Blood Angels Assault Marines and Celebrating 200 Posts

These past two weeks, I finished the Blood Angels Assault Marines and got to work on the next few things for the Legion. Also this post marks the 200th one on this blog! (At least if the numbers on the back end are to be believed, I did not bother to count them all...) This calls for celebrations and so I allowed myself to start on the big boy for the Blood Angels, Sanguinius himself.

Pict 1267: Blood Angels Assault Marines

Pict 1268: Blood Angels Assault Marines

Pict 1269: Blood Angels Assault Marines

These Assault Marines were quite fast to get finished. I really like the way they look as a group! Slowly I seem to be getting the hang of using the weathering powders on the base. Might have to get some more experience, but I felt a lot more confident with this batch.

Pict 1270: High Host Destroyers (WIP)

The next few miniatures for the Blood Angels will be a small squad of five Destroyers. Dominion Zephon has the option to take them as a command squad and I liked the idea of that. They still would be legal as a normal Destroyer Squad, but usually I might not include a vexilla on jump troops (does not seem right to me). These ones got the hand held vexilla, however, to make them look more like a command squad with a Legion banner.
For now they have the oilwash applied and I wating for it to fully dry before getting to the highlights.

Pict 1271: Sanguinius (WIP)

Lastly, I started to work on Sanguinius himself. A bit of converting going on: Magnetizing the spear / sword was quite easy. But I also wanted him off the pillar he comes with and use his flamboyant pose to emulate the amazing Fall of the Rebel Angels by Luca Giordano. I ordered a Herald of Khorne to use as the demon being steped on and turning his head. Ideally I'd like to use some more demons to build up a scenic base for him since I did not order him fighting the big Ruinstrom demon when he was availiable like that.

Luca Giordano, The Fall of the Rebel Angels, 666.M2, on view at Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien

Blood Angels Air Support

The first proper post of the year with the first three completed miniatures, of which only one was stared last year! The big one is the Avenger Strike Fighter painted in Blood Angels Legion colours. The other two are Rohan miniatures I wanted to use in game.

Pict 1261: Avenger Strike Fighter Crew

Pict 1262: Blood Angels Avenger Strike Fighter

Pict 1263: Blood Angels Avenger Strike Fighter

Pict 1264: Avenger Strike Fighter Rear Gunner

This was quite a neat project – really something different from what I usually do. And quite big as well! I sometimes had difficulties handling the plane while painting.
To get my bearings I looked at a lot of other Blood Angel aircraft as well as other Avenger Strike Fighters. To my delight, google recomended one of the latter painted on the blog Würfelwiese – a blog I highly recommend! I looked at it for inspiration on which panels to set apart in a contrasting colour and for pointers on where to put weathering on the model.

Pict 1265: Rohan Captain and King's Huntsman

On a whim, I painted these two Rohan miniatures for a game today. They are both from the Rohan Commanders set, but the Captain with the Orc is the metal version, converted with a Warhammer Woodelf bow, while the King's Huntsman is unaltered. Sadly the latter suffered from a bad case of Finecast face, but I did what I could... And for an evening's work I'm very happy with the pair of them!

Pict 1266: Blood Angels Assault Marines (WIP)

Lastly, these Assault Marines are pretty much done as well. If the Rohan Commanders had not jumped the queue, they might be there already. The are only missing the weathering on the red armour, so I expect to have a neat little before/after comparison with the next post!

The Butterfly's Tally 2022

Happy New Year! 2022 has drawn to a close and as is customary this calls for a tally of what I painted, comparing it to my resolutions from the start of the year and make some new resolutions.

Final Miniatures of 2022

Pict 1257: Blitz Bowl Face Off

Pict 1258: Blitz Bowl Dwarves

Pict 1259: Blitz Bowl Dwarves

But first, here are the last few minatures I managed to paint in 2022 – the Dwarf Blitz Bowl team. As with the humans, I did not go for my normal painting standard but a bit below that. I'm not perfectly happy with them, but they look good enough to play with. The major hurdle was the orange... I really hate the bottle of Lava Orange by The Army Painter, I have here. The paint simply does not cover well. But then again, I don't paint that shade of orange that often, so I did not want to buy a similar colour by a different manufacturer and powered through.

