Warhammer 40K TV Series?

 

This post is going to be a little different. I've had my own thoughts about the 40k universe as I've been reading Horus Heresy and what it means to be a Space Marine. This kind of ties into the strong rumors of Amazon making a series out of it with Henry Cavill. I have thoughts about him too.

I'll try to make this as coherent as possible but for anyone who has read my blog you know I can't make any promises. I don't know why I bother to say I'll try but I do. I think it makes me seem like I'll be better this time. We all know I won't.

About the 40k universe. I'm talking about the Space Marines in this case. Yes, Custodes kind of fall under that but they're not important to the general theme I'm going for. And yes, Primarchs but they're not relevant either. All three are gene engineered but to different extents. As Space Marines are the equivalent of generic while the others are brand name we'll go with that.

Yes. In the lore the Space Marine tinkering was meant to be generic. Anything more than that took too long. So Big E toned down the goodies and made a bunch of super soldiers without any real special stuff. They're assembly line work. And they're treated as disposable in a lot of respects even without going through all the HH culling. Because, after all, they can always make more.

Now I'm going into my head canon and my own small knowledge of biology. It's been a long time since I took biology but with the lore and a bit of that there's some things that come to mind for Space Marines. The short version is that they're mules. The process that makes them into Space Marines pretty much takes them out of the gene pool. And that's by intention.

So many books refer to the changes in their physiology. There's a consistent "He would have been handsome if it hadn't been for ...". They're massive compared to humanity. And they're processed when they're teenagers. They have the fear response removed. So hormonally they're altered as well. All in all it makes sense to cut them out of the human pool since they're not meant to spread the geneseed willy nilly.

Then there's that geenseed. It comes from implanted organs. So there's no canon on whether or not those changes actually change the DNA or if they're reliant on the organs. The implication is that the organs do it and that's why they take them back when they can. There's bits and pieces saying that the 'donors' will live on in the next implantation but that's the kind of lie someone who's dying would tell themself. As it is the geneseed seems separate from previous hosts or they're be far more careful who they took it from.

Why am I going on about whether or not Space Marines get it on? Because with the way they're made and the changes I honestly don't think they can. Quite probably their naughty bits aren't part of the equation and the hormones involved down there have been rerouted into more aggression and less fear. So not only may they not be able to do the dirty they don't have any interest in it.

On to Mr. Cavill. He's a handsome man in most respects. When he's all cleaned up and shiny he's about as interesting as a soggy water biscuit. I stole that. Honestly - have a look at him on the red carpet or as Superman and while he's good looking he's rather meh. When they dirtied him up as Geralt he looks a lot better. At least in my and general opinion. He's got the kind of face that needs definition that comes from hard living.

Which brings me to the next point. How are they going to cast him? There's a lot of talk about which of the lore characters he'd be and my thought is that he should be none of them. Space Marines aren't handsome. They're also huge. So anything where he's in the Space Marine clique would require the huge costumes, CGI, and other expensive things that look dated a year after they're released. There's also only so much you can do with a chapter of Space Marines. They fight. They practice fighting. They fight. There's not much else in their lives. That's what they were built for. And they wear those big helmets. What's the point of casting a well-known handsome actor when you're going to slap a helmet on him for most of the show?

My personal opinion is that the series would be better served by using the guardsmen as the central focus. The humans. And I say this for several reasons.

The first reason is cost. Having the bulk of the cast be human means they're working just fine with fewer special effects. That and the comparison between them and the Space Marines would be more jarring. Fewer Space Marines too when it comes to that. Showing the difference between guardsmen who do know fear and the ones who don't make both more emphatic.

The second reason is story. As I said earlier - Space Marines are pretty boring, story wise. They have their little spats within the chapters but overall they do what they're told. They're toy soldiers. It would be problematic if they keep killing off characters around the one Henry is playing. Making him more of a leader again gives the problem of a fluid cast around him and little in the way of character development. Space Marines don't grow.

My personal idea is to make him a put-up guardsman sergeant. Give him a troop and all the problems that come with being in that rank. Then he could really chew the scenery and have a decent ensemble cast to keep the stories fresh. Killing off one or two won't matter as much and the Space Marines are as rare as they should be.

There's people who are trying to decide what Primarch he should be. Unless they go back to 30k time there's not that many to choose from and they were even less interesting than the Space Marines. These were beings designed for specific roles and they didn't really deviate. They're figureheads and the amount of special effects to have a main character as a Primarch would be incredibly cost prohibitive.

I know everyone wants him to be the Hero. That's what he's been. But maybe it's time to let him be the hero, lower case letter H. Center the show around him but not as the top of the pyramid. Having characters both above and below him would give him a huge range that's not possible when it gets unbalanced. Let's face it - 40k is unbalanced enough as a game that doing it as a show would be correct but annoying.

