Changing the lights

I bought a cheap, small portable lightbox a couple of weeks ago to help me with making pics, so at least I can get some better reproducible results, so I reshot the two last units I painted. This is how it went:

Also, here is a pic of the full project so far:

Grim work up close

Today I've finished a Tactical support unit, 7 leggionaires with meltaguns:

Big guns never tire

Just a quick update to show the last fully painted squad: some Heavy Bolter Iron Havocs:

A matter of character

Lately I've mostly been assembling a lot os Primaris Space Marines for my "I can't believe they're not Iron Warriors" Ebon Skulls Ultima Founding chapter. I have enough for about 2500-3000 points of them now with just infantry ^_^.

GW has released a number of pretty decent Primaris character miniatures... at a price point that a) seems completely bonkers and b) that I'm not about to validate or encourage by buying. Which means that if I want to fill the roles those characters occupy I'll be needing to do some conversion work. And that's what I've done:

Primaris Captain in power armor:

Primaris Apothecary:

They're obviously still not finished (duh), but both are made using the new Primaris sprues with select regular SM parts.

I've also assembled two squads of Intercessors using the Reivers Bolt carbines. As rules-wise they are exactly the same as auto bolt rifles, I'd rather use the carbines with the regular intercessors to make them more distinctive from the other models of bolt rifles (and I wasn't going to use the carbines with the reivers anyway, so...).

(They are blue because they are from the "Know no Fear" starter set).

Randomness

So, I'm actually still alive and -somewhat- kicking. Here's a very recent pic of my desk :

If it looks like it's a random mess of whatever I felt like assembling whenever I had the time or will, that's because it's exactly the case.

All the Marines and Tyranids are from the "Deathstorm" box, released a couple of years ago for the Shields of Baal series. The Captain and Broodloord are excellent sculpts, crisp and dynamic, with the Broodloord completely dwarfing a Terminator. That's kind of big, yeah.
Unfortunately, while not as bad as the Carnifex featured previously, the other minis were kind of bad; the genestealer was a real pain to clean up, with thich moldlines over organic, detailed shapes. I'm not sure if I'll bother with doing the whole squad.

Last but not least, the trio of Sherman 105s was rushed in an hour, for a recent battle. If it's got tracks and a gun, it can fight !

A new Foundation

I actually finished these guys some time ago, but I have just varnished them and took some pics.

This is my first painted Primaris Intercesor Squad, from my "totally not Iron Warriors" new chapter:

I have to say, I'm quite happy with how they turned put, and I've decided that for these guy I'm nor gonna do much in the way of chipping and dirt, as I actually like them clean :)

And now, for something completely different... Eclipse Phase

This is a... different post from my usual fare, and not at all about painting (sorry about that). It was simpler for me to post this here instead of creating a new blog just for it, so... ^_^

English version of the post at the end! ;)

Finalmente, Edge Entertainment ha publicado la versión en pdf de Eclipse Phase, el juego de rol de ciencia ficcón transhumanista, conspiraciones y horror postapocalíptico. Este juego de rol se publica bajo la licencia Creative Commons. Para facilitar el acceso a los pdf, a continuación se incluye una serie de enlaces a las versiones actuales de los mismos. Aunque os animo a que compartáis estos pdf con cualquier amigo o desconocido con el que queráis hacerlo, también os animo a apoyar el trabajo de Edge (y el mío como traductor) y el de Posthuman Studios, de forma que todos juntos podamos ver a este juego prosperar :)

Libros en castellano

• Reglamento básico en castellano (basado en la 4ª impresión)
• Pantalla del Director de Juego, interior
• Pantalla del Director de Juego, exterior
• Gloria aventura aparecida originalmente en la Pantalla del DJ

ENGLISH VERSION

The Eclipse Phase roleplaying game is released under a Creative Commons license. To facilitate access to the PDFs, I am providing a complete set of links to the current updated version of each on this page. While we encourage you to share these PDFs with friends and strangers, we also encourage you to support our work (mine as a translator, here ^^) and purchase them if you want to see the game thrive!

• Eclipse Phase core rulebook (updated for 4th printing)
• Eclipse Phase Quick Start Rules
• Eclipse Phase Gamemaster Screen Front
• Eclipse Phase Gamemaster Screen Back
• Transhuman player's guide
• Sunward: The Inner System sourcebook (torrent magnet link)
• Rimward: The Outer System sourcebook
• Gatecrashing extrasolar exploration sourcebook (torrent magnet link)
• Panopticon sourcebook on surveillance, habitats, and uplifts
• Firewall sourcebook on the conspiratorial group fighting x-risks
• Morph Recognition Guide compilation of morph types
• X-Risks monster manual and sourcebook on threats
• The Stars Our Destination mini-sourcebook on a notorious scum swarm (also in landscape format for tablets)
• Zone Stalkers mini-sourcebook on the TITAN Quarantine Zone on Mars
• NPC File 1: Prime
• Glory scenario (originally included in the EP Gamemaster Pack)
• Continuity scenario with audio files (torrent magnet link)
• Ego Hunter scenario (also in landscape format for tablets)
• The Devotees scenario
• Million Year Echo scenario
• Transhumanity’s Fate conversion guide for the Fate Core system
• After the Fall fiction anthology (includes all EP fiction to date, plus new material) (epub or mobi)

