As promised this month’s additions to my Adeptus Mechanicus army comes in the form of two more electro priests to complete the squad of five.
There’s not much more to say about these that I’ve not said previously so here’s a look at the full squad ready to fight for the glory of Mars.
I’m not sure what I’ll tackle next month but there’s another priestly-type that I’ve been wanting to paint for a while so it might well be his turn next.
Oh oh… Hobby time has been stripped down to a bare minimum this month and those few hours I did manage to claw back from work I ended up spending kitbashing Redemptionists for Necromunda. All well and good but those are not the red-robed fanatics I was supposed to be looking at! Now, with the minutes and seconds that make up July slipping rapidly through my fingers I’d better make good on my promise to add something to my Adeptus Mechanicus army every month of 2021.
Back in June, when I was full of misplaced confidence, I reckoned I’d get three Electro Priests painted – enough to complete the squad. Time has made a fool of me on that score, but I did manage sneak in an hour or two and get this guy finished.
Whew – a close call there! Next month I’ll get the other two done (and this time I mean it!).
Did you think that those Electro Priests were going to be the only additions to the Adeptus Mechanicus this month? Well so did I! However Games Workshop recently released a new codex for the faction, and alongside it a new Skitarii Marshal miniature. These are the senior officers of the Skitarii, veterans charged with commanding the legions whilst the priests are busy thinking holy thoughts about the wonderful machines of old. With my first squad of Skitarii rangers now fully painted and more waiting for attention I decided to treat myself – and to break with tradition and paint him straight away rather than leaving him half done for months or years first!
It’s also almost the end of June (where does the time go?) which mean we must be due for a look at the progress I’ve made with this army since the start of the year. First of all here’s a look at everything I’d painted by the end of 2020.
Not very impressive is it, especially as two of those models are loaned from Blackstone Fortress. By now however things are looking a bit more imposing (click on the picture to see a bigger version).
Tremble hereteks! Naturally I’ve got a lot more planned for the second half of 2021 so let’s see how that legion looks in another 6 months.
This month’s contribution to the growing ranks of Mars comes in the form of two electro priests. Holy crusaders of the Fulgurite creed these brothers seek to reclaim the Motive Force being casually squandered by other living beings and return it to the rightful possession of the Omnissiah’s faithful. Or to put it differently the bio-electric currents which are currently keeping you alive are, to these fanatics, a gift from the Machine God Himself, a portion of His power bestowed to all living things, and if you’re not going to dedicate them to His Great Work then they’ll be having them back thank you very much.
To be honest I made a lot of mistakes painting these two but I think I’ve managed to cover them all up and I’m pretty happy with the end result (especially when I compare them to the way they could have looked…). Will I learn from these errors or will I repeat them all over again when I get to work on the other three members of their squad? We’ll find out next month!
As promised last month I’ve set myself the goal of adding at least one model to my Adeptus Mechanicus army every month in 2021. Having managed sod all with this project for many a long year I then managed to knock out a series of miniatures in the first few months without really trying. Allow me to delude myself that this was not in fact a fluke and is instead proof that the tide has turned at last for the followers of the machine god. With April’s offering seeing my first squad of Skitarii rangers growing tantalising close to full strength I decided that my first task for May would be to get them up to ten models.
As well as two standard rangers above I also painted up this trooper with their rather fancy looking Transuranic Arquebus.
Whilst I was about it I also went back to the very first two Skitarii I painted for this project and repainted the various cables in yellow rather than green, in order to tie them in to the rest of the squad. I know it’s a minor thing but the Omnissiah demands attention to detail in all things!
With that done here’s the whole squad ready to march forth in the name of Sacred Mars at last.
That’s not all I painted this month though because, infused with the motive force, I also managed to paint up one of the gloriously weird looking Sicarian Infiltrators.
I’d quite like to tackle some more of these soon but I’ve not actually built the rest of the box so they may or may not be putting in an appearance in June. Equally I have a couple of Electro Priests sitting on the painting desk so I might make them next month’s offering instead – and of course it’s always possible that I find the time to paint something else for this project in May although the way work looks at the moment I wouldn’t count on it – as ever watch this space!
I spotted something the other day which I probably should have noticed earlier; that I managed to add something to my Adeptus Mechanicus project in January, February and March of this year. Seems a pity not to add something in April too then doesn’t it? In fact I’ve started so I might as well commit – I hereby challenge myself to add something to the legions of Mars every month of 2021. It’s a trick that worked nicely for my Skaven army, building the momentum that turned a mountain of grey plastic into a swarm of fully painted vermin, so now I’ll apply it to the armies of the machine god as well.
First things first let’s do something about the squad of Skitarii rangers who still stand at a paltry four members even after all this time.
With these three ready to serve the legions of Mars I think my next move should be to add three more for a full squad of ten. Let’s see if that can be done by the end of May then.
Of course these models also fit very neatly into the “Paint the Crap You Already Own” challenge being run by Ann’s Immaterium. You can read all about the challenge here, or just get Batman to sum it up for you…
As we’re now almost at the end of the month and time for getting anything else painted is short I’ve taken the liberty of assuming I won’t get anything else finished (chance, as they say, would be a fine thing) so here’s a round-up groupshot of everything I painted for the challenge.
