The ute of today

I love this hobby. I really do. It's safe to say that I've dedicated quite a chunk of my life to constructing and painting 28-32mm scale miniatures based on the various worlds of Games Workshop. Anything can spark the beginning of a project: the release of a new miniature; something I saw online; a passage in a book; a scene in a movie; or even a real-life object, building or landscape. I never really know where the inspiration will come from, but it usually forms the burning need to create some cool-looking derivative model that will somehow slot into my existing collection. Often I'll start with the intention of really going to town, taking my time to actualise the ideas floating around in my head in a way that is as accurate or interesting as possible. To attempt to achieve something that sits at the (admittedly not very high) pinnacle of my capability. 

But occasionally I'll simply want to paint a model with the sole intention of clearing some desk space.

This Mantic Mule was just such an occasion. Released as a robust, sci-fi, military asset, I thought it would instead make a rugged, little, utility vehicle (or ute) for more domestic usage. The sort of thing you might see driving around the enclosed road system of an Imperial Hive City like Kruenta Karoliina Arx Rotunda.

But once I'd built the thing, it just sat there for years, looking forlorn and unloved, collecting dust. It's not alone in that fate, as I have hundreds of unpainted miniatures waiting for their moment under the brush. But when I absent-mindedly picked it up earlier this week and reacquainted myself with its muscular design, I realised that if I stuck to a quick, simple, paint-job, I could get the whole thing completed using just the spare moments of that single day. 

So a lunch-break and a bit, a decidedly non-military colour scheme*, and a handful of dry transfers (that I'd never used before, but which I wanted to include as an oblique reference to my rugged, little, youngest son) and this was ready for display.

As is often the case with these quicker projects, I'm a little indifferent to the final piece. I'm neither proud of it, nor do I dislike it. It's good enough to add to my collection of domestic 40K models, without being any kind of centrepiece.

But at least I have a little desk space back.

*Non-military colour scheme in the classic sense, that is. I guess there are plenty of sci-fi forces that use colour schemes heavily featuring yellow and green. My very own Ork Armoured Brigade being a pretty good example.

Three fast cars

In the classic 60s heist caper, The Italian Job, a British criminal crew put together a collection of vehicles with which to steal a cache of gold and drive it across the Alps. As well as the iconic 3 Mini Coopers, they also get hold of an Aston Martin DB4* and two Jaguar E-Types. These three fast cars, as Michael Caine's Charlie Croker explains, were on standby in case anything goes wrong. They were to be used as emergency escape vehicles, presumably for rapid redeployment of the senior gang members, should things go belly-up.

This idea of having fast back-up vehicles in case of trouble is not entirely dissimilar to something my dad once told me about motorcycling. If you're going to ride around on a bike, at some point you're going to get into trouble. So try to make sure the bike is quick enough to get you out of that trouble, before hospital or the morgue catch up with you. Of course it's not flawless logic, but in my time as a biker it definitely came into play on at least one occasion.**

Civilian motorbikes should play out in a future project, but for now the idea of quick, nimble transport, that isn't military in its design, is going to concern itself with vehicles of the four-wheeled nature. It's something I've wanted to bring to my Warhammer 40,000 tabletop wargaming collection for a while, as it fits well with my interest in the domestic side of life in Games Workshop's far future. Of course, in the game, we rarely get to see this civilian side, and the setting only occasionally reveals the existence of what it refers to as groundcars. There are scattered mentions in some Black Library fiction, but the only official models I can think of that come close to being actual cars are the Achilles Ridgerunner for the Genestealer Cult armies and the Tauros and Tauros Venators from the Enforcer and Astra Militarum ranges. And to be fair even these are substantially more like military buggies than civilian cars.

Achilles Ridgerunner and the old Elysian Drop Trooper Tauros

So what might civilian groundcars actually look like? The first time I saw any kind of model to represent this was probably way back in April 1990, in White Dwarf issue 124. In the 'Eavy Metal section we were shown Dale Hurst's scratch-built Genestealer Cult Coven Limousines.

