Emperor's Children Lord Discordant

Well, this is a model that has been sitting around ever since the release. Really happy to have finally finished it.

Due to the conversion work, painting was very difficult. In order to fit the lady on his lap, I had to do a lot of culling and shaping. By the time they were finished, the whole thing had to be glued together and then painted as one huge chunk, which really made it difficult to get to the riders! That and the 6 legs worth of gold filigree really made it feel like a challenge.

Style-wise, I always thought it would be fun to try adding a sort of love-interest semi romantic edge to a Slaanesh model. I think I was also inspired the original art for the cover of the first Vanpire Hunter D novel, which I've always really liked. As far as actual lore is concerned, I imagine perhaps he fell in love with a noble noblewoman he took as a slave - unfortunately she didn't survive the warp energy she was exposed to in the eye of terror, so he clones her again and again, enjoying the sensations of both love and heartbreak as only his gene enhanced physiology and twisted mind can. Something like that anyway.

As far as the actual paint work is concerned, this is my regular Emperor's Children scheme. I've also been working on a Leviathan dreadnought for them, which I should be able to start painting soon.

Shadowspear Obliterator - Emperor's Children

Whenever I buy a big box full of cool models, I have that concern that I'm just going to be adding to the inevitable cupboard of shame that every hobbyist seems to build up. So, with that in mind, I'm trying to make some steady progress on some of the new Chaos releases.

This is my first Obliterator from Shadowspear. They're cool models, that really look a bit like miniature Helbrutes really. I like the big and mutated look, and rules wise, they're sure to please. 

It's great that these guys got an update, and I'm sure at some point a new 3 man unit box will be released. The old designs might have been my least favourite models in the whole chaos range. Well, except perhaps for the mutilators... and with good reason!

As with most of my Emperor's Children, I'm following my standard scheme of purple and gold. It's pretty comfortable for me now, and as purple is my favourite colour, I don't really get bored of painting it. I have made a start on the second Obliterator as well, so hopefully I'll finish that off at some point in the not too distant future.

Despite my lofty goals about working through Shadowspear, I picked up a Lord Discordant at the weekend. I've mostly finished the build, but I'm working on quite a nice little conversion on it that I think people will like (well maybe depending on taste). I'm happy with the work so far, so I'm hoping to post up the build once its complete some time later this week.

Keeper of Secrets - Avatar of Shaah Complete

Well, this was one fast project. I started work on Saturday; picking up where I'd left off in the build 2 years ago, and started painting on Thursday morning. 24 hours later and I'm done!

To be fair, the speed of the paint process was mostly due to the nature of the model. I also maximised the amount of work I did with the airbrush, so I spent about 2 hours on that part of the paint. After that, it was just a matter of sorting out the details. Oh, and fair warning, this post contains moderate resin boobies!

For those who aren't familiar with the model, this is the Avatar of Shaah by Raging Heroes. It's about 8 inches tall to the top of the sword and is all resin. I've written a review of the kit lower down, if you're interested.

My favourite part of the paint is the glowing eyes. They didn't take a lot of work, and I'm really happy with the final result. I basically just airbrushed them with dark angels green, then Vallejo escorpina green. After that, I washed around the area with a little Biel-Tan Green and then just highlighted the central eyes with a ever lightening mix of moot green and white.

Considering the time spent on paint, I'm really happy with how she came out. It's also nice to take something out of the cupboard of shame and get it finished for once. I'm planning to pick up a Lord Discordant tomorrow, and I never thought in a million years that I'd actually finish this model before then.

Anyway, that about rounds it out for the Avatar itself. Due to some difficulties with this kit, I've also written about the process of building it (which is basically just a massive page long complaint), but if you're just here for cool pictures, you can skip that bit.

Kit Review

I'm happy with the look of the final model now that it's done, but honestly it was a horrible experience to build. Resin can be hard to work with, and I've gone through plenty of resin models in my time, but in a number of ways Raging Heroes really dropped the ball on this one.

A gap in the claw you can fit your thumb in...

For one, the kit was rather shiny and coated in a very noticeable quantity of release agent which was resistant to cleaning and took a lot of work just to prep. The fitting for the individual parts was also quite poor, and even with the best will, there were a number of gaps that you could easily fit a thumb nail in all over the model.

I expect to spend some time with greenstuff filling gaps, but the position of the seams was just plain terrible, and the kit honestly feels poorly designed. Often seam lines between parts seemed to be arbitrarily cut straight through crucial rounded areas that were next to impossible to fill cleanly.

Looking at a mock up of the model before paint or greenstuff, if you enlarge the picture, you'll see that there are seams running though every inch or so of the claw on the right. The front side is the better fitting one, and let me tell you it took quite a bit of time to fix all of that.

