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.

[Click for more...]

A MASSIVE(ly small) GIVEAWAY CONTEST!!

Well, after an ambitious false start attempting the Angels Sanguine halving scheme, I took a mental inventory and decided to reboot by utilizing a "normal" tabletop standard Blood Angel scheme and setting a realistic schedule for myself with incremental rewards.

I'd like to introduce to you my first completely painted Tactical Squad!

Click to Enlarge

I'm not going to base any of them until I am completely finished painting my Blood Angels, and I still need to apply decals or paint insignia, but the paint is completed. This first milestone has been reached only a few days behind schedule, and I've decided that the first reward should go to one of you!

The Tiny Giveaway
I have decided to give away a copy of Death Angel by Fantasy Flight Games:
Space Hulk: Death Angel - The Card Game is a cooperative card game set in the grim darkness of Warhammer 40,000. Players must work together as an alien menace threatens to devour their hopes of survival. If all Space Marines perish, the players collectively lose. Likewise, if at least one of the surviving Space Marines completes the objective, the players all win!


Interesting, huh? Well, you could win this brand new, sealed item, including shipping just by entering.

This game only costs about $20.00 US, so I'm not going to assign some crazy task to enter this contest. Here is how you enter and win:

1. Become a follower of this blog.
2. Take a picture of your best single Blood Angel (power armor or terminator) troop, elite, or devastator miniature. No vehicles, dreads, fast attack or HQs. Make sure you have a small piece of paper that has the date and "hivezero.com" written on it clearly visible in the picture.
3. Write at least a few sentences about what you like about the model and how you painted it.
4. Email your pictures and words to zeroATchemist.com.

A small panel of judges, including myself and at least one minor 40k Internet celeb will judge the pictures and declare a winner. Anything you send to us will be considered free to publish. You retain all rights to the picture unless other arrangements are made.

If I have to, I will post all the necessary legaleze, but I'm hoping that this will be a simple thing. Send me pretty pictures, and one of you will get a card game.

I look forward to your entries! Deadline: September 30th, 11:59pm Central Time.

Independence Day + Other Fun Events

For all my friends in the U.S., Happy Independence Day!

So it's been almost a month since I last posted. I took a bit of a break from painting to work on my army lists and to get through some non-40k activities (believe it or not, I do have a life outside 40k). With my wife and kids (and dog!) going to the summer place for 6 weeks, I thought I would actually prepare this year to finish my 3 armies - Nids, BAs, and CSMs.

The Nids are about 95% finished, and the CSMs are not a high priority...at least until the next codex. But those Blood Angels - or, rather, Angels Sanguine - wow, there are a LOT of them staring at me on my workbench. I'm actually debating changing these guys to regular Blood Angels because of the sheer numbers. Let's see:

Sanguinor
Dante
Lemartes
Astorath
Mephiston
JP Chaplain
Termie Libby
10 Tac Squad
10 Tac Squad
10 Tac Squad
5 Assault Squad
5 Assault Squad
5 Assault Squad
10 Death Company
5 Scouts
5 Sanguinary Guard
DC Dread
Furioso Dread
Libby Dread
Dread
5 Termies
5 SS/TH Termies
5 LC Termies
Baal Pred
Stormraven
5 Rhinos
Land Raider
2 Drop Pods

Yikes. So to help me finish these, I just took delivery of the following:

It's the Paasche Talon with all three size needles. It's very comparable to the Iwata HP-CS, but for 10 dollars less, you get a ton more accessories. I will be doing a review of this as soon as the compressor shows up.

On another note, has anyone played the new Warpath Rules yet?

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.

WIP: Angels Sanguine

I managed to get a little better with the Micron pen for halving. Actually, I've managed to get braver or more confident rather than better, but at any rate, I have a full tac squad almost ready, with 4 of them done enough to photograph (click to enlarge):

Sorry about the tight depth of field...the guy on the right is the least finished of the 4 anyway. As usual, a macro lens just accentuates all the flaws, but i am pretty happy with this one -er-these four.

As I mentioned, I have 4 more just about ready. The other two, well, I have a small problem.
These are AoBR marines, so the sergeant has an exposed head, and he's basically a two piece model, so there's very little in the way of head swap options. The problem is that, according to the fluff, the Angels Sanguine never take their helmets off because of some horrible secret. So the sergeant, and captain, for that matter, are both very unfluffy for the Angels Sanguine. I'll have to think about this...

Sangweenies

Vampires in Space!!!

OK, so if you've been following along on this blog, you know that I've pretty much completed a Tyranid army. I did so without really thinking about how competitive it was, since I had restarted from scratch. I just liked the models. Then the new Codex hit and people were underwhelmed.

I then bought a sizable Chaos Space Marine force, which in retrospect is a pretty disparate and unfluffy set of choices, and started painting them. I didn't realize that no one liked the codex...I just assumed it was the evil version of Space Marines.

So now that I decided to do a power armor army (try saying that 10 times fast), I saw it as my opportunity to choose a codex and build that was at least competitive in terms of Mathhammer and Internet foolishness. Since I can't stand the viking aesthetic, I was limited to SM or BA. So I've decided on Blood Angels. I'm not really wild about painting more red, but compared to the number of gaunts I've painted, this should be nothing.

Instead of making things easy, I thought I would do a quick test to see if I could paint the Angels Sanguine scheme:

While I was at it, i thought to do a quick test of the normal Blood Angels scheme of all red. I looked up Les Bursley's tutorial on Angels Sanguine and got to work. I know people have mixed feelings about Les, but he is the only person doing tutorials that actually seem geared towards the person who is trying to learn.

At any rate, this is what I ended up with. Click for bigger pics:

The halving scheme was surprisingly easy with Les' method of using a Micron pen to draw the hard border. It only added a few minutes to do it. I think that's the scheme I'm going to go for.