Epic Proportions End of May Update

Salamanders Strike Force Assembling...

The Firedrakes with a Vindicator squadron in support.

Not being sure when Dr The Viking will post a monthly round up so I'm putting up a few pictures of what I finished this month.  There will be a more detailed post on the first company when I can take some more pictures to showcase the veteran company in more detail. I was inspired by Dr The Viking's pictures of his in progress Ork army so I deviated from my normal picture approach and tried to highlight the finished units on a painted scenery background.  Future photos of this type need a little more staging so you only see the models and the scenery as background once they're cropped.  There are more pictures after the jump along with a army progress report...

Epic Proportions WIP

Salamanders Slither Forth

If they could muster an entire veteran company, my Salamanders must be a pre-Istvaan V army...

As May marches on, I'm making some progress in my goal to paint/restore somewhere between 500-1000 points each month as part of the Epic Proportions challenge.  I'm going for the low hanging fruit this month and restoring the first GW army of any kind that I ever owned and played games with.  Additionally this story will explain why I have a green space marine army that's not the first legion.

My first exposure to the 40K universe was when I started picking up White Dwarf issues in 8th grade way back in 1990.  However for the first year I was interested in the hobby, it was a solo adventure.  Coming from a small rural town in Pennsylvania I didn't know any one who was even familiar with Games Workshop or Warhammer.   While I had gotten Rogue Trader, RTB01, and other box sets for Christmas that year, other than trying to convince my younger brother to play an overly complicated game that neither one of us could totally understand, my experiences with actual gameplay were only in issues of WD or my imagination.  All that changed one fateful day in 9th grade Geometry class...

Epic Proportions First Unit Completed

4th Vindicator Squadron, Salamanders 1st Company Support 

I can't tell if I lose some resolution when I crop and enlarge the photos, or if the closer view emphasizes how much work I still need to do in controlling my edge highlight lines. It's probably the latter...

My first unit for the Epic Proportions challenge is finished and I'm pretty pleased with the results.  It was also very satisfying to set out to complete a unit and pull it off in just a few hours of painting.  Epic was always the scale where you could feasibly have the units you could never afford in full size when you were a money poor teenager, and now as a more organized adult painter it seems like a quick route to the great feeling you get when a unit is completed. This challenge may be more fun than I originally imagined. There are many more pictures after the jump...

Scenic Distractions VI

To the Barricades!

Army Painter Wasteland tufts seem to be a good turf color for "space junkyard".

This gorgeous resin barricade is available from Spellcrow miniatures an awesome producer of miniatures and scenery in resin from Poland.  They have all kinds of great conversion bits for 40K miniatures and their own line of fantasy skirmish minis and a game system to go with it.  If you have ever wanted to make a super detailed Salamanders or Space Wolves army this site has all the scaled armor and wolf pelt pauldrons you could possibly want.  There are conversion bits for several different chapters, as well as some cool ork conversion bits as well.  Also available on their website are some great pieces of scatter terrain sized scenery and if you order over $80 worth of stuff international shipping is free.

Epic Proportions Army Pitch Update

Mustering for War

This is why I love Epic, outside of a giant game of Armageddon you could never field this many marines and tanks in a game of WH40K.

This blog had 240 hits the other day and considering my daily pageviews are normally measured in the low teens I must assume this has something to do with Dr The Viking posting his project updates on Facebook.  Which leads people to his blog, then to the Epic Proportions page which will lead them ... here.  It's like how the stormtroopers finding the Jawas leads them to murdering Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru, but with 100% less charred step-family bodies posed dramatically outside their farm house.

#DadGoals

Revenge of the Calvinball

My son has been designing his own war-game with his Marvel superhero Lego mini-figures and a board he constructed for the heroes and villains to fight over.  Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes cartoon and our many games of Heroclix seem to be the inspiration of the current version of his creation.  There's no dice and combat resolutions are very subjective but the lists of powers are very true to the characters involved and it can be fun to a play a game with no sense of balance or traditional gaming logic.  For at least the first 30 minutes, then the disparity between the large amounts of HP characters have versus the small amount of damage the attacks inflict starts to make the game drag a little.  However the joy of sharing my favorite hobbies (comics and gaming) with my son and watch him create his own game more than makes up for the current lack of game balance...

Scenic Distractions V

Imperial Army Checkpoint TK 421

Not a mighty fortress just yet, but certainly enough for a security perimeter around a supply depot...

This Imperial Guard checkpoint is a perfect example of the way your hobby can spiral out of control in a constructive way sometimes if you follow your imagination.  All these items came in a sampler pack of terrain from Ender Toys Terrain which I have mentioned on this blog before.  When I first looked at buying some Ender Toys Terrain on Amazon, I was a little cautious because of how low their prices were so I bought a variety pack that contained a wide range of their terrain items so I could gauge the quality of their offerings. These pieces were primed white for a year after buying the set, but as I started taking in game pictures for this blog the bright whiteness of the bunker in particular was driving me crazy.  On a mostly basecoated board with a lot of the other terrain in various stages of painting, the primer white bunker stood out like a sore thumb.  Follow along after the jump if you want to know more about the rabbit hole I fell down thanks to these scenery items...

3rd Squad, 4th Company

Tactical Squad Peliel Part II

Since I mentioned my aversion to painting bare heads in an earlier post, you know one of the first things I did was head swap the sergeant.

Like the Sex Pistols repeatedly selling the same songs on albums with different names, I'm revisiting the third squad with detailed pictures of their finished paint jobs.  Since I dove deep into 40K history and the reasons behind my middlehammer unit markings in the first post about this unit, now I can do what people normally do on these sorts of blogs, namely post pictures of miniatures and talk about paint.  So follow along after the jump if you read the first artcle about this unit and kept shouting at your computer screen, "but when is he going to tell us what color green that is!"