Dale Hurst's seminal Genestealer Cult

This sparked a wave of similar-looking converted vehicles, that used contemporary cars from other toy companies as their basis. Eventually smaller wargaming companies got in on the act, and some truly incredible models were produced. Most notably for me was the line of civilian vehicles made by Grim Skull, for use not just by the aforementioned Genestealer Cultists, but by Inquisitorial warbands as well. At the time of writing, these models can still be purchased over at Wargame Exclusive. I might well take another look myself at some point in the not-too-distant-future.

Gothic sci-fi vehicles from Wargame Exclusive

The models include a wealth of incredible detail, from armour plates, to hood-mounted weaponry, caterpillar tracks, vents, spikes and even wings. But they were not quite what I was after for this project. I wanted something a little less ornate. Something that looked fast and utilitarian.

When I first heard Necromunda was taking to the Ash Wastes, I thought it was going to be a vehicular combat game, along the lines of Games Workshop's much earlier Dark Future. I had already made a handful of civilian vehicles (for use as both generic working sci-fi vehicles and as burnt-out terrain), so I was inspired to finish another small batch. But most of these earlier projects were about getting something finished, or exploring a paint scheme, rather than pursuing a specific design idea. So this time I wanted to go a bit further, taking The Italian Job's three fast cars as a starting point, and seeing what they might look like, ripping across the wastelands of the far future.

Enter the somewhat niche concept of customised, off-road sports cars. 

This was pretty much what I was after. But maybe not quite so pristine. So for the general condition of the vehicles I looked to the 2008 movie Death Race (the Jason Statham remake of Death Race 2000). The cars in the movie sported cool-looking guns, which were very tempting to appropriate on my models. But I had promised myself that my three vehicles would remain civilian to look at, being used for the deployment of gunmen, gangers and heavies, rather than carrying obvious mounted weaponry. Thus the cars themselves needed to be unarmed. So from the Death Race aesthetic I just wanted to incorporate some of the scratched and damaged panels, and hastily welded field repairs to give my vehicles a bit of much needed dark future flavour.

I was lucky enough to already have an unfinished model car in my collection that seemed like it might fit my desired look. It was the Marua Nemesis from the sadly now defunct Antenociti's Workshop. It's the black undercoated model in the below photo, and you can see my initial clean up of it here, from way back in 2016. After some scouting around in my local pound shops I managed to find another couple of fast cars that looked like they might be roughly the same scale. The red one is plastic, whereas the orange one has a metal shell. 

I broke all three models down to their constituent parts, in order to see what could be done without cutting anything up. 

Then ordered some additional bits from the ever-reliable Zinge Industries. Mainly wheels and lights.

After this, a quick raid of my bits box, including scouring through any left-over parts from Ramshackle Games, in order to find some extra gubbins to stick on the roof of each model.

And then just one last thing before painting. The two pound shop cars both had see-through windows and interior detail, meaning I was able to create a few armed gangers sitting inside, either driving the cars, or riding shotgun. This really helped, er, 'drive home' the message about ferrying manpower from one place to the next. If you look closely at some of these photos you can just see them through the plastic windows. 

After painting the first two in something approaching the Death Race style, I decided I wanted a lighter, more obviously different colour scheme for the third vehicle. So instead I went for a slightly newer finish, that, although clearly dirty, was only just beginning to take more serious damage. I should probably have used an airbrush to achieve smooth colour transitions between the lighter and darker areas, but to be honest I think I'm still a bit apprehensive of that particular tool. Perhaps more effort with an airbrush can be one of my goals for the year. I guess I can check back in December to see if it has transpired.

In the meantime I foresee quite a few more Orks on the immediate horizon, as I'm hoping to put a significant dent in the remainder of their un-painted army this year. But I'm getting ahead of myself. There'll be more on them and their machinery next time. Until then.

* Apparently the Aston Martin was damaged early on in filming, so a Lancia Flaminia was disguised to look like it for the Mafia hilltop scene where all three cars are pushed off the cliff.
** For the sake of balance, it's also worth noting that the sheer instant power of a sport bike probably got me into trouble as well.

