Several Shades of Crimson (Dragons, Fists, Cardinals, & Cetera.)

I've done a lot of "28mm" posts of late, which distracts a little from my more recent historical work, but I beg you to bear with me. I've been doing the sci-fi wargaming rather longer so it's a bit of a game of catch-up to make my explorations here current. (Though to be fair, it's been ten years since I last played an actual "game" with the science fiction kids.)

Still, as an artistic endeavor, they're important to me.

After my forays into Space Wolfery and Orcdom I had a lot of human miniatures in need of repainting, or half in old paint jobs that didn't work for my newer wolves. I took to repainting the older marines in other chapters. (I still have several boxes of old paints sitting around to be repurposed. It's an ongoing process.) The repaints thus far fall into one of two chapters: one of my own creation called the Crimson Dragons that are native to the desert world where my story is set, and for a few of my oldest marines the Crimson Fists. (No relation.)

Dragons first:

Ignoring the early 90s heavy weapons troopers at the end the vast bulk of this army is vintage late 80s stuff. In my opinion these were and are still some of the finest sci-fi models produced. A little dark and exaggerated, to be sure, but with tremendous character. And compared to the new stuff (note grossly out of proportion weapons of last two minis) they almost look plausible.

Of course they look quite startlingly different from Citadel's original marines:

There are several more of these, including a different officer and a rocket launcher, that await retouching as time permits. While they're not quite the same as the miniatures on the cover of Rogue Trader, they're similar enough that I hope my artistic inspiration is apparent. And while none of these are particularly recent paint jobs, they're good enough that they're not destined for the strip-bin yet.

Another hangover from the RT era is my obsession with adventurers. In Girls, Girls, Girls!  I talked a little about some of my recent adventurers, but I have many going back a long way. They represent a mixture of Imperial forces, some priests and inquisitors, and the sorts of random fringers and roustabouts you might find on the old Logan's World.

Several of these miniatures have an interesting history. Of the three below the fellow in the center started out as an "adventurer with chainsword" but was promoted to the position of "sensei"; a sort of reborn Emperor, or at least a piece of him. (Oh yes, did I mention that the "Emperor" really is just a dessicated husk with no life in it? The High Priests of Terra seem to be propping him up, Weekend at Bernie's style so that they don't have to give up power. Or at least this was the story as it unfolded in the days before the First Great Heresy at GW: The Cameran Schism of 1993.)

Anyway, the center fellow became a "sensei" as per the 1990 Realm of Chaos. The fellow on the right was released as an "imperial scout" and was for many years attached to my Space Wolves. I have since cut him loose as I think he's a bit too intriguing to be pinned down so narrowly. I can't quite identify the fellow at left, but I like him, so here he is for now.

The next few fellows are a group of dwarves, one dwarf adventurer and a couple ordinary dwarf troopers. A sensei could attract quite a following and I decided these guys had joined up.

Since the sensei is the reborn "star-child" (isn't that remarkably New-Agey for a dark future?) I figured he needed a good star banner. This Ironclaw squat was happy to provide one. And his short friend gives the sensei a pretty solid puch at range.

Here's another mixed bag. The miniature on the right was from a Citadel licensed range. The one in the middle is technically supposed to be an inquisitor. The wonder-boy is apparently quite persuasive.

Of course no adventure is complete without bad guys. Two of the three models below are "Ordo Malleus Inquisitors." The third is a quite similar model from another company. (Grenadier, perhaps? I don't quite recall and I'm not willing to pop him from his base right now.) Well, I like red and the red and white were quite striking. And only the High Priests of Terra wear red, so . . . the college of evil cardinals it is. I mentioned Emperor Bernie, right? Meet the props.

Of course all cardinals propping up long dead prelates need their own Swiss Guard. To my mind the Grey Knights serve that function. 

All marines, all monks, and all inquisitors.

Next time: non-humans.

