by Request

Admiral Drax, this one's for you mate.

As requested, my painted guard figures all in one post.

These are from a Rogue Trader's retinue, traveling about the dodgy parts of the galaxy, searching for new planets to claim in the name of profit and the God Emperor, and so forth.

Grand High Commander - Plutarco Etcheverria de Dios Otero Antormarchi and his motley retinue.

Chosen men with their long las' rifles, Bombardier General Horatio Vanderbilt and one of the 'Trader's Gretchin bodyguard.

Ship's Captain Gulliver Bevingham-Nixon and Navigator Armaud Destrierre strut their stuff on the right flank.

Trader Prince surrounded by trusted subordinates.

Sergeant Lorch, Overseer of the Mutant Penitents squad

Commander Isiah Tholme and Pay Master (Commissar) Scheiner of Platoon Command Squad #1

Squad #1 of 1st Platoon. (2-3 more of these in the pipeline)

Lieutenant Sayyid and his band of misfit Mercs take care of a lot of questionable duties that no regular trooper in his right mind would accept.

A wee diorama:

On the now re-discovered planet Oso XII, the Lord Trader wishes to investigate the possibility that ancient artifacts may well remain in the ruins left behind. 1st Squad of the household guard is sent to safeguard the area of the ruined mission.

Sergeant Coomes sends his squad inside.

Commander Tholme watches on, eager to get off this graveyard world and back into the comfort of his barracks. Pay Master Scheiner looks on to make sure all is carried out according to doctrine.

Meanwhile, in a small administrative ruin, self-styled Lieutenant Sayyid  and his band of mercenaries secure  their objective.

"All clear!"

Watching the treeline from the 2nd floor.

Not everyone is busy, Corporal Cointreau takes the opportunity to smoke a quick Iho-stick whilst others of his squad move supplies and ammo in from their lander.

Everything seems to be going as it should.

The area designated safe, the Lord Trader himself prepares to enter the ruined Mission building to seek the artifact, flanked by loyal Gretchin bodyguards and his faithful mutant standard bearer.

Overseer Lorch and his Mutants are fully trusted by the Lord Trader. Here he organises a patrol.

The Chosen men are ready with their sniper weaponry, scanning about for any threat that might pop it's head out.

Ship's Captain Bevingham-Nixon and Bombardier General Vanderbilt attends the affair, hoping to be amongst the first to set eyes upon any discovered treasures.

With bodyguards in tow, the Lord Trader sets about his self appointed sacred duty......

Little does the landing party realise, but they are being watched!

Skirmishers move in from hidden foxholes!

Airborne units alight upon the higher reaches from the skies!

Stealth units materialise from the shadows!

I wonder what will happen next!? Feel free to finish the story in a comment or some such. :)

Lastly, I think the Librarian commission is done!

 

 Per usual, the client prefers to do his own basing, which suits me fine. I hope he likes what he sees. I've not yet given it a coat of flat varnish in case he requests any changes be made.

Goddamnedsunnuvabitchstolemypants!

I'll preface this post with this - I'm writing this because I'm at home, alone and too bored to paint and that I really had resolved not to post about resolutions and new years and plans and so forth. Sad eh? It's funny what an empty house and a long dose of reading blogs about all your own resolutions and so forth will do to an idle hobbyist.

(If you can place the quote in the post title I'll give you ten shiny internet drachmas too.)

Last year was pretty much dominated (For those only just following this blog) by my British Flames of War escapades. As the last post showed, I managed to paint up a fair amount of stuff and can run multiple army types which is more than I've ever done for any games system. Truth be told though, I'm getting a little burnt out painting all that green armour and those pooey brown uniforms, so I think it's time for a change of gear.

As mentioned I really have been working on my commissions. Commission. Singular, for now. The Dark Vengeance Librarian is a soulless design and really has failed to get me excited about it to actually want to paint the thing. Just seems like the designers at GW just went and stuck random iconography all over the place to fill empty flat surfaces and the obvious dull Space marine-type dangly devotionals here and there. So far he looks like this:

I like the red cloth around his torso - looks like a cowboy bandana!

