Speeding across the Land

This time the post is about old Land Speeders. Specifically the middle child of the family. The second edition speeders have always been one of my favourite minis in general, and are definately the best version of the Speeders in my opinion (I'm not much of a fan of the Rogue Trader flying couch - please don't make me turn in my oldhammer card).

The evolution of the Land Speeder. From left to right we have Rogue Trader, 2nd edition and 3rd edition and onwards. Pic belongs to GW.

 Last week after the first proper post of this blog (not counting the introduction, that was more of an "about this blog" type of a thing) I was contacted by an army buddy of mine - technically we were in the coastal forces (part of the navy) but  "coastal forces buddy" just sounds dumb, so I'm going with "army buddy". Anyhow, he had seen the blog and told me he had an old Ravenwing Land Speeder he had no use for that he'd gotten as a part of a lot and asked whether I'd have any use for it. I did and do, so he gave it to me. What a chap! We met up and chatted about the hobby for nearly hour and a half until I had to leave (had an early shift the next day), after concluding that we should have a game at some point in the future.

I did not expect to be able to finish the speeder this quickly. However, I've been home, sick, yesterday and today (we have a very bad flu wrecking havoc at work, now that I'm home as well everybody from our location and several people from the other two locations has been on sick leave within the last two weeks and we've had to close early several times due to lack of personnel), which gave me time to finish it between spouts of sleeping and reading (pretty much the only three activities I've had the energy for).

Gunner's side

Pilot's side

I think it's fairly obvious I still need a lot of practice with free hands and the pinwash, but overall I'm pretty happy with it. The change in scheme and on the shade of green has really done wonders for my motivation. I haven't had this much fun painting marines in a long while. With these versions the biggest hurdle isn't the actual painting though. It's the basing. The weight is ridicilous. When I was doing my other speeder a couple of years ago I spent more time, money and effort on the flying base than the mini itself, nothing held it in place until I got some ridicilously strong epoxy from the hardware store and strong magnets, and even then it still took several layers of epoxy and several days of hardening (this time it was sturdy enough for pictures after maybe 16ish hours, but I separated the mini and the base and left it to dry more after taking the pics, just in case). Seriously, you could rob a store with these things. Just throw it at the window or clobber the clerk with it.

The Land Speeder is attached to the flying base with magnets and a ton of epoxy.

Aaand I just noticed some green on the Heavy Bolter skull from the pic. That needs to be fixed.

 

Revitalising the Beholders

Beholders (on a blog titled Beholder's Lair - get it? I'm subtle like that) are my custom Space Marine chapter and main 40k army. I started the hobby again about 2,5 years ago after a hiatus of around 8 years and when I did, I opted to make my own chapter instead of continuing with Ultramarines as I had during my first stint in the hobby (I also had another custom chapter back then, the Shield Bearers. With badly written background and everything, and grand total of two painted miniatures).

Beholders in all of their badly lit glory - Lamenters and Assassins unrelated

When starting on the Beholders I pondered several colour scheme options, including a dominantly purple scheme, mainly green scheme with white as a secondary colour, two white schemes (one with blue and other with green as a secondary colour), and likely some others I've forgotten. I ended up picking the white and green colour scheme with green shoulder pads and aquilas (when present), white body, helmet and shoulder trim. That choice, as I later found out, didn't turn out to be all that optimal. I kept getting asked about my "Death Guard" army, which was fairly confusing considering they clearly weren't Death Guard. Except they kinda were. It turns out during my 8 year hiatus Games-Workshop/Forge World had changed the official colour scheme of pre-heresy Death Guard from white body, helmet and shoulder pads with green shoulder trim scheme which I was familiar with to a new scheme of white body and helmet, green shoulder pads and white or gold shoulder trim (seems to vary depending on the source). Oh joy.

Pre-Heresy Death Guard - Old colour scheme

By the time I found out, it was way too late to repaint the army. Thus I ended up with a loyalist space marine army intendend to be Sons of Horus descendants who missed the heresy (more on that in some later post - I have a rough idea on the background of the chapter but it's not finished by any measurement), that looked like one of the traitor legions. They were painted during my first year back, and while I'm no master painter, they're definately behind my current painting skills. This together with the colour issue put them on a shelf as far as painting goes.

Pre-Heresy Death Guard - Current colour scheme

 In the Beholder's current colour scheme (or old colour scheme now, I suppose, since I've decided to change it) the green is Vallejo Sick Green, but I've grown sick of it, so to speak (pun intended) and so went looking for opinions in the Oldhammer and general miniatures groups on Facebook (there are several oldhammer groups with differing focuses in Facebook - there is also the Oldhammer Forums themselves, but I've never hung out there much myself). Got good opinions and insight in several of them, but especially on MIDDLEHAMMER. Tested some of the ideas and ended up changing the green, and also painting the greaves green from now on (I'll be painting the greaves on the existing minis with sick green to mach their shoulder pads, but after that it's time for more healthy colour choices).

Old colours on the left, new colours on the right.

I like the new scheme quite a lot, and luckily it's close enough to the old scheme that the changes won't take forever and the greens don't clash too much. I've also decided to use black pinwash instead of dipping from now on - kinda need practice on that front though.

The two latest additions to the army, and the first ones in the new scheme. Devastator painted yesterday, and the Dreadnough today.

And a backside shot for good measure. Everyone loves a good backside.

Well, now all I need is readers and this blog is off to a good start!

Setting up a Lair

Alrighty then. This is the first of what I hope to be many posts about the things I do on my free time. Mostly this will focus on miniatures (particularily of the Oldhammer variety) and miniature games, but I'll also be writing about other things such as boardgames from time to time.

The reason for setting up a blog is mostly to document the things I do, and also to get things going on the hobby front again - I haven't really been "feeling it" all that much lately when it comes to minis and though this might serve as an interesting way to change that. I've never run a blog before, altough I did used to have a plog (project log) of dubious quality on Warseer.com, but several factors including but not limited to; Warseer suffering several months long periods of downtime, my being self conscious about my painting being horrible, being forced into bed rest for nearly two months due to badly breaking my ankle in February 2017, and Warseer's general slow burning death, led to me abandoning the plog entirely. My painting is still not all that good, but it is better than it used to be and I'm less self conscious about it. I will also be posting pictures of minis not painted by me and also only partially painted or fixed by me aswell, since I tend to keep the paintjobs on second hand minis that are painted well enough unless I have something specific in mind for them. Sometimes I also get minis specifically for the paintjobs. This has been an introduction of sorts, which I will be following with a proper mini post either later today, or in a few days if I get stuck doing other things.

It seems pictures are all the rage these days, so here's one of my painting station.