State of the Hunt, Week 10/2023: Blog for the Blog God!

Well, seems like I am back.

First of all, many thanks to everyone for the kind words and warm welcome after my short previous post! I am feeling incredibly humbled by your reactions, especially when I wasn’t really expecting anyone to still be hanging around this blog, checking for updates! I was also sorry to hear that people were actively worried for my wellbeing — I certainly did not mean for that to happen!

So what happened? Nothing much, really — or at least, nothing too different from what the rest of you will have gone through over the last couple of years. Two and a half years of a world-wide pandemic (and counting…) were certainly a challenge to get through with (most of?!) my wits intact. There were also health problems galore in my immediate family, a situation that is unfortunately still ongoing. But I did never make a conscious choice to step away from the hobby for a longer time — it just happened to fade into the background for a while.

In fact, I still vividly remember sitting in the garden during the late summer/early autumn of 2021, quietly tinkering with the World Eaters Rhino conversion that would end up being one of the last things I posted here on the blog before my hiatus. And suddenly, it’s more than two years later, and Eternal Hunt is now 11 years old, incredibly enough — and with little enough input on my part — at least for the last two+ years.

And now I am back — it was always clear that it would be a new World Eaters release that would draw me back out of hiding. And that’s exactly what happened. And I can assure you we’ll be looking at World Eaters kitbashes and conversions again before long, for however long this resurgence of Eternal Hunt may last.

But for today, I would like to take a small detour, if that is okay with you, and briefly look back on the last two years of my hobby hiatus:

So what have I actually been up to in all this time?

On the hobby front? Not much, to be honest. In fact, before the new World Eaters hit, my most involved attempt at creating something hobby-related was a kitbash representing a veteran bolter marine for my custom INQ28 Astartes chapter, the Golden Legion (I wonder if anyone remembers Praetor Janus Auriga, for instance):

As you can see, the model was based on one of the Easy-To-Build Primaris Marines. My aim was to build a fairly standard Space Marine (in a classic pose & wielding a boltgun), while also featuring some visual elements that would embody the look and feel of the chapter. I want the Golden Legion to read as a very knightly & somewhat ostentatious chapter, and they are also Imperial Fists successors, so the use of a medieval looking helmet was key. I chose the head of Rodicus Grytt, an Imperial Fists brother of the Deathwatch originally released in the Deathwatch: Overkill game set — does anyone even remember that? 😉

All in all, it’s a fun conversion, and one I hope to get painted one of these days, so Brother Laertes of the Golden Legion will be able to begin his life of service to the Velsen Sector. But I’ll readily admit that this isn’t a particularly impressive hobby output for such a long period of time — but I didn’t really build or paint anything else, to be honest.

At the start of 2022, an article of mine was published in the 4th issue of 28 Magazine, and I loved that! But to be fair, the article talks about the HeroQuest set that I painted allll the way back in 2019, so it doesn’t exactly qualify as brand new content 😉

Oh, and I backed Mike Franchina’s VERY intriguing “Trench Crusade Kickstarter”, which seemed like the best parts of Warhammer 40k Inquisition, the Mutant Chronicles and World War I aesthetic, all thrown into a blender, with some magic fairy powder sprinkled on top. Really looking forward to receiving those miniatures at some point in the hopefully-not-too-distant future!

Beyond that, I barely kept up with the hobby, only really following two of my favourite hobby blogs – namely Apologist’s blog and Between the Bolter And Me, and I tried keeping – vaguely – up to date on the lovely World Eaters army of my buddy Augustus b’Raass. And that was it — in fact, one of my first tasks, now that I am back, will be to figure out which hobby blogs & communities are even still going. For instance, I was really happy last week to find “The Bolter & Chainsword” still alive and kicking!

CITADEL

I think the main reason for my absence was that most of the energy I would have spent on the hobby actually went elsewhere — but where?

Maybe some of you will still remember my first fledgling steps in designing videogames, using Media Molecule’s design suite Dreams — I briefly posted about it, back in the day.

Now over the last three years, I have become an active member of the Dreams community and have been ceaselessly working on my various projects there.

Fair warning: This will have very little to do with the actual focus of this blog, so if you are only here for the little plastic people, feel free to skip the following.

