me to think that there are about 200 airfix soldiers in the ground there somewhere where my grandparents lived.

And finally a confession - I was on ebay and there was an Elysian army advertised.  I put in a bid, not expecting to score.  But incredibly I did win and it's a not insignificant dent in my resolution not to buy more stuff.  Oh well, at I now have something to put in my Valkyries.

Perfidious Eldar

So, I needed to recover a particular set of Scorpions from their hiding place (not in a wall in Chatham dockyards, this time). And Lo ! they were where I left them.  Good start !

So this is yer common or garden codex sized nest of Scorpions.  Unlike some of the other Scorpions I have, which are in their Craftworld colours, I thought; well, they are supposed to be sneakatious, so I'll do them camouflage.

These boys were done before we moved here, so prolly about 2004.  And like most of the Eldar, have ne'r seen a tabletop in anger.  But.  That may change this year, so I was having a butcher's to make sure that they don't look naf.

They look OK in the flesh, perhaps they need a light wash just to unify all of the colours, but perhaps that's just me wanting to wash everything with oil paints these days.

The patterns are supposed to be sort of camo, sort of ritual pattern on their armour.  I'd imagine that their psychoresponsive armour would actually change as they crossed terrain, bleeding into the background etc etc.  But unless you we're doing a diorama, that'd be quite hard to pull off.  I think I saw someone do it nicely on CMoN, with an assassin bifurcating an Orca.  Nice scene, but not something I'll be attempting any time soon.

And I really like the artwork from the first of the Path of the Eldar books by Gav Thorpe.  Incidentally, I think the books are good in that they illustrate nicely what I always understood the Eldar path to be.  Not sure I really like Gav's fiction (I struggled with the Horus Heresy book about the Raven Guard), but I generally concur with his ideas about the Grim Dark.

More shots, as the next time you see them will be as they pull their chainswords from torso, Mon Keigh !  Bwa ha hah a *cough* Ha ha har.

I'm not sure that even the Dark Kin would speak like that, really.  Part of the attraction of the Eldar is that they are all yoghurt knitting socalistic liberal mystics who get hung up over poetry and sculpture.  Then the masks go on and they all turn into psychopaths.

Whilst I was in the box, I pulled this guy out to show you.  I was going for sort of stag beetle with the armour.  and Mr T with the wings (If you're gonna wear wings on a battlefield, there's no point in hiding them).

This is not the guy who fought the centre of Karitas' space Loganstar to a stand still on his jack jones.  This is his brother.

I kind of imagine him flitting around midfield and picking off annoying ICs with the reaper launcher and his outrageous BS.  The wraithsword is just to bat off the assault marines whilst he does it.

Rightiho !  I'm off to Kuala Lumpar for a couple of weeks.  The blog'l still have stuff on Tuesdays and Fridays.  See you later.

ECW - my back yard.

So, if you follow the Palladian Guard at all you'll have seen Col Scipio's Royalist Infantry.  And a number of comments about the fact that the ECW is not covered at all in school.  I started school in 1975 and from then until 1986, it wasn't mentioned.

The Aylesbury Vale District Council's badge/emblem is a silhouette of the statue of Oliver Cromwell which subtly dominates (it's not much bigger then lifesize, but it has presence) the town'd market square.  He would have ridden through there often enough during the mid 1640s.  This is about twenty minutes east of here.

Oxford, which was Charles 1st capital during the war, is about twenty minutes south of here. Whilst a magnificent seat of learning, and architecturally imposing, it wasn't London.  He didn't stay in London because it was naturally Parliamentarian in outlook.  Oxford was mostly loyal to the king at the outset.  The city still floods now.  It used to flood then as well. And it wasn't London and they soon ran out of money and the King had to resort increasingly to coercion to maintain his capitol.

Moving west from here, 10 minutes up the M40 is Junction 10; this is the approximate position of the Parliamentarian camp before Edgehill.

A few miles north of there is Edgehill (Oct 1642); the first meeting engagement of the English bit of the wars.  There are places oop norf and in the west country which have interesting claims to the first shots fired; the first actions per se; but Edgehill is the first time the two armies meet in the field.  The Royalist Army is led by Sir Jacob Astley; he was, by inclination and conviction, a parliamentarian.  However, he was the General of the king's armies and felt that he could not betray that confidence and so spent the war leading the side he felt he should have been opposing.  Tough gig.