Blame the father, not the children

Last week I got Forgeworld's Iron Warriors Decal sheet, and it's quite a thing. Big, chock full of cool stuff, and even decently priced, all told (Piranha Graphics' Heavy Gear ones were TINY, of worse quality and comparatively much more expensive, for example). So I decided to test them:

...and I'm quite happy with the end result, but not so much with the ease of getting there. The decals are much more... rigid, I guess, than regular GW ones, so they didn't fit AT ALL over the rounded shoulder pads. Had I not have Micro Sol and Micro Set, it would have ended in tears. But I had them, so after some applications the decals affixed right.

Also, yesterday I got the new Dark Imperium 40k 8th edition starter box, and assembled all the stuff. And as a test, I painted one of the new Primaris Marines using my IW paint scheme:

I must say that I'm very pleasantly surprised with the new minis. Yes, they are wayy bigger than the old SM minis, but heads, hands, shoulder pads and backpacks are all the same size, so really, they basically have fixed the proportions to something human-like instead of cartoony. Also, they are "truescale" now, if that is important to you (they would work lovely for Inq28 games, for example, IMHO).

As it is, I'm going to paint this new Adeptus Restartes as Iron Warriors, and "in-setting" they are going to be Primaris Space Marines build using the geneseed of the IV Legion (Primarch Gilliman has expressly forbidded Cawl to do that even though his experiments have shown that the traitor legion's geneseed was not tainted, and that them turning traitors was in reality due to their primarchs,but I don't expect Cawl would pay much attention to any order that is not "what I was already gonna do anyways", so... he'll just say that they are Ultramarine geneseed and go on with his work :p).

Doing the right thing...

... or doing it right now.

While most people outside of remote tropical islands can get easy access to undercoat sprays, if you happen to run out of black, dark green actually makes a very good replacement when doing a large stack of tanks.

Speaking of tropical islands and sprays, the latter have trouble with warm, high-humidity weather, which is remarkably common on the former. You can of course decide to do it anyway, instead of waiting a few months for the "dry" season, and go for the early-mid morning, where the air is the least humid, and the temperatures cool, as long as it's not actually raining, or about to rain. Which is often.

Assuming you've decided to brave the weather conditions, and you're going to have to if you want your minis base-coated this year, the common advice of testing it over some spare sprue remains crucial, if only to find the proper distance to spray, which tends to vary depending on weather conditions. You don't want that rough, grainy finish on your patiently-assembled, expensive, weeks-of-shipping-required minis, do you ?

So, as delicate as it can be to do it right, what happens when you just want to do it right now, ignore the above, and just take a chance in the 20 minutes you have before going to work ?
Well, you could manage the perfect base-coat, with a nice smooth finish, or as I just did earlier, get that dreaded grainy finish, and lots of cursing and swearing.

Fortunately, as long as it's not too bad, and you're working on minis with large flat areas, like say, tanks, a light, gentle sanding with very fine grit will smooth things out nicely, and leave you with a wonderful, flat, ideal base-coat you just want to paint over immediately.
Thank you Tamiya super fine grit !

From left to right, olive drab base coat, with the shade, and after clean-up.

The Sherman horde !

Old warriors still can fight

When I started this project I went and drafted most of the metal old SM armor mark minis I  had to help pad up the numbers of the units. These are about half of them:

The paint quality is a bit rougher, and the reasons are threefold: firstly, I did those in two painting sessions, and I had to stop the second one midway to run with my father to the hospital (it ended up being nothing serious, but we got a fright). Secondly, turns out I seem to have lost a lot of the training to paint metal minis, which are rougher than plastic, and it shows. And thirdly... well, I didn't want to spend too much time with these guys, truth be told ^_^. Even so, I think they look the part and they will do the job of padding numbers well enough.

The final few

And that's the last lot. When the Faranwë Craftworld fell to a Tyranid hive, its Avatar was away with a small strikeforce. For some reason it did not shut down and although hurt and cooled down in places, it is still active. The rest of the army follows him on its strange errands. From the webway, the Masque of Joyful Lament sometimes comes to provide help and hope, but right now they are all that remains of the once proud Craftworld.

The meager forces left.

Guardians, with a missile launcher for these goddamn flying Hive Tyrants.

The Avatar, painted by Manu in (I believe) 1997.

Have I told you I loved airbrushing?

Audys the Swift on his jetbike.

Eldrad is a dick, but he pops up from time to time.

Still not convinced of the rifle colour, but I like how the cloaks turned out.

Anyway, that's all folks! 4500 points and I'm done. Beyond some decals and a few touch-ups, I don't plan to paint for the coming years, and I probably won't post here. Thanks for reading :)

Big Brother comes to the fore

To mix things up a bit, this week I decided to change pace a bit and do one of the two Contemptor Dreadnoughts I have. This is the end result:

Nothing really spectacular, but good enough to play with, which is the objective after all.