But maybe, just maybe, some of you will be interested to find out where I have been burning most of my creative energy these last years:

So, my main focus has been to work on CITADEL, an ongoing game project very much inspired by games like “Journey” (by thatgamecompany) or by the games from Team Ico and Fumito Ueda (“ICO”, “Shadow of the Colossus” or “The Last Guardian”). These games have been a massive inspiration to me, and I wanted to create something at least slightly reminiscent of them. Hence CITADEL.

In the game, you join a pair of shadowy beings called “The Wanderers” and explore the ruins of a fallen civilisation, the eponymous CITADEL. This all plays out as a third person action adventure, although the gameplay is really rather simple: You can really only run, jump & explore, as the various locales and the story of the CITADEL unfold around you.

So far, two (of four) acts of the game have been released. Check out this trailer that should at least provide some first impressions of what the game looks and sounds like:

And here’s a small gallery of screenshots giving you a better idea of the game’s various environments:

Now if the game should look a little dodgy to you: Fair enough, that’s because literally all of it has been made from scratch. Yes, the underlying engine takes care of A LOT of the work that is required to make the game function at all, but all of the assets & music were created by me. And that’s how even a fairly dodgy game can come to feel like a momentuous achievement: In fact, to create an entire world like this, basically from nothing, really feels like you’re shaping the raw energies of a universe, if you’ll excuse the hyperbole. Well, it does during its best moments — there’s also a lot of cursing, playtesting and trying to get my dodgy programming to work, obviously.

But yes, it was easy to spend a lot of time doing this, and it certainly continues to fascinate me. I could go on, waxing poetical on the brilliance of Dreams and the community surrounding it, but I’ll keep the brunt of that subject for elsewhere. Like I said, video game design is not really the focus of this blog (that being said, I’d be very happy to answer any questions you might have on the subject — I just don’t want to cram it down your throats).

And surely enough, the game shares very little, if any, common ground with Warhammer 40k or miniature wargaming, admittedly. The most grimdark – and hence Warhammer-adjacent – thing I may have created so far is the Sunken One, as somewhat Cthulhuoid creature appearing as an opponent in CITADEL’s second act:

Isn’t he a beatuy? 😉

Anyway, in the – somewhat unlikely – eventy that any of you should own both a PlayStation (4 or 5) AND a copy of Dreams and would like to take a look: The two first chapters of the game are available right here:

https://indreams.me/dream/miVNpyuKwhP

https://indreams.me/dream/mryKJhppVcd

I would, of course, love for you to check this out and let me know what you think, so if you have the means to do so, I’d be excited to hear your thoughts and impressions of the game so far!

But over here on Eternal Hunt, chances are we’ll be returning to our usual menu before long: As you may already have glimpsed in my previous post, I have been hard at work tweaking some of my older World Eaters conversions — and putting the new Khorne Berzerker kit through its paces! So I think that’s where we’ll be heading for the next post. And who knows, we may even meet some old friends again — like Lord Captain Lorimar:

In the meantime, I’ll be totally honest with you, because I don’t want to over-promise and under-deliver: Who knows how long I can keep this up? Maybe updates will be sporadic. Maybe there’ll be longer breaks again. These are tough times, and I am still a lazy bum when it comes to blogging. What I do know is this, however:

It was lovely to be welcomed back into the community, and if nothing else, I want to thank you all for it by sharing some new-ish work soon. So I hope you’re looking forward to that! I also hope today’s post, while a slight departure, wasn’t a complete turn-off.

And, in closing — how I missed writing these words:

Please feel free to let me hear any thoughts and suggestions you might have. And, as always, thanks for looking and stay tuned for more!