Another reason to put him as a human would be to let him be human. That means his physiology would be just fine the way it is. Heck, he could even cut down on the weightlifting and slim down a little. Being human means romantic interests. It means getting hurt. It means fearing things that the big guys brush off. It gives him a range as an actor that isn't possible if they cast him different.

I could be completely wrong on this. On all of it. I don't think I'm completely off the mark on the geneseed stuff but the show? Yeah. They're going for ratings. And if their audience is expected and demanding the guy play in power armor then he'll be in power armor. I just think it would be a waste of the show and of the actor to take away so many options for where things could go.

Comment below if you have thoughts on this. Note that all comments are moderated on this blog so if you're just going to call me names it isn't getting through. Comments that are civil will go through even if they destroy every single thing I've written here. I'm all for discussion, if it's done with manners.

Virtual Credit Cards FTW - Update at the End

 

I'm a HUGE fan of virtual credit cards. Seriously huge. Having credit cards that are tied to a single vendor and can be locked are a wonderful security feature for online shopping. There's been way too many data breaches and there's always going to be more.

This is the second time in a week that I've had attempted fraud on my credit card account. I'm pretty sure I know where it's coming from and that it will stop now that the new charge has been declined. Why was it declined? Because I wasn't sure the vendor was on the up and up but decided to give them the benefit of the doubt because I could risk the $5. After the charge I immediately locked the card.

Lo and behold guess who tried to charge me for something else and it was more than $5 this time.

My credit card company asked about the declined charge, I confirmed it was unauthorized, they're sending me yet another new card. So I'm without a credit card for a few days again. I can use my debit card (as a credit card) for local in-person purchases until it shows up.

I'm officially done with the vendors who make me question if they're using the initial cheap thing they deliver in order to charge something more expensive later. I know the answer to that one.

People might try to quibble about it being fraud since I gave them my credit card number. They'd be wrong. I did not authorize the second charge. If they had asked and I agreed then I could have unlocked it for the purchase and everything would be fine. They didn't ask. I didn't agree. That makes it fraud.

I did authorize the initial purchase. After all, I created a virtual card for them. So that little bit of money is gone. I don't know what it was supposed to be so unless it shows up in my mailbox I'm writing it off. And I'm done with playing with sketchy vendors.

If your credit card company offers virtual cards then I highly suggest you start using them. There's a few real vendors out there who aren't set up to take them. Some even say that on the checkout page. But most do and that gives you another level of control. Even if you leave the card unlocked and someone other than that vendor tries to charge it, it gets declined.

If your credit card company doesn't offer virtual cards ask when they will. If they won't and you don't have a good reason to stay with them switch to a company that does. My credit card company has been excellent about catching fraud. I think this is the third fraud attempt in over a decade and honestly I invited them by where I online shopped. 

The first recent one is kind of odd since they didn't have a virtual number and almost no one has my real card number. I did do a bunch of local shopping the day they said the charge was made. It could be coincidence or I could have gotten skimmed. Either way my company caught it. I need to think about where I shopped that I hadn't shopped before. Just having the chip cards isn't enough anymore it seems.

I'll end this one with a reminder to look into virtual credit cards. My company upgraded so that you can create them when you want them and use them for a single vendor. I'm guessing the first charge locks them to it. This is handy for things where you don't buy online - like the food delivery apps.

The only thing that's missing is something my previous credit card company had - the ability to set a dollar limit on what could be charged to the card. That was another level of protection but I can see where there would be a lot of false positives when someone set the level too low, bought something, then it got declined. There's always a tradeoff.

Now I'm hesitant about using my debit card in person, once I think about it. If for some reason I got skimmed locally they'll have my debit card and that would be bad. I'm pondering if I can wait to go shopping until I get my new credit card. I had a whole list of errands I had planned for today and they all involved buying things. Maybe it's worth the wait for the new card, just to make sure that I'm covered.

Credit card fraud is annoying and inconvenient. Please make sure you're adequately covered.

UPDATE

I called my credit card company rather than reply to the 'did you make this' text/email. I didn't want them to cancel the new credit card they issued and I hadn't even received yet since this was a vendor using a virtual card.

After some back and forth and me saying the same thing about seven different ways I got confirmation that by deleting the virtual card any attempts to charge it in the future would come back declined saying the card didn't exist. I was concerned that for whatever reason the credit card company would roll an attempted charge on a deleted virtual charge up to the main card and honor it. Which seems stupid but it is a credit card company.

I'm 97.2390875% sure that it's not going to happen. I think I'm done with fraud charges from this vendor. We'll see in the next week.

