Ok… the silly season is over, the family has gone back to their home states, all that Christmas and New Year fuss has been run and done…
Oh, and amongst it all I became a Grandfather over the break - my daughter Jorden and young baby Zakk are well. So all in all a fantastic, memorable, but very busy, Holiday Season.
But now is the time to crack on with my Arc40k project!
I did manage to make some progress and got my basing plan sorted. As a special bonus I also have a side-story about unplanned conversions and how small furry housemates can upset the best of plans..
Chaos Knights are big models, so I wanted my base scheme to act as a bit of a "frame" to help with displaying the models as well as the usual job of helping with theme. As well as giving them somewhere to stand.
Using the bases to help with the overal visual presentation is nothing new or revolutionary. But with the interesting combination from the size of the Knights and a fair amount of empty space to play with on the bases - I wanted these bases to be in contrast to the Knight colour scheme staging them in a way that will help them ‘pop’ a little bit more.
I decided on a Martian red scheme, as I felt this would work really well in the framing job i wanted to achieve from it.
The Citadel Martian Ironearth and Ironcrust made this a lot easier to pull off. Strangely, in a decision that surprised me a little bit, I also wanted more height from the bases. A few layers of cork floor tile later and that's done.
After a large scattering of various flocks and tufts, and the almost mandatory skull or 2 - it is chaos after all - the bases were looking good. Then I spotted some 2 part resin water from AK… and I had to ask myself the question - do I really want to?
So you guessed it - after some back and forth the answer was going to be: Yeah I do!
I started by taping up the edge of the bases using Green Frog-Tape. Doing this with cheaper all purpose tape leaves you with clear resin on your paint desk! You can ask me at Arc how I know this....
Resin water effect poored and 24 hours of drying time later - Bam.. Job done, and looking great even if I do say so.
Now for the obligatory Arc-war story! With out further ado it’s on to my adventure with unplanned and involuntary conversion work.
In my build process for the Tyrant - I was putting the under shoulder melta guns together. I built them as a pair and as you do when I’d then finished for the night, left them on the desk. As I do every time!
However, on my return the next day, I discovered that one of these melta guns had……Well it had disappeared - it definitely wasn’t sitting next to it’s partner where it had been left.
Desk checked, floor checked, vacuum checked - No definately gone.
Now I must admit that I have no proof as to the exact details of what really happened. But the way some of the bits on my hobby desk were pushed aside to form a clear space perfectly cat sized. The almost exact shape of Luthien my cat, to sit in…
Well it doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to hypothesize on the what was leading up to this crime.
Yes, yes, it’s all circumstantial evidence, but surely, I can come to a conclusion that I think doesn’t put me that far off from the truth - and that is my cat found a fun new toy to play with overnight.
Look, whatever did happen - Tim shakes fist at cat - the reality was that the was gone, it no longer existed in my hobby space and it needed replacing.
I asked myself do I 3D print a new one, or would a kitbash part look better? My eventual solution was in fact to replace it with something else. I figured There’s that old addage - beware the mutant! So what self respecting Choas Knight wouldn’t benefit from a tentacle or several?
So it was that one Chaos Spawn kit later and the Tyrant has more tentacles where a twin melta gun was supposed to sit. It does look good pretty cool - and I like the result.
The moral of the story is that sometimes, if necessity is the mother of invention, cats stealing bits can be the mother of conversion! So I thank Luthien for her random assistance with this creative interlude to my project.
Anyway - interlude aside that wraps up this article. It’s nose back to the grindstone to get more stuff done. Things are progressing and now im hopefully back to the usually scheduled program and Ii can start to really crack on.
What's an Arc Journey without some time pressure?
