T2 Schmuck.

Hullo!

For the Sundays game at BOYL we're going to be playing a T2 style survival game. To that end we we're tasked with bringing along a "survivor" type mini each. After having a look around through my unpainted shit I found this guy:

No idea where he's from, I knew a couple of years back, but beer and age have erased that information. I thought he'd fit the bill anyway......a desperate street punk packing a bit of army surplus. Must be how he had managed to survive for so long when the shit went down...right?

Anyway, he's pretty cool and now I have a good excuse to paint him up.

I didn't go too nuts with the paint job to be honest. I was a little burned out bu this stage. He turned out alright, just not one of my best. I added a Ford transfer to the back of his t-shirt, hopefully helping to denote his heritage somewhat.


My son was lucky enough to be offered a place at the table as well (Thanks for additional invite Paul), so I told him that he could chose a mini to convert out of my lead pile. In preparation for the game I had introduced all of the Terminator movies to him a few weeks before....he was now in the Terminator zone.

This is the mini that he subsequently chose. His reasoning was that it reminded him of some of the garb that the scavengers were wearing in the later movies. Looked like a scavenger alright, just needed a weapon swap and he'd be good to go, which I gave him a hand with. Not long after the conversion process he came up with a name for him; Ratnik *

I let him paint this guy up all by himself. I sat with him and gave him guidance through-out, but it's essentially all his work. I helped him with dotting the eye on the lens, but that was pretty much all the brush that I contributed. He's pretty happy with how it turned out, just not with the effort required :D

* My son was sitting with me while I typed this blog post up and he has just told me that he didn't actually come up with the name himself, it was written on the base. And here I was thinking that he'd come up with something original.....lazy bloody kid :P

So, that is all the BOYL minis completed. Now it's just time to pack and I'll be ready to rock.

Thanks for coming along for the ride over the past few months while I created all these toys. Hope you liked them and I look forward to catching up with my old pals in Nottingham in a few weeks time.

Cheers big ears :)

Wacky Races

Another game at BOYL that I will be participating in this year is "The Great Wastes Race". To participate, each player had to create a racing beast & rider......the weirder the better.

I decided to use an old Reaper Miniatures beetle that I had had laying around for many years as the basis for the riding beast. The mini I chose to ride the thing was an RT pilot from the Landspeeder.

The concept.

I was pretty happy with how he looked, so I set to work converting him up. I covered up the legs of the goblin, which were part of the beetle, with a tyre. This, together a tank hatch from Ramshackle Games, formed the riders makeshift seat. The padding for the backrest was made by folding some insulted cable over on itself and gluing it together. The rest of the bits and bobs were made from wire and a jerrycan from Curtis.

Once the build was done it was onto paint:

The concept for the colour scheme is something that I'd been toying with for quite a while. I'd always wanted to try my hand at a poison dart frog pattern, this was the perfect opportunity. I just made sure that the pattern I painted was more exaggerated than in real life, otherwise the beetles form would become one. I think it worked out ok.

You might be wondering about the the plumbing. There is a wire going from the riders hand to the jerrycan, then a pipe from there into the beetles cranium. My theory behind the plumbing is that the pilot controls the beetle by some sort of brain stimulant. When he presses the button it releases this substance into the poor creatures skull, causing it to run for it's life. Who knows, maybe it gives the thing waking nightmares.....like it's being chased by a massive can of fly spray? Either way, it motivates the hell out of it.

Now, what did I decide for the creatures name? The Garthim Gasser. I'm too lazy to explain how I came up with it so please refer to here and here. Hopefully it makes sense.

Ok, that's it or now. One more mini to go and then all my BOYL prep is done.

See ya in the soup fellas :)

In game I have no idea how it will perform, but it'll be fun to play nonetheless :)

RoC warband: Psyker lvl 2

Alright, I'm at the end of my warband creation now. If you haven't been following along and you're interested to see how the rest of the gang was created then you can check them out here, here, here and here.

Here is the last addition to my Renegade warband:

Name: Gary
Psyker lvl 2, Psi pts 27, 3 x lvl 1 spells, 2 x lvl 2 spells.
Personal attribute: Transparent skin. Fear pts 3
Equipment: Mesh armour, boltgun, las pistol, stumm grenades, bionic eye with targeter, bio & energy scanner.

I based this guy off of an unreleased RT mini, Captain Repentance. He's now available from Foundry Miniatures, which is where I procured him from last time I was at BOYL. I thought he looked a bit like a psyker because of his cape and other stylish clothing. The only thing that didn't fit the psyker persona for me was the helmet.

So I lopped it off and replaced it with a goblin head from Reaper Miniatures because I felt like it. Actually, I used that head for a couple of reasons. The first being that I wanted to use an abnormally proportioned head, and secondly, I had nothing else at hand. Also, I think it looks pretty funky. 

I'd ran out of Boltguns so I made one one out of bits. Looks a bit different than the standard one, but still recognisable so I'm pretty happy with it. For the bionic eye with a targeter, bio & energy scanner I decided to combine them into one unit, mounted/grafted onto the side of his head. This was cut from a SM helmet. Then after a bit of putty work he was ready for paint.

And here is the colour scheme I chose for him:

Because he has flayed skin I tried to replicate exposed muscle tissue on his cranium, google images to the rescue there. I overpainted a Khorne transfer onto his shoulder,a  bit sloppily, but looks fine at a distance. After he was gloss varnished and sprayed with a matte coat I went back and applied some gloss to his head. Hopefully giving him a wet membrane look.

So that's the end of my Chaos Renegade warband creation. Now all I need to do to get these guys prepped is to write up their stats onto a cheat sheet and they'll be ready to rock.

Hope this series of posts has been worth it for you guys. I've had fun making them and I'm proud to have them in my collection.


Bye bye :)

RoC Warband: Squats

Ok, I'm getting to the pointy end with my RoC warband project. In previous posts I covered the Champion, Traitor Marine and lvl 0 Psyker creation process. For my next roll on the retinue table I came up with 7 mutated squats. Read on if you'd like to know more.

Dominant attribute: Manic Fighters
Equipment: Mesh armour, lasguns, bolt pistols
Heavy weapon: Heavy Webber with targeter & suspensor

I chose not to modify these guys at all, deciding to let Khornefication come about purely from the paint job alone.

I'm pretty happy with how this squad turned out. I overpainted a few transfers, which I think makes a big difference to the finished product. Also tried a few different visor techniques. They were a little tricky, not 100% satisfied with them, but I couldn't find a decent tutorial for them so I just had to wing it. I think they look ok.

Never painted squats before either, so that was a first.

Next up will be the lvl 2 Psyker. The last member of the warband. BOYL is not far away too so I better get a move on.

Cheers :)

The handsomest Strontium Dog ever!

Welcome back folks,

Another fun filled session we will be playing at BOYL this year will be a Strontium Dog themed game. We had to create a single character to bring along to do battle with Hitler....coz that's what you do. Now I must admit that I had never read any SD before and when I informed our GM he very kindly sent me a bunch of them to read. When I had gotten through them all (what a great series!) I decided that I would like to find the ugliest mini I could and convert him up.......because that's how I roll.

So, not long after typing "the ugliest mini" into Google I struck upon this chap pictured below. I then posted on FB that I was after him and after copping much flak (fair enough in this case) I managed to procure him in all his ugliness, thanks Eddy. He's an Asgard FM41 Mountain Troll for those of you who want to get one. Why? I don't know, but each to their own I guess.....weirdo!

Shortly after completion the sculptor was taken out back and strangled.

Once I got hold of him there was only one merciful thing for me to do:

So after he had been drowned and stripped of his paint I set to work. I cut off his base, hands and fur skirt (Is that what you call them? I have no idea). This guy went through a few iterations before I was finally happy with the results. The first is pictured below:

I built him a new, futuristic skirt out of wire and putty and gave him a lasgun (modded from an Ork Shoota with a barrel swap and a resistor stuck to the side) and an Ogre gauntlet. I wasn't sold on the skirt or the gauntlet so I cut them off and tried again:

I decided to change his gauntlet out for a couple of tentacles and to give him some pants instead. I also made some fangs for him out of an old IDE cable connector and sculpted the rest of his features out of Procreate. I was fairly pleased with the sculpting I'd done for the most part, except for his boots, which ended up looking more like mocassins :(

I tried to re-sculpt them, but my skills were found wanting. So I amputated his legs just below the knee and gave him some cut down robot legs from Ramshackle Games instead. I think the change improved the proportions and overall look quite a lot. So this is the look that I ended up settling on before paint.

I'm not sure why I went with the orange colour scheme, but it just felt right. Might have something to do with my childhood too? There was a show I used to watch when I was a kid called The Early Bird Show. There was a guy in a monster suit, called Marty the Monster, that was there for comic relief. Here's a pic of him:

He's the one in the dress in case you're wondering.

Anyway, he's done now, ready to dish out some justice to some Nazi scum. All the while being treated like poo by the rest of humanity.

So that's it. Next up will be more of my chaos warband.

Cheers :)