The worst seam on the whole thing? the butt. For some reason, they decided to cut the legs at the hip to the groin (which you can also see in this picture). That would've worked well if the avatar had clothes, but with a bare demon ass to contend with, it basically left a large horrible seam right across the body that was really unnecessarily hard to fill and work with. Why they didn't follow the line of the chains, I'll never know.

Detail pickup is ok, but far from ideal as well. It just feels slightly blunted and lacking in the crispness that you see in other manufacturers (eg: Anvil, Forgeworld, Prodos, Black Sun, Wargame Exclusive, Nocturna, even Finecast). Overall, if you like the model, I'd still get one, but just know that it'll be a ton of work, and honestly don't even go there unless you're an experienced model-maker.

I don't like slamming a manufacturer, but I've got other Raging Heroes models from the kickstarter, and it'll probably be a few years till I can face working on any of them either. It's a shame, but that's the reason I shelved this project in the first place, and it's a real problem. Does it look nice now? yeah, but I had a ton of work just getting it together in the first place, and it's mostly down to poor design choices.

Emperor's Children Venom Crawler Finished!

Well, Monster March is over, but I had a spare week after finishing the Shadowsword and I didn't want to let it go to waste. I picked up Shadowspear on the release day, and I've been working on the Chaos models since.

Obviously, the Venom Crawler was always going to be a nice thing to add to my army. I use a lot of Daemon Engines, and it's a cool design. I have to say that it was a real pain in the ass to paint though. It just has a lot of legs and a lot of filigree to get to grips with - so pretty much any painters worst nightmare! (which pretty much describes anything Chaos anyway)

I'm really happy with how it came out though. I've used my usual scheme for my Emperor's Children. The only differences are that I've moved to using the airbrush for the purples, and I also used some Blood for the Blood God on the tongue and demon maw bits on the side of the body. It's a nice high-gloss effect that I really like in moderation.

I haven't seen a lot of Venom Crawlers around online yet, so I think it's quite interesting to get a look at the model from different angles. Personally, I think there's a lot of cool details to be appreciated. I'll be working on some of the other Shadowspear models soon, so hopefully I can showcase them as I go. Next up is probably the Obliterators.

I'm looking forwards to the wave of new models we're seeing too. In particular, I'll definitely be looking to add a Lord Discordant, and one of the new Keeper of Secrets models to my army soon!

Emperor's Children Forgefiend

I actually painted this model twice! Once a few years ago shortly after the kit came out, and again recently to update the scheme to match my current Emperor's Children force. I haven't changed traitor legion over the years, but I did update how I painted them as my skills developed, and I wanted it to look good with the rest of the force (I updated my Helbrute in a similar way last year).

I've always liked the Ectoplasma Cannon head, just because it looks like a demon parrot or something! In fact, I like that head so much that I used it as the basis for my Heldrake's head that still graces the top of this blog today.

In terms of conversion work, it's pretty stock, but I did use one of the Mauler Fiend's tendrils to make a tail for it. It was 5 minutes of work, but I think it looks good and adds a sense of balance to the model when viewed from the side where it's quite front-heavy!

Squaduary 2019 - Fiends of Slaanesh Finished!

Well, it's been a while since my last post. I won't lie, it's mostly due to a combination of laziness, Christmas, and then more laziness.

Despite the slow progress on the blog, and hobby stuff in general, I couldn't not enter Squaduary this year. I've finished both times on the other years the event has run, so I couldn't break my perfect winning streak!

With that in mind, I've painted a unit of 3 Fiends of Slaanesh. These are the new plastic models from the Wrath and Rapture set that came out recently. I can't really comment on the rest of the set though, as I bought these on eBay for just over £20, which I think is a pretty good deal really. They're  a really nice kit; with some excellent detail, and a lot of little features to be appreciated. In particular, I really like the sort of cute sea-horse side view of the heads. Something about it just works well when combined with the rest of the model. I also like the classic backwards legs and other twisted physical parodies on these models that echo the originals nicely.

Anyway, paint wise, I used the airbrush for the skin and then just enjoyed the painting process really. I don't paint that many daemons, so it was a nice change of pace from the normal stuff (ie burly armoured dudes!)

Well, that about wraps it up for another year!

Massively Converted Slaanesh Defiler Painted and Finished

Probably my most ambitious conversion to date, this bigger than an imperial knight beast has been sitting idly by waiting for paint for about 4 years or more. In fact, I remember talking about it at the time as being about the size of a knight titan before they were ever actually released!