No ReaperCon for Me

Alas life decided that I wasn't going to ReaperCon this year. Not only was it the first year I was going to teach it was going to be my last year attending.

Short version on why I didn't go. Changing my driver's license to my new state resulted in getting a paper temporary one TSA won't accept as identification and then credit card fraud required I get a replacement card. Both of these happened less than a week before the trip. With no TSA valid ID and no credit card flying and renting a car wasn't going to happen.

Why was this going to be my last year? Good question. I'd been enjoying this convention since 2005 (artist con that year but still) but things change. My interests have changed. My painting level and direction have changed. The convention has changed. All those changes combined means this isn't a convention for me.

Conventions are expensive. Travel, hotel, tickets, classes, meals. It adds up quickly. Weighing that against what I got from the convention started tilting the scales in the wrong direction. That's not to say ReaperCon isn't fun. A whole lot of people have fun. I'm just not one of them anymore.

I missed seeing the few people I know. I missed seeing the artists I know. I missed getting to teach my class. I missed the fun classes I chose to take as my final ones. I missed some of the regional restaurants. I missed them more because I knew I wouldn't experience all that again.

I wish I'd taken many, many more pictures of those early years. I tried but it never really happened. They've long ago been scrubbed from the Reaper website in updates and changes. I'll rely on my memories and let them rose color the whole thing.

ReaperCon was the last convention I'd been attending. The ones that were local to me either changed direction away from what interested me or failed. GenCon was always a shopping trip and I don't need to shop anymore. I don't know that there's local conventions where I am but we'll see. I'm not holding out hope and none of the other conventions around the country had interested me enough to consider going. At least not in the last decade or so.

Fifteen conventions and at least two artist conventions later it's time to let this one go.

For Your Own Peace of Mind - Organize!

 

As my previous post said I'm packing to move. The deadline is fast approaching and of course I'm scrambling now since before this I had 'plenty of time'. I no longer have 'plenty of time'.

I'm going to use this post as a heartfelt plea for you to go through your hobby/office spaces. Please declutter and throw out/donate/sell what you're not going to use. Look, actually look, at what you have and be brutally practical. Take what's left and put it into storage containers, then put those on shelves. It's a lot of work and it may not seem necessary if you're in your forever home or don't plan on moving.

But sometimes you don't get the luxury of planning on moving. Sometimes your forever home turns out not to be your forever home. And in general we collect and pile up a lot of crap.

I was somewhat lucky in that I started organizing things into plastic storage bins a while ago but never really finished. I'm paying for that now in some respects and in others not so much. I can use a lot of the 'unorganized' things and use them to fill space where the containers don't fit the boxes. That helps greatly in the short term, it isn't so great in the long term.

I'm not saying you can't keep things 'just in case'. I've got a lot of things like that for scratch building and they pack up just fine. When they're unpacked they're going into, you guessed it, plastic storage bins. I've also found a lot of things that I kept because it was more convenient than throwing them out. That's no longer the case. I don't need them and see no use for them in the near to moderate future. So they go.

When you're in one place for a long time this happens. It's easier to leave things out because you're using them than it is to go through and put them away. Piles occur. There's no judgement here. There can't be based on my own situation. But I'm saying that organization will save you a lot in the long run.

I'm a big fan of plastic bins over cardboard when possible. Get ones with tops. I use a lot of the dollar store ($1.25 store?) plastic shoeboxes and their smaller containers with handy flap lids. Those two sizes are mostly what I use since I can't make them too heavy for metal miniatures and the supplies fit mostly very well into the smaller ones. I'm also a huge fan of the 16 x 16 scrapbook paper holders from the craft store since they hold mini paint bottles well. I have a cart that holds six of those. I'm going to need another cart. But when I put the paint away it's put away.

In general it's a lot easier to find stuff if you've put like with like. All the sandpaper? In a plastic paper holder with a sliding lock. All the Dremel accessories? In a container. All the bases? In a container. It's work up front but if you look at it, really look at it, it's a one time pain. Then it saves you time when you're looking for where you put whatever later.

I also have storage cubes with doors. I lucked out getting those because they were discontinued. They fit perfectly into my current space and should fit well into my new space with some planning. Right now they're handy to where I paint so I can keep things I use a lot in there. In plastic storage bins or loose-ish in other kinds of containers. I use a pill bottle and a pilsner glass for the second rate and terrain paint brushes. They're contained.

I'd have a lot more trouble if I hadn't done this up front. Even with doing a partial organization it's saved me a lot of time and things are already together. When a box has 'bases' written on it I know all the bases are in there when it comes time to unpack. When a box has 'air' written on it I know it's everything I need for the air compressor. There will be other things in those boxes but I know what the important things are.

