Jewel of July: The Angel of Disease

A Jewel that needs some serious cleaning and disinfecting this time, not so shiny as last year's.

While he may not be as objectively impressive as my KoS, I'm just as happy with him, because I've had this Conversion in mind since I first saw the Nightbringer C'tan, back in '02. I wasn't able to find suitable wings for almost a decade, tho, when the WHFB Cockatrice was released. The switch to Finecast also helped immensely with the project, both in reducing the difficulty of trimming down the bits and in greatly reducing the weight, letting me support him on a surprisingly thin bit of brass rod.

It took even longer for me to get hold of the necessary parts. I think I had him assembled and primed by sometime in 2014 or so, and I know I had the paintjob done to a usable state by the time Daemon Summoning was a big thing in 7th Ed. But it wasn't until this past weekend that I finally knuckled down and finished him up. All the work on the Gellerpox Infected really helped, since one of the reasons he'd fallen by the wayside was that I was having trouble getting the skin the way I wanted it, particularly on the wings. It's still not perfect, but it's close enough.

The staff was originally intended to be the Black Mace, but that's no longer an option for Daemon Princes, so now it's just a rod of office or something, and he counts as having two sets of Malefic Talons. Now, my Relic of choice for a Death Guard Daemon Prince is the Suppurating Plate. Since he's really not modeled suitably for that, I call him the Host of the Withering Contagion, which is completely different fluff-wise, but identical rules-wise!

I just got my light box set up again last night. I decided to go with the white background again for a while, but I might have to go back and re-shoot these on the black background, since they got kinda washed out, and then the base is so dark that it's hard to make out much. Speaking of the base, I also just realized that I forgot to clean up the rim, and I meant to do a teeny bit of black drybrushing on the entrance wound on that one skull.

I'm pretty pleased with my greenstuff work covering up the joins between the body and wings. It was crap while I was trying to actually blend them smoothly together, but once I decided to just extend the robe to cover the gaps there, it went pretty smoothly. I think the little bits are supposed to be scales, but I decided to do them as little buds of new feathers growing in, with the flesh all reddened and irritated around the areas where they're either coming in or falling out. The dead dude on the base has orange trousers because that's my standard 40K civilian clothing colour. I should probably also do a little more work on what's left of his shoulders, but it may or may not happen.

I'm sort of getting back into the swing of painting again, helped by the shock of "Holy shit it's August already OFCC is in like 2 weeks and I still have most of my Army to paint". Hopefully that will help me build some momentum, and I'll be able to sustain it better now that we're all settled in here. Until next time, y'all have a good one, y'hear!

HAIL! ALL HAIL THE RETURN OF OUR LADY OF EXCESS!

[A portion of the Adepticon WH Reveals post on WHC]
Rumours of the Dark Prince’s death have been greatly exaggerated…

Your eyes do not deceive you. A host of gorgeous new models kick off a new era for the Dark Prince, including an all-new Keeper of Secrets.

We’ve come a long way since the Keeper of Secrets first graced the worlds of Warhammer in Realm of Chaos: Slaves to Darkness. At once monstrous and beautiful, the new Keeper of Secrets is one of the most striking and unusual Warhammer miniatures ever designed. Drawing on decades of art and lore, this model manages the nigh-impossible task of creating a creature that’s both terrifying and alluring. Sinuous, elegant and predatory, it’s the epitome of everything fans love about Slaanesh. Tempted? We don’t blame you.

The Keeper of Secrets will be joined by a number of new Slaanesh models that bring to life a magnificent and richly realised cast of Daemon champions, from a new iteration of the Masque to Syll’Esske – an unholy tag team of Daemon Prince and Herald.

With so much new stuff for Slaanesh on the way, it’s only fitting that the Dark Prince and his followers should receive a new battletome. With allegiance abilities for the three hosts of Slaanesh – the Invaders, Godseekers and Pretenders – as well as updated warscrolls, spell lores and more, Battletome: Hedonites of Slaanesh will cement these warriors of excess as a major player in both the setting of Warhammer Age of Sigmar and on the tabletop.

And, of course, what would a new battletome be without endless spells?

***

Fucking finally! This is the biggest and best wave of Slaaneshi Minis the game has received since I started playing over 20 years ago! I can't wait to get my hands on them. THEY MUST ALL BE MINE!

Rogue Trader: Glitchlings

Once again, we've got the Nurgle Warning here. The camera has toned these down a bit from how gross they are in person, but they're still pretty gross.

