In the time since I started this project, the rules for the Friendly at Adepticon have been announced and one of the detachments allowed is Spearhead. In this detachment you field, at a minimum, an HQ unit and 3 units of Heavy Support.
This changed my plan from fielding as many Vanguard as possible, to doing my dream army of a smaller force supporting a bunch of Kastelan Robots.
I've made some decent progress on them so far and as of right now I'm sitting on something like this:
Also finished is a single Ironstrider Dragoon, which I will eventually do a full unit of 6 with. But for now I'm going Robots, because they are my favorite looking unit in the army. Once the rules for the Friendly were published. I jumped and ordered up four boxes of Kastelan Robots and some Grim Skull 3rd party heads for them. The plan is to replace the originals with the replacement head and attempt to do some modifications to them to make it even cooler. This all requires testing and I won't be able to get that done until after the holidays, but I'm excited to see if it works or not. The main bit of progress we're going to talk about it the Onager Dunecrawler. Over the last few weeks I've been slowly working my way through painting it and its inching ever closer to completion. There are a lot of details on this guy and at first it was a bit intimidating. I started with the base, as it was the easiest part. One thing I wanted to do with the base was give it a lot of surface variation. I knew that to do this, I needed to add a raised section with cork, but also wanted to have it dip down into a valley. For this, I cut a section of the base out and filled it in with plastic sheeting and green stuff. I then covered the cork and the rest of the base with green stuff to add dunes and clumps to the surface. As I have been adding pieces of human skeletons to the bases, I added a mostly complete skeleton to the base near the raised section too. Once it was all dry, I primed it with Chaos Black and a quick spray of Army Painter Dragon Red. This was then followed with texture paints to give it the sandy/crackle look. The base was washed with Agrax Earthshade and Reikland Flashshade before being drybrushed with Wild Rider Red and Ushbati Bone. The legs were next up. At first, I was annoyed with myself for assembling them ahead of time. But once the base coats were on and it got rolling, it wasn't as big a deal. There were some parts that were hard to reach. But now that they're done, I am super pleased with the way they turned out. Especially after I sponged them. I think I am the most proud of how the "shin" plates came out. The green on them ended up really popping. I've since moved on to the upper body, which as of last night I have the main armor plates painted and the accent colors added on and base coated the copper and steel areas. Since I needed to weather the green before I started on the metals and accent colors, I went ahead and weathered it. Then I realized that I forgot to put decals on. I guess I'll be doing that and then blending them in. Whoops. The Onager is getting closer and closer to being finished and I can't wait to see it on the table! A few other things I'm planning for the army are possibly a custom Enginseer, as well as customizing my Datasmiths. I like the idea of custom priests to go along with my Dominus. The Datasmiths may be especially fun. They are pretty simple, as far as load outs and finding bits goes. If I remember correctly, Datasmiths have a pistol and a power fist. I can rob the pistol from the actual Datasmith models and then play with power fists from different models, like a terminator one, or a space marine one. I'll have to do some looking. But that's it for now. I'm really liking the army so far and can't wait to get games in. Oh, ya. I also found a group of players! So I may be able to get consistent 40k in before Adepticon. These are exciting times. |         |