Another thing I found from all this is just how much I have of particular kinds of items. Between you and me I have too many of some. I know I can clear one of those when I get settled. The other will take more work and planning. But until it was all gathered up I didn't know the extent of what I had. Having it scattered put it out of mind. Having it put in one place lost me that luxury.

So just how well organized will the new space be? I'd like to think it's going to be decently organized. What's not in plastic containers will get there. The things that can be reduced will be. I will have more storage space so more things will be visible for me to use. I'll even label the containers if I get all kinds of ambitious. Those are all future considerations. Right now it's a matter of a rough organization of at least getting things into the boxes that will go into the same room.

I'm lucky in that I'll have more rooms for things now. With my hobbies I outgrew my two bedroom apartment resulting in a dense accumulation that was difficult to use. I worked hard to use every possible bit of storage space and I think I did well. The problem with that was getting to most things. I also had things on the shelves that I wasn't going to use but had the space to put them. That happens. That's going to happen again. By having more rooms and separating two big space hogging hobbies I'll have actual room to work. That's a luxury I haven't had for well over a decade.

I'll end this as I started, begging you to take the time to organize what you have. Plastic works better than cardboard in my opinion because if something bad happens that involves water your stuff has a much better chance of coming through undamaged or at least minimally damaged. Wipe it off and put it back. Cardboard, not so much. There's enough variety of sizes and shapes of plastic containers that you can find what you need or at least what will work well enough. You don't have to do it all at once. But please, please, please do it.

A Pause in our Program

Yeah, I know I haven't posted in a long time. Most of that was me just not painting. But the reason now is that I'm moving.

Expect the painting and printing posts to pick up again when I'm in my new place.

Ork Speed Freeks - Work In Progress 5

This time it's red. Lovely, lovely, pain-in-the-butt red. I won't go into the long winded details of the painting techniques because I did that in Part 4 of this series. You're welcome.

I'm still using craft paints, as the picture below shows. Here's the set of colors this time around.

The specific paints are:

• Anita All Purpose Acrylic - 11039 Wine - Pantone 7623
• Anita All Purpose Acrylic - 11003 True Red - Pantone 186
• Anita All Purpose Acrylic - 308062 Light Coral - Pantone  489 (closest, Pantone is darker)

This time there's no white or ivory. Red is one of those annoyingly difficult colors because it's wonderful right up until you get to highlighting. Highlighting means using some other color than red because red plus white equals PINK. While pink is not a terrible color in and of itself it doesn't work well for most things I paint red.

If you look up tutorials you find a lot of different ways to go with red highlights. Because of all the dark yellow on mine I decided to lean into the orange range without actually going orange. I picked that coral color because it's still in the red family while leaning into orange. Coral is one of those colors I dislike for no reason I know. It seems to work for this so now I'm stuck with having coral paint around.

To same some time here's the red and red-coral mixes dried on the parchment paper for your review.

You can see that there's three shades on here. Let me explain them.

Center right - True Red. I like this color. It's a vibrant red with not so great coverage. At least two coats are needed to get this one decent. More on that later.

Lower center - True Red and Coral in about a 3:1 ratio. I'm not exactly sure since I mixed and added until I liked it. This was the color stippled over the base coat.

Upper left - True Red and Coral in about a 4:1 ratio. Again I can't be certain because I mixed on the fly. This one is darker than the first mix because it went on after the glaze.

Not shown - The color from the upper left with more Coral to use as edge highlighting. It was probably about the same as the one in the lower center or slightly lighter.

As you can tell I'm not very concerned about matching these colors again. Orks are wonderful for variation. What I was concerned about was building up a depth of colors.

First up - base coating.

Nothing too fancy here, it's a red base coat. If I were doing fancy painting I would have gone back over all the areas I was going to paint red with white or grey so they were a consistent base. As it is there's black, grey, white, and some yellow under there. There are differences where those change but I didn't think it was important enough to spend the effort.

Base Stipple

As you can see there's a lot of difference between the two colors and it looks pretty harsh. This time I cut down a smaller brush for stippling since I was going to be painting smaller areas. I also did a few lines of the lighter color on the weapons where I wanted a different effect. I'm going to work on that later as I get more into the details.

Glaze

The wine glaze smoothed out those color transitions nicely and added the depth and lining. The red-coral mix is still more visible than the yellow mixes were but that's part of painting red when you're not doing it in lots of layer transitions.

I also moved the glaze around while it was wet so it would have some variation rather than making it smooth. It's kind of subtle but adds to the overall effect.

Second Stipple and Edge Highlights

And the bulk of the red is done. It's still got a kind of pink cast to it in my opinion but not enough to make me want to do anything about it. On the tabletop it isn't all that obvious and with all the other colors that will be involved it won't stand out like it does here.

