Wednesday 29 February 2012

GW Airbrush - first proper use

Well, after getting my Necron vehicles undercoated silver I used the GW airbrush properly for the first time. There was no way on earth I was going to use a paint brush to put Devlan Mud on the models. The airbrush did a good job, not brilliant but not bad either. The only real issue was that the Necron warriors on the ghost arcs didn't really get a good coating on the bits facing the middle. That's not the airbrushes fault though, that's my fault for assembling it before painting it.

I painted 2 Ghost Arks and 1 Command Barge this was. Just painting on Devlan Mud. I'm happy with the results but it did use 2 entire pots of paint!!! On the plus side though it took waaaay less than half the time had I done it with a brush. So I'm happy. I just with you could dry brush with an airbrush lol.

Here's one of the Ghost Arks after dry brushing and some of the unfinished brass bits. Still very much work in progress.


Also, a preview of an article about a new method of doing flight bases that I've found (uses voodoo and magnets :O

Blogroll

I just found out how to add a blogroll to the blog. I feel like such a dunce, I used to be good with computers once upon a time. This blogging business is still quite new to me.

Friday 24 February 2012

GW Airbrush initial review



I finally got round to assembling my Necron vehicles that I bought when the codex was released. When making them I realised that they were all going to be an absolute nightmare to paint. My initial thought was that you paint lots of bits before assembling. There are LOTS of bits that would need painting seperately and there is a hell of a lot of surface area to paint with a paint brush!

So I needed an alternative.... the GW airbrush came to mind. Its not too expensive so if it was a complete failure I wouldn't be too disappointed and I would test it on something else first anyway.

It arrived in the post today and I tried it in my lunch break. I found a poor unsuspecting genestealer that wasn't even undercoated. I loaded the airbrush with a tiny amount of tallarn flesh foundation paint and some water (about 50/50 mix).

The first thing I noticed was how powerful the air flow is. If you're painting small models you either need to stick them down or hold them in your hand or they'll get blown away as my genestealer did. I decided to hold it in my fingers.

The flow of paint out of the airbrush was really fine and consistent, much better than experiences I've had with aerosol undercoates.

After a few goings over I was left with a darkish flesh coloured genestealer. It was a great and quite even coat, no running or pooling. One thing I really like is that the details are still very crisp whereas if I'd painted it with a brush I would expect to loose a tad of crispness. The surface was also very smooth as there was no brush strokes.

All in all I'm pleasantly surprised with the good job it did. I look forward to dousing my Necron vehicles with devlan mud with it after I've undercoated them with silver army painter spray. It should reduce the painting time of my Necrons massively!

Sunday 19 February 2012

40k kill teams tournament - I won! Woop Woop!

Today was the Guardians of Tyr 40k Kill teams tournament at Wargames workshop. I entered with my 4 wraiths with whipcoils list and came 1st. We were allowed to give 3 models a universal special rule each, I gave one feel no pain, one fleet and one infiltrate.

It wasn't easy. The first 2 games my dice seemed to be lucky and my saves were going well (2nd game I didn't even lose a model, sorry Ian). 3rd game was pretty dire, I killed one space marine and lost 3 wraiths, loosing the game. 4th game I scraped a victory, 5th was a minor victory and 6th game was a hard fought victory deciding if I'd win or not. It was a good set of games and I enjoyed playing. The wraiths were pretty easy to use, I basically just had to hop from one LOS blocking bit of terrain to another until I was close enough to the enemy, most of the time that worked.

 Yay my first tournament trophy!





 The emperors finest hiding as far away from me as they could.


Tuesday 14 February 2012

Game 2 of the club campaign

I forgot my camera so no pics today.

Last night was an awesome, fun and truly bizarre game. I'll try to describe it as best I can. First off, I was a bit hyper from a crazy drive to make sure I got to the club as quickly as possible as I finished work later than normal. I got held up by an accident on the A1 and my car ran out of fuel near the club due to a dodgy fuel guage. I made it there half an hour late buzzing from adrenaline and having not eaten much. I dread to think how annoying I was last night.