Sir Jacob Astley

A lot of the war was armies manoeuvring through the countryside, dancing around each other for advantage and using up the goodwill of the population in pretty short order.  A few more miles west of Edgehill is Cropredy Bridge (Jun 1644), these days more famous for it's music festival.  But it was once the scene of a running battle when the armies did actually run into each other.

Half an hour south west again is Stow on Wold (Mar 1646); the last meeting engagement of the war.  Here the last remnants of the Royalist Army finally succumbed to the New Model Army.  The last battered remnants of the Royalist Army, despite having the high ground at the outset of the battle (I've stood on the NWA's startline, it's not ground anyone would choose for any sort of battle; but they had to strike or the Roaylists would have escaped).  The NMA repeatedly assaulted uphill until they routed the Royalists into the town. Here Sir Jacob Astley finally broke his sword.  The roundhead commanders respectfully brought up their drum for the aging and tired man to sit on.

Half an hour south of there is Burford; scene of running battles through the town (including through one of the inns, still open as a pub) and a post war rebellion by Soldiers who had not been paid for months. (if you follow the link, the 1649 bit is about half way down the page).

The ECW is usually studied in isolation as king vs parliament.  I think this is a gross over simplification, Walsingham, working for Elizabeth I, spent a lot of his professional life foiling Catholic plots to assassinate the Queen after she failed to wed the King of Spain.  So the reformation has to be seen against the backdrop of the times; there was a time that if you were flagrantly Catholic then trying to just walk into London would find your head on a pike on the gates to the city.

Post Elizabeth and Walsingham, we have what are generally known as the Bishop's Wars which are often viewed as being confined to Scotland.  But the fact that they abated without seriously threatening to unseat Charles I gave him enormous confidence.  This led directly to the clash with Parliament and the bit we think of as the ECW.

During the commonwealth, the Lord Protector then turned his attention to Ireland, perceived as a threat due to it's Catholic allegiance and feared due to (not being being understood because of its unfathomable) non-English culture.  This was never going to go well.  The Puritanical elements of the New Model Army saw invasion of Catholic Ireland as the continuation of God's Work.  Just to contextualise, contemporaneously, Matthew Hopkins is busy drowning cat ladies in the home counties to the accompaniment of loud popular acclaim.

So the ECW is an act in three parts; preceded by the Elizabethan era of cold war type tension and deniable black ops, it kicks off with the Bishop's Wars, and goes through the civil war in England and on to Cromwell's Irish campaigns without missing a stride.  It's a big slew of history with obvious roots in the reign of Henry VIII and troubles that are arguably still with us today.

Heavy Weapon Progress. Curious Constructs Cannon Carriages

So then, it's the middle of last year and some of those other heavy weapons from the Cadian Heavy Weapons set still need homes.  Oh look, Col Gravis is having a kick starter !

And the very first option is the carriage without a weapon.  That's handy, one thinks to one's self, there's a potential home for the weapons.  One quick backing later and I've got me carriages. Now the weapon shield does not allow one to fit a GW weapon to the CC weapon carriage.  So rather than hack it about, these are going to be done naked.

So this them glued up.  I'm thinking that the las cannon battery can be mounted on the axle at the front and then perhaps connected up with a bit of pretty heavy gauge brass wire.

In case you're wondering, there is an autocannon propped up on that las-cannon.  So, then, a week and a bit later and we're here:

Undercoated, base coated, monumentally heavy pin oil wash and then a few details like the cartridges in the auto cannon drums, auto cannon cocking handles and las-cannon barrels.

When you click on the fots, you should be able to see that muzzle shroud on the las-cannon and the muzzle brakes on the auto cannon are suspiciously green; I was holding them by the muzzle as I worked on them, figuring that this would be an area that got extra work later.

I know one of them is pointing at the ground.  But hey, in the Grim Darkness of the far future, even the dirt is probably worth shootin' at.  More tarting up to go on these, but as I write this the 60mm base las-cannons are done.

And in other news, I remembered to get Mrs Zzzzz a valentine card before the day this year.  So ratcheting up the brownie points for Col Winterbourne's extravaganza.  As long it doesn't clash with anything else.  I've been dreaming up justification for his battle, but that can wait.

More Black Templar Action

So, I attacked the figure case where all the termites live with scissors in order to make a little bit more space for the three new guys.  But whilst I had them out of the garage and in the warmth, I thought I would just show the whole package off.

Now, I know that this is all a little bit predicable; none of it is my work, not the gluing or the painting.  And that these guys have all been featured fairly recently.  But I'm showing anyone who is interested what a Land Raider Crusader full of termites looks like.