I'm not going to say the red is done. I know I'll be using red in detailing so there will be more on the models. I don't know what I'm going to do about color, depth, etc. until I get to that point.

One thing that slows down the process now is picking where to paint a color. That happens at the base coat step. Orks are random. Random is more difficult than people think. We like patterns. Trying not to make patterns is frustrating because I keep double checking myself. In this case it's worse because of the prevalence of red in the canon color schemes. I did my best.

Going forward the posts won't be about a single color. I'm past that point in the process. The bulk of the models have been painted and now it's on to the detail work. The technique I use for important colors is well documented (base coat, stipple, glaze, stipple, edge highlight) so I'll do the same as here and just link back to the original post without showing all the stages of the process. Unless I think it looks cool in which case you get to see all the steps.

You will notice I haven't really touched the orks except when I overpainted a color. That's because I consider them a separate object to paint. It would have been very nice if the riders were separate models but they're not so I work with what I have. I did do some black base coats when I was in my black phase and those may or may not stay. It's all about what looks good in the moment really.

Ork Speed Freeks - A Work in Progress 4

And we're on to colors! Well. One color. Since these are going to be run mostly as Evil Sunz that means yellow is the main color for them. That's just how it is. And of course yellow is one of the more difficult colors to paint.

I started trying out miniature paints and found that even with the surplus of paints I have I didn't have the right yellow to get a color I wanted. Yes. I did look at mixing, as much as I don't like mixing paints for armies. I even ordered another set of yellows but I'll show you what happened there later. I ended up buying craft paints for a couple of reasons.

One - They're cheap. Vehicles take a lot more paint that miniatures for the most part and there's no real need to use the expensive stuff for them.

Two - They cover well. Once again I'm looking at army painting here. So covering well is an important thing.

The colors I decided on were these. They're the Hobby Lobby house brand so I included Pantone numbers for those who are looking for a close match. Since I have a Pantone sample swatch book I have to assume everyone has one.

• Anita All Purpose Acrylic - 11164 Ripe Apricot - Pantone 150
• Anita All Purpose Acrylic - 11005 Bright Yellow - Pantone 116 (close enough)
• Ivory (any will do)
• White (any will do)

The first layer is 2 coats of Bright Yellow over grey primer. Or use white primer. But I don't recommend black primer once you get into the colors because it's a pain in the butt to get both coverage and bright colors. But you do you.

It looks a little bland but that's fine. It's a solid yellow base to use to build up (and down) colors. I left some areas unpainted that I plan on painting other colors and I painted some areas that will probably get painted other colors. It's an evolving process.

Now we get into the fun part of painting orks - the lack of uniformity. For most factions you want things to be uniform. Because, uniforms. The ork faction is pretty haphazard by design so it gives you a lot of creative freedom and the ability to cut as many corners as you want.

The next layer is a stipple of lighter yellow. Let's get into that.

For those who aren't familiar with the stipple technique. You need a brush with short, stiff bristles. Take one of your synthetic ones that isn't floppy and cut it straight across a short distance (1/8 inch or 5mm at minimum). This brush is gonna get wrecked but that's fine. Then pick up a small amount of paint, maybe double what you would use for dry brushing but half as much as you'd use for regular painting, then you're ready to stipple. Stab the area to be painted randomly with the brush. Voila - stippled. Or maybe gobbed in this case.

I mixed up a lighter shade of yellow from the base coat; I wanted something duller than the color straight white would give so I decided to use ivory too.

First I tried straight ivory paint and didn't like that the result was really dull and greenish.

See? Meh and greenish.

Next I tried a half-and-half mix of ivory and white. I wanted to dull the color (ivory) while still keeping it bright (white). That was the winner. Coincidentally it's almost identical to Reaper Miniature's limited edition Golden Glow paint.

Now that I had the lighter color I blotched stippled it all over the base coat. In reality I painted blotches over about half the base coat so I had both colors showing.

The orks sat here for a while due to some pretty serious real life issues. If you know me either you know what happened or you can ask. If you don't know me then just accept that they were pretty serious life issues. It took me a while to get back to painting in general.

On to the next step - covering up all that paint. Really what I did was paint over everything with a transparent glaze of the darker yellow. That blends the colors into a more harmonious whole while leaving me the ability to keep going light again. If that makes any sense. Just look at the pictures.

I used acrylic blending gel rather than matte medium because it has the glazing properties that matte medium doesn't. After mixing it with the paint I added flow improver until I was happy with the result. It's just like making the contrast paints in that I drew up the paint onto the side of the palette until it had the right viscosity. I'd try to explain more but it's something you have to learn in person. Remember - paint is cheap so keep trying.

You can see the previous colors through the glaze and that it pooled in the recesses to do some nice shading.