State of the Hunt, week 43/2020: Blood on the tracks

Hey everyone, I have been sitting on this next update for quite a while, but it has been an “eventful” couple of weeks, so you’re only getting some new content now. It’s also nothing special, really — just a few more kitbashes I have been working on recently. But anyway, here goes:

On the one hand, I am currently still working on a couple of additional kitbashed World Eaters, bringing what was originally planned as “The Hateful Eight” to something that would be more correctly dubbed “The Hateful Sixteen-ish” — but I already suspected this might happen, so yeah… 😉

First up, here’s one of the models I shared with you during a previous World Eaters-related post a couple of weeks ago:

I only messed around with his pose a bit (as his arms and head have not been properly glued in yet) and added some some gear to his belt:

But messing around with the model again gave me an appetite for kitbashing yet another World Eater. And when I ended up looking at some of the unbuilt Blood Warriors from the 1st edition Age of Sigmar starter box on my pile of shame – these gentlemen here…

…I came up with an idea for the model in the in the top left spot and created this jolly chap:

Believe it or not, what actually kicked off this entire conversion was my observation that the little round vent from an old CSM backpack would neatly fit into the middle of that breastplate 😉

I really love the brutish, overgrown look of this guy — it’s also why I gave him that almost neanderthalian bare head from the Blood Warriors kit (minus the “Abaddon-lite” topknot, that is). Oh, and he’s wielding a proper chainaxe, too — in fact, the head of his axe is a venerable bit from a really old plastic CC weapons sprue, even predating the plastic berzerkers — hard to believe, I know 😉

Here are both models in a comparison shot:

An interesting conversion note for these two models is that they also serve as examples of two approaches to converting Blood Warrior legs into CSM legs: In both cases, the Blood Warrior lower legs were carefully removed from just above the knee down, then to be replaced with Astartes greaves: The first model uses plastic Mk. III legs that, while completely appropriate from a design standpoint, are maybe just a fraction too small and slender. They still work reasonably well if you don’t scrutinise the model too closely, but in an ideal world they’d just be a bit bigger.

Meanwhile, the new guy uses greaves from the new vanilla CSM kit, and they really do perfectly match those Blood Warrior parts — at the same time, they make a conversion that was already hilariously wasteful even moreso 😉

In other news, something completely unexpected happened to me while I was working on those kitbashes: I suddenly found myself setting aside hobby time to work on a freaking RHINO!

In my defense, it was all a reaction to seeing Apologist’s incredible Blood Angels Rhino that actually almost works as a character in its own right. And discovering that brilliantly realised model made me think of something I had wanted to try for quite a while. So I took one of the Rhinos I own (I put those together cleanly and meticulously, but without much flair, years ago, mainly because Rhinos were something you needed for a World Eaters army, but not something I was all that interested in). Anyway, here’s what the model looked like when I started:

It doesn’t show up in the picture above, but everyone who has already worked on a Rhino model will be aware that there’s a tantalisingly huge bit of empty space where the driver’s compartment of the APC should be. And if you have been following my blog for a while, you may remember that I’ve developed a bit of a thing for adding cockpits to models.

Now adding a fully realised driver’s compartment to a Rhino is something I had been thinking of every now and then, but it was Apologist’s attention to detail that finally took me over the edge, so I started to look for reference material that would help me.

This article over on Spikey Bits gave me a good idea about where to start. Even more important was Captain MAGpie’s conversion of a Command Rhino. And there were some “official” illustrations that proved to be an invaluable resource:

A Predator poster that came with an old issue of White Dwarf (in the early aughts, if I remember correctly). If you take a closer look, you’ll be able to make out some specifics regarding the cockpit/driver’s compartment:

And there are the schematics for a Damocles command Rhino — from a Forgeworld publication, I believe?!

So here’s an early mockup of the driver’s compartment:

The driver actually uses a torso from the new CSM kit as well as a head from the Havoc kit — the latter seems like a brilliant fit for a Rhino driver, what with all the cabling and bionic eye. And I did want to bring the model in line with the new CSM models.

There’s also a lot of emergency gear stashed in the driver’s  compartment — such as some extra CC weapons (in case the driver gets to join in on the action), some extra promethium and some spare pieces of tank track to allow for field repairs:

With the basic shapes blocked in, I next made some tweak to the driver and the area surrounding him:

And here’s what the whole ensemble looks like with the front armour in place — getting this all to fit together smoothly was more work than I thought!

