Update VIII: Age of Sigmar & Side Projects

It's been a few months since my last update that showcased what I'd been up to lately. So here's some quick and dirty bulletpoints of how I've been spending my hobby time.


1) Completed a Trukk for my Ork 40k forces:
I managed to slam out this model fairly quickly following the completion of the Gorkanaut.

However, despite building and doing the initial airbrush work on a unit of Meganobz and Gretchin I became very burnt out with painting my 40k Orks after nearly five months of focusing on them pretty much unceasingly. So with 1000pts having been fully painted, I have put off finishing my remaining 250 points to move onto different things.

Furthermore the campaign I was running went on a hiatus as I think many of us became frustrated with the clunkiness of the 40k ruleset. I will certainly be holding onto my lovely orks in anticipation of the new 40k edition that will appear in the next 6-9 months. I'm very much hoping for a streamlined AoS-like update that will bring us all back to the table.

2) Create a female Chaos Space Marine  Raptor squad as a painting side-project.

Having finished my extended article on the sexism inherent to miniature wargaming sculptures I decided it only fitting that I create a small squad of female space marines to transgress the sculpting norms.

The conversion process itself was very straightforward, I just switched out the Space Marine heads with the heroic-scale female head sculpts from Statuesque Miniatures found here. Given how androgynous a properly armed combatant looks, I think it ended up being quite convincing.

The above squad leader was a fairly extensive conversion of the Chaos Aspiring Champion. It was one I'd been intending to do for a while and I'm quite happy with how it turned out.

Unfortunately I've yet to get around to painting them as Age of Sigmar swooped in shortly after undercoating them and began to monopolize my hobby time.

3) I have started an Age of Sigmar force: Fyreslayers!

On a whim I ended up participating in a game of Warhammer Quest: Silver Tower which I was surprised to discover I actually enjoyed enormously. It's a really fun, light, and well-designed game and I'm looking forward to picking up a copy in the future.

Shortly on the heels of that, a friend of mine from Element Games decided we should both try out Age of Sigmar and we ended up having an absolute blast. As mentioned above my gaming group has become somewhat disillusioned with the 40k ruleset and AoS is its polar opposite in terms of how quickly and smoothly the fighting goes.

It was admittedly a very one-sided affair, and I was crushed quite convincingly. I played my roomate's Ogre force while he played Stormcast and it became very apparent early on that our wild guesswork for the relative army strengths was off by a wide margin. Yet with the General's Handbook coming out this month we expect that the Pitched Battle point system will alleviate most of our worries in this department. The game itself was still a ton of fun and extremely intuitive.

As a result most of my 40k campaign group are making the leap over to AoS, and I have settled on an Order Alliance to be my starting point. Specifically, I liked the look of the new Fyreslayers models (I wanted to work with as much modern plastics I could) and consequently dove into a test model for some uniquely-colored forces.

Without further ado I present my Fyreslayers color scheme:

Nordic Papa Smurf.

The Verdigras was done with nihilakh oxide, a new GW technical paint that was far easier than the products I worked with on my converted Big Mek, highly recommended!

This guy was very quick and a lot of fun to paint. I've already purchased and assembled about fifteen figures to start a small AoS force, and I'm looking forward to expanding onwards and upwards. Rest assured there will be regular updates to follow!