Agents of the Imperium, shoulder to shoulder, side by side

I'm doing something a little different today. I wanted to try out an idea, so for this single exercise I've briefly changed my approach to the hobby. But before I get into that, a bit of backstory.

In late 1998, Forge World was unleashed on the world as a specialist offshoot of Games Workshop aimed at older, more experienced hobbyists. Although it was meant to concentrate on large scale busts and terrain, by the early 2000s it had dramatically expanded its scope to include an incredible selection of 28mm resin models.

There were so many amazing sets available, from just about every variation of Imperial Guard tank you could imagine, to mobile Ork fortresses on caterpillar tracks, huge Chaos War Mammoths, Death Korps of Krieg troops mounted on gas-mask-wearing horses, servitors, Inquisitors, dragons, aircraft and a hundred other models that I really wish I'd bought.

Forge World's Krieg Death Riders and Ork Battle Fortress. The latter is sadly out of print these days.

And the Chaos War Mammoth and Marauder Bomber. The elephant might be one of the rarest kits in existence.

In that last category 'models I wish I'd bought' were the Titan Crew On Foot, consisting of a Princeps and two Moderati, sculpted by Simon Egan. When they were first released they cost something like £12. My younger, naive self didn't know what was to come with the prices of models, and I think I found them too expensive. Yet they stayed in the range for about another decade, slowly creeping up in price to around £17, before eventually being consigned to the big-glass-display-cabinet-in-the-sky in the mid-to-late 2010s.

As soon as they disappeared from the Forge World website, I realised how much I wanted them in my collection. More so than any of the other fantastic models that were still available. A feeling I'm sure many other hobbyists out there are frustratingly familiar with. So I then spent several years scouring eBay trying to find them, in the hope of not having to pay the £70 to £100 they were routinely going for.

Finally, about a year ago, I found them for not much more than their original store price. Result! The downside was that as well as having been painted in colours not to my taste, they had also been converted slightly. But these were minor gripes, and it was still an opportunity too good to miss. So I bought them, dipped them in Dettol until the paint came off, then stripped away all the extra parts that had been added. To my relief the base models were almost 100% intact.

Last week I thought it would be an interesting project to get some paint back on them. I realised that the original Forge World paint job was pretty much exactly what I was after, so that got me thinking about the aforementioned experiment. I decided to break out my smallest brush and do my absolute very best to emulate the display colour scheme of the finished Forge World models as closely as I could. Obviously having the small brush wasn't enough in its own right, and unfortunately my lack of any real painting talent soon came into play.

Nonetheless I've posted the results here for all to see. Below are the original models, expertly painted by Stuart Witter for the catalogue, and then after that, my somewhat less expert attempt to copy the colour scheme and photograph them from the same angle.

Once I got started I soon realised that these characters sported some serious detail. So much so that I actually couldn't see it, even wearing my strongest reading glasses. For the first time in my hobby career I tried using a magnifying glass, but that made it extraordinarily difficult to coordinate the brush, so instead I came up with a rather foolish looking solution. I wore two pairs of glasses at the same time – and it revealed a whole wealth of detail that I had no idea was even there. Below are some more shots of Stuart Witter's beautiful smooth paintjob, followed immediately by my not-so-smooth effort.

Although this has confirmed my suspicions that I'll never be a superstar painter, I have actually surpassed my meagre expectations and am secretly quite pleased with the results. These guys will be a proud addition to my collection, going in among the various denizens of my hive city, Kruenta Karoliina Arx Rotunda.

So now I just need a Titan to go with them.

RIP Forge World of old, you will be sorely missed.

Necromunda Ash Wastes inter-spire light haulage rig and escort runner

In anticipation of the release of the new Necromunda Ash Wastes vehicular combat game, I've dug out a handful of unfinished models and given them a coat of paint.

At the time of writing there's some speculation about the forthcoming game, but not many hard facts. As far as I can tell it looks set to introduce something like the Road Warrior aesthetic of the Mad Max films into the Warhammer 40,000 universe. And not for the first time either. Games Workshop has gone down this route before. Previous instances of the company riffing on George Miller's post-apocalyptic Australian action film series have produced the games Dark Future, Gorkamorka and Speed Freeks.

