Citadel Woods

Here is my proof of concept for the GiTD Citadel Woods. I wanted to do something different so I am going with Fall colors for these. Sorry about the crappy pictures but you should get the idea. Only three more sets left to do.

Realm of Battle

A while back my friend Tim received a large shipment of terrain from GW for the Gathering in the Desert LOTR Indy GT. I agreed to help paint some this stuff because, frankly, I'm and OK guy.

The first task seems like the most difficult but will probably turn out to be the easiest - the Realm of Battle set. This is a truly huge terrain set and I must say that I am impressed. I am not sure I could ever justify buying one for myself but I must admit that it is tempting. These are nice terrain boards.

For the GiTD we have two sets of the RoB. Tim is painting one and I am painting the other. Since the LOTR game only uses a 4'x4' table we have enough to do three tables. Of course, this means that they have to match to maximise the usefulness of both sets. See Tim's post for the color info.

I was very surprised at how quick and easy these painted up. I would estimate that I have about 10 hours total in this set which I thought was pretty good. If I have really tried I could have easily had these done in half the time.

Next up on the GiTD terrain front will be a couple of GW hills and the modular hills. These will be done in the same colors. Then I have to do three sets of woods, an Arcane Ruins and a Temple of Skulls.

Space Marine Terminator Librarian

This is a stock Terminator Librarian from the current Space Marine line. He is painted up as a Librarian for my Knights of Eden Sapce Marine Chpater. As usual, this model took way too long to finish. I think I have been working on it for more than a year.

I now have three HQ options for this army and they are all very different.

The Knights of Eden - Army to Date

I have been doing lots of posts on this blog about my home brew Space Marine Chapter but I have never posted a group shot of the army. Mostly this has been do to not having enough done to make a group picture very interesting. In the last couple of weeks, however, I have added a Heavy Support, a Fast Attack, an Elite and an HQ. I finally have a unit for each force organization slot. This picture represents about 5 years of collecting and painting. This army started out as a couple tac squads, some scouts and a speeder for my Daemonhunters army, but has now grown to a full Space Marine force.

Here is what the army consists of today.

HQ

Space Marine Captain with a Command Squad
Chaplain

Elite

9 Terminators
Dreadnought
Techmarine with Servitors
10 Sternguard Veterans

Troops

3 - 10 man Tactical Squads
5 man Scout Squad

Fast Attack

10 man Assault Marine Squad
Landspeeder
Landspeeder Typhoon

Heavy Support

Land Raider

Dedicated Transports

4 Rhinos
Drop Pod

There are many more items in the collection waiting to be painted. I still have a couple more Rhinos, a couple more tac squads, about 20 more scouts, scout bikers, regular bikers, a couple more speeders, two more dreds, 5 more terminators, a Librarian in terminator armor, a couple of whirlwinds, a razorback, another Drop Pod and at least 2 more captains. I have so much stuff left I am debating starting another Space Marine army or painting all this up for a Knights of Eden Apocalypse force.

Space Marine Company Command Squad

I finally have a command squad for my Knights of Eden Captain, which I just realized I have never photographed and blogged. Anyway, this unit took way too long to get painted. It seemed that each time I would start to work on it I would quickly loose interest and move to something else. I think the banner scared me and I was subconsciously using this as an excuse to not finish the unit.

I have been taking a drawing class and it inspired me to take another look and doing the banner. I have also been inspired by Ron Saikowski's banners. Take a look at the Tutorial section a the ++ From the Warp ++ blog for excellent examples of what you can do with hand painted banners. Armed with new-found confidence I jumped back into this project and finished it up! In the end the banner is not as good as I had hoped but I think it looks good considering it is my first hand painted...well...anything really.

Another thing that I like about this unit is the 2 Power Fist guy. With the 5th edition rules the only way a PF can get an extra attack is to have 2 of them. I figured that with the current selection of models and parts your were unlikely to see this combination on the table. It seems that all the models currently available from GW either have a left hand PF already or you can get the plastic PF arm with is also left hand. Searching my references I could not find a model with a right hand power fist. The only way this could be modeled, that I could see, would be to use a Lightning Claw model and remove the claws. This seemed like a waste to me.

After digging through my vast collection of junk I found an old Blood Angels Sargent with a raised Power Fist. It was still a left hand power fist but it was different. It was smaller than most. I then remembered that the original plastic Space Marine set had a right hand power fist arm and it to was small. I dug through the bits box and bingo! there was the answer. The old RT era power fist is right hand and it matches the early metal PF version well. After a little modification to the army I was able to get the model of my dreams (OK, not of my dreams, really). It should be fun to spring this one in a game and see how it works.