Unlike the previous sets of little gribblies, I did these more like I do my Nurgle Daemons, which takes a while because it involves a bunch of different colours and multiple washes and technical paint. As I mentioned, the camera toned it down a bit, because it tends to treat the inks I use as more translucent than they are in person, and the glistening slimy bits don't work the same in a photo. Anyhow they're right under the cut if you want to give them a look:

Neglected Model September

As with so many of my plans, my goal of breaking this down into multiple posts over the course of the week got derailed. In this case, when my camera's batteries died on the very first Model of the lot, and then that snowballed into all the other things that tend to derail my intended posting schedule. Anyhow, it was quite a productive month thanks to this challenge, and I'm really happy with the results, so I've kept all the pics at full resolution, just cropping and adjusting the colour levels. This means that this is going to be absolutely huge, so I'm putting most of it behind a cut. Let's start with Spiteclaw's Swarm:

Oh, FFS

https://www.instagram.com/p/BoZxpK4lUbl/

I mean, don't get me wrong, it looks fantastic, and I'm looking forward to the release, it's just that once again, I have the worst timing ever.

Azazel's Neglected Model September Wrap-up Post

Basically just a proof of completion with just a few minutes left in September. I'm going to go back and do better individual shots of all these in the next couple of days,  but I wanted to get something up to mark the end of the month.

As is usually the case, all of these could use a little more touch-up, or a couple more details picked out, or another layer of highlights somewhere, but they've hit my personal point of "Fuck it, they're good enough." I feel I should note that all of these were at least started, and some of them (particularly the Skaven) were quite far along, and just needed some final touches. Even so, 16 Models completed in a month (and not just slammed out to three colour minimum, even if it was a pretty decent 3-colour minimum for all those Daemonettes in August) is very good for how my productivity has been trending these last few years. My original plan was to stagger the finishes throughout the month and give them each their own post, but instead, I ended up bouncing around between the various groups, and getting them all done right at the end of the month.

Coming up next, I've got a couple of possibilities for DreadTober, and most of what's left of the Silver Tower box will qualify for the Unit-ed October Challenge, as well as (hopefully) a significant chunk of the Rogue Trader box. It's not likely, but it's also not impossible that I might manage to squeeze in a little something for Orktober as well. I'll hopefully have some preview posts up for those soon as well. Until then, y'all have a good one, y'hear!

Alternate Fiend of Slaanesh and Flesh Hound Models from FFG

Fiends of Slaanesh are a really cool design and concept, but with only a single sculpt available, in resin, at US$25 each, they're kind of awkward to fit into an Army, and they look sort of wimpy next to their counterparts that have been updated to plastic kits, like the Beasts of Nurgle and Bloodcrushers. Flesh Hounds are in somewhat better shape, with 5 sculpts in the box, and a couple of plastic ones teased along with Korghos Khul and Magore's Fiends, but are still US$10 each on their own, in resin only.

A while ago, I stumbled across the Uthuk Y'llan for FFG's Runewars Miniatures Game, and was struck by the potential in some of their options for use as Chaos Daemons, particularly the ones I'm discussing here. It's not entirely surprising, as the Uthuk Y'llan make use of a great many summoned daemons (tho they call them other things), and almost certainly took inspiration from some of the same places GW did.

First up, we have the Spined Threshers, which feel pretty much perfect as an update for the Fiends of Slaanesh. Not as much of an improvement as I might like in terms of variety and price, since the two available sculpts are designed to be built one way, and the plastic used is very hard, but they are still an improvement in those regards, and their size and presence are vastly better.

Apparently in the Runewars fluff, they're made from multiple summoned daemons bound together into a single form, which is why they have multiple mouths all over the place. One mouth remains for each daemon that was bound into a given Thresher, I guess so they can individually feed or something. IDK, I haven't actually paid much attention to Runewars except for the Models.

Now, as I've mentioned, and as shown in the pic at the top of this post, they are much bigger than the current Fiends. But they are about the same size as the current Beasts of Nurgle, which were formerly close to the Fiends in size. So I feel like they'll make a pretty good alternate. I plan on knocking half an inch off any measurements where the larger base would benefit me, and since they have no shooting attacks, the greater height and profile are pure disadvantage. They can actually just barely squeeze onto 40mm bases, but it looked stupid, so I put them on 60s.

Flesh Hounds, as I said at the start, are in better shape, but can really suffer from lack of variety, especially when running multiple packs at once. I like to use a ton of them in minimum-sized packs, so I've made a practice of getting as many possible varieties as I can, to help keep them sorted out. The Flesh Rippers summoned by the Uthuk Y'llan seemed about perfect to form up another pack, since they have an aesthetic that's entirely compatible with Khornate stuff, but are distinctly different from any of the specific GW designs. They also cost about 60% of what the GW ones do.