These three games all have various crossover points with what I imagine the new Necromunda expansion to be, but Dark Future, released in the late 80s, was the only one that focussed on human gangs – even if the models were in a slightly different scale to everything else. Coming in at roughly 20mm tall, the miniatures were way bigger than 6mm Epic scale, yet smaller than the 28-32mm of most of GW's other games.* But that didn't stop them being brilliant. Here are a few pages from White Dwarf around the time.

The game bonded a kind of sports car, go-faster aesthetic with the darker Mad Max look and feel, and the results ended up being occasionally grimdark, and occasionally colourful, and occasionally somehow both.

This started me thinking about what I call the Star Wars paint-job. It's the colour schemes we find throughout the Star Wars franchise, where vehicles are painted in predominantly flat, neutral colour tones: greys, creams etc, with a single, brighter, accent colour injected for detailing. And then the whole thing is beaten up, battered, and generally made to look as if it's seen better days. Luke's X-Wing in the original movie is a classic example, and it felt like an interesting direction in which to take a couple of ground vehicles.

The car below is a Marrua Gaucho from Antenociti's Workshop. It's a solid chunk of resin, and I've talked about the pre-paint clean-up here. I've decided this is going to be an escort runner; a fast set of wheels used to accompany a slower moving vehicle, providing extra tactical options, and additional manpower.

Meanwhile, I've called the truck an inter-spire light haulage rig – mainly because I'm anticipating the land train in the forthcoming Ash Wastes boxset to do a similar job, but to be significantly heavier. The model is actually a Pegasus Tactical Vehicle from Puppets War. You used to be able to buy the trailer (seen in the top image of the below set) that afforded a few different ways to construct the whole thing. I wanted to keep this modular capability as open as possible, so I talked about magnetising the various parts in an earlier post, here.

Below are some of the various different possibilities from the kit, seen from a few different angles. It was important to me that the two alternate cabs had individual paint schemes, but that the rest of the parts would be completely compatible with both.

And last, and probably least, I also quickly painted up the following little fella. It was kind of a test model for the other two, where I could brush up on the techniques and see what worked. The model itself was just a cheap toy car that I found in a pound shop a few years ago, and thought might be good for just this purpose. I don't love the paint job or the vehicle, but it's good enough to pass as a bit of background texture, tucked away in a dark corner, out of full sight.

So now all that remains is to await the new game and see if these models fit with its as yet unseen contents. That and paint the other 6 or 7 hundred other miniatures I've already got kicking around at home.

*And, of course, a lot smaller than the 54mm of Inquisitor. 

Hammer time! (*hammer not included)

ABC War Robots. Atomic. Bacterial. Chemical. Mass-produced, automated troops, designed to withstand the most hostile warfare environments. I may have said this before, but it's definitely worth saying again: everyone needs one of these in their life. So here's mine, Hammerstein, leader of the ABC Warriors, and now my stand-in model for any dangerous, humanoid robot in any science fiction miniatures game you care to mention.

I decided I wanted a model of this implacable metal soldier after completing my squad of Adeptus Arbites Enforcers inspired by the Judges from the 2012 Karl Urban Dredd movie. 

As a continuing homage, I thought it would be cool to revisit the earlier 1995 Stallone movie, Judge Dredd, and try to build one of the Judges' main foes.

This guy

Seen here deploying signature 'red steel' 'looks to kill.'

However I soon stopped short when I realised I had no idea whatsoever how to go about doing this. No idea whatsoever until I saw something rather excellent on Twitter. Enter Martin Carcosa and his ancient cybernetica combat unit, based on the same high-cheekboned, killer robot.

So thanks are due to Martin Carcosa, not just for this wonderful inspiration, and for working out which parts from other kits looked awesome, but also for being kind enough to let me copy it, and even actively encouraging me to do so.

However there was one downside. I liked what Martin had done so much, it became kind of pointless to simply try to make an exact copy. He had already created what I considered the definitive WH40K version of the Judge Dredd movie robot, so what was the point in me doing the same?