Several people online suggested adding some kind of basket or platform below the turret hatch on the left part of the driver’s compartment. And while I didn’t manage to throw together an entire basket, I think this might be a pretty good compromise:

As you can see, there’s now a little metal platform directly underneath the hatch. It hasn’t been glued to the Rhino’s roof yet, though, and on second thought, might work even better if turned around by 90 degrees:

From a utilitarian standpoint, this whole conversion is completely pointless, obviously. But it has been a lot of fun to delve into exploring an area like this that doesn’t normally get shown, and come up with a believable setup for it. I imagine I’ll be working on this for quite a bit, and of course I’ll also be thinking about some additional decoration for the rest of the Rhino, in order to turn it into more of a character, so to speak.

So yeah, that’s it for today’s update. It goes without saying that I would love to hear any suggestions and feedback you might have.

And, as always, thanks for looking and stay tuned for more!

State of the Hunt, week 37/2020: Slow and steady…

I keep chugging along, messing with World Eaters models, but as it turns out, several little things can make for a rather sizeable post when combined, so let’s take a look at what I am currently up to:

I. Number Nine

First up, I have managed to paint the ninth model for my “Hateful Eight” project — and you don’t need to be a maths wizard to realise that this probably marks the beginning of another squad of eight 😉

While my original plan was to focus on the two heavy weapon-wielding legionaries next,…

…another model actually managed to jump the queue. Take a look:

Another older conversion, this one, originally converted all the way back in 2014. The model may be a bit rough around the edges, and also slightly shorter than some of the other squad members, but having waited so long on my pile of shame, the poor guy definitely deserved his day in the limelight.

The blunt, brutal look of the helmet was a visual touch I really wanted to incorporate into this project, and the pose is obviously at the halfway mark between “Come at me, bro!” and “Are you not entertained?”, which seems like a pretty good match for a World Eater 😉

This model may, admittedly, not be the star of the show, but he still looks cool with the rest of the guys — and he’s too customised to just read as a vanilla grunt, in any case. I am weirdly fond of him, to be honest, and it definitely feels good to finally have painted this piece. Here are some more pictures:

II. World Eaters painting tutorial

Speaking of World Eaters, since several people wanted to know about the tweaked recipe I have been using for these last models, let me take this opportunity to share it with you, lest I end up putting if off even longer. I have been sitting on this for a while, so the photos are actually of a previous model, but they should still work well enough for a tutorial.

So here goes, my current and – hopefully – improved recipe for painting World Eaters in nine-and-a-half pretty easy steps:

Step 1: Undercoating

I use GW Leadbelcher spray paint to undercoat my World Eaters, which might seem a little strange to you — I’ll admit it’s a little quirk of this particular recipe, and one that probably originated in the fact that the first models I painted using this new approach, especially Argus the Brazen, had some rather large metallic areas.

I’ve stuck with the Leadbelcher undercoat, though, because it actually has a number of advantages:

• some of the parts you actually may want to be silver on the finished models, such as the chainmail or the flex fitting in the armour gaps, are usually one of the deepest layers of the sculpt. So they can be hard to reach with a brush if you want to block them in. Plus they really do end up looking more convincing if you paint the rest of the armour “on top of them”, as it were.
• the silver is a pretty bright undercoat, so it works rather well for a paintjob that’s predominantly based on different red tones. It would probably be even more useful when painting Word Bearers, because you wouldn’t even need to paint the armour trim in another colour.

When the undercoat has dried, the areas I want to stay silver on the finished model (the aforementioned parts as well as the knives, weapon blades or some of the spikes, get a healthy dose of Army Painter Dark Tone wash at this point to shade them.

Step 2: All of the red armour plates are now blocked in using GW Mephiston Red: There’s absolutely no need to be too careful at this point — just try to keep the red off the already shaded, silver areas mentioned above.

Step 3: The bronze/brass areas (mostly the armour trim) are picked out in a 60:40 mix of Vallejo Tinny Tin and Vallejo Brassy Brass.

Also, if there are any areas of bare skin or bone on the model, these are picked out using GW Rakarth Flesh. For the skin, this creates a pale, caucasian skin tone, so if you are looking for a different colour, you may need to change the recipe accordingly (for instance, I have found GW Doombull Brown to be an excellent base colour for dark skin). Experiment a bit with this! The World Eaters are described as an ethnically diverse legion in the fluff, so this is a great opportunity to experiment with a number of skin tones!

Step 4: The grey and brown parts are painted using GW Skavenblight Dinge and GW Mournfang Brown, respectively.