Unfortunately, there are again only two sculpts, but they actually mix up fairly nicely when not ranked up, and it should be less noticeable when they're one of 8 Packs on the table. The other disadvantage is that they come attached to the rectangular bases you see here, but those are much softer plastic than the Models themselves, and so relatively easy to cut away. In terms of size, they match up quite nicely with GW Flesh Hounds.

Thinking about it just now, they'd probably also make good alternatives for Drukhari Khymerae as well. I'm looking forward to getting both lots of these painted up, but since (as usual) I have far too many projects going on, who knows when I'll get to them. When I do, I will put pics up here.

I have a couple more of the Heroes from Silver Tower ready to go, and several of the monsters very close to completion, so hopefully I'll get them wrapped up and photographed soon, and then I'll do another post of those to wrap up Neglected Model September. I'm also working on building and priming the stuff from the Rogue Trader boxed set and the Heresy Girls Kickstarter, so those are going to be my major goals for October. Until next time, y'all have a good one, y'hear!

Moar Slaaneshi Conversions

In addition to my Keeper of Secrets and Noise Marine Dread, there were three other Conversions that were the driving force behind making the Slaanesh Army I took to OFCC. Everything else in the Army was basically just there to let me use these five Models, and/or fill up Points.

First up is this Chaos Lord on Steed of Slaanesh. I'd been wanting to use that Steed Model for a 40K Chaos Lord ever since it was released back something like 15 years ago, and finally got around to it:

I wish I'd had some more time for it. The Steed in particular could have been substantially improved by a wash and then bringing some of it back up to Rakarth Flesh, and there was more detail I didn't get around to picking out in gold. The only thing that really bugs me, tho, is that I didn't get the edge of the base finished off, which was a common "theme" with this Army.

He got massively overkilled in most Games, because the Model ended up looking much more impressive than his statline actually justified (He's essentially a Chaos Lord with Jump Pack, Power Sword, and a couple of minor stat buffs), so people would line up an attack on him suitable for taking out someone like Abaddon, and then splat him with the first third of it.

Next up is another that I wanted to do since I first saw the base Model. The amount of conversion required here was actually very minimal, basically just scraping off some detail, and replacing the feet and one hand.

Really, most of what went into changing her from the Yncarne to a Daemon Princess was just tweaking the colour scheme, and even then, a lot of the colours are in the official colour scheme for the Yncarne, just used differently. Again, really could have used one more round of wash and highlight, and some gem effect paint on the spirit stones, but I'm still really happy with how she came out.

One of my teammates, who has an Ynnari Army himself, just about lost it when I unveiled her, totally pissed that I'd turned an Aeldari Avatar into basically its exact opposite. Which, honestly, was pretty much the kind of reaction I was hoping for. Chaos should disturb people.

Finally, we have The Vindication of The Devine. (No, that's not a typo. House Devine was the first Knight House to fall to Chaos.) Blending together some rough concepts from the old Hellscourge Daemon Knight from Epic (which had a Castigator Cannon, but was so lacking in detail that it was impossible to tell what that actually was, and was also terrifyingly fast and maneuverable for a War Engine of its size), Forge World's Cerastus Knight Castigator, which established the Castigator Cannon as some sort of dual Gatling gun arrangement, the options available to Renegade Knights, and the general theme that Slaaneshi stuff is faster and more maneuverable and more capable of acrobatic feats than a similar Unit that didn't have the blessing of the Dark Prince would be.

Even with a ton of 1/16" brass rod running through all that, it ended up sagging a bit from its intended pose. The original version had the knees bent in a little tighter, like it was in the process of springing off of that crag and suddenly reversing direction. The left foot was originally up higher as well, which helped the sense of motion, and kept the detail I added to the bottom visible, but it didn't hold. These pics were a total pain to take, because the thing barely fits in my light box at all. I took a bunch more, trying to get better shots of things like the head, but these were the only ones that came out even halfway decent.

 Again with the gloss causing problems for my camera. I added an eye where there's usually a little viewport or something (I'm not really sure what that's supposed to be) in the hatch above what was the pilot's compartment, before it got turned into a Daemon Engine. Similarly, I left off all the grab rails and ladders and such, since no one needs to be able to climb up there and get inside anymore.

 I added some plasticard and putty and a bit from the Chaos Hatch Sprue to fill in the foot, but it ended up sagging down to the point where it wasn't visible, so it ended up unpainted because of the time crunch.

A shot focusing on the base. I get way too into it sometimes when I'm working on these big Models. There's just so much room to go wild with, and the larger bases look so flat and featureless if you don't do something to break them up.