With that I've finished a grand total of 131 minatures this year. Just a little bit more than 2021 – a double success! And with this number in mind, we are already into...

The Hobby Tally 2022

So, these were my resolutions for this year:

• 20 Warhammer Fantasy / Age of Sigmar miniatures
•  19 models painted plus 10 Blood Bowl balls and markers – I'd call that one done
  
• 10 Infinity miniatures
• not a single one painted...
  
• 10 MESBG miniatures
• easily done by Erebor Dwarves alone
  
• 10 miniatures by independent creators
• only the five Mjowls from the very start of the year...
  
• 10 pieces of terrain
• about half way there with a set of dwarven doors, the 5 pieces of the crashed Aquila Lander and a few bits of 40k scatter
  
  

Looking at it now, that is still quite a lot of stuff and while I managed to fulfill about half of these promts, I fear the hobby butterfly effect really prevented me from getting to the rest. For example, at the start of the year, I did not imagine painting the Blood Angels (more on those later). And the models also reflect the games I played or did not play – since I mostly dropped out of Infinity, I did not paint a single miniature for this system... Still I'm pretty happy with what I achieved and looking back at these goals will inform the resolutions I want to make for this upcoming year!

And if you want so look back at my progress of previous years, here are the links to the tallies of the past: The Tally 2017, The Tally 2018, The Tally 2019, The Tally 2020, The Tally 2021

 

Other big projects of 2022

There are some other projects I want to highlight, looking at my Middle-earth miniatures first:

Pict 1136: Mordor Troll Chieftain

Pict 1139: Mordor Troll Chieftain vs. Aragorn Elessar

Right at the start of the year, I converted and painted two Mordor Troll Chieftains – the second one stepping on an unfortunate Aragorn. I'm still really happy with the two of them and they take a place of pride in my cabinet.

Pict 1196: Númenorean Banner Bearer

In June I painted this Númenorean banner bearer to enter into the Middle-earth painting competition over on Instagram. While I did not make it that far in the competition, I really enjoyed the opportunity to challenge myself, especially with the freehand on the banner itself.

Pict 1210: The Nazgûl of Dol Guldur

The Nazgûl of Dol Guldur were a great project to do over the summer. For one I did not have that much time to paint during august and september and the Ringwraiths seemed like a nice and enclosed project to get back into the swing of things. And of course I got to experiment with texturing the cloth which came out great. If I were to redo the banner bearer from earlier, I'd do that to the black and white textiles for sure!

Pict 1163: Howling Griffons Sternguard Veterans

Other than my adventures in Middle-earth, I mainly spent the year painting Space Marines. I had not thought it possible (man, I still love the little space mans!), but first Arbitor Ian got me back into them with his series on the Badab War; the result of which are these Howling Griffons.

Pict 1260: 2022 Blood Angels Legion

Pict 1232: Blood Angels Contemptor

But of course the big thing was the release of the new edition of the Horus Heresy. First up, here is a photo showing my painted collection as it stands right now. I'm pretty impressed with myself that I was able to stick to it so well. It's Arbitor Ian again with his Tale of Four Gamers series that's kept me on track here. And of course participating in Dreadtober was a highlight for the project! Posting progress every week and seeing what everyone else was up to was great fun and amazing to get to know other bloggers!

Hobby resolutions for 2023

Seeing how I did and did not achive my goals last year, I want to set my new targets with an eye to playing the games. I find that to be one of the best motivations to actually paint my models. But of course I will always get swept of track, so my first three goals are somewhat small asks. I also want to try and finish some more terrain and especially get some progress on with the modular gaming board. Lastly, I again want to paint over 100 miniatures in total. While I have not painted less in the last few years I still want the ecouragement of a goal to keep me in line. And of course I want to try again and paint / sell more than buy...

So, that's it; here is what I want to accomplish this year:

• Paint and play at least the first of the two Cursed City expansions (it's only 6 miniatures: 3 giant bats, Radukar the Beast, Lady Annika and Carmilla DuSang)
  
• Paint 5 Infinity miniatures and play a game with them
• Paint 10 MESBG miniatures
• Paint 3 more tiles of the modular gaming board as well as the rest of the Garden of Morr (that's 6 pieces of wall)
  
• Paint at least 100 miniatures in total