The hammer of war

A spark

During my years in this hobby I've poked my nose, among other places, in the Warhammer 40,000 universe. Actually the whole scale modeling and "let's paint small things" thing bit my when I was in high school, when my friend Joose showed the Hero's Quest pieces he had painted. With my other friend Mika we thought that we could do the same with our Space Crusade games. These two didn't keep painting stuff for long but I seem to be still on the same road.

I still have that game somewhere in the closet and I think that the pieces are just plain awful, but maybe I could take a photo or a few to show where and how I more or less started all this. Some of them were so ugly that I had to repaint them later - but still ages ago so they may be only marginally better but pretty bad despite any "improvement" attempts of mine :P

Sinking deeper

Even though Space Crusade has a nice amount of varied pieces, they didn't last me forever. So I ended up going by Fantasiapelit every once in a while to get more crap to work on. If I remember correctly I had some imperial stormtroopers, space marines and because I liked the attitude, a Basilisk SPA unit (it was also a neat target marker on the board as opposed to an empty or a few-blip-infested room).

Then at some point, maybe it was because I liked the first Dawn of War RTS I invested in a metallic Dreadnought thingamagick. They've got flamethrowers and they can pick up their enemies and swipe the hordes with them - how can you not like that? Because I didn't have a deeper understanding of the Warhammer universe, I decided to take a safe route by doing a Blood Angels unit. Besides, one of the marine teams in the game was Blood Angels to begin with.

A red warmachine

My recollection of how I built this thing is hazy at best, but I do remember very clearly that the right arm was a project of its own. The connectors didn't fit together at all so I had to trim down the rod and carve up the hole so they'd fit at some point. Because of this the right arm is in an unusual-ish pose, to hide the small remaining gap. If I remember correctly, you could put an enemy figure in the raised arm to be thrown around and that it looked amusing.

The whole was basecoated black and then a bunch of layers of Citadel's Blood Red was applied. Those grappling fingers were painted with a Revell's metallic copper, metallic parts and worn off areas were drybrushed with either Chainmail or Mithril Silver - whichever of those I happened to own at that point. Tin Bitz was used on the exhaust pipes, that was a new, experimental paint for me at that point. Green lenses in the Left and Right Torso are just a dab of Green Ink each and all those bone/skull/wing decorations are first drybrushed with that metal paint and then redrybrushed more lightly with Skull White. That was the gist of it, at least.

My baseplate was again basecoated black and then simply drybrushed with whichever of the Citadel's greys I happened to have and that's all. The skull(s) and spent casings were done just like similarly coloured ones on the Dreadnought itself.

Oh, and those decals? I applied enough of them so that it wouldn't look "nude" by accident. As a whole I think it's a very neat thing even though I didn't have a clue about the item itself - not that I know more now. One thing that jumps out of the photos to me is that smoke grenade launcher, and I can't recall if I did something to this thingie after I had taken these photos... I'll take a look at my storage to see if that red beast is still somewhere or have I forgotten it to my parents or something. I also decided not to glue the torso to the hips because I wanted to torsotwist for the pics. And I'm not going to go and play with this piece so it didn't need to be sturdy for gaming purposes.

A superstylish finished piece

I'm the first one to admit: these photos are beyond awful. There's just nothing I can do to them anymore, really. Maybe my original idea was to take better photos at some point. Or maybe I just didn't care in the least. Do try to survive, ok?

That's this week's weirdness. For the next one I'm really going to try to get at least something done to my Jagdpanther. I've kept telling myself that for a couple of weeks already, but I'll prove myself one of these days ;)