Shadespire: Sepulchral Guard

Finally finished my first Shadespire Warband. This is the Sepulchral Guard. 

Great skeleton sculpts, finely detailed, perfect fit and a pleasure to paint up. Couldn't ask for more. Now, time to try out the game.

'Til next time.

More Shadow War Terrain

So, one project that's been sitting on the shelf for months has been this last major piece of Shadow War terrain. I finally got around to completing the weathering and painting in the final details. With that, this terrain piece is now done.

With the weathering completed, the piece now fits in with the other two pieces of SW: Armageddon properly.

As always, lots of nice detail in this terrain.

Can't say enough about its utility and usefulness in 40K games.

'Til next time.

Azreal

OK, down to the last few figures for my Dark Angels LVO army. This figure is the army Warlord: Azreal.

It is a conversion of the Primaris Captain figure, since the actual GW Azreal figure is ages old and woefully undersized.

Only the banner survives from the original figure. And to get the figure "walking" up the stairs of this base, I heated up the cape over a candle flame and bent it to fit.

The weapon is a combi-plasma/bolter from the Calth boxed set.

Next up is Belial, leader of the Deathwing.

'Til next time.

The Best Day of the Year

If you've been following this blog for the last several years, you know that my favourite day of the calendar is the day we return to standard time. That day, when you get an extra hour of weekend, far and away outshines every other day of the year for pure joy. Period.

Every year, I try to invest that extra hour into an ongoing hobby project. So, this time around, that extra hour got sprinkled between a few things going on at the hobby table.

To start, I picked up the new Shadespire expansions on Saturday, and dove straight into the skeleton box.

Each model consisted of only two pieces, but what results is the most dynamic set of skeletons I've ever run across...and I've painted more than a few sets of skellies in my time.

On to the day's two main projects. Two character models for my 40K Dark Angels force. First up, Azreal. Now, the actual Azreal model is a small, pathetic chunk of metal which looks to be a few decades old. I'm making my own from a Primaris Captain model, but salvaging the banner and relic bearer from the original. Here are the component parts of the Azreal I'm making.

Also, there's Belial. This is the Deatwing commander, put out by Games Workshop and moulded in the absolutely horrible FineCast resin. What a piece of junk. But, the model's pose and detail is nice, so I'm going to push through it. Needless to say, cleaning the pieces to a half-acceptable state nearly saw me throw this model in the garbage.

I also wanted a special base for the Azreal model, so I picked the "steps" from the GW heroic bases set. Base coated brown.

I pinned all the pieces for the two models, in preparation for painting.

Base coats were done in three colours, depending on the item and final intended finish. Black, white and Zandri Dust.

Belial started with Zandri Dust (in order to get the bone-coloured Terminator armour portions correct), but the majority of the model is green...so I put blue-tac over the armour portions (and face) and started spraying the green.

And without two much effort, got the major colour areas done before going in with washes and a few highlights. More to come on this one.

All the other components got their base colours in an epic airbrush session.

Over the course of the day, I went into various bits and started to add in detail, like painting Azreal's new head. This piece is about half-way done at this point.

I was able to complete one component before calling it a day in the hobby room, and that was Azreal's base. 

 Really, it was just a nice, relaxing hobby room day, without any pressure of a pending tournament or game to get ready for. The extra hour really helped, and I'm hoping to get a finished piece out on Wednesday.

'Til next time.

Dark Angel Scout Snipers

I wanted some scouts for my Dark Angels force, so I grabbed 5 scout snipers from the Shadow War Armageddon box.

To make these guys blend in with my Dark Angels force, I wanted their body armor to be in metallic green, and their camouflage cloaks to match, colour-wise, with the urban camo I was painted on my Repulsor tank. So, I started with assembly. 

Before I started into this project, the heads were already mostly painted from a tutorial I ran a few months back up at Thunderground in St Albert.

The bodies and guns were painted gloss black.

The fronts of the figures were sprayed with silver...

 ...in order to receive the green ghost tint.

I then painted on the gold aquila and sprayed the figures with a flat sealer. This allowed me to move on to blocking out the other colours I was going to be using for the cloth and leather portions. All painting was pretty straight forward from this point.

Including the cloaks, which got an urban camo treatment. The figures were  glued onto their final bases, the heads were finished off, and that was about it. Time to move onto the next project.

'Til next time.