The Beard Bunker

With our Deathwatch session coming up I've painted up another marine, this time for Jon (he's a keen gamer but isn't into the hobby side of things). He was built and painted according to Jon's choices, from the big honkin' Infernus heavy bolter to the choice of heraldry, face and skin tone. Since every other player has made and painted their own guy, the paint styles across the squad vary hugely. As such, I took the opportunity to try painting the black armour in a different style to my own marine (featured last week ). Today's post then is a sort of compare and contrast. I'm not sure that I prefer one or the other; apples and oranges, innit. That said, one is definitely faster. Or rather: less slow. Neither of these marines are of the "bang it out in an afternoon" variety. When you only have to paint two dudes it's a chance to put some extra love into it. Let's start by explaining what the differences are in the black armour of the two min...

It's easy to fall into a trap when creating a Space Marine. Fear is the baby, and every other human emotion besides rage is the bathwater. Legions of blandly angry bald dudes populate the fanficosphere and, dare I say it, a certain percentage of the Black Library. If they're not angry, they're stoic. That's usually even more boring. Obviously if I objected to the presence of rage and stoicism in my fiction I wouldn't be a 40K fan, but there's limits. Today, then, I seek to do my part by providing a series of prompts to help anyone trying to write a Space Marine character, be it to lead their army in a 40K Crusade or for a roleplay scenario. It's specifically written for creating Deathwatch characters, but honestly it'll work fine for pretty much any loyalist marine, and in a pinch, spiky marines too. Side note: I wrote this guide for our gaming group to create their Deathwatch roleplay characters. I won't share the rules themselves, since they're...

 Not a massive amount to say this week, so I've taken a lot of photos instead.  I've managed to find a bit of time off work and threw myself into finishing off my Napoleonics to-do pile. In a week I chunked through two half finished light infantry units, and a full battalion of line.  This brings me up to having the bare minimum for playing some Black Powder! Yes, Black Powder, and Napoleonics in general is massive in scale and the forces used where huge. Which looks amazing on the tabletop but is a daunting task to paint.  To add a little perspective what I have here is an Infantry brigade of four battalions + command. It also has an attached artillery battery and some Hussars (for giggles). This amounts to about 250pts. To quote the Black Powder rulebook "in a typical encounter battle, we’ll have three players on each side with each player controlling a brigade. A brigade might typically be four infantry battalions, a gun, and two cavalry regiments together with a...

The boys in blue and heretics in red have been doing far too much of the heavy lifting here of late.  It seemed time for some Necrons to show their faces. There won't be the tips or guidance that Jeff or Charlie can offer, merely a showcase of (almost) all of my shiny metal boyz. Leading my force are a bevvy of various nobles, front-right is my Overlord, centre his Warden, and front-left a supporting Lord.  There's also another Lord hiding on the right.  Behind them are the two shards of the C'Tan the Ikarrans once controlled and aim to recover (I've rebased them to match the Void Dragon I hope to get in the future, and had some fun trying to make the Nightbringer look like the very ground is recoiling from him as he passes). The final Lord in the army is the Skorpekh Lord and his destroyer minions.  New Indomitus additions, these have changed the way the Necrons play quite considerably, giving them far more punch in combat.  You can also see the Canoptek Spyder...

In over 20 years of painting miniatures, I've only just realised this Cobalt Scions army is the first time I've ever painted an army in which every model is fully edge highlighted. Plenty of characters and warbands got highlights over the years, but mostly I've used faster methods for the bulk of an army. Drybrushing, dirt washes, that sort of thing. Doing highlights across the whole army has revealed that I'd never really refined my highlighting method. I hadn't needed to, just doing one character here and there. Two and a half thousand points into the project, I've unsurprisingly learned quite a bit, and over the course of the project I've more or less halved the time it takes me to paint these guys. Today then I'm going to provide some updates to the (still mostly true) guide to highlighting blue power armour I wrote in June 2020 . I figured this stuff out while preparing for a game against Tom and Andy's combined Necrons (an educational thrashing...

When I painted an Impulsor back in March , I mentioned that I'd built it from the Gladiator kit (that's the full Impulsor kit plus the extra gubbins for a turret). In preparation for a recent game against Andy and Tom's extremely aggressive Necrons, I decided guns were more important than speed, and took the chance to paint up the turret. In doing so I learned a thing or two about making vehicle painting more efficient, so I'm sharing those things today. Does this require magnetising? The actual turret mount doesn't need any magnetising - it just sits on the Impulsor's hull and doesn't move around at all. Here's how it goes together: I suspect this may have been a deliberate move by a forward-thinking sculptor. With the additional layers of paint it doesn't sit perfectly flush, but if that bothers you then it's easily scraped back on the underside of the turret mount. If you wanted to be able to field all three Gladiator variants you'd want...

Bladeguard Veterans have a very particular aesthetic, and that aesthetic looks a whole lot more medieval than the rest of my Cobalt Scions force. This led me to have a bit of a think about how they fit in. Regular readers will already have learned that when I say "a bit of a think" this generally means "Charlie's written a load of new lore." Today, then, I offer you three things: Pictures. The death of an Astartes Chapter. Notes on the Heraldry I've chosen. The Nova Tarentis Massacre A prosperous world of significant agricultural and mineral output, Nova Tarentis was crucial to trade within its area of the Segmentum Pacificus, and an obvious target for the archenemy. Traitor Guard and Dark Mechanicum forces attacked in strength, and pleas for aid were made. Keen to end the invasion quickly, the full Azure Drakes chapter responded, along with four companies of Cobalt Scions in support. The Drakes' Chapter Master Sorkhos Danithor committed to a full orbita...