New Spawn….Influenced by the Disc and a Buddy

As things come together, you always get new ideas and the Tzeentch disc that was previously shown gave me some ideas on a new chaos spawn. The ideas were mainly to help tie more of this stuff together in the army. My previous chaos spawn for this army, affectionately known as Blue Spawn and Brown Spawn, were based on the metal chaos troll bodies and current plastic spawn kit, respectively. I do very much like both of them and I am always toying with the ideas of how to include more spawn in my army lists. They are very quirky in games and cause havoc in both sides, and I enjoy running them as a pair. 

So, how to do that? Well, my buddy Mike Butcher created these wonderful looking models back a few years ago for his Nurgle Demon army.



And my Blue Spawn uses an ogre head on the chaos troll body, so combining that I came up with this…

It uses a rat ogre body left over from the Warhammer Fantasy boxed set. I particularly liked how Mike tied together the ogre head and the lower jaw of the tyranid heads on his models, so I attempted to do something very similar in hopes that this ties together better with my disc.

Not sure what I will do with the paint schemes just yet, but they should all tie together with the other spawn. I do really like the use of the armor on these rat ogres, they do kind of resemble the armor on some of my marauders. I’ll probably incorporate some of the armor elements into my Chaos Ogres down the road.

 This will be one of those freaky models.  I'm very much looking forward to the completion of it.

For the second spawn, I will go back to the rat ogre body from the box set and combined in some more tyranid pieces in the conversion.
 
Until next time...

My Chaos Warrior Unit Beginning to Take Shape

This style of chaos warrior conversion has been done a lot and it’s a fairly easy and straight forward conversion to do. Simply use chaos knight lance bits and attach them to the your normal chaos warrior and wah-lah, you have a chaos warrior with a halberd. Locally, Jerrod and Jake here my town have done this with their chaos warriors and they make for very nice looking models.

So I’ve taken that idea and expanded on it a bit, changing some of the things up using some different posing and adding a number of detail bits and doing a bit of conversion to them, afterall mutations are my theme.   The guy next to the musician has a shield inspired by the Wulfrik character model.  The musician is from the GW Chosen line of miniatures, and I did give him a cape.

To carry through on that mutant theme, some of the models got beastmen legs and some got bloodletter legs, all left over bits from other conversions. Like the VC Bashin’ Orcs, I did not want to repeat a single head in the unit, so you see I did do some converting on the helmets also.

And yes you may notice that I am a model short to make a rank in the back, I will be adding a few more models and plan to build a unit filler model to help out with that.

A shot of the back rank.  I like how GW added the skulls hanging down the back of the capes, but as you see there is not a lot of variety there.  So I added some heads.  I saw Redmanphill, over at Subject to Stupidity, doing a bit of press-molding in a couple posts recently.  Press molding is has it places in converting and usually it is easier to do than carving up a piece of plastic.  That is the method I used here for the heads that are hanging down on the capes. 

The models above sport some more press mold heads.  I went back to the head technique that I used for my Khorne Knights also using the halberd blades from GW's Storm Vermin and clipping the horns.  I think this gives the helms a very menacing look.  Below is another look at one of those heads, along with a bit of a different look on holding the halberd.

And below is a look at my left flank, you don't want to mess with those guys.

And yes, I do have a complete unit of metal chosen models sitting in primer waiting for paint work, I do like those models as they are, but with them I gave each one a different head.

More Chaos Marauders

I was going through my bitz boxes recently and noted that I only had a few pieces left over for marauder bodies and beastmen bodies, so I thought I may as well use them up. I’m always running short on marauders anyways.

So here are some of the models that I came up with and converted, they ought to fit in well with my current mutated marauders.

The above, I had a torso leftover from an old metal centigor. Time to use it up.

I still have a ton of torsos leftover from converting Knightgors, so I may need to bitz order some more chaos warrior pieces down the road and use those up.

These guys below wll be placed in the middle ranks, so I'm not concerned that much with the shoulder joint issues. I did cut the gauntlets on a couple to rotate the hands.

Tzeentch Lord on a Converted Disc WIP

Been awhile since I made any progress on this, but it is coming along. I have posted WIPs of the Disc previously here and on several forums and some of the comments have mostly been positive, but a couple got me to thinking. Still have a bit to go yet. Need to blend in the right foot. Touch up things around the horns.

Come up with an arm.

The shoulder socket has been magnetized. For Arm swaps.

Added a tail to make the model a bit more menancing.

