Works in Progress

Hey all, thought I'd follow up yesterday's post in quick succession as there's been a bit of a hobby drought these last couple of weeks.

I've thrown together a few shots of a couple of projects that are currently works in progress.

The game board sections are coming along nicely. They were basecoated in Army Painter leather brown primer; two cans just stretched far enough to cover all six pieces. Just. Using the airbrush I applied some shading around the base of the hilly areas and add low-lights to some of the other features on the sections. Although the contrast looks quite stark in the photos, it's not so noticeable in the flesh, er, plastic.

I used some low-tack masking tape to mask off the areas around the skull pits before laying down a couple of layers of Bleached Bone as it seemed like a quicker option than painting these areas. In reality though, I was a little over-zealous with the airbrush and dusted BB outside of the masking. This was relatively quickly resolved though with a subsequent drybrush of Dheneb Stone over the whole area to tie the colours together and represent the worn down surfaces around these areas. I also used the airbrush to lay down a few patches of the paler tones to add some further contrast.

Switching tack, I revisited these Genestealers as an impromptu painting project with my lad Jake a few weeks back. He's a budding painter and has got the 'spraying stuff' bug from his Dad, so we found these lurking in a figure case to use as fodder.

They were originally basecoated with Army Painter Skeleton Bone primer, so the Scorpion Green went on pretty well without any hiccups. Once this was dry, the bases were painted Scorched Brown and the 'Stealers themselves were all washed with Thraka Green wash to shade in between the armour plates, ribs and other joints. We're in the process of re-overbrushing the majority of each figure with Scorpion Green. The teeth and claws are Khemri Brown/Dheneb Stone and the tongues have been painted Hawk Turqoise/Ice Blue.

We've had a couple of trial games of Kill Team 40k and these things tear it up! You get 14 standard Genestealers for your 200pts and they're lethal. Assuming there's sufficient cover to bounce between, there's not much that can be done to stop them. Unlike your regular games of 40k, it's pretty much full speed ahead each time, and with limited enemy forces on the table, it's normally all sewn up by the end of turn 3.

Gruesome. But, I might have an answer to the problem...

Laters

Imperial Strongpoint; (sadly) not Forgeworld's Strongpoint

Hey all,

Thought I'd post some feedback about the Imperial Strongpoint game board tile I recently received from Forgeworld. Having already received and basecoated the plastic Realm of Battle board (which I'm really pleased with), I had high expectations of the expansion piece. Unfortunately, despite the great pics on the website, the finished article that arrived was really disappointing. I've not bought anything from Forgeworld for a while, due to previous let-downs, but really hoped they were on their game with this one. The first thing that struck me about this was that the construction, whilst more detailed than the rest of the RoB boards, was nowhere near as robust as the plastic sections. There is no reinforcement underneath and the board was a little warped (but not massively so...).

After cleaning it up with hot water and dish washing detergent, I let the whole thing dry off thoroughly for 36 hours. Before undercoating, I had to add a lot of extra basing material to better define surface edges, where things like walls and the tank defences in the picture joined the ground.

Another grumble was the quality of the cast around areas like these barrels that form part of the defence positions. When I spoke with the guy at Forgeworld yesterday, I said that they look as though they were hit by a Meltagun, as they're pretty saggy and have a lot of holes in. The surface of the board is quite different to the plastic sections, and once it was undercoated brown, resembled an Aero chocolate bar. Now I understand why the demo pieces shown on the FW site are covered in snow flock. Although the winter scheme looks good, it didn't really fit the 'Summertime-on-Ultramar' theme of the rest of the sections.

I crudely filled this ~70mm gap along the top of the blast doors with green stuff, with the intention of sanding it down with the multi-tool once it had set. It seems as though the resin along here was so thin that basically there just wasn't enough. Although I was aware of it when I first checked it over, I didn't appreciate the extent of it until I had primed the board.

However, even after all of that (which I would have tolerated to a point), the real killer was the fact that, even though I'd cleaned the thing before starting, the paint would not adhere to it. Just taking it in and out of the box caused it to flake. I'd used Army Painter Leather Brown, which I'd used without issue on the rest of the board.

I relayed all this to forgeworld and they reckoned that using non-GW/Citadel products may be the problem. However, after advising that I'd been in touch with Consumer Direct to check where I stood before calling FW, they quickly retracted that and then stated that they prep all of their stuff by using a high-strength kitchen cleaner and then undercoat with Halfords car body primer......

When I first got into the hobby, I had a conversation about painting with Jim in the Brighton GW store, during which I suggested using coloured car primers. With some scorn, he explained about the formulation of the different paints and suggested that using car paint would just clog up all the detail on the model. Fair comment. So I was amazed to hear that this is how FW prep their stuff.

However, at the end of it all it's going back for a full refund.

Now to chase up my Fortress of Redemption that's been on order for five weeks......

White Dwarf 388

Hey folks,

Hadn't realised it had been quite so long since my last post. Been pretty busy lately, but getting in a bit of hobby goodness where I can.

Looking forward to getting my hands on some of the new Citadel paints. I can recommend the April issue of White Dwarf 388 for anyone wanting to find out more about the new paint range. It's one of those issues that may not be totally accessible for newcomers or occasional readers, but for me, this months issue is right on the money. There's some great looking stuff coming out for the Empire, plus official deathworld updates for the Battle Missions book.

Outside of this, I was lucky enough to get some new paint spraying kit and the Imperial Strongpoint Realm of Battle extension tile for my birthday recently. The RoB tile is pretty good; it needs the usual soap and water treatment before I do much else with it as there's quite a bit of dust and mould soap still left on the casting. There are a couple of places where the moulding is a little rough, and some green stuff is needed to fill a gap over the top of the blast doors where the resin was too thin. I'm going to add some extra rubble here and there where details aren't too clear, but it should scrub up well I think.

I've also finished the assembly stage of my Deathwatch Kill Team and am really pleased how they've turned out. More on those to come.

Until next time, laters folks.