Step 5: The red areas are washed with GW Seraphim Sepia, and the bronze areas receive a generous wash of Army Painter Strong Tone:

Step 6: I then higlight the armour trim, using pure Vallejo Brassy Brass and, if the model needs a little extra pop, Vallejo Bright Bronze — careful with the latter, though! It is really bright. I mostly try to stick to just using Brassy Brass, unless I want some areas of the model to really catch the light.

Step 7: At this point, the red areas may require some cleanup, so I go back with the original Mephiston Red here and there. This is also a good way of laying the foundation for the coming highlights, so you may want to hit some of the ridges and elevated areas with a touch of Mephiston Red as well.

This is also the time to wash the skin and bone areas. I use GW Ogryn Flesh, which is now OOP, but I still have some left. GW Reikland Fleshshade should really work just as well. The bone areas are washed with Vallejo Strong Tone.

Step 8: Here’s the really crucial step that will make sure the red has a lot more depth: I use progressively lighter red and orange tones to paint scratches onto the armour and add some edge highlights on the most prominent areas. I start with GW Evil Sunz Scarlet (which isn’t all that noticeable in the photos below)…

…then use GW Wild Rider Red, making sure to paint a smaller higlight than the one that came before,…

…and then finally create a last, very small, higlight/scratch with GW Fire Dragon Bright. You can see the finished effect below.

Step 9: This is also the time to add the highlights to all of the silver, grey and brown areas, using lighter tones of the respective colours. I use GW Mythril Silver for the metal (now OOP as well; GW Stormhost Silver should be an excellent replacement), a mix of GW Skavenblight Dinge and white for the grey areas (GW Stormvermin Fur works as a straight-from-the-pot solution, although it has a slightly brownish tinge. GW Dawnstone also works) and a mix of GW Mournfang Brown and GW Steel Legion Drab for the brown leather. Oh, and I use some fine highlights with the original GW Rakarth Flesh to add more definition to the areas of skin, particularly the face, at this point.

And that just about covers everything, I guess. You can still add some glossy blood effect (GW Blood for the Blood God or Tamiya Clear Red) to either the weapon and/or the armour at this point, if you are that way inclined — just make sure not to go overboard! And try to create a mix of darker, more clotted blood (by mixing some brown or black wash into the blood effect) and fresh, bright red blood (by adding some pure blood effect on top or around the edges of the darker patches). A blood effect can quickly overwhelm the miniature, though — even on a follower of Khorne. So take it slowly!

And here’s a look at the finished model, painted using this recipe:

I hope you’ll find this helpful when painting your own, bloodthirsty madmen! The recipe is still a work-in-progress in that I think it could possibly be improved (still not entirely happy with the bronze part, for example), but it’s as close as I have come yet to figuring out an ideal recipe for painting World Eaters without going crazy during the process 😉

III. Next up on the chopping block…

Before we wind up this post, I do of course have another kitbash to share with you: I noticed how virtually none of my recent World Eaters conversions were wielding actual chainaxes, so I created this guy:

He still needs a bit of fine tuning and some additional gear, but I am pretty happy with the model. As you can probably see from the pictures, it’s basically another AoS Blood Warriors/plastic Mk. III/vanilla CSM hybrid.

Here he is, next to the icon bearer from my previous post:

And here’s what the second squad of modernised may look like:

The roster is still likely to change, of course — for instance, those Havocs technically aren’t even allowed, and even if I ignore that fact, I would probably want to put one of them in each of the squads. But hey, I am slowly hammering out what a second squad might look like, so bear with me 😉

 

And with that, we have come to the end of today’s update! It goes without saying that I would love to hear your thoughts and feedback, so drop me a comment!

And, as always, thanks for looking and stay tuned for more!

State of the Hunt, week 35/2020: Blood and Plague

Another update today, and while I only have a few things to show you, I don’t want this blog to fall silent again, so here goes:

First up, I thought it would be fun to take a quick snapshot of all the models in my World Eaters collection that actually use the modernised colour scheme:

In addition to “The Hateful Eight”, there’s Euron Hearteater, Brother Argus the Brazen (the FW World Eaters Dreadnought I got from my buddy Augustus b’Raass, and, of course,  “The Hound”, renegade War Dog.