One of the comments was that the disc looks too much like a 40k Tyranid (not a bad thing in my opinion) and another was what about a tail. Then as I was working on the knights I saw the musician’s horn.

So, that led to a slight change in modeling to where I came up with this. And you guessed it, some of the horns that I cut off the knights/chaos warriors heads make an appearance (don’t throw anything away).

I'm also working on some more marauders and I am just about ready to enter the painting phase. This is just one of the first of the additional marauders. I've had this head laying around caught off from a Reaper Miniature for a number of years. Thought it was time to put it to use.

A lone knight....You Cannot buy this from Perry Miniatures

Oh but I wish you could. Below are some pics of one of my converted Perry Miniatures knights. A single model is a bit easier to view sometimes than a whole group of them. I converted some their normal Normans to look the way I wanted them to look.

Their normal Normans just have mail armor, I wanted a sleeveless surcoat.

The horses are normally just naked, I wanted to change that also.

The shields normally have bosses and are a bit smaller, from the 1090's period. I wanted something to change that, and these GW High Elf shields were close to the style and shape that I wanted.

The basing is the same as the Hospitallers.

Another Friday Night in the Kart...Carnage Ensues

Wah! Crazy night tonight racing. I completely changed the setup on my front end. Got out 4 scales, checking nose weight and cross weight. Cut the lead bar in two and moved 6 pounds to the nose, to try and cure the push in and loose off. Handling improved on a hot slick race track. Still a bit loose, but loose is fast if you can hang on.

Warm up session felt good. Heat 1 Started 3 rd to last out of 8 karts by number draw, lap 2 got wild we went 3 wide in to turn 4. I came out of the lap in second, but the carnage behind me brought out the yellow and the field reverted to the previous lap. Restart was bad for me and I only gained one spot.

Heat 2 got crazy. We had a red flag thrown for a big wreck. Well someone hit me in the left rear and my rear tire launched him into the air, and the kart behind him driven by the lone gal in the field hit him and launched her right over the hay bail wall, and flipped her over into the catch fence, the kart rolled and landed on top of her. The guy that launched off me busted up his kart a little but was able to continue. And another guy went off the track into the wall with them. Me I just felt someone hit me, and looked over my shoulder and saw the nose of the kart and kept going. I ended up finishing terrible in that heat, 3rd to last. And the gal, had no padding on her steering column post, well she caught a bolt that scraped the inside of her thigh a few inches long. They put some disinfectent and gauss on an taped it up. She's a trooper, she want to get back and race the feature, but the track officials held her out.

25 lap Feature I started 7th out of 8 karts. About 9 laps in I was in last, got caught up in a slide with another kart that damn near spun out in front of me and lost all my momentum. Later my old man got spun, so gained those spots. My tire pressure adjustment was completely wrong. Yellow came out, single file restart, passed a couple karts. Finished 4th, held off my old man for the last 6 laps in a back and forth dogfight. 4th was actually 2nd in our engine class. My engine is not right. My oldman has built himself a new engine, so I'm going to try his current engine. He's definitely faster than me, so will see if its the engine or the driver.

My oldman at 64 years old won the 2nd heat race. To give you an idea on the speed, someone radar gunned us at the end of the straight away, we are hitting 50-55 mph, most everyone is running mid to upper 11 second lap times on an 1/8th mile oval.

Painted Norman / Crusader Spearmen Unit

A very small spear unit. Definitely not done with these dudes. No movement tray yet. I did go with a variety of looks. Some English, some French, some crusaders, some from the kingdom of Jerusalem.

The goal of this army is to play over a variety of periods and different settings.


The banners did turnout better than the Hospitallers. I also did do a bit of converting adding some surcoats to the mailed Perry Normans.

Some of the figures are from the Perry's HYW line. Note that quite a few of the shields are from GW High Elves, I was trying to get rid of the bosses and this was a quicker way of doing just that.

Not sure when I will get back to expanding this unit. I was disappointed recently to hear that Conquest Games' plastic Normans on foot were going to be delayed considerably. So I will probably wait, and do some more knights in the mean time.

Crossbows...Fire at will

Small update on my WAB Knight army, 7 of my 16 crossbow men. No real conversion work here. Went with the Perry 's HYW line of crossbow men, as I really like the poses on these compared to their Norman line.

A bit of variety in colors, I'm not going to paint an army that is entirely black and white. Besides I plan to use this army across a lot of periods.

Fun in the Dirt.

