Speed painting for real

Really love this Epic stuff - such a great feeling being able to paint up 20 minis in about an hour. Really hope we get this revival of Epic we heard talk of when the GW stopped supporting it - if I remember correctly the rumours said Fantasy Flight Games.

Ready for battle

Bar a bit of basing I finished a couple more stands and two rhinos yesterday - which gives me my first ever battle ready unit for Epic, yay.

Hatches

While I was trying to get the hatches on the drop pod right, I really went through a lot of balsa. Turned out it wasn't quite as easy to get it right as I had hoped. The main problem was actually to come up with a shape I would be able to reproduce several times, and hence I went through almost as many designs as little pieces of wood.
I ended up with this, a piece slightly shorter than the main structure, and with a short slope at the top. I would have liked to get the usual shape, with a sharp bend following the contours of the structure, but I would never be able to do several that would look suitingly alike. I pretty confident, that once I add a bit of detail to the structure it will look just about right.

But of cause

Yes, of cause - couldn't help my self, no need for just painting up stuff, gotta build some as well. As drop pods seem to be hard to find a good proxy for - and the ones being left on GW is fairly expensive, I decided to try make some.

Cutting out a couple of shapes in 1 mm plastic card, and using the old kindergarten x-mas tree sliding trick, the basic shape was pretty easy to come by. Works rather well I think. The dimensions are 18 mm across in the bottom, and 30 mm high. For the body/doors mi compadre, just suggested parting a rod in four, which would give me four 90 degree angles to work with. So hopefully I can get past the hobby shop today.

The tiniest of distractions........

The progress of the Herakli has been rather slow - that would be me kind of lacking the excitement to paint atm. I therefore decided I needed something new to work on, something new to play in fact. I always wanted to try playing something 6 or 15mm, always wanted to field hordes of models, full armies with loads of tanks, walkers and infantry to spend like rubble and planes zooming over the battlefield to cause havoc in the ranks of the enemy. Hence I spend some time searching the web, reading through several interesting set of rules and looking at miniatures from a wealth of manufactures. And now hopefully a couple of guys from work and myself will be starting some Epic Armageddon soon. Seems those are pretty popular rules, we have a well known universe, and 6 mm minis are just that cheaper than 15 mm ones.
Then what army to choose - well AdMech obviously! But also nids and necrons would be really cool - oh and IG.........damn, same as always. I think I've settled for nids for a starter, at least I ordered a few of them just to try to paint them up, see if it works. But I also happened to have some old SM laying around, quite a few actually, so what else to do - gotta paint them up should be rather fast and give a good starting point, so one can get a few games under the belt. They will of cause, be painted up in my Iron Ghosts colors. Tried out some weathering on the rhino - not sure it's worth it though.

But first of all the progress on the herakli, not to much left to do actually.

And my few Epic models.

See the beast

Had a few extra hours today, and got to work on the skin. I wanted it really bright, kind of seethrough, with some pale blues and purple. Turned out to be rather difficult to photograph though.

Knight Titans inbound

DreamForge-Games just released a new pic of their 15 mm leviathan - got a whole host of these inbound. Really looking forward to getting my hands on them, aren't they just amazing. Have to figure out small conversions, to make them a bit more Gothic looking.
The small chap on the side is a 28 mm trooper - and I was worried they would be too small...............................

Small painting update

Got a bit  more grime/nuances worked into the metal. A bit concerned I might have made it a bit too bright now, I think I'll wait for some more colors before I decide, but any way it should be pretty easy to fix with a bit of washing. Also toyed with the idea of working a bit of purple into the metal, but I'm not sure any more.

Quite a few times in the past I've considered getting some of HiTech miniatures models, haven't gotten around to it yet though. But I think I might add this fellow to my Herakli at some point, really cool stuff. And as I think I said earlier, I don't mind my Herakli looking different.

It aint much......

...but it's a start. Feeling the mojo returning and started painting up the Herakli. I also, per suggestion, added two small cogs to the gun arm - to make the big one move, you see.

New conversion parts...loads of them!

Well seeing those new huge marine models made me happy. Lots of people already hate them - I think they look awesome - I mean look at the size of those things, look at the load of conversion parts, I cannot wait to get my hands on those. I'll be putting my praetorians on pause till I get a hold of those legs, that's for sure.
But also on their own part they are cool in my book, and I could see them appear in my Iron Ghost army - I could easily make them fit the fluff.