Good old fashioned Blood Angel Terminators (with NMM)

I had a great day at Wayland Games/Tabletop Nation today, including a sweet game of 40k where my Eldar/Corsairs tabled a bunch of Grey Knights :) More on that tomorrow (I think). For today, here's some Blood Angel Terminators I painted a while back.

 Having painted nearly thirty Space Wolf Termies before this lot, it was kind of a relief to build and paint models with pretty much the same armour and equipment. Paint for the armour is the usual recipe of Mechrite Red, Blood Red layer, Blazing Orange and Vomit Brown highlights and Graveyard Earth shade.

 The Storm Shield has a very basic Codex Grey base. I forgot what I used for shades and highlights. I believe the cracked effects are just lines of Codex Grey/Chaos Black mix, with a very fine highlight of skull white (maybe a very light grey?) to give that 3D effect.

The 'nid skull is a spare from a genestealer sprue. Its a happy coincidence that the few 'nids I have painted have been that colour as it matches the colours on the termies really well. Almost as if I planned it...

 Side view - so you can see the Forge World shoulder pads. The sculpt quality is pretty good. You can keep the ribbons and parchment as far as I am concerned, but the winged blood drops are really sharply cast - very easy to paint up with a striking contrast between the recesses and raised points. I don't think the Blood Angels pack is nearly as good as the Space Wolves one - it would have been nice to see a proper conversion kit, rather than just an upgrade style pack. But they are still a nice way to mark out your BA terminators out as different than the plain boxed ones.

 So here I wanted to show the blend I did for the NMM effect on the Thunder Hammer. There's something about taking pictures with my phone when the light is really strong though, hence that bar effect you can see. I suspect its just that the light is too strong for my camera, but hopefully you get the idea. For a steel effect, I often start with a base of Hawk Turquoise/Bleached Bone. I then blend up to Space Wolves Grey, then through to White. I blend down to Regal Blue.

Getting this NMM effect is, in my opinion, easier on smaller pieces, like these blades or Dreadnought claws, than on big pieces of armour. Thats because you only have to worry about light coming from one direction. Often my NMM blends can actually look really crumby until the very last step - the edge highlight and notching. I often do this with my lightest blend of the base but you can do it with straight white paint too. Basically, you overbrush the edges (every one!) so you get a fine edge highlight and then add a few diagonal streaks. Depending on how you do it, you can get either the effect of the blade being pitted from striking hard objects of seeming to shine with reflected light.

You don't have to do a NMM blend to get this effect either. Even if you use the old Boltgun Metal/Badab Black wash, followed by a drybrush with Chainmail technique, you can add a degree of verisimilitude to your blade by adding these notches/streaks. The trick is getting the lines thing enough to look natural and then knowing when to stop :)

PLEASE do feel free to ask any questions. I know you are reading this :) If you have any questions about any of the stuff I have painted or written about, leave a comment. Unless you're going to be rude, of course. In which case, move on - this isn't the place for you :)

Eldar D-cannons, the Dead Walk, and Fast Vehicles FTW

I actually had a really fun game of 40k using Eldar this evening! Since getting hold of a bargain bunch of wraithguard a few weeks ago on Ebay i have been fielding a list based around them, and a Wraithseer. This has made me able to largely get around the major drawbacks of playing the prettiest race in the game - S3 and T3.
Eldar look great. Even though the sculpts are generally several years old and the tanks are all identical chassis, they can still look great. But they really suffer, particularly on 4x4 boards from being physically weak.