Definitely not an army, but they do look pretty cool together, if I do say so myself 😉

Having finished “The Hateful Eight” – or at least a first squad of updated World Eaters, depending on how you look at it – it was back to a spell of light kitbashing this week. But in fact, everything started with another endeavour that was very much World Eaters-related:

I had been eyeing up a particular set of bitz for a conversion for a rather long while now, so I finally gave it a try and made this first mockup:

A model wearing a massive, studded suit of Mk. III armour, as you can see — there’s such a brutal, workmanlike look to that armour, and I think it works really well for an officer of the XII legion. Believe it or not, though, the legs and body actually came from the multipart plastic Plague Marines — that conversion had been on my mind for such a long time that I finally caved and bought a box of Plague Marines. But hey, it’s not like I won’t put all those bitz to good use — more on that in a minute 😉

Anyway, back to the model at hand: I was already pretty happy with the first mockup, so I worked on the model a bit more and cleaned up the conversion:

I shaved off the Nurglite mutations and tentacles and added a few additional bitz: The head came from a Custodian, the left and upper right arm (and pauldrons) are from the vanilla CSM kit. The left-hand axe came from the Forgeworld Red Butchers (I think), and the right-hand axe was taken from one of the Blood Warriors from the 1st edition Age of Sigmar starter box.

…Oh, and I did add some trophy skulls while I was at it, of course 😉

I am currently working on a smaller trophy pole/back banner, but I am honestly not sure whether it’s the right direction for the model:

The Plague Marine kit, in the meantime, is fascinating for a number of reasons:

The kit maybe goes a bit too far with the mutations and gribbly detail in some areas — some of those parts look like something you would expect to see on a Scooby Doo villain. At the same time, I really appreciate that many of the parts feature callbacks to some of the very classic Plague Marine designs, especially the seminal concept artwork by Jes Goodwin. And, probably the thing that surprised me the most: It very much feels like a classic GW kit in that you end up getting lots and lots of leftover bitz. Modern GW kits are fantastic, but more often than not, you end up exactly as many parts as you need to finish the model, with maybe an extra head or shoulder pad. Not so with these guys, where each of the seven models in the box allows for at least two or three general equipment/assembly options. And by committing to one of them, you end up with lots of extra parts.

By the same token, “using up” that one body for my World Eaters champion shown above made sure I was left with the Plague Marine bitz that should normally have been combined with that body. And seeing how I still had a set of three of the cheap-o Easy To Build Plague Marines (from one of the first issues of Warhammer 40k Conquest) knocking about, I decided to have a bit of fun:

I started with the parts for the Plague Spewer and threw them on one of the snapfit Plague Marine bodies:

It took a bit of cutting and bending, but in the end, I am pretty happy with the outcome!

While I was at it, I also started to put together a model completely based on the parts from the Plague Marine kit:

Not really that much of a conversion, admittedly — the idea here was to to channel Jes Goodwin’s classic metal Plague Marine (and the sketch that model was originally based on):

After getting the basic assembly right, it was time for a bit of gap filling — I also used some GS cables on the Jes Goodwin-inspired model to bring it even further in line with the model that inspired it:

At the same time, those cables also have the added advantage of replacing those weird, cartoony tentacles that were part of the stock model. Meanwhile, the model on the right is simply an attempt at combining leftover parts with yet another cheap snapfit Plague Marine — in fact, I really like how two of those models were mostly made using leftover bitz!

One more little project before we call it quits for today: My eventual – inevitable – second squad of modernised World Eaters will have need of an icon bearer, of course, so I made a quick mockup:

And here’s the model after I have put in a bit more work:

The bolt pistol was replaced with an axe because, frankly, you can never, ever have enough axes on a Khornate model 😉 And while this only occured to me in hindsight, the helmet on this guy actually feels pleasantly reminiscent of the helmet designs of the first plastic World Eaters:

This makes for another pretty cool shout out to one of the classic designs — just perfect for this project!

So yeah, that’s it for today. Like I said, it’s not much, but I would still very much like to hear any thoughts you may have, so drop me a comment!

As always, thanks for looking and stay tuned for more!

