Malifaux: Building the Whiskey Golem and Miss Ery

A clash of titans!

Although the the last month has been an incredibly busy one, I am happy to say that it was not completely bereft of modeling time.  Admittedly, I am still assembling Ophelia’s crew of gunslinging gremlins, but as I worked on them, my eyes kept being drawn to the shiny box containing the Whiskey Golem. Who would not be excited about a ramshackle walking cask of strong alcohol?  Eventually, the urge became too intense, and I put the gremlin that I had been working on aside and pulled open the whiskey golem box.  I convinced myself that it was the right thing to do. After all, any self-respecting gremlin needs his malt liquor, right?

The Evolution of the Tyranid Zoanthrope

In space no one can hear you scream.

While no one was really expecting it, Games Workshop revisited the Hive Mind and opened the floodgates to another wave of new tyranid monstrosities over the past few weeks. When first hearing about the coming tyranid releases, I made the assumption that it would focus solely on introducing large tyranid bio-constructs to serve as army centerpieces (sort of a trend for Games Workshop for a while now). This was largely true, with the release of the Toxicrene and Maleceptor on the first week followed by the Tyrannocyte and Sporocyst on the second. However, the third week took a drastic turn. Instead of dreaming up new tyranid creatures, they looked inward and redesigned two of their older units in plastic, the Venomthrope and the beloved Zoanthrope! Frequent readers may remember my earlier post looking over the evolution of the iconic tyranid warrior. Now that the Zoanthrope has new and exciting plastic kit, I can think of no better a time to do something similar!

The Genesis of a Space Marine: Unboxing Vulkan and musings on a conversion

Another Primarch, as impressive as the last!

By now it is probably not a surprise to anyone that I am a huge fan of Forge World's primarch models (http://betweenthebolterandme.blogspot.com/search/label/Primarch). I have written about them at length on numerous occasions, and eagerly await each new release.  Despite my inherent urge to collect all of them just for the sake of having a complete collection, it is not very practical.  For single models, they are very costly, and often require a  significant time investment to assemble and fix their casting issues. Furthermore, inherent in their nature, they are all from different Legions.  And no matter how fanatical about the models, I simply cannot collect a small army for every Legion such that each Primarch has a place.  To get around this to some capacity, I considered trying to use some of the models for conversions, but their cyclopean scale made me hesitant and I shelved the idea, waiting for some inspiration to push me past those initial musings.  That inspiration came when Migsula of Legion of Plastic, unveiled his newest project, the Vlka Fenryka.  Taking what he learned from his Legion project (creating a true-scale Alpha Legion army), he set his sights on the Sons of Russ, and set out to create a band of warrior-gods from the 13th company.  Unlike his Legion project, which he restricted to only plastic, he has fully embraced Forge World and has begun to create warriors using some of the Primarch models.  And while a talented modeler like Migsula dabbling with some of the finest miniatures in the world is exciting by itself, it was the stream of posts that followed (along with the accompanying discussions in the comments section) talking about his artistic vision, that set my imagination racing and rekindled my desire to use some of the Primarch figures as a basis for conversions.

Putrid Blightkings: Death Guard terminator conversion

Embrace the madness in your soul!

In our last post about the Putrid Blightkings, we talked at length about how they are uniquely poised to be the foundation of all manner of interesting conversions. In our minds, the most obvious was utilizing them to make a range of interesting and unique plague marines and plague terminators for Warhammer 40k. Since the models are so complex and layered, it quickly became clear that a simple weapons swap would not do the models justice, and that they would require more significant modeling work. I am happy to report that work is well underway for the first of these conversions, an ancient Death Guard terminator! This post is geared around showing my progress on the conversion and talking about some of my thoughts on how I might finish him and what to do with the rest of the squad. Hopefully I can get some opinions from all of you about the unfinished aspects of the conversion!