Bark > Bite

You have to plan on getting into a fist fight on a smaller board. Orks, Marines (all flavours), and 'nids are all very strong on the assault and won't have far to go to get at your skinny space elves. But wraithguard, while not having bags of killing power up close, are at the very least a formidable roadblock with their high toughness. And, when you field a full squad, particularly with a warlock giving Enhance, they have a good chance of just wearing you down. Over a couple of rounds of combat this evening my guard were able to take out Korsarro Khan and go on to hold up a squad of hammernators for another two rounds. This after obliterating that same squad's Land Raider.
I also have a Wraithseer in this list and, although he had been very useful in previous games, tonight he was only so-so. After destroying a Rhino and pinning the tactical marines inside he got such in combat with the hammernators. Taking a wound reduced his initiative to the same as theirs, while his invulnerable save was actually worse. It took then a couple of turns but eventually they were able to dispatch him for the loss of only two marines.
When we set upthe game I was really expecting to get tabled. My opponent had built a White Scars list, using one of the new Stormtalons, a squadron of Typhoons, a biker squad, and the aforementioned hammernators. Playing Capture and Control, with him going first, I figured he would use Outflank to quickly assault me at my 'base' while protecting his with a tactical squad. To combat this, I kept all my force in reserve, thus denying him a turn of shooting if he deployed stuff early. Despite my army coming on in a rather piecemeal fashion, this tactic worked out for me. When my Fire Prisms and Wraithguard cane on, for examples, they were both immediately presented with convenient targets to destroy (a Land Raider) or force to flee (bye bye, bike squadron).
In the end I was able to Forrest Gump my way to a win. I had planned to use a Wave Serpent, carrying Dire Avengers, to go flat-out at his objective, dismount, then assault him, forcing his troops to move off the objective as they piled in making the game a draw as my objective was unheld. But, at the last minute, it occurred to me that the Pathfinders I had had sitting across the table from my objective were troops! And that the Falcon right next to them was a transport! So a quick embarkation and flight across the board later, plus that assault at the other end, and hey presto - a win for the Eldar!
Funnily enough, my opponent had also forgotten Eldar scouts are troops, so he had not seriously tried to destroy them during the game. So my win was probably even more of a shock to him than it was to me. Full credit to him though, he took it like a champ.
A good time then, as they say, was had by all.
Its always nice to get a win, but its even better to have a fun game. We both had good fortune and bad, we both made mistakes as well as having some things go our way. I'm sure we will both learn from those mistakes too.

Getting Started

Well, I had planned to kick off this Space Wolves blog with a look at using the Citadel spray gun to base coat my brand new wolf guard terminators. Sadly the process didn't turn out as smoothly as I'd hoped for.

Turns out I got a duff gun from the local GW store. The pipe from the paint bottle didn't fit into the one on the gun itself without some severe brute-forcing. I managed to get enough paint out to coat three models before I decided this just couldn't be working as intended. My store's manager confirmed this and was happy to replace the gun. Unluckily for me they had no more guns in stock so I had to order one from the web. Should arrive tomorrow.

I did get on with painting the termies I had sprayed though. They're nearly finished - I took pictures to prove it. But it turns out my camera phone really isn't that good at close up stills, even with macro setting enabled, so the pictures are all blurry. Gonna work on that tonight and tomorrow and see if I can't come up with a solution.

In the meantime, a little background on the wolf guard I'm painting. A tip I picked up from a friend was that Space Wolves tend to do well at larger points limits because they have access to some powerful special characters. When I looked at the most powerful and special of their characters, Logan Grimnar, I saw his inclusion in an army made Wolf Guard count as troops. So I decided to put together an all-Wolf Guard, all terminator army list. I'll put the full list up later, but for now at 1500 points I have Logan and 19 brothers in 3 drop pods. For 1750 I stay with Logan and 18 guards but add in Njal Stormcaller. I'm gonna play around with subbing Njal out for a Land Raider, but at this stage I really like the impact Njal has on enemy infantry.

All this leaves me with lots of termies to paint and needing lots of games to practise before the Triple Crown Tournament at GW Headquarters in June. Yeah, I know - an all-terminator army is not going to win a tournament. But as I've only been playing the game since December I don't expect to win. This tournament is going to be mostly about fun, meeting people, and checking out Warhammer World. And hey, I have won three of my last four games locally with the all-termie funtime explosion force (and drawn once), so hey, who knows what might happen?