Tales of a hobby butterfly

These models from microcosm miniatures are perfect looking bikers with an old school vibe.

You can order them with biker heads or military helmets, I chose the helmets as they fit the theme of my army better, but was very tempted by the biker heads.

The squad leader had his weapon replaced with an axe from the old dwarf warrior sprue.

In 2nd edition games they can be used in games as bikers as intended. In 10th edition games I will use them as proxy rough riders, I know they don’t have lances bur I’m sure if they were to ram something with their bikes they will do similar damage.

Picked up a pack of metal space dwarfs at a the selwig show from the bring and buy. I belive these dudes were from a kickstarter from uscarl miniatures.

The sculpts are full of detail and really catch the old school vibe with the padded flack jackets and cool helmets.

Kind of want the models to be useful in 2nd edition 40k as well as 10th I’m trying to get 1500 points painted by the end of the month for an upcoming game at wayland, will have to see how it goes.

The dwarfs in exo armour are from scibor and make a rather swish command squad, the big dude in mech suit is from gudrun studio and be used as an ogryn body guard in this force

These three minis complete two rival squads for shatterpoint so I can get a game in at the weekend.

We will use a smaller table and reduce the amount of objectives to take in to account the smaller forces but should give us a good feel for the game.

The light sabres are crazy fragile so removed them with a sharp knife, carefully drilled the handle of the sabre and my finger with a .3mm drill and inserted brass rod cut to the required length, I think if I had to do it again I would use slightly thicker rod or just remove the sabre and have the models with them turned off as they are super fiddly to fix.

Recently picked up the shatter point core set, the first chaps on the painting table were the squads of b1 droids which were a complete pain to stick together. For big models they are made up of many tiny annoying bits

The main colour on these is gw contrast skeleton hord with some thinner added and a coat of matt varnish to get rid of the contrast shine.

I was gonna paint maul next but the light sabres look very fragile so I’m looking into ways of replacing them with brass rod before I paint them.

So I stuck together a unit of clones I always find white daunting to paint and usually end up with a very chalky look so I watch loads of tutorials on you tube and kind of amalgamated bits of each video and came up with these chaps.

They were base coated dark grey then drybrushed white to show up the detail.

Then I layered a mix of off white a tiny bit of black and dark brown in the shadows.

Once that dried I added some deck tan by valkejo to the mix and kind of watered it down so the darker bits would show through  and covered the armour plates.

Again I let this dry then painted neat deck tan on the high areas.

To Finnish the white I made a mix of bleached bone and white and added this in layers each time adding more white till i got the colour I was aiming for.

The black bits were then sploshed in with black speed paint.

This weekend I visited the colours show at newbury racecourse.

Whilst there I visited the rather awesome oakbound studio stand that is filled with loads of cool sculpts. I grabbed a couple of packs of wolfs among some other things.

My plan with the wolfs is to make some hobgoblin wolf riders ti support my chaos dwarfs. using the hobgoblins I got on an oakbound kickstarter that ran earlier in the year.

The goblins fit nicely with a bit of bending and some green stuff to extend their scrappy clothing to hide any gaps between the wolfs and the goblins bums

Earlier in the week I was gifted some forge world chaos dwarfs by a good mate.

This spurred me on into working on a chaos dwarf force I have been thinking about for a while.

I already have some swish hobgoblin minis from an oakbound studio kickstarter and some 3d printed fimir I plan on using as black orks so the chaos dwarfs came at a great time to fill out the force.

I always wanted to add some bull centaur models as they look cool and really have the feel of chaos dwarfs. Looking at the prices on ebay I decided to make some of my own using parts from my bitz box.

The body is from a gw plastic chaos hound with the head and front legs surgically removed with the clippers of doom.

The front legs are from a plastic gore with the body of a chaos dwarf pinned on top.

The head is an ork skull from the box of skulls with a green stuff hat of mighty proportions, and his big axe is from the old chaos warriors set.

Once all these bits were found I stuck it all together then plopped on some greenstuff to hide the gaps and add  a suitably old school chaos dwarf beard.

I’m pretty happy with the result, just need to make 9 more now