Revisiting a Dark and Distant Fantasy Part III: Lighter and Friendlier Metals

Now for the lighter stuff. Of course just about the same time GW began to super-size their astro-arsenal Citadel moved away from the lead miniatures I talked about in Part II and into the recently departed world of "pewter."  (I guess they prefer to be on the other side of frivolous legal maneuvers.) I was at first skeptical, since the material was harder and more brittle, but I jumped aboard. At this point I'm even sold on it, if one wishes to cast in metal.

The fellow above is nothing particularly special, but I do like the wolf tail markings I painted on the interior lining of his cloak. The next three fellows go together. There's a kind of tango that happens. Follow with me now . . .

Huh. Those are nifty arms. Where did they come from?

Now that looks suspciously like the "official"Logan Grimnar model (which looks absolutely nothing like the Grimnar in the drawing where he first appeared.) But something's different. Looks like something I saw somewhere else once too . . .

Heck of an axe on that one. I wonder who he is . . . Wait . . . I think I get it now.

One of the very last Citadel models I bought was their "Logan Grimnar." He reminded me very much of the character drawn on the front of the Space Wolf codex. (On which drawing I must assume the model is based.) But they decided to use this terminator for Logan Grimnar, which was in my opinion a terrible mistake. He's "just" another Terminator officer. Maybe even a non-com. Nothing wrong with that, but he wasn't intended to be the leader of the whole dang chapter. Chapter leaders were, by and large, relatively normal guys. More medals. Fancier uniforms. But no special armament or stature. I wanted a Logan Grimnar model. I also thought the model was interesting. But the two needed to be pried apart and a bright line drawn between them. The terminator gave up his arms to the greater good and received in turn two normal, but quite functional ones. The arms came from the second model, which was a normal wolfguard sergeant. I cut the sword off and built it up with a plastic chainsword. I also carved up a knife to put in the jaws off the wolf head and added a chain and some emblems carved from putty to the right arm. Lastly I carved a new wolf pelt from putty to substitute for the one that came with the model. (Which I later recycled with a dreadnaught, to which I believe it is a better fit.) The resulting model is a decent approximation of the drawing from the cover of the codex.

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I then took the arms from the "Grimnar" model, cut the axe off, and affixed them to the wolfguard sergeant model. I used a sword cut from the third model to replace the axe, thereby gaining two sergeants for the price of about three and a half. (Two really cool and different ones. So I count it adequate.

But in the end I wanted Grimnar. The drawing depicts a quite balding older man with the usual long teeth, but doesn't show much beyond his face and a suggestion of his torso. I had several duplicate Space Wolf sergeants so I started with the one I felt was closest. As a beginning I cut off his head and replaced it with a nicely bearded plastic squat head. I lengthened his beard and let it run down onto the armor in several places, added fangs, and gave him a bionic eye. This was a mistake. When I later looked at the Grimnar model I found that he didn't have a bionic eye, but was instead wearing a targeter. That's what you get when you work off memory, I suppose. (I had misplaced the codex. I was able to find the cover picture online, but not the old drawing from the interior. I wonder why that might be?) Again, I cut off his sword and gave it to the first terminator. In the newly vacated hand I placed the haft of the large axe. To balance this massive piece of weapon I needed a pommel. A piece from the end of a pull chain turned out to be about ideal.

And there you have it. That's about where I left off when I was last in the world of the dark future. For the curious I'll continue by posting a few collection reviews, and I suspect the Malleus Bellum is back to stay, so episodes from Antiques Roadshow and This Old Fig might pop up every now and then. For present, happy gaming.

Revisiting a Dark and Distant Fantasy Part II: Fiat Plumbum

And on the third day the Gamemaster said: "Let there be lead." And He brought forth lead miniatures in all their varieties: man and beast; elves, orcs, and dragons; dwarves, halflings and lesser creatures. Even an artillery piece or two.

But today we're just going to talk about men. (And anyone who dismisses halflings obviously hasn't been on the other end of a sniper scope from one. Or within throwing distance, really. I want a baseball team made entirely of halflings. We'll win every game.)

