Reggie's Back, Alright!

Time has definitely not been on my side as of late...

So as you can tell by my entries here, the past year has been a blur of trials and tribulations, of sorts. Between a random personal life and a struggling professional one, it's been pretty crazy. What's even crazier? I almost had to give up on the hobby!

It's a thought that always seems to cross most struggling hobbyists' minds every now and again, especially when money and adult life come into the mix. That being said, I'm pushing to persevere. Things aren't perfect now, but I always seem to fall back onto my faithful hobby to bring a semblance of happiness back to me.

That being said, onto the models.

Like I said before, things have been pretty busy. I've had to re-prioritize my efforts on completing what models are the easiest for me to do.

Getting more vets together

Some old school love!

Seeing as how I got my start in this hobby back on the eve of 4th edition, I was happy to get back into the swing of things by painting up some of the older models I had sitting around. I ended up painting up the old Nork Deddog model, mostly because "why not"? I'm guilty of never really using him, but I love the model hobby wise. That, and I needed to test out the Tallarn Flesh replacement paint I had recently discovered: Beast Hide! I believe that's the name of it anyway. It's a slight bit darker than Tallarn Flesh, but it still works fairly well. A drop of white/light grey mixed in would do the ticket. An Internet goes to where the inspiration for his armor scheme came from! 

My Borderlands-inspired Hellhounds!

If you have somehow been keeping up with my posts, I'm sure these tanks may look somewhat familiar. I managed to experiment a bit with my painting techniques with properly thinning my paints for a brushstroke-less delivery on the smoother surfaces on armored panels. Looking back on these photos, I may have thinned out my paints a bit too much, but no brushstrokes!

That being said, I'm still excited how they are coming along. I hope to get some more camouflage/graffiti on these guys.

Either way, I hope to get more of my work posted, as I only was able to take so many pictures. Hopefully, I'll be able to stay on the ball better when it comes to getting more footage available. Until then...

Air Cav Madness!

I was rather happy that I got to stop by my FLGS yesterday, as I managed to get a very nice trade!

LOTS of Spess Mehrehns!

A friend of mine at the shop bought the last 2 Assault on Black Reach box sets they had (Yes, they still had some), and wanted the 2 sets of AoBR Orks I got from previous trades/Christmas. As a result, I have a nice supplementary force for my IG. I especially like this option, as these guys are actually Battle Brothers with my Guard. Woot for awesome trades! As for the chapter these guys will be, I'll still leave that for another time...

So I have a few other things I've been working on as of late, mostly just for the lulz.

I finally got around to finishing this guy up. He was a random acquisition I got from eBay back in '08. He was already sprayed green, so there wasn't a whole lot more that I wanted to do. I thought about camo'ing up the Chimera, but we'll see where we go from there. I need to dig up my old IG codex. They had some awesome hobby articles in there. Why did they stop doing that?!

And here's the center of today's post

I ended up grabbing this model kit some time ago just for scale modelling purposes. However, my quickly-dwindling hobby budget is forcing me to get creative with what I've got. After seeing several hobby posts around the Interwebs, I figured this would be an okay idea, especially to round off my Valkyrie squadron. 

As you can see, I've already started priming a lot of the larger panel-esque parts of the chopper. Seeing as how the interior of this model is heavily featured, I wanted to make sure I could prime and paint enough of those parts as I could before I start putting this thing together.

You can tell this was a cheaply-made model kit...

 As unfortunate as the build quality is, I didn't want to buy more 40k pieces I can't afford, not to mention the only other people who could fit in would be 40k Sentinel pilots, and I'm quite certain they don't have legs anymore. Given that this is an older model kit, I was a bit worried about the comparison of scale with the 40k scale of "heroic" 28mm.

Not horribly accurate, but it'll do.

That being said, I started on the pilots, as I wanted to get these guys done quickly. They would need some of the greater amounts of detailing, next to instrument panels and weapons.

Thank God for Vallejo Extra Opaque paint!

These guys are coming together nicely, as poorly molded as these guys are. Thank God most of the bad flashing is on the legs, which aren't going to be seen much. I want these guys to look like they're attached to my mercenary company, so I'm matching their flight suits to the general paint scheme of my army. I'll probably give them an insignia somewhere on their shoulders and paint their helmets up accordingly.

Either way, things are building up quite nicely. I have a LOT of projects crowding up the table, but I couldn't be any happier about it. We'll be back soon enough!

*Insert Random Side-Project Here*

After a long day, I still managed to get some hobby work done today. It wasn't much (especially for post # 50!), but I'm pretty happy with it. I apologize for the poor quality of the photos in this entry. Granted, they weren't anything special before, but I know these ones were taken with little to no backlight on my netbook. I'm hoping to get a photo box together soon. 

Finally getting to use the "cutter squad"

I didn't manage to get any beginning WIP shots, but I ended up finding some old salvage parts from a broken pool skimmer lid I found when I worked cleaning pools for the summer.

I'm pretty sure I was as safe as possible when cutting this resin piece...

What was I doing this for? Not terrain...at least, not yet for something like this.

