Inquisitional Warband Acolyte Sergeant Calaran Kriegers, WIP 2.

Here's a quick update of Sergeant Kriegers, I've put him together for the most part. Before I can go any further I need to do some gap filling with some green stuff around his knee joint.

I'm still working on converting the hot-shot lasgun. What I think I'm going to do at this point is use the upper arms of the scion's with the lower forearms from the skitarii, to give him a more grizzled hardcore veteran look.

At this point in his life, Sergeant Kriegers has been run through the mill and keeps on going. He's been blown up, burned, shot, plasma burned, and has multiple limbs severed. He is Inquisitor Invictus Novus right-hand man, and one of his most trusted companions and friend, well as much as Inquisitors have friends. The Mechanicus has helped him out by replacing his ruined parts with the best the Imperium has to offer. It was more due to Inquisitor Invictus Novus connections, that Sargent Kriegers has been able to receive some of his more advanced upgrades.

I also gave Sergeant Kriegers a servo-skull sort of as a little pet, I recently finished reading Adeptus Mechanicus: Skitarius, and I love the character Rob Sanders gave to Phrenos 361 in the book. Phrenos 361 is almost like a little dog that goes and scouts out ahead relaying information back to Stroika, the main character of the book. So I thought that why not, Kriegers could use even more character, so I through one on. I haven't come up with a name for the servo-skull yet, though I will soon.

That's it for right now, hopefully I'll get some time soon to sit down and really finish this guy up. Anyway until next time!

Inquisitional Warband Acolyte Sergeant Calaran Kriegers, WIP 1.

The bits I've collected so for.

Here's something else I've got on my workbench, the first acolyte for my Inquisitorial warband! I'm kit bashing together a number of thing, the main body is a tempestus scion, the head and arms are from the new skitarii kit. I'm going to convert up a new looking style of hot-shot lasgun using a skitarii vanguard rife bit and a lasgun. I'm not sure on what head to go with yet either one of the ranger heads, or one of the bare heads.

The head options.

I'll be cutting the Skiarii leg off at the knee and adding it to the scion legs.

I'll use one of these arms for the base of the Hot-shot lasgun.

A brief backstory on this acolyte, his name is Sergeant Calaran Kriegers, he was a highly trained scion that was recruited by my inquisitor, Invictus Novus. Invictus inquisitorially requisitioned him and his squad on the hive world of Malthus in the Calixis Sector around 941.M41. The hive world was in chaos the local PDF couldn't keep control. Heretical psykers had pushed the world to the point of instability and daemons were starting the tear themselves through, Sergeant Kriegers and his scion squad, the Dragon Slayers were pinned down in the middle of hab block, bloodletters streaming in all around them, they were about to be over run when Invictus showed up with his inferno pistol blazing and power sword sparking blue electric lightning. He slayed through the daemons rallying Kriegers and his dragons to fight with renewed furiosity and fervor. Once the block had been cleared of all taint, Sergeant Kriegers knew that this agent of the Inquisition would be needing more help, and due to the vox network being down he didn't have anyway of receiving new orders, he might as well put his training to use. After the mission was successfully completed, well successful in the eyes of the inquisition, Invictus asked if Sergeant Kriegers and the few remaining Dragon Slayers want the come and work for him, and the Dragons accepted.

Cultists WIP part 1

Finally finished putting together my first set of 10 Chaos Cultists and are now ready to be primed! These will be the first of a lot of things, one this will be the first time in a very long time that I sit down to paint to paint a unit of troops since I was like 16. Second these will be the test models for a lot of different painting and weathering techniques, also painting skin, metal, leather, and cloth. Also I'm hoping that this will get me over my resistance to painting, for some reason I keep feeling like I can't do it or if I do, do it that I'll mess it up in some way. And not anymore I'm tired of looking at all the gray plastic and I really want to feel good about putting something down on the table that looks awesome! I also have to say the details on these models are just amazing too, GW as really been killing it on th plastic kits lately.

Blood for the Blood God! Skulls for this Throne!

I plan on painting them to match my Khorneate warband, that I plan on starting sometime in the future. I'm also painting them up so that they may be used i then Assassinorum Execution Force board game too. I think I have about another 30 cultists floating around somewhere in my studio, I plan on painting them all with a unifying color and do something unique with each unit so it's clear they are from separate units. Oh and the main color I'll be using to unify all the cultists together will be... You guessed it Khorne red! And brass. I thought about doing them in some sort of pre-Heresy World Eaters color scheme and then decided against it, which I'll talk about why later when explaining my warbands backstory. Now time to slap some paint on these bad boys!

Kill Team Apothecary

    Hey all it's been a while! To help me get back into the swing of things I've been starting to work on a kill team so that 1. I can start having so fun with the game, and 2. give myself a narrower task to focus on. So I thought I'ed start with a kill team a go from there, in a sort of escalation style manner. My first step was to find all of my salvaged bits, these were all the bits that I had previously stripped the paint from and I had no idea of what to do with them all, then it hit me, I could convert a small kill team force from cobbled together bits. I then saw the Apothecary backpack and I knew that the first character was going to make was to be an apothecary.

    I'm quite happy with how he turned out. This is the first model that I've scratch built, and it was a lot of fun to do it. My plan is now to do this with the rest of the models in the kill team, leave no model unconverted! And I plan on trying to make them from my salvaged bits too, I know all ready that I need  to use some new bits and I want to use them sparingly.

