I hate painting. But I love converting and kitbashing. Ahh, crap... Now I have to figure out how to post images on this forum and not just a link to an image on imgur... There we go. The one I uploaded to this post has a kinda-sad story behind it. For years, whenever my best friend's birthday would roll around, or at Christmas time, I'd embark on a special project for him, and make a miniature of his furry RP character in Astartes armor, then paint it. The first ended up pretty terrible, but I learned a lot from it. For example, after that, I started using the wolf helms from the plastic Space Wolves pack kit. Now, I don't play Space Wolves, so I was effectively spending 22 dollars plus tax on each one of those heads, since only 2 came in each kit and I could never find them in-stock on eBay. On the plus side, I did end up with tons of extra power weapons and chainswords and stuff. I also looked into tails, and settled on the wolf tails from the WHFB Goblin Wolf Riders kit. It seemed wasteful to just buy a box of them for the 10 tails, so I checked GW's site for just the wolves themselves, but the price worked out to be about the same, so I just bought a box from my local store. To fit them to Space Marine butt armor required cutting a deep notch in the tails. Some of them over the years I just kind of half-assed, to be honest, others I put a lot of effort into. This was one of the latter. I spent about 2 hours going through all of my Space Marine sprues and picking out any that held parts I might want to use. I included the front half of a limited-edition miniature from the Dark Angels VS Chaos starter box of the edition, because it had a tabard that was waving in the wind a bit and I wanted a pose where he was running forward. I stuck him together, originally with a lightning claw in one hand and a heavily customized stormbolter in the other, the weapon made from about 6-8 different pieces from various kits. But I ran into a serious problem. He was leaning so far forward that he kept tipping forward, and sticking him in melee with anything would be impossible unless I turned him sideways, which would be weird - his forward tip could've probably poked an enemy that was behind the enemy immediately behind the enemy he was fighting. So I just took him apart, and had a think on it while looking at my parts. I got an idea, and went to ask my friend if it was okay if I gave him a hammer capable of ending tanks - my friend really, REALLY likes swords, which has proven rather problematic in recent years since my only opponent prefers to play Orks, and my inner powergamer hasn't learned to shut up yet. But he was excited about the thunder hammer - he'd played Space Marine, and being able to threaten almost anything in the game was appealing to him. So I went and built him as he is in the picture. It didn't take too too long, and I made sure to get everything connected solidly before leaving it to dry. I then primed him with spraypaint, and took a break from it for a few days. I forget exactly what happened, but I do remember sitting down at my table one evening, and spending the whole night painting, fiddling with the details to get him as perfect as I could. Finally satisfied, I took some photos, started arranging them together into one image, but noticed many errors I'd made, now that it was a picture ten times larger than what I could've seen in real life. So I went back and spent another hour or two fixing them. I then took a veritable crapload of photos, intending to choose the best ones to include in the amalgamation. I cropped and copied and pasted and tried to get it looking as slick as I could, to better display the fruits of my labors. I had spent at least a full day, just on this one miniature, this one gift for my best friend. And I sent him the photo, watched it download to his computer, my heart pounding and mind racing with all the praise he would surely lavish upon me for my ultimate creation, made in his image. And then, there it was, the reply: "Neat." I have no idea what sort of biological process happened in my body at that point. Whatever it was, it made the world go darker and darker to total pitch black, while my mind spiraled down and down with thoughts about never making another Warhammer model again, of selling off the collection, maybe even just tossing it all in the trash and never playing another tabletop game ever, ever again in my life. And then, I'm not sure, but I think I even had a pang of suicidal thought, but whatever it was, it snapped me back to reality, and the lights came on again behind my eyes. I told my friend what had just happened inside my head at that underwhelming lack of interest, and he explained, with much sorrow from having inadvertently hurt me like that, that he thought it was a good model, but the previous efforts over the years had diluted the specialness of it, and his local store closing had ended his interest in the tabletop game due to lack of opponents, so it was hard to get excited about tabletop stuff, and also that he just hadn't known just how much work I'd put into it, and his general lack of expertise with the tabletop game left him ill-equipped to judge them beyond, "Neat" or "Not neat."
There we have my army, in it's full glory (picture taken prior to deployment for my first game ever). Funny how I've seen a lot of people have paint-blotches here and there, and reading tips about thinning down paints with a drop of water! IT DOES WONDERS! ...also, the citadel paints Mephiston Red and Ceramite White (both are bases) suck major ass... 2 whites and 1 red has gone sour, whereas all other paints are still fine. Even in the local Warhammer-store, the local paint-guru has had several paints of those 2 colors go bad... Anyone using any good alternative? EDIT: also, anyone have any good tips for taking awesome pictures of your mini's? Everything from camera settings to lighting-setups and all.
Light background (put it in a corner on a white paper - or something grey if you wanna show your White Scars), very good natural light (means mostly outside), no direct light so you don't have stark shadows, and definetely NO CAMERA FLASH!
I usually either take them outside on a reasonable bright day, or under a good Daylight Bulb. Mostly the latter.
I dig the variety of poses you've come up with. I don't actually see any greenstuff in their joints, which means either you accomplished this without using any (which is boss) or you are a fucking ninja at using greenstuff (which is also boss). Plus, yay 30k.
