Review: Mr. Nekonote Station

So I went to C2E2 a few weeks ago. If your only exposure to cons are 40k heavy, please do yourself a favor and attend one of these pop culture/comic conventions. They are ever so slightly less geeky, although the winner of the cosplay contest was a female 40k inquisitor!

The plasma gun was pretty amazing.

So while walking through Artists Alley where commissions were incredibly cheap (but no one I spoke with had really done 40k art), I noticed that there were a few hobby vendors an aisle over amidst the booths full of vintage toys and fidget spinners. Most of those hobby booths were Gundam-focused, of

Conversion: Grot Flier

Roald Dahl! I've never even heard of this.

25-28mm scale is a funny thing, especially 28mm Heroic. It totally makes sense in terms of being compact enough for gaming but large enough to have some detail in the miniatures. But still, it becomes problematic when trying to adapt materials and models from other manufacturers that were not intended for gaming let alone this scale.

Review: Eccentric Miniatures Base Conversion

Adaptors are always nice.

Just a quick one today for the new year. I'm going to try to get through my backlog of posts that I meant to write, so we're going to go from no posts to a post every two days or so for a while. For the 3 of you who are actually still following this blog (hi Mom! Just kidding, even my mom won't follow this), brace yourselves.

So today we have a nifty little kit from Eccentric Miniatures. Or, more specifically, 

Corsec Magnet Applicator

Once in a while, I will stumble across a product that solves a minor chronic problem so elegantly that I can't figure out why I hadn't looked for it before. These are not wholly innovative gadgets; rather, they are things that have existed, but I just had no idea since it didn't fall within my tiny sphere of attention. I want to show you one of these products.

Mantic Typhus Zombies, Part 1

At the last Adepticon, I noticed a deal at the Mantic booth. They were selling a box of 30 Zombies from their Kings of War game and 3 boxes of 10 Marines from Warpath in a bundle. This was an obvious kit to create cultist zombies for the Chaos Space Marine codex that had just been released. So I went for it...

DIY Dark Eldar Webway Portal, step by (short) step

Remember these little guys?

These little demispheres were in stock for a few seconds on the GW site. They are selling for FORTY USD DOLLARS on Ebay. I'm all for convenience, but that's simply ridiculous.

Eldar Pegasus Scratchbuild

Andy Hicks has posted a step by step of an amazing Eldar scratchbuild. It's the Pegasus super heavy.

It's enormous.

 

 

Check it out at Graven Games.

Epic Contest Results and Pocket 40k

Nope

So I had a "little" contest (heh heh) to give away a slew of tiny epic marines and Land Raiders. Now, A little background about my giveaways:

Phenomenal Baneblade/Warhound

This is an interesting thing...something that blew me away. I saw it on Apocalypse 40k, but it has a long provenance prior to that.

More than meets the eye.

The gentle hammer, or GW and their C&Ds.

So as you know, GW and the community have suddenly hit this crazy perfect storm of conflict. People are suing each other, DCMA notices are flying around, and GW is seriously locking down their intellectual property. I would put links to the Chapterhouse thing, but if you don't know the story by now, consider it a bullet dodged.

Anyway, I understand why GW is hurling out cease and desist letters like Pez out of a cartoon character's trachea, but I was really surprised to find out how far they were going.

Adepticon 2013 Part 1: My favorite army, Despicable Me

So I'm noticing that more and more people are blogging about Adepticon, so much so that any sort of summary on my part would be redundant and incomplete. So I thought I'd take the next few posts just to talk about some of the fun stuff I found there. I'm sure even these personal thoughts will be covered elsewhere, but, well, on with it!

I wanted to show you my absolute favorite army I've seen since I started attending Adepticons.
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WIP: Emperors Children Sonic Dread...color blocked

Not even remotely related to this post.

Not much time to post this evening. It's already 1:00am and I have a bunch of work to do for a 9:30am meeting. But I wanted to show the progress I've made on my little 3 year project, my Sonic Dread.
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Dreading a Bath

There's a party in the Simple Green hot tub, and you're invited!

Four Dreadnoughts. A furioso and furioso librarian that were in the colors of the Angels Sanguine. One AoBR dread in A.S. colors that is going to be sporting the autocannon arms from Shapeways, and my Emperors Children / Flawless Host Sonic Dread conversion.

These four will be my first foray into airbrushing in over 10 years.Exciting!

WIP: Emperors Children / Flawless Host Sonic Dreadnought

A little over two years ago, I posted about my very first conversion project. I took an AoBR dread and made it Chaos-ish. You can see my initial efforts here and here. Almost immediately after those posts, I realized how bad the CSM codex was/is, so I shelved this dread, using it for test painting gesso, sashes, foundations, etc. I eventually stuck it on a shelf.

Hey, what do you expect? I had barely gotten back into the hobby.