Step 1: Size it up!

Step 2: Get it ready!

If you haven't noticed yet, I love doing base treatments, especially for something as large as the Dreadnought from the old Assault on Black Reach set. Speaking of which...

I do happen to have the rest of the gang waiting!

My plan is to throw these guys into a secondary list as the standard Spess Mehrehns/IG list. As for what chapter I want to do, I'll leave that for another time...

I was going to work on another command squad from a Cadian CS box set I got a few years back, but I seem to have lost track of where said box set went.

I'm sure it'll turn up sometime soon.

Anyway, tomorrow is Warhammer day at the FLGS, so I'll probably have another entry ready after tomorrow. Hopefully, I'll be able to *gasp* actually play a match! We'll be back!

Makin' Bacon!

So yeah. Hudson's Bacon Fest was yesterday, and boy; am I glad I went. Sarcasm aside, no one should run a festival dedicated to bacon, and then proceed to run out of said bacon 2 hours into the festival. *end rant*

Anyway, much progress has been made over the past several insomnia-fueled days. I've been hanging around my FLGS a lot more often, and as a result, the motivation to keep chugging along on my army has been pretty strong. I'm glad to stay on track; to do something I love so much, and most importantly, have the support to keep at it.

I completely forgot I had this classic Hellhound model laying around. I think I got it as a Christmas present well over 4 years ago. I had a lot of difficulty getting the hull together when I first got the model, and I ended up back-shelving the project. Thank God I managed to dig this one up out of the random box of old terrain projects I had in the basement. It might not be updated with all of the more recent optional weaponry, but it never hurts to have an extra Hellhound on the field, right?

From the random "graveyard" of projects I almost gave up on...

Thanks to the assistance of one of my friends at the FLGS, he managed to help me start piecing together the old Chimera-based hull. I've kept the model limited at this stage, as I want to find a way to at least magnetize the hull-mounted weapons. They get melta-guns this time around! Who can pass that up?

For the lulz

I also got my hands on one of the new Hellhound models, mostly for the new weapon loadouts. I thankfully have some spray primer to help speed these guys along!

Finally starting to look  like something, eh?

As underused as the Leman Russ Vanquisher is, this particular project is really starting to grow on me. As you can see, I have finally displayed the slightly-Orky turret onto the tank, with a fresh new upper hull piece I got from a previous resolution GW managed to help me out with a few years back. I also managed to strip off a lot of the old paint, leaving a conveniently durable metal-toned primer behind. The treads also held onto their black primer, too.

I love seeing the old archive bits on this thing!

 The previous owner of this tank did a good job extending the barrel of the Battle Cannon, though I'm hoping to build up the sides of the extension with some strip styrene scraps I have laying around. I want to Imperial up this tank!

This'll be the last thing my enemies will see!

Like with the Hellhound, I want to make sure I can wait until I get my hands on some magnets so I can swap out the hull-mounted guns when I need to. Thankfully, some eBay auctions went my way. I just need to wait for the last ones to wrap up and get here...

I managed to get some really nice bases from the awesome people over at Micro Art Studios. I figured they'd be good for the urban-themed army that I'm building now, so I can have this Catachan CS really stand out. I'm not too sure how I want to build these guys, so I only have some bare legs/torsos on them now. I can't wait to start work on them!

Coming along nicely, eh?

I'm very happy about how good my stealthy veteran squad is looking. I was originally planning to have these guys as Forward Sentries. As a result, I think I'll outfit them with some sniper rifles to really make a mess of things for enemy infantry formations. I didn't happen to get a picture of them yet, but I do have some classic Cadian sniper models that are going to fit the bill perfectly next to these guys.

"Sight unseen, commander."

I still need to kit out these guys, but that'll come together soon enough.

I took these pictures a few days ago, so I've actually have made more progress on my projects than what I've posted. I hope to have a more updated entry in by Thursday night. We'll see how it goes soon enough! We'll be back!

Quick Post-Weekend Update

Summer is definitely wrapping up fairly well for me. Granted, I wish I had some full-time, well-paying employment to look forward to, but at least I have some spare time to take care of the nice things in life, one of them being scale model building and 40k.

I've been making some small gains in my work:

Finally settled on a Troops scheme!

I ended up going full District 9 on the way I wanted my generic troops to look. I wanted something fairly easy to replicate, but something more exciting than "make the fatigues this color, make the armor that color, done" method most IG players go. I'm sure I'll drive myself insane with the sheer amount of guardsmen I have left to paint, but I'm having fun for now. I'll leave the loss of sanity for a better time.

Something awesome this way comes...

 I ended up finding some mystery bits I got from a random trade I did up in the capital region last summer. I figured it'd be nice if I could do something different to help distinguish my veteran units from the rank and file of my other troops. With stealth being the primary focus, I'll keep my color palette to a minimum and kit these guys out with lots of extras. It'll be awesome.

Just a little sneak peek

This...well... I honestly don't know what I'm really doing with this piece here. It's a looted tank I got from someone on eBay a few years back, as I was insane back in those days (no surprise there) and wanted to make a secondary Blood Axe army to screw around with. Now that my wallet is running dry, I figured I'd do the right thing and reclaim this tank back into the Imperium.

