Gnome more Gnomes to paint

..lamented Alexgnomander, as he reached the limits of the gnome world.

i cast 'summon terrible wordplay'! ahaha

My project for the Old World Army Challenge is complete! OWAC is such a blast every year - I can't wait for 2021, which will see a different group of short, hirsute warriors...

Those Who Fly

Space. The #grimdark frontier.

two pilots and a navigator walk into a bar...

Thistle has meant that even when I am home and my partner is not, I am not able to get as much work done as I actually want. It's worth it, but a little frustrating. Now that the gnome project is wrapping up, I can concentrate on other projects. Although, having said that, I think I've started... three new ones this week? Don't look at me.

#maydur

Just some friendly Adeptus. Nothing to see here. Move along, citizen.

group shot came out a bit shadowy. appropriate.

I got into Warhammer in the late 90s. Like many of us from that era, I spent a percentage of my limited resources poring over White Dwarf each month. Many of those images and articles are burned into my memory, taking up space that I could otherwise use to learn Russian or Korean, develop project management skills, or figure out how to join gaming groups in my thirties.

Probably worth it, to be fair.

White Dwarf #224, August 1998, p.53.
Image © Games Workshop. Used without permission.

One of the images that I always vaguely remembered was Ed Spettigue's (mostly) Tallarn Imperial Guard army from White Dwarf #224. He'd gone with a striking white-and-bone scheme, including on his Sisters of Battle, assassins, and the Mordian Iron Guard he used for heavy weapons. It was cool as hell.

When it came to painting the handful of metal assassins I'd somehow acquired, I was stuck on a painting scheme. I also wasn't sure if I wanted to base them to match my Mantis Warriors, or the industrial setting of the Death Guard, or maybe do some generic basing - maybe even do something weird, like spaceship tiles or something. I then remembered Spettigue's Tallarn, and some thing clicked into place.

While my collection of White Dwarfs was apparently stolen from my father's garage a few years ago, that's not as much of a problem in the age of the internet as you might think, and I was able to dig up a copy. I took a slightly different approach, but am still pleased to have a pack of assassins that aren't the usual black-on-black.

Welcome to my Gno-May-n, as it were

(sorry)

May-n characters for the army

My May entry for the Old World Army Challenge is up! Check it out, and check out the other competitors. There are some seriously amazing painters in the group.

Those Who Play

Despite the bright colours, this might be the most grimdark set yet.

Children shouldn't have any place on a battlefield, especially not in the kind of warzones that Warhammer 40,000 describes. It's a bit bleak for tabletop gaming. At the same time, these were really fun models to paint. I imagine that they'll add a certain amount of charm to the townscape once I get around to some buildings and other terrain.

In the meantime, let's not dwell on the implications.

Those Who Work

The lifeblood of Empire.

♪ ♫ one of these is not like the others ♪

The end of the world has sapped a bit of my motivation, I'm afraid. The fact that I am horrific on my brushes doesn't help, and my usual small detail brush is getting a bit bristly, meaning that it's even more difficult to get any work done.

Also, we got a kitten.

Thistle

Still, I spent the past few days getting started on my Old World Army Challenge Project gnomes and doing these working-class folks as a palate cleanser. (I then ran out of white undercoat, so getting the gnomes done might be a bit of a challenge!)

Three of them are from the Colony 87 range, the same as the majority of my civilians. The lady with all the gear is from Crooked Dice's Paranormal Exterminators range, although I just picked her up cheap in an order from Bad Squiddo a couple years ago just because she looked like fun.

For more photos, we go below the cut...

Those Who Work: Droids

Robots are workers too! Synth rights!

these aren't produced by no STC I seen

A while ago, I was invited into an old school gaming group on Facebook, basically a treasure trove of people with way more talent than I have painting extremely cool shit, but without the seventeen mechadendrites and three-different-browns palette of the INQ28 crowd. (Who, to be clear are also a treasure trove of people with way more talent than I have. I can like two things.)

One of the admins of the group had made these little droids, and just after I joined he was selling the last few from his limited run. I hadn't yet figured out how I was going to do terrain and civilians, but I definitely had to have them.

I then picked up the Jackobot, from Citadel's long lost Paranoia range. A few other #oldhammer types have also painted up this model, and I struggled with how to do a colour scheme for him for a while. A mishap with undercoating meant that he had a kind of blotchy, uneven undercoat, which presented a perfect opportunity to practice chipping and weathering.

Under the cut, we have many, many more photos.

Gnome-pril

Febru-gnome

March of the Gnomes

I haven't mentioned here, but the Old World Army Challenge is still going strong! My gnomes now consist of several regiments of infantry, some fox-riding cavalry, and an artillery battery.

Gnome-pril

Check out the project as a whole and see the absolutely stunning array of talent on display. The rest of the folks are bloody incredible.

Project: (Rogue) Traders

..an infinite deal of nothing...

Full Thrust civilian spacecraft 

Miniature games need objectives, and spaceship miniature games more so than most! Otherwise why are your trillion-dollar warships shooting space lasers at each other in the vast emptiness of space? So I got together some of Ground Zero Games's selection of civilian craft and painted them up.

Like the other Full Thrust things I've shared, these are 'finished', although I may expand on them in future, especially if I get any other fleets...

Merchant shipping

Old closeup photos below the cut!

Project: Strike Force Wollondilly

Remember one of my first posts, when I talked about Full Thrust? I mentioned that I had two fleets. The alien Sa'Vasku with their bioships, and the Oceanic Union - Space Australia (and friends).

Oceanic Union Strike Force Wollondilly

Here they are! I finally got around to getting some photos taken.

The Oceanic Union are a federation consisting of Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, and a host of Pacific nations - Tuvalu, Vanuatu, &c. Given the balkanisation of the former United States in the setting, I like to think that Hawai'i was a late joiner. This also handily explains why the New Anglian Confederation and the Oceanic Union aren't as close as the modern UK-USA-AU alliance. As we'll see, I've also included Timor-Leste as a member, although the former Portuguese Timor had yet to succesfully leave Indonesia when Jon wrote his timeline.

Jon never really detailed the minor factions, but the Full Thrust community has agglutinated a kind of quasi-canon. One such detail is that Oceanic Union Defence Force ships (OUDFS; 'oddfuss') are usually painted in designs indigenous to the regions of the Federation. When combined with the flat, panelled surfaces of OUDFS ships, this gives a great deal of freedom for striking freehand designs.

This project was actually finished in May 2018; you can see the project unfold in real-time on the old Tumblr.

Below the cut for more individual photos!

Those Who Rule

Sometimes a family is a lord, a lady, their baby, their homonculus, and their other... baby.

Lord Greiss, Lord-Governor of Colony 87, and family

Last time, the civilians were the intelligentsia; scholars, priests, adeptus administatrum. I've split my civilians into class-based groups (sort of, as we'll see) to create batches that are easier to manage. This week was the aristocracy.

(Well, and last week. It's been a bit of a tough fortnight.)

Let's take a closer look below the cut.