    The Narthecium was a lot of fun to scratch build. It was made a chainsword, cut in half, with the handle cut off too. Then I glued the scout binocular bit on the outside of the narthcium. The extraction needle was made from a extra thick paper clip, with a promethium canister gules to the end to be the gene seed holding tube, then glued on to the narthcuim through a hole drilled into both the chainsword and binoculars. I made from greenstuff the little piece of tubing on the end an glued it to one of the binocular lenses and then to the back of the Narthecium. Lastly I cut and glued an auspex cut at the handle and glued to the top, along with the chainsword exhaust vent, of the Narthecium.

I gave the Apothecary a power sword mostly because for my kill team he for the most part will be leading the team, not to mention I love power swords, they just look so cool to me and I think is gives him a more badass knight feel. I also added a bit of plasticard to the left pauldron to give it a more MK III feel. 

    As for fluff, or "backstory" as some are calling it now. I'm thinking I want to make them a succor chapter of the Imperial Fists, the chapter tactic "Bolter Drill" is a really cool idea to me and I really love the Imperial Fist's fluff not to mention their amazing color scheme too. I also want to make my own chapter, mostly because I would like to have a force that can explore the different chapter tactics out there with out being peg holed into a certain chapter affiliation. 

    I'm not sure what color scheme I'm going to go with right now, I play Ultramarines and Blood Angels so I have blue and red power armor and want something that goes along with both so that I could either have them as a succor chapter or an allied contingence of another succor chapter. Two ideas I do have for color scheme are either a royal purple, with sky blue eyes and gold trim, kinda like the Soul Drinkers. Or a color scheme more like this, I really fell in love with the scheme when I saw one of winters SEO battle reports, if you haven't already checked him out, please do I think his battle reports are fun, well lit, and I think his army is very cool looking, so do it! Go check him out! I like the brighter blue its for sure, in my opinion, a lot more cheerful scheme than the Ultramarine's, I think they still somewhat match without matching too much. 

   Next step is to prime him up! And then work on his base. I was thinking about giving him a space hulk style, Zone Mortalis, or landing bay kind of a base, more on that to come.

Basing theme

My basing theme.

California redwood forest.

After a very long look at a large variety of different basing themes, which there are a lot of out there, so many. The basing theme or style that I landed on was a combination of my two most favorite themes and scenescapes. First one being a woodland, overgrown, redwood forest style. And the second being ruined rubble urban city terrain. I like the dampness, the darkness, and green of the forest, I'll be combining that to the rubble and concrete nature of the urban theme, to get an overgrown modern ruined cityscape.

Kind of overgrown, with the urban theme.

 I'll be adding moss, leaves, small branches, static grass, and grass tuffs, to broken and chipped plaster tiles. I'll have tiles coming up, broken, smashed and cracked. Rocks and rubble scattered about. I'll also have fallen tree branches with leaves and moss, maybe some smaller plants to really give it that overgrown feeling.

Overgrown and Gothic.

Close to what I'm going for.

The idea is that my marines have landed on a long deserted Imperial planet, rich with minerals and other resources, as well as being a fairly "safe" planet (well at one point), not to many monsters or giant beasts. Then it was heavily contested over by a smaller Tau sept called the No'va. The planet was then ripped into the warp where it sat letting nature take over and running its corse. Most if not all of the human population managed to evacuate off the planet to safety, the Tau were not as fortunate... 

Checklist for the Las Vegas Open 2015

Las Vegas checklist:

-Army 

-Army list, 5 typed copies

-Dice

-Tape measure

-Objective cards

-psychic powers cards

-Objective markers

-Rulebooks and Codices 

-"A slick Fanny Pack, to impress the ladies." 

So far most of the smaller things can be checked off, what I really need to get finished off that list is my army, which ya know I'ed need to actually play in the tournament, so that's my big focus for the next couple of weeks build, base, and paint an army.

Going to Vegas, plans for the blog.

Las Vegas Open 2015

So my hope/plan for the rest of this year and the coming year is to make it to the Las Vegas Open in 2015 and play in their 40K friendly event. This does a couple of things for me for me 1. it gives me a clear and very solid deadline in which to get my army completed and fielded in battle before the event in February, and 2. I've never been to Vegas or any type of Wargaming convention, or have yet to even play a game (yeah I know that will soon change), so the idea of all this is very exciting to me

This definitely gives me a boost of motivation and inspiration, so on to my plan. My plan is to try and post to the blog everyday, they may be WIP post, studio updates, tutorials, Terrain and basing ideas, or anything else Warhammer 40,000 related.

Found on deviantART

I also plan to write some fluff for my 2nd company Ultramarines, so far I plan to name each battle brother and give them a little backstory (fluff) on how and maybe why they joined the Ultramarines. So that's what I've been doing the last couple of weeks, reading and watching warhammer 40k history (fluff) then writing some of my own to give my army more of a theme.

Found on Pintrest.

Pintrest. I recently stared a Pintrest account for all the Warhammer 40k material and related material I find on the web, it's a way for me to keep a public idea folder of all the amazing tutorials and post from other blogs out there. I started it mainly because of wanting to find more terrain building ideas, which Pintrest is great for. I've already found more source material than I can even have time for! 

Well that's all I have for now, keep checking back for updates, inspiration, tutorials and more!