Anyway, with my latest push to finish some of my Chaos off and get my Emperor's Children back in shape, I finally got the thing finished. The airbrush helped to get It done as I was able to basecoat the silver and purple bits with reasonable speed and with less pain than otherwise might have been felt if I had to di it all by hand; especially considering it was fully built and had to be painted as one big chunk!

The conversion itself uses almost exclusively parts of the defiler kit, but it has all been reposed, cut and chopped together to walk upright. I did a lot of restructuring of the torso and everything as well. I'm really excited to finally finish it too. My Emperor's Children are never going to take to the field without him!

There are a couple of other pictures below. I recently finished a Warpsmith as well, so they should work together well and be very thematic too!

Helbrute shown for scale purposes

 Is it too late to claim them both as an incredibly last minute Dreadtober entry to go with my Dragoon?

Emperor's Children Warpsmith

Death to the False Emperor!.... I mean erm..., more chaos stuff incoming.

This is my converted Warpsmith. I built the model recently from a spare Plague Marine model that I got on eBay a little while ago. It took me a while to get around to building him, but I'm really glad that I did. I really like the paint job too, which I think has helped to make sense of the model as it is encrusted with so much detail that in bare plastic his chest just looked like one massive lump or something.

His head is from the heresy white scars upgrade bits (which I bought just because they're cool). I was lucky in that I had a spare axe head from the tech priest dominus in my bits box after I built my 40k Skaven conversion, and it just seemed like thee perfect part to use.

With 8th edition, lists favour having 2 HQ choices, so I know I'll get a lot of use out of him. That and his stats, equipment, and the ability to fix vehicles are pretty good; especially considering his fairly reasonable points cost.

Overall, I'm really happy with how the model came out. I'm almost surprised myself that he used to be a plague marine!

Slaanesh Chaos Lord - Converted, Painted and Finished

Behold the glory of Blazmodeus! It's rare that I spend this long painting a model, and even rarer for me to name it after myself, but I'm really happy with this guy!

He was one of my best conversions; possibly the best, but he ended up sitting on a shelf unpainted. In fact, he was such a good conversion that I almost didn't want to paint him for fear that I wouldn't be able to paint him well enough to live up the model itself. I made a bit of an attempt to paint him a few months ago, but ultimately gave up as I couldn't get the result I wanted.

I started again recently as part of my latest Chaos push, and he is finally finished and ready to lead some of my Emperor's Children in to battle.

Overall, I'm really happy with the model; in particular the mix of colours came out really nice on him, and I like the blend on the armour. He is actually the first model in my Emperor's Children to be painted using the airbrush, but he definitely won't be the last!

For me, he really looks the way that I envisage Chaos marines should look. I think that the mask being torn away from his face came out well in the end too, which is cool.

I think I'll be using this guy as my general for many years to come.

Converted Warpsmith

I realised something about my Chaos recently; I need more HQ choices. I have several different Chaos Lords that go way back over the years, but not a lot else. I was looking in the codex, and I remembered that shortly after 8th edition dropped, I was planning to convert a Warpsmith out of one of the new plague marine models. I still had all the parts, so I decided to finally make the project a reality.

Anyway, the miniature shown above is the fruits of my labour. I'm pretty happy with how he came out, and one of the things I love about converting characters is that he was basically free, as he was entirely made with stuff I just had laying about the place. I did buy the plague marines though, but I got them as a set shortly after Dark Imperium was released, and they were cheap as hell on eBay.

While I was at it, I finally greenstuffed and based my unit of Slaanesh marines that I converted from the other plague marine models, so I'm planning to undercoat and airbrush them together in a batch soon. I'm really happy with them though, and I think that they look great.

One more post to go for this week, and I think I've saved the best till last. It's cool custom chaos lord time, and he's fully painted in all his bangin' glory!

Daemonette Squad Finished (Juan Diaz Metal Sculpts)

Another unit finally finished. I've been working on these for some time. I've got more units to get through too as I stocked up on 2 another 20 when they went back into production for a limited run. These are all the ones that I collected earlier, and I had gradually painted 6 of them to finished about a year ago. I finished the last 4 recently.

I really like these metal sculpts. I actually do like the plastic ones as well, but I particularly like the fine details these ones have; in particular I actually like how they scale with other models in the chaos range. They look small and delicate next to your marines, which seems fitting somehow.

They look great as a unit too, and I know that I'll get a lot of use out of them now that they're finished. They don't cost that many points, so are the kind of unit you can afford to take in a lot of lists. Obviously, their survivability isn't that good, but I tend to play a mostly shooting oriented force with my Emperor's Children, and they're more likely to be used for counter-assault than anything else.

I'm posting again tomorrow, but It'll be something different. I finished my piece for Dreadtober, so I figure I better put that on the blog. After that, more Chaos!