House Hawkshroud group shot

While I was taking pics for my previous 2 posts I took some groups shots with Accipiter Ferox for no other reason than I wanted to:

Hawkshroud Skitarri Rangers

While my Hawkshroud Vanguard would run forward with Accipter Ferox, the squad of Rangers is intended to sit back in cover and shoot from range.

My fearless and cunning opponent and I are currently obsessed with the Prisma app for turning our pics into gothic cartoons - the plan is to do a bat rep completely in the style above at some stage when our schedules align.

First post for 2016! Hawkshroud Skitarri Vanguard

Despite a complete lack of posting this year, I've been making a fair amount of progress, so I have several posts queued up to catch up.

Oathsworn Knight

I have finished the Imperial Knight, after about a year, and am pretty happy with the result.

Battle Report: SW+IK vs Squat Hearthguard (SM) 1500pts

My friend and I finally got a chance to play - first 7th ed battle of 2015 sadly. We had both been painting up units for the game: me with my Imperial Knight, and him with his awesome custom Squat Hearthguard (counts as space marine).

The actual game itself turned into a bit of a pantsing - it was my friend's first game using the SM codex and his army and we were both a bit rusty. So I won't go into an in depth battle report but will let the pics give an overview. Lists and stuff after the break!

Skitarii & Decals

The Imperial Knight is getting closer and closer to being done. I headed into my FLGS on the weekend hunting for microset and microsol, which they didn't have and picked up some Vallejo gloss varnish, decal fix and decal medium. more on that later!

While I was there I completely gave into temptation and picked up a Codex: Skitarii and a set of Skitarii data cards (which in hindsight I probably didn't need as I only plan on running Skitarii as allies).

WIP - IK ready for decals & weathering

A slight delay to blogging this month, mainly due to my camera being broken - my daughter loves playing with it and I don't think the zoom was designed with an excitable 2 year old in mind. Photos this week are via a tablet, so apologies in advance for photo quality.

Work has been insane the last few months, so very little actual gaming has happened this year, but I'm continuing to make progress on the painting front.

IK - Does Sir dress to the left, or the right?

I still need to clean up the detail on the Knights body (so many wires) so decided to do a test fit of the plating to determine at what point the detail became hidden from view.

WIP: Imperial Knight rises

More progress - I'm pushing through the lack of motivation a little at a time, and as I started going beyond jut the Boltgun Metal and Tin Bits I can start to see him taking shape.

Imperial Knight progress & motivation

The Imperial Knight continues. Slooowly.

I've passed through stages 1 and 2 and caught myself veering into 3 and possibly 4 recently. I recognise the signs because I don't think I've ever painted or kitbashed a mini without even a 5 minute "this isn't working, OMG I suck waaaaah" moment.

WIP - Imperial Knight based and paint applied

The Imperial Knight reached a big milestone this weekend, in that it was actually based and then undercoated black.

Nekkid Knight. The plan is to undercoat the plates white so the yellow in the heraldry (House Hawkshroud) is a bit easier to paint. That's the theory anyway.

Terrain - Ruined barricades finished

Last weekend I managed to get a few hours free to finish off the ruined barricades terrain. Same approach as last time - dry brushing and some weathering pigments to finish.

I'm reasonably happy with how these turned out and they'll hopefully look good on the table. More importantly hopefully they will give a little bit more cover.

I have been planning to use 2 of the 6 resin pieces on my Imperial Knight's base, so this little side project gave me a bit of a feel for painting the resin. This helped me get off my butt and make some progress on the Knight this weekend. I'll post some WIP pics of that later in the week.

More ruined barricade pics after the break.

WIP: Imperial Knight right arm magnetised

I was given a free morning by my lovely wife who took my daughter out to visit a friend, so I chose to spend my few hours of freedom being very mature and responsible and playing with toy soldiers!

I want to be able to field my Knight with either the thermal cannon or battle cannon, as I'm only ever going to be buying/painting one of these babies - so playing with magnets it is!

WIP Roboto a Roboto Fight!

Some slow progress this week.

The Morkanaut continues and is at a point where normally I would finish the OSL and call it done, but I'm keen to break out the weathering pigments and see how that works.

Battle Report - first game of 7th Ed: 1500 pts new SW codex vs Squats (IG + IK allies) - Pic Heavy!

So my regular opponent of awesome and I finally managed to sync up for a game of 40k using 7th Ed rules and the shiny new Space Wolf codex I had obtained the previous week.

And it was awesome!

My Space Wolves and the Squats of Clan Kincaid have been duelling for several years over possession of an alleged artefact linked to Russ himself, although the Squats refuse to part with the device until the Wolves pay for Russ's bar tab (with interest).

And this time, the Squats obtained an abandoned mining robot housing the mortally wounded remnants of the last member of the Golgothan Resistance to help the remnants of the clan fend off the ravening force of Wolves.

Meanwhile, I tried out using a named character - Harald Deathwolf. With the previous codex, the named IC's were all so so expensive, but Harald is quite reasonably priced for what you get.

On to the detail of the game - lots of text and pictures after the break.

WIP Imperial Knight - Legs assembled

I spent an evening recently finally with the Imperial Knight, cleaning up and assembling the legs and lower torso. I have kept all the plating separate to make it easy to paint the parts of the skeleton underneath those areas.

First Post!

Who is this masked man, and why is he bothering?..

I have been gaming with 40k since late 2008, playing mainly 5th edition. I can probably count the number of 6th edition games on both hands due to the arrival of my daughter in late 2012 followed by my main gaming friend also becoming a dad in late 2013.

My first love in 40k has been the Space Wolves, and has been since I was poring through White Dwarf back in the early 90's so when I started 40k in 2008 that's where I began.

Since then I have also dipped a toe into the realms of Orks, with a Kanwall army (it was a great idea in 5th when I started, less so in 6th when I finished painting the army although still fun to play and a blast to paint.

So why bother with a blog since I'm certainly late to the blogging party?

Because 2014 is looking to be a big year, with 7th Edition having just dropped, and an Ork codex just around the corner. A Gorkanaut should fit into the kanwall just nicely.

There are rumours of a new Space Wolf codex, which would be almost 5 years since the last one. The 2009 codex has aged well, but an update to 7th ed would be nice.

And after trying to decide what codex to ally my Wolves with for about a year, GW released the Imperial Knights and it was clear - it must be mine!

Should be a good year!