Currently, I'm working on finishing up a bunch of things from the Silver Tower set for Azazel's Neglected Model September Hobby Challenge. I should have enough to do a decent post sometime in the next few days, but it might take longer before I get around to actually taking pics and processing them and stuff. How ever long it ends up being, until then, y'all have a good one, y'hear!

OFCC Aftermath

Last weekend, I went down to Portland for the Ordo Fanaticus Club Challenge. It's a team event, superficially similar to the ATC/ETC, but with a major difference: The goal when making matchups with the other team isn't to set them up so you'll win more, but to set them up so that everyone has the best chance of getting a fun and interesting game. It's pretty much always a great time, and is the one 40K event that I never miss, even in years when I'm not really otherwise playing 40K, or I'm too broke to go anywhere else, or whatever. 11 years in a row now, I've made it happen.

N went above and beyond, getting us this awesome banner and some cool 3D printed tokens to give to our Opponents

I've tried a couple of times in the past, but this was the first year I've ever managed to pull together a themed team. I went down this time as the captain of the Infil-Traitors, with each of us running one of the four Traitor Legions dedicated to one specific God of Chaos. We had R with a World Eaters force, L representing the Thousand Sons (including both Ahriman and Magnus), N with his Death Guard (including both Mortarion and Typhus), and then me, mostly following the theme in general, but running only a Patrol of actual Emperor's Children alongside a much larger contingent of Daemons of Slaanesh and a Renegade Knight.

Anyhow, that's mostly just the lead-in to the pictures. The three big projects I've been working on were for this event, and two of them (my army and a Sector Mechanicus table) were sufficiently finished to use.

My army as a whole. This was my big impetus for getting the Keeper of Secrets finished, as you can see.

A better picture of her. All of these can be clicked for larger versions. They were posted by the TO; I was way too frazzled to get pics myself.

My Renegade Knight. I included it in the project for two reasons. First, I wanted to reduce my model count, since I'd had issues with my back the year before, and it was giving me trouble during the months running up to the event. Secondly, and more importantly, I had the idea for the conversion, and really wanted to make it happen.

You can sort of see part of my Noise Marine Dread at the bottom of that pic, and it's visible, along with my Daemon Princess and Chaos Lord on Steed of Slaanesh, in the first one, but I can't find the better shots of them that I thought were in the album. I'll have to do dedicated photo shoots for those now that I actually have some room available to set my light box up again.

Here's my Sector Mechanicus table. The railings on the walkways and platforms were unfortunately another area where I didn't manage to get everything I wanted done, but it still worked well. This was apparently taken during round three, since that's me sitting there, and my opponent for that game (who was a great dude, with an awesome Custodes Army) standing there, but I don't remember the pic being taken at all.

Pulling over a pic of his army, because it was too awesome not to share

Honestly, I'm still really not recovered from it. My sleep schedule is a mess right now, and I'm trying to edge back into getting some modeling/painting done. I'll hopefully get around to taking more pics of my various conversions for the Army at some point soon. Until then, y'all have a good one, y'hear!

...if Two of Them Are Dead (Jewel of July)

Tell me all of your childhood fears
I live on emotions
I eat your dreams
Nothing's ever what it seems

Nearly two years after I finished the modeling, I have finally finished the painting on my converted Keeper of Secrets. At least for a certain value of "finished". There's definitely touch-up and more highlighting that could be done, but as far as I'm concerned, she is complete.

You better believe me
Every word
Tell me secrets you might have heard
Ugly rumors are all we need
Tales of murder, guilt and greed
 

Bite your tongue dance and burn
Reality a world of hurt
You may say no but not to me
Silence, silence

Remember, remember this
Remember treachery sealed with a loving kiss

She's on a 150mm oval, like the plastic Bloodthirster and Lord of Change. Technically, that's not the "correct" base size for a Keeper of Secrets at this point, but it fits with most of the other Greater Daemons, and seems like a reasonable prediction for what the eventual plastic Keeper will be on.

This was the best pic I managed of the base. This is one part where I may well go back and add some more detail, but for now,  I'm happy with it.

Truth is lies 

Stand on me
Reality a fairy tale
We do not come to bend the knee

A couple of close-ups of the more detailed areas. Trimming down the Slaanesh CSM shoulder pads for the icons on her helm and breast was incredibly fiddly and time-consuming, but I think it was worth it. You can also really see in these some of the places where the Pallid Wych Flesh highlights ended up being too thick or heavy. I did some touch-up, but I can't really afford to spend more time or energy on that right now.

Finally, thanks to this little blast from the past, she is now known as Danglethrust Sinhammer! Until next time, y'all have a good one, y'hear!

Truth is all a children's game
Reality a bitter pill
We do not come to set you free
Silence, silence

Silence when you speak to me