The reason why there's an Ork head in my hand is because it was glued into the driver's porthole. I managed to finally pop him out using a sculpting tool. I figure it'll make a nice kill trophy. I've got my work cut out for me with this piece though. The entire rear engine block is cut off and will need extensive surgery to look good again. Thank god I have some extra plasticard and milliput to help out with making this tank worthy of my forces.

Anyway, that's it for now. Hopefully I'll have some more progress to show you guys in the near future, especially involving some Grey Knights and a few tanks that I'll try and crank out. We'll be back soon!

A Much-Needed Update

In between job hunting, organization and a few other distractions *cough*TeamFortress2andSleepingDogs*cough* I am finally getting back to work on my 40k stuff. I ended up seeing this tutorial some time ago, and figured I should probably finally paint the random Grey Knight miniature I got some time ago at one of the many random trades I get myself involved with. Here's the fruits of my labor:

Front on shot, sorry for the bad quality on the shot. I need to get my DSLR fixed...

 A bit of a more distant, better shot. I had to deviate from the tutorial a bit.

Side-on shot. Not too bad, if I may say so myself.

Either way, it's always a good motivator when you get a paint job done right the first time like this. It's definitely a motivator with the new projects I have planned for getting geared up for 6th edition.

I completely forget where I saw this tutorial, but I ended up making some custom bases for the small box set of Grey Knights I got a while ago.

Hard to believe, but the only things I used to spruce these babies up were scrap pieces from a Tony's frozen pizza, some leftover granny grating bits, a few cotton swab sticks and a straw from a Capri Sun. Not bad for scrap, right?

I was happy to get my hands on some Cadians through an awesome trade I did through my FLGS. I am horrible when it comes to choosing a paint scheme for my army. Going with the whole rag-tag mercenary theme, I ended up using design aspects from District 9 and Total Recall.

This was the primary inspiration here.

...and after seeing these guys last month on the silver screen last month, it stuck.

A nice WIP shot of a few of them. These are only 4 of a few squads.

I ended up using some of Tamiya's primer to get these guys started. It was my first time using it, and it was very...interesting to say the least. I definitely sprayed a bit too much, but it wasn't anything that ruins the models. They're only a few of my Troops choices. I can't wait to get these guys wrapped up. I just need to figure out what color the fatigues should be.

So yeah, I hope to have a few more updates coming in the near future. My workbench is crowded up with lots of stuff to take care of, and I couldn't be any happier about it!

Utilize the Down-Time!

As much as I wanted to go to Kirwan's (my FLGS) for their charity tourney, I had to stay home to keep an eye on things there, as well as take care of my parent's spastic dog. Either way, it gave me some time to keep plugging away at the GIGANTIC collection of miniatures I've built up for times like these.

This was how it started out this morning...

I only wanted to start plugging away at the random vehicles I have to work on. I wish I took more WIP shots, but I was in the "zone", and realized that I need to redo my freaking Valkyrie. The paint job I was attempting for its interior is rather... lackluster.

 The Rhino kit is something I'm putting together for my Inquisition forces. It's coming along steadily. I'm kinda pissed that I screwed up the rear hatch, but overall, the Rhino-based kits are a blast to put together. They're more friendly than the Chimera kits; that's for sure!

A shot of my first semi-completed vehicle interior

Not my best work, but it's something that'll suffice. I know it's not Golden Demon material, but I just hope I'm improving.

I found this gem of a miniature from Reaper Miniatures. I know it's a bit off-scale from GW's "heroic" repertoire, but I think it'll be a nice Astropath/Primaris Psyker stand-in. That, and having a female model on the table changes things up a bit. Thank god for Liquid Green Stuff. It's interesting to work with.

Cypher!

 I normally HATE anything Chaos related, if my Inquisition-oriented army hasn't displayed. Regardless, ever since I read his fluff in the old Heroes and Villains book, I always thought Cypher was awesome, which is in no way, shape or form also helped along by my disinclination toward the Dark Angels. I thought he had a pretty awesome back-story and that the model itself was well done. Even for the crazy proportions of 3rd Edition models, he was awesome.

Another WIP shot of him. Very Assassin's Creed-ish...

All in all, I hope I can do this model some justice. I don't know how I'd play this guy, but I'm sure I can fit him in somewhere, or at least have him as a stand-in for an Inquisitor or something. We'll see...

I'm starting to have a change of heart for Vallejo paints. I picked up this kit from another hobby shop in the Albany area, and used them today for my interior work for the Rhino. After finally getting my paint-to-thinner ratio correct, these paints really were worth their weight in gold. Vallejo really has been an interesting kind of paint to work with, thought I do wish there was a dealer around here that sold some Reaper paints. I want to give them another shot as well.

...and this is what the table looks like now!

I'm VERY glad the rest of my family isn't home right now. I've cleaned the table up some since this picture was taken, but it's safe to say I think I'll be painting for a while. Thank god I love it! It feels so good to finally have my motivation back to do some hobby work again!