Dawn of the Lead

This might sound like an April Fools’ thing, but I’ve started a small project for…Warhammer 40k. Wait, what? After not having touched the game since the 90s, I tried a small scenario with some close friends a while back (using my Colonial Marines as Imperial Guard), and realized that it was actually pretty fun! This, combined with the fact that I had long been eyeing the Azadi Death Front models from 40 Emperor, and the realization that a 40k army doesn’t have to be an ultra massive endeavour, have led to me starting a small 40k force. While I haven’t played the game, I have enjoyed many of the different 40k digital games, and quite like the fiction too. The Imperial Guard (or Astra Militarum in silly trademarkable lingo) has always been my favourite. This shouldn’t be a surprise, given my love for Aliens, Starship Troopers and the like. They’re the underdogs, the meat that gets fed into the grinder – albeit meat with pretty sweet tanks.

The ADF models are a really cool force of all-female troopers, inspired by Kurdish YPJ soldiers. I don’t really want to mix real-world politics with my toy soldiers too much, but I love both the look of the minis and appreciate their real-world counterparts. Headscarves, sneakers, harem pants – what’s not to like. A bit of extra representation in the grim darkness of the far future isn’t a bad thing either.

Illustration by Alberto Luna, ©40Emperor

Now, I’m not a fan of batch painting, which has been a major detriment to any army-based miniature gaming thing since my WHFB days. However, I happened to have a very free weekend – back in October when I started this post(!) – so I printed out a whole squad of troopers, gave them a blast of black primer, and got to work. It was a fun weekend’s work, and I watched a bunch of films and series from my backlog (Wandavision is fun, What if…? is fun, Predators is still fun, AvP and AvP: Requiem were still not good but better than I remembered, and I quite enjoyed Alien: Resurrection much to my surprise). At the end of it I had an actual squad to be used in 40k, with even a few extra models thrown in. For me, finishing 12 models over a couple of days is a huge thing!

I wanted to try some new techniques, so I did a bit of OSL on the plasma gunner, and some heated metal effects on the support weapons – which I think turned out pretty nice! All of the scarves are different, and allowed me to break up the uniformity of the squad. I want them to look more like a a militia/rebel force than a super uniform military unit, and I think that works decently well too. With the bases I went for a kind of a rocky, sandy Afghanistan look – not quite desert, but dry, dusty and barren.

Click for a larger version

Click for a larger version

Click for a larger version

Click for a larger version

After the squad, I’ve painted a Sisirk war walker, the ADF’s equivalent of a Sentinel, some Heresy scifi troopers with 3d printed female heads (to represent Tempestus Scions), a custom Hero Forge Astropath, and I’m nearly done with a Chimera alternative too! This doesn’t mean that I’ve neglected all my other projects: I’ve painted a bunch of gothic horror monsters, some graveyard pieces and monster hunters, too! I’ll show those off too, possibly, eventually, maybe.

As regulars have probably noticed, the blog has been very quiet for the past few months. As usual, there’s nothing dramatic involved, luckily! I’ve been really busy with work, took some time off to go to London for Salute 2021 (happy I did, as next year’s event is cancelled), and so on – “the uze”, as Cheetor would say. As I’ve mentioned approximately a hundred times by now, as a lot of my daily work is writing, whether research articles or grant applications or professional communications, there’s not usually a lot of energy for spare time writing. I’m thoroughly enjoying reading your blogs, though, and I’m not about to leave this wonderful little community! I’m on holiday for the next three weeks, so I ‘m fairly certain the blog will pick up a bit again – it usually does towards the end of the year!