And I'm messing about with the camera and trying to get to the best set up with the most reliable results.

Despite the fact that I've zoomed out so far that I'm showing off around the background sheet, I like this picture; it shows a land raider crusader, five guys with TH/SS, two with Lightening Clowns and one with furious charge and no helmet (good combo, brother bullet magnet...)  Just the very thing to exemplify the Black Templar modus operandi. These guys will only ever make their points back if anyone is daft enough to let them reach their back quarter.  But if they get there, if they get there, brothers, then the Alien, the Heretic and the Traitor, they are all just the Emperor's mincemeat.

And as promised, Brother Moon.  Here he is facing down a nurgly melee servitor, possibly under control of 'The Cleaved' warp smiths.  Who obviously are not anywhere near here...

The combat swirls as the teasing Brother Moon tries to lure the hulking great collection of stims, auto senses, powerfists and nurgly FNP into stepping in front of the handily placed Hurricane Bolter.  Brother Moon is all for honourable challenges, but not with oozing, pus filled servitors.

Look out Brother Moon, he's behind you !  The canny Brother Moon disengages and moves away.  Finally the servitor advances to it's doom.

Without even one of the witty quips for which he is known, Brother Moon wipes the goo off his shoes and climbs back into the Land Raider.

Thunderhawk Progress.

 OK, so this is strictly WIP.  I did notice that when I mentioned 'thunderhawk' in my  list of outstanding things, no-one even mentioned it.  Well, just I case you thought I'd forsaken the Guard and gone over to the power-armoured side.  I present, for the time being, my thunderhawk !

From this angle the big feature is the cockpit canopy.  Which on a one piece resin floor tile will need a bit of work.  And/or balancing amount of skill.  Neither of which are abundant around here, but I'll give it a go.  S'only spaze muhreen terrain, after all.

So that's two layers of (midnight and then royal) blue and then blue ink.  So there'll be another glaze of ink (or two) and then a layer of 'ardcoat and I'll see what that looks like.  The airframe was undercoated black, then sprayed a nice deep red (just a shade deeper than red gore). Then hairspray and sand and then the German Grey.  So I'm quite pleased with the weathering effect but you'll have noticed that the German Grey is perfect camouflage for the terrain.  Ho hum, time to rethink the landscape,

I figured that the Grey T-hork could pass for a Black Templar one that had been out in the sun a lot, or some sort of codex grey replacement airframe or Inquisition vehicle.  Or perhaps belong to a Chapter that really does have grey a colour scheme.

So carried on with the further weathering; mostly rust.  Now my  blazing orange had almost had it, but responded very well to resurrection.  So after a bit of paintomancy, I sloshed some on.  It looks very vivid, but that's the light/camera/refractive index etc.  It's dulled down with a black/brown oil wash.  a bit.

Another few thin washes with the black and brown in differing quantities should improve things a bit.  One problem I have with this is self restraint; to apply a thin wash in the first place and then to let it dry enough before doing the next thing.  What I find is that the wash always ends up heavy and that a blast from Mrs Zzzzz's hair drier would improve things.  Ho hum, I'll try and concentrate next time.

I plan on just carrying on with the weathering that I've already done and carrying on until the orange is a little less in-yer-face.  And of course, eventually changing the landscape to something a little more beige.  I'm allowed beige, because I'm old enough.  You have to call it brown.  But I figure that the tile is big enough to handle a bit of beige around the crashed bus and fade to grey at the edges.

Ummmmmmmmm, Ultravox.  I'm sure that used to be a piece of wargear.

The last three Black Templar Terminators

These three gents when to Golem a long time before Christmas and only recently made it back.  There's a heavily converted one and two AoBR termies with Lightening Clause from the standard Termie set.

This guy was re-posed by someone I work with (we're in the same directorate and oh, it's just complicated and not really interesting) who does freelance sculpting.  He did this man's face as well.  It used to be green.  He has a sense of movement that I'm not sure the original designers of the mini intended.  He might be the only furious charging termie in Oxfordshire.

Heretics eye view.

This guy was supplied to Golem with the damage already done.

The man hug position.  Come and get it.  I havn't forgotten that I promised Mordian 7th a decent picture of Brother Moon (the Emperor's Champion).  I'll have to line that up at some point...

Anyway. the thing here is that this takes the number of Black Templar Termites to a grand and wholly appropriate total of eight.  Too many for a normal Land Raider, but I'm sure I don't have to remind you, just snug in a LR Crusader (how appropriate).