In Part I we left off with discussions of plastic miniatures. My first experiments with heavy metals were relatively tame as they go. I painted them up and left it at that.

Modifications, such as they were, were little different from what I was occasionally doing in plastic to "wolf" things up:

Okay, the plastic guy has some small alterations beyond wolfing. But if I recall correctly that miniature was one I acquired from Ben. I modded the bolter and added the pelt. Ben had already posed it. For some reason I kept it though. But back to lead . . .

One subtle but significant modification is visible in the next two pictures:

Can't see it? It's subtle. Let's try one more . . .

Whad'ya think? There it is. I started drilling out the barrels on my guns. Plastic, lead, or whatever else I might have used. It's a small thing, but I like it. Saw it in White Dwarf and I was hooked.

When the Space Wolves characters came out I had the fantastic idea, absolutely fantastic, that my command section should be mounted on wolfback. Wolves the size of draught horses. Pretty silly, honestly, but I did it. The results were mixed, but I was all of twenty or twenty one at the time. Still learning.

That was the beginning of my experiments with sculpting. Still hadn't discovered kneadtite (or green stuff, if you prefer), so everything was rather crude. But the concept wasn't terrible. I find it might almost be worth updating. Shortly after this I started building an orc army and got a little more serious about conversions.

To the curious, the mage-advisor (*cough* runepriest) started as a chaplain, lost his head, gained a plastic beak, a wire and plastic staff not visible from this side, an assortment of Squadron Signal green putty runes, and a crude home-made wolf head. The CinCWolf, Leman Lord Geri, has plastic legs, a rough-rider torso (apt, no?), a plastic head modified by the addition of a wolf-snout, an orc sawblade coated in putty and sculpted into a chainsword, a spare Freki's head on his helm, her tail on his sword, a plastic power-first, a wire necklace with plastic-sliver teeth, several crude putty gemstones, and a paper cloak with a homemade wolf pelt. While I still have uses for Squardon Signal's green putty, It's not the material I'd use for sculpting anymore. I used it then as I had it lying about, but now I'd go for kneadtite or possibly milliput. (Still have to give the old standby a try. I'm learning to like the "green stuff," but the "white stuff" supposedly has advantages for some projects. Possibly of the largish sort I sometimes enjoy.)

In the next edition I'll show you my very last conversions before jumping off the bus and moving to 1/2400. Of course, I seem to be back aboard, so maybe I'll try my hand at it again now that I've learned a thing or two. And tell me if you spot this evening's easter egg modeling project. Again, thanks for listening. It's a journey, but we're getting closer to the end.

Revisiting a Dark and Distant Fantasy Part I: Early Imperial Plastic

40,000 years in the future used to be a fairly grim place. Kind of a dirty classic steampunk. Then it got bright and all comic-booky heroic and I decided the light bothered my eyes so I left. Mind you, I never got rid of my toys, so the door was always open. To be honest, I guess I'd just pretended I'd left: threw some blankets over the windows and retreated to the basement. (To crib shamelessly from my friend Z, who lives the dark and dangerous steampunk life every day.)

While the apocalyptic destruction of the great gaming citadel is ongoing, I've decided I might as well admit I'm still here and come out and play with the bones a little. They're good bones. Bones with character.

I first met the Space Marines in a friends box set of the then ubiquitous "beakies." I hated them. Everything was exagerated. The models were crude and poorly detailed. They didn't fit together well. The plastic was some kind of harder grade of styrenesque something that didn't bond well with standard hobby glue. In short, they were plastic models from people that had no real clue how to make plastic models. But after I bonded with them for a little while . . . (Not literally people! I didn't use CA glue then.) . . . after I'd had some time to grow comfortable with the aesthetic I realized they had some character and this was an arms race I could join. After I read my friend Ben's Rogue Trader I was hooked. I could modify things. There were models that looked somewhat more elegant. I had some ideas.