Next up was more paint! I'm using the light yellow mix again. I did the same stipple thing as before but in smaller areas.

These pictures are doing double duty because I took them after I used a lighter version of the light paint to do edge highlighting. To make it lighter I used white. That made it the bright color but it was already light enough that it didn't go cartoonish on me. I wasn't very picky about edge highlighting because orks. But I did do all the hard edges and the softer ones on those face fronts. I also did some on the big curve of the wartrike front fenders.

And that's it. The yellow is done. When I paint more the lighter yellows won't be exactly the same but they'll be close enough. You can see that this turned out a very good yellow without leaning into the orange too much and without being YELLOW. It is a difficult color to paint but I think I chose well when I picked the shades.

I got pretty sloppy when painting these. It's part of the way things go both when stippling and when glazing. Once I saw it was going to get messy I accepted it. That doesn't mean I didn't try to make it tidy. It meant that I knew I was going to have to do cleanup after it was done. As it is I'm going to hold off on that until the rest of the colors are painted or I'd be doing that more than is needed.

I did say I'd let you know know what happened with the set of yellow paints I ordered. I'm not going to name the brand. I like the brand. I use them when I paint miniatures. They didn't work for this particular project but that's nothing against them.

This was one coat of the darker but not darkest yellow in the set. You can see that it already went green and just didn't look right. At least it didn't look right to me. It wasn't ork yellow. So I painted over it with the craft paint and never looked back.

This little end bit is to remind you to try things. Nothing was harmed here and it didn't take me much time to try, decide, and move forward. Some won't work, some will work, some will surprise you. If you're really not sure try one decent size area or a failed print/piece of sprue and use that as your test piece. 

Ork Speed Freeks - A Work in Progress 3

Each step is less and less surface area to paint. Yay! This time it was the silver for anything I want to be metal. It's painted over black to give it some depth. Rather than doing large group pictures going forward I'll be showing smaller batches since details will start to matter soon.

Yes, I can see the layer lines too.

The Megatrakk Scrapjet has the metal on it. I'm not really sure how I'm going to paint the treads yet so those are still black. I forgot to get a side picture to show the tread workings but since it's been further painted I don't want to muddle up the order. There's a lot of silver in there too.

I'm trying very hard not to let the layer lines bother me but I have a feeling that these will be retired in favor of resin printed ones at some point in the future unless I can minimize how those layer lines stand out. For now they stay. This taught me lessons in patience about printing thinner layers even though it takes longer, and I've done that with other vehicles going forward.

Shiny metal guns, struts, exhaust, claws, etc.

The leftmost magnetized arm looks like it doesn't sit flush but I think there's a loose piece of pin in the body cavity causing that. I didn't do a lot to make these pretty pictures since it's a WIP.

Yet another view, showing the differences. I know there's a lot of faces as the front fender but that's because I forgot to print one of the options and printed that one twice.

The Nob Bikers with their power claws (which haven't been seen before). The claw arms are magnetized so I can swap out weapons and because of that they're painted separately. That's why they weren't shown before.

I was bothered by the rectangular block on the back wheel/tread area (see previous posts for those) because it didn't seem right. Finally I realized I had forgotten to print the guns. Sigh. I hadn't even prepared the files for printing. Those got printed, I stripped the paint off the contact areas on the bikes, painted the guns up separate, then attached them. I have to touch up the joins but they're out of the way enough not to matter that much. Forgetting the guns. Sheesh.

Here's the boyz! Warbikers go vroom.

Another view showing the variety of poses.

Now we're getting into the basic fast attack troops. They don't have weapon options so everything is what it looks like. One again it's silver over the black.

Another set of warbikers. These have humanoid skulls on them in various places.

Another view of them.

Yet another view! The humanoid skulls are quite small compared to the size of the orks, which is as it should be.

A different set of warbikers which adds variety. I prefer a variety in my troops and luckily I can get it with 3D printing them. One of these guys isn't behaving at all when it comes to attaching the front wheel assembly. I have it pinned and even now it's a bit loose. Once it's on the base it will be fine but I need to be a bit careful when handling it. I don't like him.

My, that's a big gun you have there.

More warbikers, more guns.

Yet another different set of warbikers. I don't quite understand the metal plates wrapping around the tires but I guess it's an ork thing. I'll be doing some weathering on those when the painting is done. These have a space for a gun to be attached to their back and I had an extra so the center guy got two. His grots like him better.

Oh yeah baby.

I still really like the unusual aspect of a trike with two wheels in the front. It's way front heavy because I didn't hollow those out when I printed them and I won't make that mistake if I print another. I probably won't because these don't have a lot on the table at once and I have different versions if I want another one.