Customer wanted it for his Heresy Era Dark Angels, which means proper-job black armour with red chapter badge. Am hoping I can get him finished by the end of next week as the same customer is also waiting for me to paint up a squad of 7 of the current Ratling sculpts too.

To break up the painting of the above, I also laid down the majority of the base colours on a fig for a mate's DnD character. Think it's some sort of Reaper fig? I switched out it's pole weapon for an axe head too as that's what the bloke wields in-game.

Very Brotherhood of the Wolf.

On to things I plan for this shiny new 2014.....

1. First off, Relic Knights. The Kickstarter stuff is now being manufactured and I'm hoping they'll be able to get shipments out before silly Chinese New Year closes down a country of 2 billion people..... (!?!) I'll have a crud-load of stuff to paint and as we get closer to delivery, I am getting more and more excited to paint it up. Will be a nice, colourful change from the WW2 uniformity! My aim is to have at least a basic points level worth of stuff painted before year's end.

2. Next up is my poor neglected 28mm sci-fi home-brewed project. I've already started writing up a little fluff for this and will hopefully have something posted up in the next week or two to get some feedback. I've plenty of Dreamforge Eisenkern (21) troopers to paint for this and some cool Reaper Bones generic sci-fi-trooper-type-figs that should look good squaring off against eachother. I've even (last night) stuck together a piece of mdf terrain for the project too. I've a tonne of foamcore boards to cut out next to make into trashed city buildings too. I plan to have the pieces for this project done, all of them well before year's end. The scenery can also be used for Relic Knights, so double the reason to get them done.

3. Painting the above tricorn'd fellow got me to realising that I still have a silly amount of fantasy (Very old and newer sculpts) figures that really have sat unloved for too long. They'd seriously make our Friday evening roleplay sessions far more fun and be a nice change of pace should the other projects start becoming a chore. From 1980's DnD sculpts (pig-faced-orcs!) to more recent cool looking Reaper stuff, I have plenty of different characters to choose for whatever hobby mood takes me. No real promise on this one.... maybe 10 of them painted up this year, maybe more?

4. My poor Imperial Guard.... They have sat unloved for over a year. My aim is to get at least two more squads and a command squad painted up AND finish those Chimera stand-ins too.

5. Should my current mound of Flames of War Canadians ever prove to be tiresome, I still have plenty left to paint and I still need a dedicated MidWar army too. My original plan was to start a Romanian army. Cool eh? But expensive, so that's been shelved indefinitely. Instead I'm sticking to my old plan of being able to field a British Motor Coy - supposedly crap in the minds of dedicated players, but it's an army I already have 80% of the figures for and that by itself is a big decider. I also have that whole British Guards Cromwell/Challenger Company to paint up, so REALLY do not need to be buying any more 15mm soldiers. For this I hope to have at least one of the Company types painted up by the end of the year.

6. That Chaos Fantasy warband project. Yeah.... about that. I'm determined to finish the damned thing. The end.

7. A simple one, well the idea is simple, but the execution is going to be trickier - start using the Airbrush and compressor my wife so lovingly bought me over a year ago!!!

8. This one probably should have been number 7 eh? My nurgle stuff, needs selling. That's right. Well, the Nurgle space marines - just not into them anymore. The daemons though - they are going to get painted, damnit!

9. Lastly - my poor poor Inquisimunda.... So much potential, yet my gaming group were crap and didn't want to play. Still, those fun conversions and interesting miniatures are still sat there, wondering why they couldn't at least stand there in their full regalia as apposed to their current primed states? So for my final pledge, I aim to get at least two of the teams done, also by the end of the year. 

So there you have it, lots to get on with and hopefully more interesting for blog posting for the general blog readership than this past year of almost all Flames of War blog posts! If you managed to read to the bottom, then I applaud your tenacity. Thank you.