2012 and 2013 No Yearbooks

I have not made a yearbook post since the end of 2011. That is sad. The biggest reason is that I lost track of doing On The Table Now posts and Finished posts. Without those, I can't keep track of what I have done over the year. I am painting a lot more than I post about. I've just gotten lazy.

So, we're turning over a new leaf here at TMM Blog. I am not a big fan of New Year resolutions, but let's make some promises to ourselves and by the tears of Sanguinius let's keep them!

1. Take a picture of everything you finish and post it.

Wishlisting The Right Way

I made a wish list on the GW site for what I think it will take to update some of my armies into 6th. Now we have this Embargo on and I can't buy any of this stuff for 6 months or a year (or Emperor forbid longer). I might sneak one or two under the radar but for the most part, these are tiny metal dreams.

The big change is 6th is flyers. If you do not have one, then you are going to get reamed and hard. I signed up for a flyer for every army that I am preparing to build. Gotta have the Ork Bomma. It is just such a cool model with great rules. I am planning to start Orks at some point. I've collected 3 Blackreach Ork boxes, some bikes, some special characters but still have giant holes to fill. I will have an Ork army and it will have a wicked Bomma in it.

While we are shaking the wishing tree, I wanted not one but two of the gleaming metal peaches of the Storm Tallon gunships. In 5th they were ok but in 6th they are indispensable. Great as a flyer killer and great to harass troops and tanks alike. Also, it is a great model and I don't care what its detractors say. It is cute and deadly and it will RULE THE SKIES!

After Richard stomped the crap out of me with his Veteran Trooper-packed Vendettas, I have lusted after them. I was holding my own with him while they were in reserve but as soon as they came on, in one turn her claimed two objectives and blew up one of my tanks. Valkyries and their Forge World sisters the Vendettas are brutal and, for right now at least, they are a steak at their points cost. I am sure that will change but I have always wanted a small detachment of air cav. Now, with allies, I do not have to start an IG army to have that.

My Necron force is still hanging out in the dark days of 3rd Edition. I have only painted two new models (The Catacomb Command Barge and the Ghost Ark). They are seriously hurting without flyer cover and so I need (not want but frelling NEED) one of their flyers. Night Scythe or Doom Scythe, I do not care. Mostly because I can easily magnetize them or at least i hope I can.

I also put a few vehicles on the wish list for armies that I have not precisely started yet. I have a very small sisters force and have not really decided on my paint scheme. You can only get Immolators and Exorcists from GW Direct these days. Eventual I'll need a ride for my girls to cruse around in and pick up shoot dudes. And the Exorcist is a great model. I need to get the metal versions before they come out with Finecast upgrades that are twice the price and half as good.

Most of the things on the wist least are new shiny things and not very fluffy or just filling gaps in my model collection and army. Just to show you that I am not a giant flaming hypocrit, There is some useless and fluffy stuff on the list too.

I want one of each of the Daemons Troops to go with my ten man Cult Troop CSM squads. Surely there is or will be an Apoclypse formation about having that, but regardless I want my Khorne Beserkers to have some Bloodletter friends. Also, this will challenge me to branch out with my painting.

To bolster my Iron Warriors, I just need some Basilisks. Those giant artillery piece have been a part of the Sons of Perturbo since the dark days. I can't wait to paint them up in metal and caution stripes with some Traitor Guard crawling over them.

Taht's all I have time to blog about for now. No time to finish the links or add pictures so this is going to be a vanilla post with no flash. I'll go to bed with visions of tiny metal angles dancing in my head for now and plot my spending spree.

Hatin on BoLS - Apples and Oranges

The best thing about hating BoLS is that they give you so many opportunities to point out their shortcomings. I could make an entire blog just for that.

Today's hate is directed towards Black Blow Fly and his article entitled "40k: Devgants vs. Purifiers." The article is full of half-baked ideas, unfinished thought and ultimately full of fail. I really do not care to take it apart piece by misbegotten piece. That would take up valuable painting time. What I will do is copy a short excerpt from the article that is rife with not only logical fallacy, but also indicative of his overall poor writing and the poor writing common on BoLS.

"No this is not another batrep... Heh. Let's take two units from two totally different codices and compare them.

One unit is selected from the Tyranid codex which is often said to be the worst codex released during fifth edition (there is some contention for Dark Angels though for sure). The other unit is selected from the Grey Knight codex which is often said to be the most broken over the top codex ever released. How can we compare the two?"

Vyndica - Dark Eldar Hellions

My second commission on Vyndica and first real win on that site. A person that goes by the name of Flayed Ewok payed me $120 to paint 5 Dark Eldar Hellions in The Severed color scheme. I had played around with purple minis with the Living Saint and my flailed attempt at a Sisters of Battle army. Since then I used purple extensively on my Space Hulk Genestealers and Lictors. It was in those last minis that I relly feel that I got to understand purple as a color.

Now, we are friends. I can make it do what I want seemingly intuitively. Black wash loves purple. Purple wash loves purple. It mixes will with white to make highlights. It mixes well with black to make shades. It is like the ain't-red. It is so forgiving and easy-going.

I sprayed these minis black and based them Xereus Purple. They got a black wash and a touch up with Xereus Purple again. After that there is a small highlight of Genestealer Purple and the purple areas are finished. I used the same technique on the boards as I did the purple cloth.