Instead I figured I'd do what I did with my Judges' bikes and go back to the original comics and take some additional inspiration from there. So a quick flick through several hundred pages of collected stories and I'd found the following images:

A panel from the original ABC Warriors strip in the late 1970s, with art by Mike McMahon

The above image showed I could have Hammerstein's iconic ROVER badge on the back of his waist, instead of the front where it's usually found. In my design for the model I wanted V-shaped pistons below his stomach region, rather than a wide, flat space for text.

Hammerstein in classic 80s story The Black Hole, with art by Simon Bisley

In the Bisley picture above we are seeing the character's rank markings on his arm, with a single arch-like sweeping shoulder pad to frame them. This felt like a good look for my version.

Hammerstein in Khronicles of Khaos, with art by Kev Walker

As the comics went on, Hammerstein took more and more knocks, with his armour starting to look heavily pockmarked and battle-scarred. I suspect images like the one above (circa 1992) had quite an influence on the movie version, which hit the cinemas just a few years later.

A page from The Volgon War, with art by Clint Langley

Skip forward another decade or so, and the square-jawed war droid appears to have rebuilt and repaired himself and given his bodywork a new coat of paint. I figured using that blue-grey colour for my model would be a very obvious way to differentiate it from Martin's and would give an instant clue that mine wasn't wholly based on the robot from the film. Although I am still partial to a bit of rust and weathering, so my version isn't exactly what you'd call factory fresh.

So in the end it made sense to base my model around the same head and arms that Martin used, emphasizing Hammerstein's flat-top, crew-cut, and giving up the hammer in favour of those over-sized hands, whilst at the same time keeping all the exposed cabling and pistons from the movie version. But then mix in some of the comic book cues seen above. 

For anyone interested in the construction side of kit-bashing and scratch-building, you can see the, er, 'nude' version of my model below.

And finally, if, like me, you find this monstrous metal infantryman strangely fascinating, and want to know more about the character's appearances in various media, you might be interested in this earlier post detailing some of his history.

Fast forward 12 months

It's been almost exactly a year since my last post. That's a huge gap, but the good news (at least for me) is that, although this blog has been dormant, my hobby activity has not, and I have plenty of bits and pieces to share over the next few posts.

But firstly, let's start with why. Why have I been quiet for so long? Well, the main reason is that this time last year, my wife and I began to undertake some fairly extensive work on our family home. Work that saw us completely pack away all my models, tools and paint, that saw us remove most of the top section of our house, that saw at least one ceiling fall in, and two people fall through them (neither were injured), that had rain water pouring down internal walls, a bedroom completely open to the elements for several days, and that ended up taking more than twice as long as originally estimated. But after everything was over, and finally complete, work that gave us a whole new floor on our house. I'm talking, of course, about a loft conversion, but after the painful, drawn-out process that we went through, it feels like so much more than just those simple words.

When we first started the work, I had no idea that I'd be putting this blog into such a long slumber, even though the building work had been planned many months in advance. I just never put two and two together and realised quite how disruptive it would be. I hadn't accounted for some of the intense mental anguish that would occur, while watching one's home being quite literally torn apart.

But it's done now and the upshot of the process, as far as this blog is concerned, is that instead of a dingy space, in among the rafters of a dusty roof, I now have a properly appointed office for all my work and hobby pursuits.

When fitting out the room we ensured there was plenty of shelf, desk and storage space. Me so that I could fit everything in and it would still be neat and functional, and my wife so that she could guarantee there wouldn't be any of my toys elsewhere in the house.

One of the biggest boons of this, and of being forced to organise everything from scratch, is that when placing finished models on shelves, I was able to set them up as little displays – almost like dioramas. 

Chaos troops man the ramparts of a town they have taken...

... in defence against the approaching Undead horde

Dredd style Arbites Enforcers bring riot suppression weaponry to bear

An Ork armoured brigade starts to amass in preparation for their next Waaagh.

The streets of Kruenta are alive with all manner of Imperial citizenry

There was a lot more to the last 12 months than just the moments I've touched on above, and there's a fair bit more to my office than just these images, but I think it's probably best to leave it here for now, to ward against the dreaded approach of boring and excruciating detail.

What's that? Too late?