State of the Hunt, week 32/2020: Not dead yet…

Oh my, it’s certainly time for another update! I must apologise for the lack of content over here: It seems like, unlike everybody else in the hobby scene, I didn’t use the Covid19-related downtime to paint 10,000 points of tabletop models — in fact, I haven’t even managed to paint more than a handful of models this year, to be honest. And while I would love to blame current events, world politics or any other kind of external force, the more likely explanation is a mix of my eternal laziness and several distractions.

But once again, my good friend Annie provided me with the motivation to get back to the painting table — albeit for a different reason than usual…

I. All good things…

Earlier this month, Annie left the blasted plains of northwestern Jhermani for one of the big Hive Cities further north. Which is great for her, but actually a massive catastrophe for my personal hobby productivity, because our joint painting and converting sessions were always a shining beacon of “finally getting stuff done”. Under no circumstances does this mean, however, that we won’t be having any painting sessions in the future — quite the opposite, I hope. The logistics will just be slightly more complicated. But that remains a problem for another day.

For now, I wanted to create something nice and topical for Annie to wish her well on her way, so I picked up a brush (for the first time in months, I might add), and made her this:

“Guten Flug” means “Have a good flight” in German, in case anyone was wondering (because y’know, that gobbo seems to be a pilot and everything…). The model itself is a Blood Bowl event model Annie gave to me a few years ago, so it seemed like the perfect choice for this occasion. The plinth was made from a piece of Zebrano wood I got from my uncle (who uses different types of wood to create his own knife handles). I’d say it all makes for a nice little ensemble — and the piece should fit right in with all of the nifty Blood Bowl stuff in the showcases at Annie’s new place.

So all the best, and don’t think you’ll be safe from me ‘oop north 😉

II. Supply drop from the lowlands:

Another shout out must go to my buddy Augustus b’Raass who sent me a lovely bitz drop earlier this year — what a delight!

To my great regret, I have yet to figure out what to do with most of those lovely bitz — but thinking about that is already half of the fun, and also seems like the perfect activity for lazy summer afternoons in the sweltering heat…

At least I have already started messing around with some of the stuff Augustus has sent me: Some of the heads from the Necromunda Corpsegrinder Cult seemed just perfect for some of my models, after all.

For instance, one of the bare Corpsegrinder faces seemed like the ideal piece to add some extra oomph to this 30k World Eater in Cataphractii armour I converted back when “Betrayal at Calth” was released:

The angry expression in combination with the tubes and augmetic plugs seem just perfect for a World Eater, yet the lack of mutations led to me using it one a 30k model, rather than a 40k one.

But fear not, my 40k World Eaters were also able to claim a skull, so to speak: One of the slightly more elaborate, horned Corpsgrinder masks ended up on the rocket launcher wielding World Eater I converted a while ago:

I kept tweaking this model for what feels like ages, swapping in head after head, but now I think I may finally have found the right part to complete the conversion.What do you think?

Oh, and speaking of World Eaters, I have finally started to paint the next member for my “Hateful Eight” project, the icon bearer based on one of the classic metal World Eaters from the 90s. I shared the conversion with you in a previous post:

Having painted the little goblin pilot shown above, I didn’t want to lapse back into utter laziness again, and seeing how I already had the red paint pot before me, I got to work…

This reminds me that I’ll have to share my current World Eaters recipe one of these days — in case anyone’s interested, that is!

Anyway, this is what the model looks like right now:

Still some work left to be done, but I think I am on the right track!

III. Visiting some Islands…

Wait, you didn’t think we’d make it through this post without a mention of my current infatuation with Media molecule’s “Dreams”, did you? Seriously, though: Just a short heads-up, because I have been plonking away at my game, “Islands”, and making small tweaks and updates based on user feedback. So regardless of whether or not the game is actually any good, it’s at least getting better and better 😉

I have also created another trailer for the game that I think gives you a pretty good idea of what it looks like. Check this out:

If you happen to have access to both a PlayStation 4 and a copy of Dreams, I would be delighted if you were to check out my game. It can be found here.

 

Anf that’s it for today. I certainly hope this update finds you all well! If you have any thoughts or feedback, I would, of course, love to hear them!

As always, thanks for looking and stay tuned for more! And please stay safe and healthy!