Let's Do the Time Warp Again

It's been about a month since I've updated anything, but not for lack of doing anything: I recently came into a lot of Age of Sigmar miniatures — auctions and swap meets at your local FLGS are the best — and I've been busy doing a lot of grunt work on that front. To wit:

Formerly Slaanesh Chaos warriors. You can also see half-completed Marauders, left, several metal and plastic Plaguebearers in lovely plague green, the beginning of my kitbashed astrolith bearer (plastic saurus along with an unknown plastic totem), a modern plastic skink (which will one day be a skink chief), some old plastic reptile swarms, all Games Workshop; you can also see Genbu the Tortoise, from Wyrd; and a metal Skully from the original Calico Kate kit by Ninja Division (formerly Soda Pop Miniatures).

A Chaos chariot, converted from a corpse cart. (I can't take credit for this; it's part of a lot I inherited.) I really like this concept, and I'm looking forward to finishing the execution. The chariot itself is from the corpse cart kit, but I'm not sure exactly which kit the Chaos armored horses come from; they're likely either knights or lords, though I have a hard time imagining anyone actually ripping up either of those kits to make a chariot. I'm not sure where the tie came from, but it's HIPS plastic; as far as I can tell, it's all GW.

Literally dozens of models from almost as many kits — plastic saurus knights, original plastic skinks, metal terradons with skink riders, plastic stegadon (soon to be an engine of the gods, natch), original metal Krok-Gar on carnosaur, original metal slaan with plastic skink attendant, original metal salamanders, salamander handlers, resin sunblood, Tichi Huichi, plastic scar-veteran on cold one ... some green stuff, and based with pumice.

Not accounted for in the pictures: a full unit of 40 saurus, a Chaos chariot in metal, an original metal stegadon, 41 plague monks (have to account for both possible leaders!), 10 plague censers, a plague priest, another 10 plaguebearers, a Darkoath warqueen, a warshrine (or, rather, a few dozen bits that will become a warshrine), the Malign Sorcery kit ...

I wasn't kidding about it being grunt work — that's almost 200 battleline figures across two armies. There's not a lot of room for modifications at the grunt level, especially when you're working with units of 30 and 40. With my limited hobby time these days, I'm saving any special conversion work for big-deal or close-to-my-heart characters. For example:

My kitbashed starseer. It includes: The throne and skink attendant from the metal/resin slaan starmaster; the attendants and weapons from the original metal slaan priest; totems, shields, and arms from the plastic saurus warriors kit; skink rider from the plastic terradon kit; and a mystery plastic lizardman totem, all Games Workshop; there's some limited green stuff work, too.

My first DIY sculpt was Tetto'ekko; I've always had a soft spot for the concept of a skink pretending to be a slaan. This is my follow-up my sculpt, this time exclusively using Games Workshop bits. (For those not in the know — slaan are large, frog-like wizards who rule over the lizardmen. The skinks are the small, smart ones that act as their bureaucrats; the saurus — seen here as attendants — are the brutes who keep the outsiders out and advance the cosmic designs of the slaan.) And, of course, I'm using the original metal slaan as well:

Slaan Starpriest with plastic skink attendant, including green stuff. Games Workshop.

I haven't stopped painting, though it has slowed to a crawl — partly because I'm a little burnt out from the frankly tedious work of making a massive robot that just-so shade of teal. (I'm in the process of blending in Games Workshop's Nihilakh Oxide and Hellion Green before I glaze the whole mess and then go back in and add more rust. ... Then I can do the metals and orange spot-paint before finally doing the sickly green OSL. And then I get to paint the base!)

Then there's the seraphon scale-color test batch I did, using saurus warriors. The goal was to replicate a photo negative; the unnatural scheme is supposed to imply that they're not really living-and-breathing creatures anymore.

Plastic saurus warriors in photo-negative test scheme.

There's a little bit of clean-up work left on these — I've got to get the eyes looking nice, pick out the claws, and then figure out where I'm going to cheat the effect so it still looks photo-negative but also looks coherent from a distance. Part of that is the ultra-simple paint scheme I'll be applying to the various shields and jewelry; the real test will be seeing if the white-base, black-highlight scheme holds up when paired with a more traditional dark-base-light-highlight on the accoutrements. (I'll be bringing in traditional lizardman blue on the shields.)

I did the whole unit for two reasons: 1) I'll need a lot of test subjects to get this to look right; and 2) if it looks good out the gate, I don't want to go back and do the whole lot later. If I'm not happy with the final result, then I'll go with a more traditional scheme — blue and red, plenty of gold.

As far as my schedule: I'm still devoted to the idea of finishing my 40k army this year. For reference, that current list typically includes:

• Sorcerer on palanquin of Nurglings
• 2x plagueburst crawlers
• 9x Nurglings
• Chaos decimator
• 30x plaguebearers
• Daemon prince of Nurgle
• Foetid bloat-drone
• Poxbringer

Now that I have my Knight Valiant on the table, I'll be tinkering with that lineup; the robot clocks in around 500 points, so it's going to knock out a good chunk of the army. (I'm most closely eyeing the bloat-drone and daemon prince — I typically play progressive scoring games, so the Nurglings do most of the heavy lifting on the movement front. If I was playing a lot of maelstrom, the choice would be much harder.)

Once I've nailed down that 2,000-ish, I'm going to refocus on getting those exact models painted this year. From there, I'll move on to my Age of Sigmar stuff; the lizardmen will get some love as inspiration hits me, while the Chaos battleline models will get my workaday efforts.