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Utterly Amazing

Every once in a while, I will stumble across some tidbit on the Internet that influences my take on 40k. Sometimes, I'll find something that is compelling enough to share with the community. And then there are very rare occasions where I will repost something from the 40k community because it's just that cool.

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Captain, My Captain

My attempt to finish my Blood Angels to a table top standard is coming along slowly but steadily. Next up is my converted AOBR Captain. I thought I had written about this model before, but I can't find it right now. He is the normal Black Reach Captain but with one little change: I Dremeled off the bare head and replace with with a Corvus pattern helmet.

Army Painter Dragon Red Spray Primer, Mechrite Red, Shining Gold, Chaos Black, Red Gore, Blood Red, Bleached Bone, Boltgun Metal, Mithril Silver, Devlan Mud, Asurmen Blue, Baal Red, Iyaden Darksun, Sunburst Yellow

His position is a bit static, but hey, he's from the AoBR set, so what can you do? The only painting I have left to do is a bit of detail when the red primer shows through. In addition to my helmet "conversion", I added one extra little touch:

Do you see the purity seal on the back of the banner. That's made of greenstuff and Instant Mold. I did a review of Instant Mold here.

The thing about the Angels Sanguine...

From the Lexicanum:

The Angels Sanguine are known never to remove their masks in the presence of anyone outside their Chapter. Even amongst their battle-brothers, their faces are usually hooded.

So this poses some challenges when fielding a few marines. I have always hated bare-headed models...it just seems really, really dumb. I understand why, but it's still silly to me. So when I realized that I needed to field a sergeant in my tactical squad, I knew I had to modify the AoBR sergeant a bit to make it work in a fluffy way.

This is the sergeant from the Black Reach box:

I only have CSM heads in my bitz box since I've never collected regular space marines before, but I found sort a neat looking one that didn't have spikes or horns. In fact, it looks a bit like a chaplain helmet, but not quite as skull-like.

I dremeled out the head and neck and voila (sorry, this was taken late last night on a cell phone):

Each time I do these little, forgiving projects, my confidence builds, and I want to do more. I still need to figure out the whole mycetic spore thing.

WIP: The Furious Three

I wanted to continue posting about trying to get three Blood Angel Dreadnought variants from one Blood Angel Dreadnought box and two AoBR Dreads. The first part of this WIP is here.

I couldn't find the memory card for my Rebel this evening, so I used one of my kids' digital cameras. I had it set all wrong, and only one picture came out to the point that one could tell what one was looking at. Here it is:

The regular Furioso front plate has been added, and it fits as well as could be expected. In fact, it worked so well that I decided to hack up a second one to use the librarian faceplate as well.

EDIT: OK, I had second thoughts, and I went digging again for the memory card and found it.

So the "regular" Furioso came together nicely, and my poor dexterity with green stuff was not really evident, except for the circled part. The Dremel melted the polystyrene and created this little lip. The good news is that it's very very thin, so once it completely sets, I will just remove it with a knife.

A few spots...

needed gap filling...

here and there.

So here's another interesting thing. This is a piece that comes with the Furioso set. It's the top plate if you decide to forgo the magna grapple:

The problem is that on an AoBR dread, this piece is part of the front faceplate. So even if you had an extra one (or two) of these, it wouldn't really help in terms of money and of effort. So I took up the Dremel and grabbed the half melted faceplate of the dread that cannibalized for this project:

And I simply cut out the highlighted part. It fit quite well:

I HIGHLY recommend gluing the faceplate in place before adding the top plate. It's a bear to install after the fact.

Pretty decent, huh?

OK, I'll have more shortly after the green stuff dries.

Simple Green vs Dullcote....Simple Green FTW

This is my chaos dread after a 36 hour bath in Simple Green and about 30 seconds under running water and toothbrush:

The black on the left shin and behind the head is stuck on grey stuff, so I'm not that concerned about it. Now I just need to go over it with a toothpick and then prime it. World Eaters? Emperors Children? Stay tuned...

Dreadnought Conversion, Pt.2

The terminator parts worked well. Still needs more paint, wash, and sealing:

Wow, is this a difficult model to paint. I'm actually really impressed by the level of detail in this model. There are support cables and hydraulic systems in places that could not possibly be seen once the model is assembled. that's pretty cool for a model that comes with a starter kit.

Just to reiterate, the standard is the staff from a Chaos lord sorcerer, as is the helmet, cowling, and apron. The shoulder spikes are from a Chaos rhino kit. The tyranid skull is from a genestealer box (I think...it's an actual skull, not a conversion from a head...I'm not sure where it came from, actually).

 Since black is such a pain to paint well, I considered other factions than Black Legion, but I'm bound by my own closed-mindedness...they just don't look as evil as black.

Hopefully, I will be done soon. I'm falling behind schedule.