Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Mustard Warriors







The main thing I hope to work on with my new mantis warriors is weathering. Over the weekend I got a couple of test "models" painted to try some new techniques. First up was a crashed aquila piece that was lost (cat had dragged it off somewhere) when I painted the rest of the set. I had some pictures but they didn’t turn out particularly well. The mantis warrior scheme is primarily camo green with dark yellow as the secondary color. I started off testing the green. There are some neat tutorials out there on how to use hairspray as a masking agent for airbrushes to get a chipped effect. this is great except I don't have any hair spray and my airbrush is currently out of commission.

Here is the first marine. He is close to what I am looking for but I’m not entirely happy with the result. The mantis warrior symbol is going to be replaced now that muggins was kind enough to point me towards some decals. The red is also a little too red in my opinion so it’s get some brown added on future models. The is also something about the stripping on his face that bugs me, so that will get some touchup. I also have no idea how to base these guys. Any comments or suggestions would be appreciated.

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

New Army Project

Just in case there weren't enough suits of power armour around, the 40kfightclub and AFK Games are starting a new Babad War campaign. Rules are fairly simple even though they aren't fully defined. Pick an army, paint them up, play some games. After looking at the various color schemes for different armies I settled on the Mantis Warriors. I've never painted a green army before so that should be interesting. The other thing I wanted to do on the Space Wolves but never did was more intensive weathering. Mantis warriors seem to be a good source for this as well since their fluff is that they have been isolated and poorly supplied.

They are also veterans that excel at guerrilla warrior as shown by their chapter tactic, every power armored, infantry squad that doesn't have a transport gets infiltrate. Which is cool until you think about it. You lose a ton of mobility and there are a lot of times you don't want your basic marines so close. It is however, cool for things like devastators, sternguard, and multimeltas. Like my space wolves, this will mostly be a painting project but those loyalist scumbag need to be stopped. I know I want a couple of things in the army. Techmarines (probably with a cannon), a contemptor dread (although it will probably count as a regular/siege one)

I’m thinking something along the lines of:

Mantis Warrior Librarian
Sternguard with combi’s
Vanguard Veterans on foot
3 tactical squads, 1 drop pod, 1-2 rhinos
2 devastator squads, probably 1 plasma cannon based and 1 missile launcher based
Dreadnought (the siege dreadnought seems pretty cool) in fancy drop pod
Thunderfire cannon
Some sort of flyer (fluff says they take good care of their thunderhawks and flyers. Leading candidates are the rumored white dwarf one, storm eagle, assault ram)

Hopefully about 2000 points all said and done. Many of the details will have to be figured out once the rules for 6th edition appear.