Plaguebearer with Icon and Blue Slime

Part of the plaguebearer command squad, the icon bearer often has a central role in my daemons armies. Being high toughness with the feel no pain special rule makes plaguebearers a high priority to hoist a chaos icon high. Indeed, since the new daemons codex came out, if I chose to field chaos icons, plaguebearers are my first pick in mixed armies to hold a chaos icon (although I do sometimes use a chaos icon with horrors of Tzeentch as well).

This plaguebearer was a bit of a painting experiment. As with the majority of the rest of my plaguebearers, I painted the plaguesword in a virulent, un-natural blue colour. To go with this blue-ick, I thought it might be neat if I could have some blue slime on the chaos icon, instead of the usual greens and yellows that traditionally go hand-in-hand with Nurgle miniatures.

The blue is achieved with a base coat of electric blue and a deep blue inking. This is complemented with some minor highlighting in places and a slimy-looking blue tongue in the plaguebearer's mouth, suggestive of the inner toxins that the minion of Nurgle has. I'm particularly pleased with the "glistening" quality that the blue slime has -- achieved without using varnish. The spokes of the icon were base coated in bleached bone, inked in chestnut and gently highlighted in gold in random places, suggestive of rusting and oxidation of a metal. The skulls (sort of embedded on to the metal spokes and attached by the blue slime!) were drybrushed in dheneb stone, inked black and highlighted progressively lighter.

The plaguebearer himself was done in traditional green colours: goblin green basecoat, green inking, green highlighting, gryphonne sepia washes of the legs, bum and face, highlighting in dheneb stone and cream on the face and a careful hand to pick out the eyeball and nails with a treble-zero size paint brush. The trickiest part was blending the horn in with the rest of the colour tones, this took a few washes of sepia and a bit of experimenting with different blends of bleached bone and dheneb stone.

As well as the plaguebearer, there is a mal-formed nurgling lurking on the base of this miniature (sitting on the foot of the plaguebearer in fact!). I use the word mal-formed as the Nurgling's arms are tentacles, he's missing an eye and he looks like he has a plaguebearer-style horn ... not quite the picture of a mini-Great Unclean One we're used to, but appropriately Nurglesque! The nurgling has received a deeper inking of green so that his skin colour is subtly different from the plaguebearers. The one good eye is picked out in white (again using the trusty treble zero paint brush) whilst there seems to be a stream of snot coming from one of his nostrils, here picked out in bleached bone. This close up also shows some of the sepia wash that was applied to the plaguebearer's legs: it looks a noticeably different tone of green / brown than some of the other regions, suggestive, perhaps, of wading through dirt.

Overall, I'm pleased with the result here. I was worried that the blue slime aspect would just look plain odd. But somehow, I think it blends in with the overall theme of the miniature very well by providing a good accent without dominating it.

Painted Night Lords Halberdier

The chaos space marine halberdier that I assembled a while ago has now been painted up in some Night Lords colours. Eventually, I'm thinking of having an entire squad of Night Lords like this one to form a chaos chosen elites squad.

The image here doesn't show the colours well -- the ultramarine blue that is highlighting the regal blue base colour of the shoulder pads (and elsewhere) seems to have a bright quality that the miniature doesn't really have in real life(!). That aside, most of the rest of the miniature's colours are a good fit to real life. I mainly modelled the colour scheme after the old chaos space marine codex: choosing gold for the highlight colour as well as the helmet. The halberd itself is one of the items that I decided to paint in an odd colour: frosty looking light blues and whites on the blade and metal portions. I'm not certain that I'll keep it that way: I may revert it back to metallic silver. Still, I've learned from this model and I'm hoping the next one will be even better (when I get around to it!).

Dynamic Necron

I have been exploring some "dynamic" conversions lately and got messing around with a plastic necron. I feel that Necrons have some of the most static poses in Warhammer 40,000, so I wanted to see if I could communicate a bit more dynamism by making as few conversions / clippings (etc.) as possible, without resorting to making the base the primary feature.

This is the result. The only conversion work that I've done here is to clip the right leg off at the hip and re-position it so that it stretches out behind the miniature (rather than the usual "two feet on the ground" necron pose). The second step was to glue the arms in an unusual place -- above the head. These two things combined results in a very dramatic pose. It positively looks like this necron is sprinting along! Either that, or he's just tripped himself up and is about to fall face first in to the dirt!

Gallery: Chariot of Tzeentch In Action

This is a bit of a "picture of the day" style post. Here we have my Chariot of Tzeentch atop a Khornate skull pile, deep in chaos wastelands. Enjoy :)

Shadow Sword: Part IV. Storm Lord Enabling

I want to get the most out of my Shadow Sword. To do this, I want to be able to configure it in multiple patterns: with many of the various side sponson options (etc.). But more significantly from a hobby point of view, I want to be able to configure it as both a Shadow Sword tank and a Storm Lord tank.

To be able to field the tank in both configurations, the critical piece of plastic that I needed to think about was the one that attaches either at the back of the main weapon housing (see picture to the left), or at the front of it. This bit is reversible. On one side, there is a metal-like standing platform for troopers to use stubber guns from the rear of the tank (in the Storm Lord configuration -- as seen in the upper left image), or when reversed it spaces the front of the hull and the main weapon housing (see image below).

My solution has been to magnetize this critical bit of plastic, along with the main weapon housing. The reversible bit has three magnets on it -- two one one end and one on the other end.
This arrangement provides a strong stable link for the reversible plastic bit at both ends of the main weapon housing. In addition, I also glued further magnets to the appropriate parts of the main hull (front and rear) to provide stability at both ends of the reversible bit.

I think this part of the Shadow Sword has been the trickiest to figure out so far. I've now only got the main weapons to take care of and some additional sponsons to build, ...and then I'm essentially done with the construction and ready to paint the beast.

Statistics / Gaming Note about Plasma Blastguns and Destructors

Plasma blastguns and plasma destructors are typically (but not exclusively) mounted on titans. They are the superheavy variety of the not-so-humble plasma gun and plasma pistol.

Blastgun Statistics.
Both superheavy plasma weapons can fire with two different profiles, depending upon the user's tastes. The first profile is known as "rapid". For the blastgun and you get two S8, AV2, 7" blasts. The second, known as "full", gets you one S10, AV2, 10" blast. Additionally, should it actually matter in Apocalypse, the latter has a larger range than the former.

But what I want to comment on today is the mathematics behind these two profiles. If you do not want to hunt after two very separate targets, then it is always preferable to choose the "full" profile. This is because the area of effect is proportional to the radius squared. In the full profile, we get pi x (10)^2, which is about 314 square inches. In the rapid profile, we get 2 times pi x (7)^2, = 2 times pi x 49 = 309 square inches.

So not only does shooting two separate shots mean that you get a lower strength, you also drop a few square inches of effect!

But then again, let me immediately note that in the insanity that is apocalypse, this shouldn't matter too much!, but its just something to be aware of. (You'll also note that I've avoided speaking of the relative merits of the Melta Cannon versus the plasma blastgun!).

Plasma Destructor.
On the other hand, the warlord battle titan mounted plasma destructor is able to fire two 10 inch blasts in full mode, and three 7 inch blasts in rapid mode. The difference between the two is a whopping 166 square inches -- this is much more significant than the plasma blastgun variety (should you be fielding a warlord titan!). For me, it always has to be the full mode here, assuming of course that the battlefield is jam-packed to apocalyptic proportions.