Well just because it rained last Friday and canceled my go-kart racing on the asphalt oval, doesn't mean that you cannot get in some laps and not have any fun. Since it rained lightly that just meant that our homemade dirt oval track did not need as much preparation time. And yes, it is as much fun as it looks on my face inside the helmet.

And the Old Man known as Deathwish is absolutely having a ball also as I'm chasing him down.

The dirt track was in good shape and the scary part is that our lap times are almost as fast on the 1/8 mile dirt as they are on the 1/8 mile asphalt. The kart frames are the same as our asphalt karts minus the bodywork, engines are the same, as are the tire sizes.

And the wildlife does not seem to mind it as the deer came out later to investigate what we were doing and the turkey flew in and then flew off as we were taking a short break adjusting the karts.

Rained out and Tutorials and Chicago Gamesday

No go-kart racing report to make tonight, track never dried out from the rain we got today and last night. And we run racing slick tires, no tread. So slicks, asphalt, and water, don't work. I will get in some dirt tracking with my niece tomorrow.

I've had a whole lot of people PM and Email me on various forums asking for tutorials on basing and making movement trays. Well you all are in luck as I do plan to do tutorials on both and will post them here first. If there is something that I do that you would like to learn please let me know.

Chicago Gamesday, I normally would be all over this, but I have a conflict with the date. But that said, there will be plenty of other talent there and you will have the opportunity to chat with them and ask them lots of questions. There will be a Golden Demon Lounge at the event and talents such as Kent Plumb, Chris Borer, Dave Pauwels,Brice Cocanour, James Craig, Todd Swanson, Kirill Zhilkov, Dave Taylor, and Brian Sobb, and more to be announced later will all be there in the lounge, all day long. This is not to stroke egos or show off, heck I've been apart of this in the past and have never even won a golden demon. Its about the hobby and people who love to talk and show what they know. These are friends and acquiatances of mine, and good fun people. And if you see Chris Borer there, please make a donation to him so that he can afford to buy a new pair of shorts.

If I happen to remember, I'll post a schedule for the Demon Lounge when we get closer to the event.

Old Stuff Wednesday - June...Painted Khorne Knightgors

Well last month I showed you an old Khorne Knightgor. That was my first and my test model for the Khorne Knights that used with Khorne Beastmen army back then. That got me to thinking that I should show the rest of the unit. So below you will see the rest of the models I came up with.

What would a unit champion be without a huge sword. Back then I was basically using space marine arms with these models. All of the armor you see on the torsos and heads were sculpted by me.

The belt buckles, I remember it taking forever to sculpt one good one, which I would later just press mold.

Another shot of one of my favorite models on the end.

Dead bodies, skulls, heads, blood, and skin is the theme of Khorne, I had lots of fun doing these.

The banner was to be obnoxiously huge and in your face. The skull was painted on in freehand.

At first I was not going to put the eyeball in it, but the more I thought about the more it just made sense to do it.

Ah more spikes and dead body spike to the centaur. Note where the saddles use to be on the old armored horses. I filled that space in to continue a smooth looking armor.

I do love this unit. And I do want to match it some day soon with my new warriors khorne knights.

Until next time.

My Painted WAB Hospitallers...Let the Crusade Begin

These are my Hospitallers. I’ve never been crazy about painting black and white, but I knew I wanted to do a Holy Order and this one of my favorite choices. Some of them are my converted Perry Miniatures knights mixed with the Perry’s Holy Order/Hospitaller Knights.

The ones without hoods and sleeve-less surcoats are my conversions, like the knight with the couched lance and standard bearer. The two horses with the caparisons are my conversions with GS and BS.

I think this unit of knights turned out pretty good, the black and white works, even though it’s a pain to do. I used somewhere around 6-7 shades of black/gray for the blacks and then toned it all back down with a GW Black Wash.

With the conversions, I was attempting to get Norman early Perry Crusader models out of the First Crusade in the 1090s, into more of the late Second and Third Crusades.

Note some of the kite shields are actually GW High Elves shields from their foot infantry, that made conversion of the shields much easier. And some of the shields were actually converted with green stuff putty.

The movement tray I think turned out well. The basing is HO scale railroad ballast, with some gravel, Joefix grass tufts, and GW Staw. I'm happy with the basing, its a bit different from what I normally do.

The banner did not turn out great, but I will fix that at a later date. Its a painted paper banner with some foil in between the layers to keep the bend.

The horses, scared me at first to do them. I'm not someone that has a lot of knowledge about horses, so I used a number of reference photos and attempted to get 3-4 different paint schemes that would work well. Out of everything I think the horses turned out the best, with the exception of the white one in the back.