Anyway, on to the game. It was a 3v3 game for random objectives. We had to search buildings instead of shooting and on a d6 roll of a 6 there was an objective. Also to make things way more crazy there was a set of tunnels underground accessible via buildings in the main table. These tunnels were represented with space hulk terrain on another table. The rooms in the tunnels were also possible objectives. We also had restictions to our force org, we can only have 1 elite/fast/heavy/hq if we take 2 troops, 2 if we take 3 troops or 3 if we take 4 troops. In this game each player only had 750 points, so the restrictions were quite limiting. We also had restrictions on max wounds, MCs, saves and vehicle armour.

On my side (the bad guys), I had necrons led by imotekh, 20 warriors, cryptek with chronometron and 5 wraiths with whip coils. Dale had orks, 90 boyz and a warboss. Jon had nurgley chaos marines and some plague bearers.

On the enemy side the corpse gods followers had: Blood angels led by Dante, lots of jump pack stuff and space wolves with erm wolfy stuff and long fangs.

Imotekh messed up the game quite a bit. We stole the initiative because of him and he made it night fight for the first 3 turns meaning we barely got shot at all. His lightning was a bit pants, killing only 7 or 8 marines I think.

The whole game revolved around trying to get guys into the tunnels and our armies moving towards the middle of the table. Two objectives were found and held by our side in the tunnels and one was found and held by the space doggies. My necrons fared alright, I lost 2 wraiths and a handful of warriors. My wraiths killed a captain and a squad of honour guard barely taking a scratch from them. The orks died in droves, kind of what orks do though. The nurgle forces did well holding 2 objectives and killing Dante.

The blood angels died in droves too but the space wolves did well, killing loads of orks.

So in the end the bad guys won. Dante now can't come back for the rest of the campaign (yay). Imotekh survived to fight another day. It was an amazing game. Haven't had this much fun playing 40k for a while. Congrats to the Guardians of Tyr for organizing it. Thanks Ian and Barrie.

I hope this wasn't too rambling or incoherent. I'm knackered and relying on my iPhone to autocorrect and hopefully make this all make sense lol.

Thursday 2 February 2012

We said we'd never speak of it again.......

....but we never said anything about writing about it.
Last Monday was another night of kill teams fun. It ended with a 4 way kill teams game with myself using necrons (4 wraiths) another necron player using 2 wraiths and some deathmarks, a chaos player with chosed and a pile of genestealers. 




Basically my wraiths and the genestealers ran towards the shooty armys, mine got there and the stealers didn't. I tore my way through the chaos chosen, barely taking a scratch, then set my sights on the remaining enemy necrons. His wraiths charged me and his snipers took out one of my wraiths. I managed to break through his assault with one remaining wraith. Slowly but surely I hacked and slashed my way through the deathmarks, taking a leadership test each turn. After 4 or 5 turns of Ld tests my wraith, left with 1 wound, stood triumphant on the battlefield with dead necrons and chaos strewn around him. Victory was mine [evil laugh]. Afterwards we said we'd never speak of the battle again but nobody stipulated anything about blogs lol.

Moral of the story - Wraiths with whipcoils absolutely kick arse in kill teams! I've yet to use them in a normal game but I look forward to it.

Wednesday 1 February 2012

Cryptek painted, Imotekh too

I've painted the cryptek now. He looks alright for a cheap and nasty quick conversion. The question is can I be bothered to make more of them. I might just use my pariahs as crypteks as they don't have any use now.

I painted Imotekh last week or the week before I think. Not the most complicated or dramatic paint job but it'll do. I find it hard to make necrons look spectacular as I only really use 3 colours on them; boltgun metal, brazen brass or dwarf bronze and blood red for the faces. Painting the Imotekh model has led me to redoing all the bases for my necrons lol. They were just unpainted sand but I've decided to go with the grey, like my Blood Angels.