Hobby Blog #5: Teenage Mutant Sewer Zenos
A reasonably successfully month of hobby stuff. Just working through a bit of my backlog really.
Adepta Sororitas
I got a bit of work done on my Sisters. My hobby shop finally got black spray paint in again, so I kit-bashed a few more basic sisters to fill the ranks, along with a couple more flagellants. It is getting to the point that I can fill out the core choices in a sisters list and a growing squad of killing machines to back them up.
I also bashed a few more extras. I want the option to run multiple small squads as well as big ones. Also, I might want to run dominion squads with melters or storm bolters. I need some additional superiors to command those squads with a range of weapon options.
So I made her.
There are some things I need to fix with this paint job. The eyes need a bit of tidying up and the base is a bit off. Man, I still have not got the hang of pigments.
However, I’m very happy with the kitbash. It is a really simple one. It is the lead warrior of the Triumph of Saint Katherine kit with her shield arm replaced with the under-slung bolt gun from the Battle Sisters kit. A lot of the average battle sisters are more ambitious kitbashes than this, but sometimes a really simple replacement, or two pieces just fitting together, can feel just as satisfying.
I used a colour shift paint on her sword, which I plan on doing for any power weapons in this army. It looks quite good in real life but I couldn’t get it to show up on the camera.
I got my hands on the Redemptionists kit. The plan was to make some missionarys and priests for the list, but there is a whole load of extra parts in the kit and they lined up reasonably nicely with the Battle Sisters kit. It took a bit of filling and a little Milliput to make them line up, but they look great. In game, one can count as a heavy flamer and the other as a superior with chainsword, combi-flamer.
Sister Chloé
This is another simple bash from the Triumph kit, with just a spear replacing the heart icon. I think I’m going to run her as a Dogmata. They are supposed to have a mace, but I feel an imposing spear is just as good for ensuring that no sisters give into the temptations of chaos and heresy.
Assassin
Part of the England loot was an old metal Vindicare assassin. I’m sure the sketchy Thorian inquisitor bankrolling The Order of Our Crippled Mother is perfectly capable of scoring some assassin support if he needs it, so Procul agent 7T joins the sisters for some fire support. Who can say how many surprise assaults by the order have simply been to provide Procul agent 7T with the chance to take a particularly important shot?
This is a particularly lovely model. By keeping it really simple with the paint job, I think he has come out beautifully. One of the best I did this month. Though, I could do with cleaning up the pistol a bit. That’s the horrible thing about photographing your models. Mistakes that are hardly visible with the naked eye stand out.
Cardenal Duco
The Cardinal will play the role of a missionary in the army. He is a very simple bash using one of the maces from the Iron Golems kit and keeping everything else as is. Again, a simple bash can sometimes provide the effect you are looking for more than a complex over-the-top one. I painted him up to be far gaudier than the rest of the sisters. How could people possibly know he is sacred and important if he isn’t decked out in gold?
Genestealers
I finished of the “start collecting” box a while ago, but I had the gear to start working on my aberrants. The idea was to bash together the Warriors and Iron Golems sets. The problem was that the sizes of the two kits were way too off to make the bash clean. The fix I settled on was to hide as much as possible under robes. Ragged robes are already part of the look of the genestealers. Also it makes sense that the more together members of the cult would throw rags over their more mutated brethren. Then, at a distance, they might look like servitors to any enforcers who don’t know what is and is not their business.
I’ve made robe effects in the past out of green stuff and it looks fine, but I tried something different. I’d been experimenting with toilet paper soaked in PVA glue in some of my terrain building and I thought it might be worth giving a try on miniatures. It works remarkably well. It is easy to manipulate, has a long drying time so you can fiddle with it until it looks right and then it dries quite hard and, thus far, is durable.
Emboldened, I started thinking about other ways I could fill out the squad up to a round 10 without buying new kits, or just doing the same arm swap over and over again. I was already doing sewer bases for my army. I thought perhaps some of them could be in the process of coming up out from the filthy water to ambush their unsuspecting foes.
Then I took the concept to its logical conclusion.
They are quite a lot of fun. They are not really what I was trying to go for in the beginning, but they do the job. I just need to make 4 more regular lads and a boss and we’ve got a squad.
More Mordheim Bandits
I had a play around with my bandits. First of all, this guy.
He is a kitbash I did as a teen who I thought would work as a bandit chief. The base is an old Valten model. Remember him?
I had also done a bit of a paint job on him. It was terrible. I used Green Stuff World’s paint remover along with a toothbrush to get him down to the pewter. It did a really good job. Although I am aware that there are other cheaper ways to strip miniatures, it was my first time doing it and it was reassuring to have some official product to use. I painted him up in some bandit greens and I gave him an oil paints wash. Using oil paints is becoming more of a commonly used tactic when painting minis and it is fun to do. It is also fun to go to an art shop and pretend to know what you are doing when choosing from the paint selections. I put on a beret and everything.
This is just a black oil wash and it makes him look grimy and dark in a way that the acrylics never do. It looks good and I will certainly do it for other bandits.
Like these two.
The guy with the sword is a kitbash my brother did when we were teens and left unpainted down the years. The other is a bash of some Empire, High Elf and Wood Elf bits. They are both painted with some rudimentary base coats, then an oil wash. If grit and grimy is the look you’re going for, you really can’t go wrong with oils. I learned how to use them from a couple of places. Not Just Mecha was the first video I watched on oils and what inspired me to try them. However, I also found this video from Zumikito miniatures helpful along with this one from 52 Miniatures. It is a style of painting that I think opens up all sorts of new options for painting. In the future, I want to give a try to some more complex Blanchitsu style paint jobs. I still have a lot to learn here. For instance, while using white spirit to reactivate the oils, I put too much pressure on the q-tips and ended getting down to the primer. I’ll have to be more gentle next time.
Terrain
Just a few bits and bobs here. Mostly just trying to make some points of interest for my Mordheim table.
And another trash build for Necromunda/40K. It’s kind of a mess, but it does the job. The posters are from the amazing Underhive Art. It was very fun to use them.
Gaslands
I have been making Gaslands cars. I like the whole concept of miniature agnostic games, particularly the ones that encourage cheap and dirty kitbashes (there may be some Napoleonic figures entering my life soon).
I had a lot of fun with these using bits from the Genestealer sprues, toy guns, toy cars and bits of trash. There is nothing super ambitious here, but it is fun to play around with bits without the feeling that you might be mucking up some expensive Warhammer figures.
The little figures are from a world war 2 game. I chopped them up, shaved of their helmet and replaced them with colourful green-stuff hairdos. they are unconvincing up close but could conceivable have belonged to Tina Turner at a distance.