So I bought my own box of beakies. When my friends bought multi-meltas and heavy bolters and all those fancy guns I, being on a budget then, hacked and slashed with the bits I had lying about and made my own special guns. For several years my beakies were well equipped but with something of an odd-lot look about them. Later, when I started to buy lead I found this unsatisfactory and most of the conversions ended up in the repaint/repair bin, from whence I dug these:

Everything from fishing weights to the drive shaft from a pickup truck model made it's way into the arsenal. There's also the grip from a motorcycle, sprue, German clips in large calibers, and folding fin aerial rockets. Or at least pods to carry them. Lots of model parts. I like styrene. It's good to have some sitting about. I always worry I'll run out of interesting parts but I truly never do.

None of these are in their original paint, but they're from the first couple of years. By the time of the last one I was beginning to get just a little more bold. You might see that I sliced and diced some lead in the service of a very crude conversion. He was intended as a chapter commander in the absence of the original great wolf himself. (Which figure I owned but couldn't really toss onto a battlefield.) While this miniature wasn't particularly successful, some of the techniques I tried turned out useful later.

Another technique I was slow to learn was stripping. This fellow is an example of what came out of the repair bin for a repaint. It's perhaps obvious that the stripping was accomplished with a hobby knife, but in this case I almost like it. The thick paint and bad strip job kind of give him a nice battle-worn character. He's probably due up for some repairs, but this gives you the flavor of what I did. All in all, I'd say it's not too bad for an eighteen-year-old kid. The banner is the usual paint and paper, but I think the pose, the rubber band straps, and the putty wolf's tail were nice touches.

But enough of soldiers. Given that I started out with plastic airplanes maybe it's not surprising that my army was a little more armor heavy than most:

Of course, I've never met a military model that couldn't be improved by a little cutting and pasting, or even smacking about with a ball-peen hammer. The lead Predator has had the hammer technique applied to the track guard. The small piece of track is salvaged from a converted Rhino that you can see with large red crosses in a previous post. The camouflage netting is nylon screen. More hammer work and some possibly identifiable bits from more recent kits can be seen on the leftmost tank in the second picture. In the background are an old-school Whirlwind that was visible in the previous post and a Razorback that was not. (Not having been released yet and all.) The Whirlwind makes use of a conversion from an issue of White Dwarf. I cut up a large square base for the rockets (and still have baseless dreadnaughts as a result) and used some leftover bits from my Predators for the rest. The bottom was the big angle door front piece. the top was the eagle plate.

When I picked up the land raider you see below I found all this lovely empty space inside. It had a nice floor, some couches, hatches and doors you could leave unglued, but no place for a driver to sit. (And no room elsewhere in the model that couldn't be seen through that door.)

A dive into my parts bin fixed that. I've begun to forget what some of the particular bits are, but there are pieces of a visible nuclear submarine model, chairs from a German flak cannon, a wheel from a Panzer IV I think it was, an ammunition drum, a harness from a dorsal turret . . . parts. Spare parts in assorted scales repurposed to become consoles and controls. I'm still relatively pleased with the result twenty years later.

And if you want some really intense conversion, try this on for size . . .

He's beginning to show his age, Eddie is, but he's still a sight on a battlefield. He uses guns from G.I. Joe toys, electrical conduit, a cockpit from an A-10, sheet styrene, wooden dowel, paintbrush handles, a barrel from a predator, German ammo lockers, British drop tanks, the bones of two or three beakies, the flight console from a B-17 and I believe the engineer's console from a B-29 . . . and lord only knows what else. Fun stuff. I've actually used him in a battle once. Try this one on: he lost. (My friend Ben had two. Ed was a little overmatched. But I gave as good as I got.) Oh yes: if it wasn't obvious Ed started life as a vinyl ED-209 model. I have a toy star wars walker sitting about for use one day in the future. Maybe.

In Part II I talk a little about my experiments with lead and wonder where those extra brain-cells went.