I didn't magnetize his claw arm because he only has one arm option. I could have done it but the other one I have right now has a claw on that arm too. Seems like this fella likes his power claw.

I touched up the black after painting the silver but I know I'll have to keep touching up things as I paint. It's part of life. Going forward I'll be using craft paint for silver rather than the expensive stuff. Silver is silver and these things eat paint and brushes. I bought more cheap craft paint brushes too.

The silver that's on it is Army Painter Plate Mail Metal. It covered great in one coat.

The Games Workshop Way is to pick out details on metal with a bronze/copper color. I did a little of that and painted over it. I'm not sure how I'm going to pick out the details on these yet. There's a nice amount of detail on the weapons so I'll have some fun with it.

Next up will be painting yellow because most vehicles are used in Evil Sunz clan games and their color is yellow. Yes, I know red makes things go faster but that's more a Goff color. Yes, I know Goffs tend to be painted black more than red until you get into the bigger guys. But yellow it is and it's the next largest color block.

Yellow sucks to paint and I'm very sure you're going to be reading a lot about how yellow sucks to paint in the next post.

Ork Speed Freeks - A Work in Progress 2

I'm through what I consider the most tedious part of painting - large base coats. I can't find a way to describe them as interesting. What's even less interesting is doing them twice.

In the last post I had base coated them black with a different shade of black on the tires. I wasn't certain about the tires. I was right to be uncertain about the tires. And the base coat needed some work.

This time I did what I should have done in the first place. I used acrylic craft paint (Hobby Lobby store brand) instead of the miniature paint. Not only is it much cheaper it's got more coverage. And it's cheaper.

Woo. Black. At least it's a more solid undercoat and I finished base coating all the areas I currently think will be metal. I'll be figuring that out as I go since that's detail stuff.

A bit more tidy in these shots, showing where the metals will be once they're finished. A lot of what the other pictures showed are the undersides, which to me are important to paint but won't be seen much if at all once they're done. It's a personal quirk.

I haven't done any work on the separate arms. I'll correct that in the next painting session since I'll need to get metal on them and eventually paint the skin at the same time I'm doing that for the base models. I might as well set it up with these.

Next up - lots of silver, which should be only slightly less tedious than the black because there's less of it to do.

I have something special planned for the megatrakk scrapject canopy windows but it will be at the end of the process so you'll have to wait for it. I also have to test it and confirm it will be what I want it to be.

Ork Speed Freeks - A Work In Progress 1

I've started on making an Ork Warhammer 40k army. 3D printer go brrrrr.

Almost every model I'm using is from Gear Guts' Mek Shop. Lemme tell you about them first so I can move on with the fancy pictures and stuff. First, I subscribe to his Patreon which I recommend to anyone doing 3D printing since it's one of the best value Patreons I've seen. The USA shop (linked above) sells the print files and also printed models. If you're in the UK or Australia there's shops that sell printed models (yay lower postage!) but not the files. Rumor has it there may be a vendor in Canada at some point but as of now there isn't one.

For those not familiar with Warhammer 40k I'll give you a summary of what's going on. You have models. You roll dice. Either you win or lose the fight. OK. I'll be nice and give more detail. When playing you choose a point value for the game (typically). Then within that point value you pick and choose models with various roles, based on the rules, to fill it out. I've chosen a faction that's quite frankly silly but fun - Orks. The roles are the same across the game but the model roles have different names.

I was doing random printing for a while then found a local group that seems nice and meets regularly. That meant putting together a playable force. I poked around on the Discord and Facebook groups to see posted army lists that didn't chase the meta and found a couple of forces I liked. I settled on a 500 point Speed Freek force to start learning the game.

That meant printing warbikers. A lot of warbikers. But that's fine because GG put out a lot of warbiker sets so I had variety, which I really like on the table.

After much printing I had this:

These aren't totally warbikers. The vehicle on the left is a Megatrakk Scrapjet that I already had printed. That one is off the filament printer so it has layer lines. I played with various ways to minimize them but forgot that the missiles are pretty rough. Oh well. That's what paint is for. The big guy in the middle is the boss - the Deffkilla Wartrike. I chose that model because I liked the oddity of having two wheels in front rather than in back. Finally I have the Boss Nobz on their bigger, fancier warbikes. I accidentally printed two of one of them so I have an extra that I'll paint up because I'll use it at some point later. They're not actually missing arms. Those have been magentized and printed separate since they have weapon choices.

These are the warbikers. They're kind of low level cavalry and the lowest level in this force. As you can see I went for a variety of models so that they'll be more interesting on the table. That jerk in the upper left caused me no end of issues until I finally drilled holes and pinned parts of it together. That showed him. Once again I have one more than I need for this force but hey, I'll use it at some point.

