Age of Armies - Month 1: Helldrake - DONE!

Khorne Helldrake - DONE!

It's the end of the first month of 40K Global's Age of Armies Campaign and I'm pleased to say that I completed my commitment to paint a Helldrake and I got my first experience with an airbrush. I've already posted about the technique I used to paint the Helldrake (here) so I thought that I'd give you my first impressions on using the airbrush to accompany the pictures of the finished product.

Quick Tips

There are a couple of tricks which you're not going to be able to get from any research you do before buying an airbrush. Firstly, correctly thinning your paint is not easy and takes a little while to get right ... and then you need to change colours and you have to thin the next one! I will say that I've found the Vallejo Air paints are about the right consistency straight out of the bottle but they do tend to dry fairly quickly in the brush. This causes clogs and will have you cleaning the brush a bit more often than you probably want. Thinning the paint with a drop of water mixed with "Flow Release" 9/1 seems to solve the problem nicely.

Secondly before you blow trigger air through the brush you absolutely must spary onto scrap paper otherwise you'll blow whatever residue is left in the nozzle or on the needle all over your model. I've done this in a few places on the Helldrake and it's bugs the hell out of me!

Give it a Blow

On the whole I really like using the airbrush, it's far more precise a tool than I thought it would be but it also takes exactly as much practice to use well as I thought it would. As such I'm expecting that my next attempt at a Helldrake (a few months down the line) will look noticeably better than this one.

If you're on the fence about getting one I would say that if you do a reasonable amount of painting, and can afford to, it's worth giving it a go. Once you see the results you can get you'll want to use it on as much as you can. I know I do. I'll be painting up two Khorne Bezerker units and a lord on a Juggernaught next month and I'll be using my airbrush at least for base colouring and applying some basic shadows and highlights.

On with the Show

Anyway, enough of that, here are the pictures of the Helldrake, please let me know what you think in the comments below.

Baleflamer detail.

Baby got back!

Flame pattern detail.

Top down.

Parting shot.

Best 40K Cosplay Ever!!

Just a little insomnia fueled blog post here to update you on my Helldrake progress and to share a pretty amazing piece of Cosplay I just spotted via Kotaku.

OMG!!!

Firstly this has to be the best attempt at a Terminator suit I've ever seen and extra props go out to Roses & Boltshells for keeping it Imperial Fists! Love it! Check out the Kotaku article (there's a video of the suit in action too) or visit Roses & Boltshells on their Facebook site.

AoA Khorne List – 1st Play-Test

Grazer offered to give me a game this Thursday and was happy for me to proxy my little heart out to try out a Khorne CSM/Daemons list I’d been thinking about for the Age of Armies project. So, I’ll just dive straight into the list (and the proxies!):

Chaos Space Marines (Primary)

HQ
Chaos Lord (Mark of Khorne, Axe of Blind Fury, Juggernaught) (Carnifex)

TROOP
Khorne Bezerkers (x8 w. Rhino) (Assault Marines & Rhino)
Khorne Bezerkers (x8 w. Rhino) (Assault Marines & Rhino)
Cultists (x15, Sgt w. Shotgun) (Grazer’s own Squats!)

FAST ATTACK
Helldrake (Baleflamer) (Winged Hive Tyrant)
Helldrake (Baleflamer) (Winged Hive Tyrant)
Chaos Spawn (x5, Mark of Khorne) (Raveners)

HEAVY SUPPORT
Maulerfiend (Tervigon)

Chaos Daemons (Ally)

HQ
Bloodthirster (Swarmlord)

TROOP
Bloodletters (x10) (Genestealers)

FAST ATTACK
Flesh Hounds (x8) (Various 40mm Nids)

HEAVY SUPPORT
Soul Grinder (Trygon)

A Call for Competition ... of sorts.

Chaos! You know it makes sense.

Well, this year looks like it might be more of a hobby focused year than a gaming one. I’m certainly planning to go to a few tournaments this year (BoTCh, Blog Wars, Open War, Throne of Skulls and probably a couple of others) but my usual Thursday night games seem to have dried up with my regular opponents disappearing, for very good reasons of their own I might say. Fortunately there are a couple of major hobby projects that have caught my eye which should fill the gap nicely.

Firstly I’m going to take part in the Age of Armies campaign being run by the 40KUK Podcast as you can see here. I’m still minded to go Khorne Marines/Daemons but given my magpie nature nothing is set in stone until the paint hits the model.

Secondly, I recently downloaded and digested the Age of the Emperor supplement published by the Tempus Fugitives crew and it’s got me feeling all unnecessary about Heresy Era stuff and as such I’m going to repaint my Marines as Imperial Fists and Blood Angels add some Mark III armour from Forgeworld into the mix. Those of you who have followed the blog for a while will know that my marines are predominantly Yellow anyway but I am planning to strip them in batches of 5 and start again from scratch. There are a couple of reasons for this, mostly because I want to ensure the consistency of the new scheme but also because I want to try a different technique for painting yellow which I think I can get to look cleaner and brighter than my current “dirty yellow” look.

Lastly, I won an Amazon Gift Voucher recently and decided to splurge it on an airbrush and compressor kit and there’s nothing like a new toy to get the hobby juices flowing. I am really itching to start using it to see what sort of difference it makes to my throughput and the results I can achieve both on large models and blocks of infantry. I’ve been spending the last few days trawling through YouTube and various forums looking for advice on how to both operate and maintain and airbrush and how to get the best results with it as part of various projects. I’ll definitely be blogging about my experiences so keep an eye out for that.

What all this means is that you should start to see a more regular flow of content on the Blog which Grazer has pretty much single-handedly been supporting over the last few months/half a year. Battle reports are likely to be few and far between, but will probably come all at once as I attend tournaments, and are likely to be focussed on what I learned from humiliating defeats (nothing different there then!). Hopefully the painting and modelling content should be coming thick and fast (well I expect I’ll manage one post a week at least), and the predominantly yellow pictures should be broken up with some red for the Blood Angles and more red from the Khornate Chaos project.

On a final note if anyone in the Nottingham area fancies a game at Warhammer World (or I can Stretch to Eye of the Storm in Mansfield) on a Thursday night please just drop me a line either as a reply to this post or email me at andylane78 at gmail dot com and we’ll sort something out.

Silver & Gold and Other Army Lists

The 40kUK Podcast are currently instigating a hobby event called “Age of Armies”, you can find out more about it here. But suffice to say it’s an army building challenge requiring you to build and paint a new army over the course of the year with a view to bringing it to a tournament at the end of the year, possibly the Autumn Throne of Skulls.

I’ve always wanted to do one of these events but they’ve always seemed to fall at times that weren’t convenient for one reason or another but this time, I’ve just finished my Tyranids, my Marines are just expanding into 6^th edition and my Orks may never surface again ... so I quite fancy doing something new. The premise is that you acquire the equivalent of £50 worth of models for your army each month which is pretty achievable I think but what I really like about this is the intention for everyone involved to attend a tournament together at the end of the challenge. This sounds like a lot of fun.

The big question though, is what army should I do? I’ve been really tempted to do a Chaos Marines (Khorne) Primary with Ork Allies army because I have always loved the Chaos Marines from a fluff perspective and it would give my Orks a focus again. However I pretty much have all the Ork models I’d need painted up so that’s probably a no-go from the point of view of this challenge.

The list I’d considered at 1850pts was: