A completed army...kinda

 January has been a productive month. I received a few extra toys from friends and family at Christmas and this has spurred me to get some painting done. Far too often in the past I've received gifts only to leave them unpainted and sometimes unused altogether;

Scattered through out you can see pictures of my work. You'll have to forgive the poor photos, the camera on my phone died and I'm having to use my inferior tablet camera. Dave from Zen and the Art of Miniature Painting is coming to visit at the end of the month for another weekend of gaming and I'll try to snag his camera to get some decent shots of the whole army.

My Trygon I brought in early 2010 after my house mates at the time bought me some Games Workshop vouchers. I've used it in a handful of games, back before I vowed not to play with unpainted miniatures, but it remains unpainted to this day.

My Tyrannofex and Tervigon I received for my birthday in 2012. I had to go and check my twitter just now to remember the year and the accompanying tweet contained the words 'best get painting'. Almost three years on and I've just got one of them painted and they've never seen the field of battle.

We all have our grey plastic piles of shame, this is not unusual. It's one thing to buy yourself new miniatures and not get round to painting then, but what's played on my mind of late is that other people spent money on some of my miniatures for me, and I've just let them sit there unused. Now while my family may not be able to tell one Tyranid from another, I can, and it's made me feel ever so ungrateful for the gifts I've received.

Well no more.

While some of these older gifts still lay unpainted for now, I vowed this year to get my new miniatures painted as quickly as possible and sure enough within a month of getting them, all of my new miniatures from Christmas were painted, and I even managed to get a little more done.

My Hive Tyrant, finally finished. I have already finished his base. Expect better pictures soon, along with his Tyrant Guard, which I only now realize I have no pictures of

Before I knew it my Tyranid army has reached 2000pts of fully painted miniatures. And it feels good, really good, not only to get a full army completed but also to get new miniatures that move almost directly on to the painted pile and not the grey plastic pile.

I say completed, but this army is never going to be really completed. About this time last year I wrote a post cataloguing my painted and unpainted miniatures, and those of you that remember that will probably realise I still have a lot of unpainted Tyranids. And this is before you take in to account all the new models I want to get. This army was created, after all, with the intention of becoming an apocalypse army.

Having reached this mile stone, however, I thought it might be a good time to take a quick stock check of how many points I've still got to paint and of how much progress I've made over the last year.

My two Zoanthropes and Broodlord, which I painted last year

Counting nothing but the WYSIWYG upgrades and using the latest codex, at the start of last year I had 637pts of painted miniatures. I'm not counting my Hive Tyrant in this even though he was fully base coated. It doesn't sound a lot, but this little lot accounted for over 50 miniatures, being made up mostly of gaunts. Including the Hive Tyrant, this left me with 3026pts worth of miniatures to paint.

In 2014 I finally finished painting my Hive Tyrant after it languished in base coats for almost two years. I also painted my Broodlord, two Zoanthropes, three Tyrant guard and this January I painted my Tyrannofex. This accounts for 753pts taken from my unpainted pile.

In addition I painted my aforementioned new miniatures last month; two Tyranocytes, 12 spore mines, two Mucloid spores, a further two Zoanthropes and a Neurothrope adding a further 465pts on to the painted pile.

My second Tyranocyte and Spore mines. Once again all bases have been properly finished now

For those not doing the math as you go, this gives me 1855pts of painted miniatures. With a few upgrades here and there this brings the army to 2000pts. Of cause this still leaves me with 2273pts to paint but this no longer feels so bad. 

Roughly 700pts of this is simply Genestealers, of which I'm in no rush to paint, and about a further 700pts is made up of just four monstrous creatures, which no longer seems so daunting now that I've got five under my belt.

As I mentioned earlier, I've got a weekend of gaming planned at the end of the month, so I'll get to put these guys in to action then. I'll let you know how they do.

The Dark Pact Revisited

Back in July I wrote a post about The Dark Pact, a Horus Heresy themed Tale of 4 Gamers type of affair. This is a follow up post to that one, so go and give it a quick read to remind yourself of what it's all about before reading this one.

DISHONOURABLE MENTIONS

Ok so that would be all of us then.

As you can probably guess by a lack of posts since the last one, the Dark Pact has kinda petered out. Unfortunately I think this a pretty common occurrence with this type of thing. Everybody is so pumped and excited when a project like this starts but the enthusiasm soon dwindles as the project roles on and life gets in the way. If anyone has any good tips for maintaining momentum within a group please leave them in the comments below.

I was intending to writing another post at the time of the second deadline. However, as only Craig and I had managed to meet that target there seemed little point. Since then Matt and David have caught up as well so I figured that it was about time I got you guys updated. Incidentally we've seen nothing new from Mog or John so there'll be no update there.

VI Space Wolves XIV Death Guard- Rob

 I realise I never posted Robs first months offerings in the original post, as he hadn't finished at the time of writing. If you've read the last post you'll see I made a big joke about how Rob constantly changed his mind about which legion to take, so it's no surprise then to see he ended up with painted Death Guard in the end.

I would complain but he's done such a good job on these that it's hard to. Unfortunately it looks like he's out of the Dark Pact for good. So there's no 'month 2' offerings. I keep trying to tempt him back and you never know I might be successful one day.

The 4 of us who are left (me, Craig, Matt and Dave) haven't given up on building Heresy armies altogether, we're just not following regular deadlines. Unfortunately cost is the main barrier at the moment. As it happens though we're all building regular 40k armies at the moment.

XIII Ultramarines - Dave

I only have pictures of 3 of Dave's Marines. I'm missing the other two although I'm sure he's finished them.

I'm betting he never got the chance to photo the other to what with the moving to Australia malarkey

 As always you can read about Dave's adventures here on his blog. If you've kept up-to-date there you may have seen him post pictures of his new Heresy miniatures a few weeks back.

He's recently moved to Australia for a couple of years and he's working on some Dark Angels at the moment, although he's had to make some hard decisions about what miniatures to take over with him. He's also threatened to GM some games when he gets back, so we've all got about 2 years to get some armies built in preparation.


XII World Eaters – Matt

2nd Month models

Army so far

Matt got the second half of his squad completed a little before Christmas. He's currently working on some 40k Orks. I had two sets of the Black Reach Orks lying about which I sold to him (I'm sure I'm going to regret getting rid of them one day) so he's using them as a basis for an army.

XVI Sons of Horus - Craig

2nd Month models

Army so far

 Craig got his Justaerin finished on time although I say he cheated. The rules stated you have to paint 5 models or a unit. Justaerin can be fielded in units of 3 so technically he's fine but I know he has two others he intended to paint but didn't.

He also broke the spirit and point of the project by buying too many miniatures. One of the things we wanted to do was to only buy little bits at a time and paint it before buying more. I believe me and Dave have 5 basic marines unpainted, while I don't think Matt has any. Craig on the other hand has his two Justaerin, 3 Jet bikes, 5 basic marine and 5 assault marines...I think I've got that right.

He's also getting in on the regular 40k action by starting an Eldar army. Me, Craig and Matt all reside in Cardiff now so once they've got a few hundred points painted up we'll be getting some games in and I'll be sure to write about those games here.

I'm also hoping to get them to guest write a post once they've got some models painted...although I've not told them that yet.

VIII Night Lords – Me

2nd Month models

Army so far

So I say I win the Dark pact as I was the only one to get 10 models painted when they were suppose have been painted. If you follow me on Twitter you may have already seen me post these pics on there last year when I painted them.

I've been toying with painting a new legion. The new Night Lords rules in Massacre are cool and all but something doesn't sit right with me. When I think about how my army is going to grow, I realise it's not going to grow into want I envisioned from a Heresy army. It's difficult to explain and perhaps I'll write another post about my thoughts on it at a later date.

I think one of my problems is that I don't like the models for the Raptors. If they release some awesome models for the terror squads it may pull me back in.

I've got 5 Heresy marines unpainted and I'm tempted to paint them as another Legion as a test. Even then several legions are winning me over, although Imperial Fists are currently in the lead.

I'm going to be working on my nidz for the foreseeable future anyway so the issue is fairly mute at the moment.

So I'll leave it there, hopefully we'll see a further return to the Dark Pact, we've not given up on it entirely.

If you like the post be sure to comment and share it with your friendsTill next time...

The Week in Hobby 19/1/14

This is the 2nd in what I plan to be a regular segment on the blog. Each Sunday I'll be summarising my hobby and gaming activity during the week as well as providing a glimpse into the week ahead. I'm still not totally sold on the name of this segment, so it may change and suggestions are welcome.

The Blog round up
First a quick summery of this weeks blog posts. On Tuesday I posted the Tyranid Gallery a picture heavy post with many pictures of my painted aspiring horde.

Then on Thursday I posted The Swarm Evolves the second part to the previous weeks

The Swarm Approaches, a kind of before and after look at my Tyranid army with the new Codex being released in between. The post also contains some pics of some old games from 2012.

My hobby week

I have to admit, my hobby week has been a slow one. I started playing Minecraft again after seeing some cool lets plays, and boy what a time sink that game is.

All week I've been saying to myself that I need to do something just so I have something to write about today. And today I did just that.

First up I needed to sort out my painting table. While the table itself has been set up in my new house since I moved in, my paints, brushes and other tools have all been sat in boxes. In fact my painting table has been used primarily as a desk since I moved. Recently it's housed my laptop and it's become my writing desk. Well it was time for that to change.

I realised earlier today that this has been a hindrance mentally to picking up my paint brush and I was suddenly reminded of an old blog post I wrote 2 and a half years ago Good habits and getting distracted . Particularly the section on establishing a painting area and the benefits of having a dedicated painting table.

My painting table, relatively clutter free and ready to paint Tyranids

So now once again my painting table is organised with everything I need for my Tyranids close to hand making it so much easier to sit down for a quick half hour session when I get a chance.

What's more I actually put the table to good use today and spent a couple of hours working on my Hive Tyrant and I think it may be finally finished after waiting 18 moths in a half painted state. I still need to finish up the base and in fact as I'm just waiting for the Nuln Oil wash on the base to dry I figured it would be a good chance to write this post.

The finished Hive Tyrant with just the base to finish and after looking at this pic, perhaps a couple of touch ups

Going back to a point I brushed over earlier (excuse the pun), I want to add that it was a great motivator knowing I had to write this post today and I wanted to have some hobby progress to show. I can't guarantee that I'll have hobby progress every week but in those weeks I don't I can guarantee there'll be a heavy air of shame about the post.

The Week Ahead

Hopefully I'll get another 2 blog posts up during the week. I want to update you on The Dark Pact and I haven’t decided what the other article will be yet. I'm not sure to what extent I'll stick with the Tuesday and Thursday schedule either. I definitely want to maintain the Sunday post, I just don't want to get burnt out on the blog by forcing myself to commit to three articles each week. Like I said last week this is still very much a work in progress.

As for my hobby week, I think next on my painting table will be my Broodlord and two Zoanthropes. I figure they should be relatively quick and easy to get out of the way. After that more Termagants. I'm think another 12 to get the unit I have up to 30, and will probably aim to have 10 of those armed with Devourers.

Not saying I'm going to get all of that done, but that's the order I'm tackling things.

And that's it for this Week in Hobby.If you like the post comment and share it with your friends

Till next time... 

 

Tyranid Gallery

I'm still working on the promised second part of last weeks article The Swarm Approaches I should have that up on Thursday. In the mean time I wanted to post a gallery of my painted Tyranids so far.

Some of these pictures I may have posted on Twitter around the time I first painted them but that was a long while ago now, plus I wanted to collate them all in one place for posterity. They're ordered chronologically based on when I painted them.

In the future I may update this post as I complete more units or if I can figure out how I'll create a separate area of the blog where I can store galleries.

I will create a painting guide at some point for these too. When I do I'll update this post to include the link to that here.

Initial Test models

The colour scheme is surprisingly easy to do. It was inspired by Citadels new paint range when that was released 2 years ago

Obviously the scheme for the bases was decided on later

These last two models were another colour scheme I was considering.

While I really liked this scheme I decided on the yellow and blue mainly because it was more striking

Gaunts lots of gaunts 

Note: This is the same group of Termagants photographed from 3 different angles

I really wish I had already painted this many

Big time...

There are 18 Termagants and 18 Hormagaunts painted here. They're a funny number because 4 were used for test models.

And it really bugs me that they're not an even 20. An extra 2 models for each unit is a priority.

Fun fact: I painted all 38 in one big batch...never again will I batch paint with that many...I wanted to rip my eyes out

Tyranid Warriors

6 Warriors with Death Spitters and a barbed strangler. You might notice some odd specks on their carapace.

That's the snow, the powder got everywhere, like sand from a beach. I've cleared it off the models now.

 Carnifex

 

My first go at a monstrous creature. After all those troops I decided I needed a treat.

I really love this model. I'm particularly proud of how I've posed him.

Although I did that several years before I painted him

 Group Shot

 

These are the majority of what I've got painted so far

I really like how these guys look as a swarm. The yellow and blue works well in large numbers

I'm looking forward to the day I can cover a gaming table with these critters

Fun Fact No.2:
I went for snow basing largely because I had some GW snow lying about for years and wanted an excuse to use it

 Genestealers

 

Once I painted these I obviously decided they didn't warrant another set of group shots. They also only got 1 photo compared to 2-3 for all the other units. I'm sure they feel under appreciated and thus under perform in battle to spite me

 Work in progress Hive Tyrant

 

Yep, if you've paid attention to previous posts you may have worked out that this has been a work
in progress for about 18 months. He also only gets a portrait photo rather than a proper landscape one.

I don't know what the Genestealers are grumbling about

The Swarm Approaches

The new Tyranid codex is being released tomorrow and with that in mind I thought it would be a good idea to take stock of my own Tyranid swarm.

Now eagled eyed readers may have noticed updates to my battle log over the past couple of years despite posts having been sporadic (massive understatement I know). Go have a look now, just scroll to the bottom of the page...

What's that? It's not changed much? Well believe it or not I have updated it every time I played a game. And yes that's not a lot of games played, and yes that means I only played one game in 2013 and that was against my 13 year old nephew.

As pitiful as that is, that's not what I want to talk about today. What you've hopefully also noticed is a new category in the log...Tyranids!

You'll notice I played a couple of games with them in 2012, right around the time 6^th edition was released. I started painting them a few months prior to this with that express intention of using them for the new edition. A few pictures of them from this time are dotted throughout this post, but expect a few more detailed posts to come about them in the future.

A couple of friends and I have recently been talking about getting back into gaming proper and from my perspective the impending release of a new codex is the perfect excuse. With that in mind I thought it might be fun to make a list of what I have, and what still needs to be painted.

I've also totalled up their points values under the current codex and will write a follow up post next week comparing their values under the new codex.

The list of completion:

Please excuse the poor pics, I've recently moved and have not been able to set up a decent area for photography yet

HQ
Hive Tyrant with Devourer and Scything Talons (Half painted)

Troops

6 Warriors with Scything Talons, 5 Deathspitters and 1 Barbed Strangler

18 Termagaunts

18 Hormagaunts

10 Genestealers

Heavy Support
1 Carnifex with twin Scything Talons

The list of shame:

HQ
3 Tyrant Guard
Tervigon With crushing claws

Elites
2 Zoanthropes

Troops
6 Warriors with Rending Claws and Devourers

20 Hormagaunts

20 Termagaunts with Devourers

13 Ripper Swarm bases

16 Genestealers with scything talons

23 Genestealers

Fast Attack
6 Ravenors with Rending Claws and Spine Fists

Heavy Support
Trygon Prime

Tyrannofex

Carnifex with Crushing Claws and Venom cannon

Carnifex with Crushing Claws and Scything Talons

Plus 8 Objective markers

And Some unassembled Extras

Troops
1 Broodlord

8 Termagaunts

8 Hormagaunts

8 Genestealers

So from a painted models point of view that's 54 models painted with 139 still to go!! To be fair there are 57 Genestealers in that list. I've painted 10 so far, but I can't really see myself needing another 47, so I can consider most of them a low priority.

From a points perspective here are the totals. I've not included any additional biomorphs, just what's included on the model:

Painted:

Unit                      QTY            Points
HQ                           1                 185
Troops                     4                  553
Heavy Support        1                  160
Total                       6                  898

Unpainted:

Unit                    QTY              Points
HQ                         1                    365
Elite                       1                    120
Troops                   6                   1484
Fast Attack            1                     240
Heavy Support      4                     885
Total                    13                  3094

Grand Total        19                  3962

Again it's worth pointing out that nearly 700 points of this is unpainted Genestealers. Also the unit quantity with the troops is fairly malleable depending on how big you want to make the units but suffice to say, I have a lot of troops with roughly 10 units accounting for around 2000pts of the army.

So where do I go from here

I'm looking forward to seeing how this list shapes up once applied under the new codex. As much as I want to buy every new Tyranid going there's still so many older ones I want as well. However money is tight and I've already got so many models to paint. I want to say I wont buy another model until all of these are painted but we know that wont happen. I will pledge however to get a good chunk of them painted before buying any more.

As to what I'll paint first, I should get my Hive Tyrant finished first. After that I'm not sure, I'll wait until I can have a good read of the new codex before deciding.

Picture from my game against Paulb 2/7/12

The Dark Pact

So it's been 2 years since my last post. Instead of dwelling on that fact I'm going to move directly on to talking about my latest project.

Back in April I went up to Cardiff to visit some old uni friends for a weekend around my birthday. On the Sunday Me, Matt and Rob are sat in a weatherspoons recovering from the previous two nights. We're there to meet a third friend of mine, Craig, whom I've not seen in sometime but who only vaguely knows the other two (I don't think Rob and Craig had ever actually met before).

Now I don't know about you, but I always get worried when different friends of mine meet, I mean they all like me but will they like each other? Now knowing they have all played 40k to a greater or lesser extent in the past, and still have an interest in the background and setting of it all, once they all sat down, as an ice breaker I jokingly said 'We need to find 14 other people and each collect a different Legion from the Horus Heresy'

I never thought they'd actually do it.

10 weeks on and we have our first miniatures to show. We've picked up some extra bodies along the way and there's now 7 of us although not everyone has made the first deadline.

We're running this as a Tale of 4 gamers type of affair. For those unaware, what this basically means is we have a target date and a target number of miniatures to paint by that date. Specifically for this challenge the target is a minimum of 5 models or a unit entry every 6 weeks. Not particularly lofty goals but we had to consider that several members of the group have not painted anything in almost 10 years, plus finances is an issue. We'll be using for the most part, Forge World miniatures and as great as they are, they're not cheep.

We've had 10 weeks for the first deadline however. The first period was always going to be toughest. Picking a legion and setting down a specific colour scheme and style to last the entire project is no easy decision and many of us were painting to the last day.

But enough of the preamble, here are our offerings for the first period posted in order of completion from 1^st to last.

XII World Eaters – Matt

 Matt has totally bucked the trend of the group and made us all look bad by finishing his models over a week early. He's also totally found a kindred spirit in Angron and now has an unhealthy obsession with gore.

XIII Ultramarines - Dave

Dave was the first new recruit, I invited him to our facebook group just so he could see what was going on. Within a day he was like 'I'm doing Ultramarines' and that was that.

Dave runs his own blog and has made a few posts already on this project. Check it out here http://zenartminipainting.blogspot.co.uk/ and be sure to look back at his earlier posts, he's got some pretty cool back story written up.

XVIII Salamanders - John

John was incredibly late to the party, having no more than half the amount of time the rest of us had. He also jumped straight in with no test models, even though he's not painted anything in about 10 years. I think he's done a fantastic job especially considering all of this, so I think we can forgive his lack of bases at this point.


VIII Night Lords – Jim (me)

Despite only sporadically painting and gaming these days, I've been dubbed the lore-master or Chief Librarian of the group, being the only one to have read all of the Horus Heresy Black Library novels, as well as reading more about the 30k and 40k universe than anyone else here.

I'll write another post later in the week with more pics of my Night Lords and to talk a little more about them.

XVI Sons of Horus - Craig

Craig is another one whose not painted for years. He was also late, by about 6 hours taking the view that if he's not gone to sleep yet it's still Sunday. Craig was originally doing Death Guard, but decided he wanted tanks, lots of tanks (actually I get the impression that like me he wants everything) so switched to the Sons of Horus a few weeks into the project.

DISHONOURABLE MENTIONS
We decided early on that the best way for our group to deal with failure to meet targets would be with mockery and peer pressure rather than any other tangible penalties.

VI Space Wolves - Rob

So Rob was originally doing Word Bearers, then Space Wolves, then Iron Hands, then Space Wolves, then Death Corps of Krieg (we told him no), then Space Wolves, then Raven Guard, then finally Space Wolves. I may have got the order slightly mixed up, it's difficult to keep track.

As you can see despite having his first miniature completed weeks ago, and being one of the original members of the group, Rob has failed to get the rest of his squad completed. He's waiting for shoulder pads or some other such nonsense, unsurprisingly he changed his mind about how they looked.

But I guess it's typical of the Space Puppies to be late, they never got to Terra on time either. Hopefully we'll see a completed squad from him by the end of the week.

XV Thousand Sons - Mog

Morgan is the only one of us to have a wife and kids. So when I invited him to the group I didn't expect he'd have the time or spare cash to get involved, but I invited him as I thought he'd be interested to view our progress if nothing else. Within days he was posting pictures of test models and assembled heresy miniatures. Apparently, it seemed, Mog had been planning this kind of project for sometime.

But alas he's been quiet for the past few weeks, work and family commitments seem to be getting the best of him (although part of me thinks he's using them as convenient excuses that we can't easily argue with)

All in all I'm really proud of all of our efforts, despite each of us for the most part living in different cities we've done a great job at keeping in contact with each other and spurring each other on. Hopefully we'll keep this up and I can't wait until we can get together with our full armies and play a big game of apocalypse together.