3D Printing

I figure the printing part should get it's own little section in this first post. Each warbiker (boyz and nobz) was a separate print and took about four hours. The Deffkilla Wartrike took two prints and about maybe six or seven hours. The Megatrakk Scrapjet (I had to look this one up since I printed it a while ago) twelve hours on the filament printer but would have taken two or three prints on the resin one for no time savings but also no layer lines.

I won't get into comparing costs with buying them from Games Workshop. That's not the point here even though I know I saved money on most models I print. The point is that I get a huge variety that you don't get from boxed sets. I can also edit the files to have magnet holes printed into them for when I want to be able to swap out parts. With kits, if you get the parts you need to be able to swap them out at all, you need to drill holes and no one likes that.

GG also is nice enough to have the gun barrels recessed so that's less work since drilling out gun barrels is part of detailed model preparation. Yes, I know you can paint the black dot and make it look like the barrels are drilled but that's not a concern when it's part of the model.

I've also printed the bases for when they're ready to be used. I didn't print fancy ones since my plan is to do the traditional sand bases with some grass tufts. I have sand. I have grass tufts. I don't want to print fancy base toppers. It was an easy decision and I can print the bases very nicely on the filament printer.

Painting

The rest of the posts will be about painting the models. That's the fun part. Orks aren't known for their precision or fashion sense. They're the only faction in the game rules that's allowed to loot models from any other faction and make them their own. Colors have meaning to Orks because part of their silliness is that whatever they believe happens. They believe that red makes vehicles go faster so the rules give you that option to give them extra movement. The various Ork clans also have colors to differentiate them.

The good thing is that you can mix up the colors without a problem. Just because yellow is used for a certain clan doesn't mean that same color can't be in a different clan army. This is excellent because if not for that you'd either have to pick a clan and stick with it or have multiple models painted in multiple colors. While GW would just love for you to have the multiple models (don't get me started on 'what you see is what you get' rules) the general flow is just to say what clan(s) things are when playing.

The pictures show the primed models. I went fancy and tried using an appropriate color of primer for what the part will eventually be painted. Black primer where there will be a black base coat is a no brainer. Grey is a neutral for the body of the vehicle. White is for the 'contrast paint' (Part 1 and Part 2 of that process) since I developed the color scheme to work over white and personally prefer white as a primer color anyway.

I will probably do the same thing with future models. It's kind of a pain and it makes me learn how to better control my airbrush but it should work out better in the long run. I'll know that as I paint these. I highly recommend Badger Stynylrez primer for either airbrushing or brush painting. That stuff sticks like you wouldn't believe. I linked to their main site but you can find it on Amazon as well. I don't know what's in it but I firmly believe that it's some kind of unicorn fluid and we'll leave it at that.

The treads on the Skrapjet (I got tired of typing out the full name) I also airbrushed in the black paint base coat because those things are brush killers. If you can see it at all you can see it isn't as shiny as the rest.

Here's the work I did last night - base coating. I bought a pack of cheap synthetic brushes for painting vehicles because there's no way my mini painting brushes were appropriate and even with my my massive brush collection I didn't have the right ones for this work. Everything but the tires are painted with Reaper Pure Black. The tires are Secret Weapon Tire Black, which is actually kind of green black. Secret Weapon is no longer available so this is me using my stocks.

Going forward I'm probably going to use craft acrylic paint for the black base coat. There's no reason that I can see for using the expensive miniature paint for this. It's black and it's going to mostly get covered over with other colors. I'm going to have a close look to see if the Tire Black is different enough from the Pure Black to justify using it here. It's a thin paint out of the bottle so it may need two coats to show a difference and with it being in short supply I don't know that I want to use it on army painting. I'll make that call when I see it.

The next step will be painting the undercarriages. Those will be streaky metallic since they will have been fairly abused by terrain and they're not visible for the most part. I know I could leave them black but metallic will stand out more against a neutral background. If these were flush with the bases I wouldn't bother and probably wouldn't have primed them at all to get a better glue bond.

Speaking of glue bonds I did try a little sanding to make flat spots on the tires so the bikes would 'sit' better and have larger contact points with the bases. I found out the resin is excellently hard and sanding was a tedious process for minor results. I always planned on pinning the bikes to the bases anyway and the sand will hide the fact that the tires aren't compressed. I can strip the paint off the contact points when it's time to combine them so I didn't bother with trying to avoid painting the areas I did sand.

I'm kind of sort of waiting for some paints I ordered from Warcolours before painting on colors but they're taking their own sweet time getting here from Greece so I may use some of my copious paint collection to start. I want the colors to be different shades. That fits the aesthetic of the faction. I always planned on painting them in groups so that they would have different shades. I just wanted the new stuff as opposed to the hundreds of bottles of paint I already have.