The blue-green areas were painted Sotek Green, washed black and touched up. A short highlight of Temple Guard Blue and those areas are finished. If you are thinking that this sounds a lot like the technique that I used on Greg's Cult minis and my Genestealers, then you would be correct. The basic order of the colors of paint is the same but the way they are applied differs.

That is what where a painter's expertise comes into play. The order and type of paint is important but fabric needs to be painted in a different manner than hard surfaces like the boards. Each reflect and absorbs light differently and thus have to be painted in a different manner. 

Starting Space Wolves (Now with bonus Liquid Talent mini-rant)

In addition to starting Sisters, Orks and Tyranids, I thought it would be a smart idea to start Space Wolves too! Really I am just hammering out a color pallet and figuring out how I want to paint these guys. Rather than paint them in a icy blue style, I wanted to paint them is a dusty or desert theme. Think Tallaran Wolves. 

I based them in Dheneb Stone followed by two coats of 1:1 Graveyard Earth and Kommando Khaki. The metal bits are Chainmail and the gold bits are Shining Gold. After that the whole model gets a wash of Dev Mud. 

I know what you are saying and we've talked about this before many many times. The difference between me and most folks that lean on the Dev Mud crutch is that I do not stop at this step. As you can see the model is really dark and muddy-brown. It makes me a little sick to see a "painted" army across the table from me that looks like a brown blob because the "painter" threw down a base color, washed it brown and called it good. Not. Painting. 

Really Struggling with Purple

This is not the epic post that was promised. 

Against my previous promise, I am starting an auxiliary Sister army despite them being an all metal army. I went with a Husky theme of purple and gold. I've never painted purple before and I am having trouble getting what I want out of it.

I started with Hormagaunt Purple over a black primer. I did a heavy overbrush Liche Purple and I think that was my big mistake. There is nothing wrong with LP but it is a very dark color. The next step of washing everything black did not help. The modle ended up almost black. That would have been great if I was doing an off-black Dark Eldar army but I wanted my sisters bright. The gold and cloth turned out so bright that the purple is overpowered. I touched up the washed LP with straight LP but that did nothing to help. It is still a deep and lustrous purple, but it may as well be black next to the gold and cloth.

To try and highlight it, I tried to use Warlock Purple but it looks really bad and cheesy. WP has too much pink in it or something and the result looks like something out of Tron. So I tried to mix them and a 2:1 mix of LP to WP gives this nice glowy result like you can see on her left boot. I want to widen the area of the mix color and then do hard edge highlighting with straight WP but I still do not think that I am going to get the result that I want. 

From The Back 40k

I found a good article on painting purple that skips the Liche Purple step entirely. They do Hormagaunt Purple over black followed by a 1:2 mix of HP and WP. That gives a brighter purple base to work up from than the straight Liche Purple. From there, the paint on a black wash into the recesses. The next two stages of highlighting use the same 1:2 HP to LP but each successive stage adds in one part Skull White. I am going to give this a shot as soon as I finish this mini.

Rather than learning to paint purple with the old paints, I should get some of the new purples and learn to paint that way. Just eyeballing the colors, it looks like there may be a little more room in the purple department with the new paint as opposed to the old paints. In the long run, I'll have to switch over to the new paints anyway. Maybe I'll give the Black Shirts another chance.


UPDATE:
I highlighted all the hard edges with Warlock Purple and massively dislike it. It looks like a bad 80's commercial and still too damn dark! I started painting sans Liche Purple with this guide and already love it. More on how awesome that is when the mini is done and maybe after I've had a chance to paint one with the new colors. 

Moving the Goalpost

The last post got me thinking about setting some actual goals for 2012.

Are you men or are you mice?

• Start a new army (Nids, Tau, Space Wolves, Sisters and Orks all in boxes) and paint it to a playable size (~1500 points)
• Paint some vehicles! 2012 is the year of the vehicle! Need to paint the three Rhinos on the desk, a Vindicator and as many Drop Pods as I can get to.
• Get some transport for figs. Need to place first Battlefoam order and get some transports for my TMM.
• Do something other than 40k. There is Warmachine, Fantasy, et al out there. I should maybe pick up a new game.
• Learn to paint some new colors. Yellow and purple are high on the list. I also want to work more greens into my metals and learn to paint patina and rust better.
•  Get more gaming in. I've fallen out of playing and that's not cool. I played 4 games last year but enjoyed them all. It is just a function of going down to the gaming store with an army and rolling some dice.

In Jan next year, I'll check back and see how much I got done.

Deathwatch Codex

I just got the Deathwatch Codex and it was worth the decade-long wait. Certain websites that shall remain nameless have had this Codex on their "next 8-12 months" for almost that entire decade. Rumors are such garbage. 

It took GW more than a few tried to get Daemonhunters/Grey Knights/Ordo Malleus right and some could say that they still are not a well-rounded army. They have never done justice to Sisters of Battle with numerous chances and it almost seems misogynistically intentional at this point. While I can't say that this is a "home run on the first try" situation that we have here but is a darn good for a first try. 

Deathwatch is going to suffer from what every Astartes army suffers from and that is being out numbered, except Deathwatch (like Grey Knights) runs the risk of being out numbered by Astartes. All of these armies lack a cheep troops choice. There were several things that I was shocked to see didn't make it into this book that were part of 40k cannon, but I was really shocked to see Scouts missing. GW seems to have a problem moving that dated box set. They would not even have to release anything new to include them though a Deathwatch Scout arm like the one I made would be pretty awesome.