Not sure what I’ll tackle next but I’ve got a feeling that some worshippers of the machine god might just be among them…
Released as part of the Kill Team: Rogue Trader set Larsen van der Grauss is a Lectro-Maester of Adeptus Mechanicus, which means he’s a prospector charged with seeking out new sources of power for the forge worlds. There’s something wonderfully retro sci-fi about him, an aesthetic which runs through a lot of the Adeptus Mechanicus range but which really comes to the fore here. He’s also been sitting around unfinished since September of 2018 so he’ll be another submission to the Neglected But Not Forgotten challenge being run by Ann’s Immaterium.
A close up reveals not only the flaws in my painting but also freehand on the screen of his high-tech handheld gizmo (which I’m secretly rather proud of).
I’d love to see another boxset similar to Kill Team: Rogue Trader someday. Games Workshop have done some excellent sets recently but most of them have been made up of models that were already available, spiced up with a few extras which were given an early release through the boxset. The Rogue Trader set however explored entirely new ground, without any of it needing to develop into a fully released faction (not that I’d have minded if it had). The only comparable example I can think of in recent years (outside of Specialist Games of course) has been the Warhammer Quest games. Between them Blackstone Fortress and Kill Team: Rogue Trader really expanded a lot of the otherwise unexplored corners of the 40k universe and I certainly wouldn’t be averse to seeing more sets like this in the future.
This is one of the first models I planned to tackle for Fembruary and so it makes sense, in the topsy-turvy way I go about my hobbying, that she’s one of the very last to be completed. Back when Lady Olynder, the Mortarch of Grief, was first released I worried that she’d be a difficult creature to paint and commented that I felt like I was the only person on earth who didn’t really like her. To be honest there were plenty of moments whilst actually painting her which didn’t help to change my mind. Much like the Khinerai I painted earlier in the month the whole model is prone to moving around every time a brush touches it and despite my attempts to anchor her a bit more solidly both she and her handmaidens pushed my patience to the limit at times.
That said however I still enjoyed painting her a great deal, even if she did make me grind my teeth and swear more than usual, and I’m happy with the end result so all’s well that ends well. Rather than paint her as the Queen of the Nighthaunt I used her as the basis from which to convert a tech-priestess for my nascent Adeptus Mechanicus collection.
With a conversion of this type there’s always a temptation to keep adding things but to me the simplicity of the original Lady Olynder is one of its great strengths and I wanted to strike a balance between maintaining that whilst adding just enough to tie her into a futuristic rather than fantasy setting and make it clear that here we have a representative of the Martian priesthood rather than an ambulatory bedsheet. For those who’re unfamiliar with the base model I used here’s the studio version from Games Workshop as a comparison.
As well as the Princess herself I had a lot of fun with the two little handmaidens. Strange though it may be to say I think there’s something quite cute about these two, and they offered an opportunity to play up the technological aspects without detracting from the simplicity of the core figure.
Finally here we have her, ready to command the soldiers of the Red Planet in their unending search for lost technology.
And there we have it, another model that could so easily have been left unfinished get’s pushed over the finish line for Fembruary. That’s not all either, tomorrow – once I’ve added a few finishing touches – we’ll see another agent of House Escher.
It’s been the best part of twenty years since I started banging on about wanting to paint an Adeptus Mechanicus army, almost six years since miniatures for them were released and nine months since I finally got a couple of Skitarii painted. For that matter it’s also been one week since you looked at me, cocked your head to the side and said, “We need to talk about Mars” and five days since you laughed at me saying “The Omnissiah demands you get your shit together and paint His legions!”. Anyway, at long last my two Skitarii have been joined by two more.
Really I should have painted another to round out a squad but the uncanny powers of Tzeentch with which I’ve been tampering over recent weeks have clearly addled what was left of my common sense.
I’m not going to pretend that more of these will follow straight away, I’ve got more Tzeentch and the Fembruary challenge lined up which I want to concentrate on, but I am determined that after that I’ll give the armies of Sacred Mars the love and attention they have been denied for so long.
Working on the servitor X-101 got me thinking about the sons of Holy Mars once again, and the fact that I haven’t painted anything for the glorious birthworld of the Mechanicum since back in April. Despite how much I know inside I love tech-priests and their ilk I still seem to have a bit of a mental block when it comes to actually painting them. Still, whilst I’ve got Blackstone Fortress on the brain I can always kill two (servo-)birds with one (radioactive!) stone and paint Daedalosus, the wandering tech-adept who can be taken as part of the band of adventurers venturing into the fortress.
I know I’ve slowed down a bit on getting Blackstone Fortress painted since I completed the original boxset, although this last week has done a little bit towards setting that right. We’ve got out of the habit of playing it since we discovered Warcry – although I paint plenty of other things that never see a gaming table so I don’t really see why that should make any difference. Still I would like to get the finger out and get everything else painted for it (especially once the wintery weather puts me off from being outdoors more than I strictly need to!). I’m still in two minds about buying the final expansion, Ascension. On the one hand the new Guardian Drones look amazing, we’ve enjoyed the game and it makes sense to complete the collection and finish the adventure. On the other hand the price feels a little bit like they’re taking the piss – safe in the knowledge that lots of people have been hooked by previous expansions Games Workshop are charging a bit more than I, without the box open in front of me to take a proper look at its contents, feels it really deserves. I may yet save up for it but it’s not the only thing GW are trying to tempt me into buying right now. I’ll think about it…
Convert or Die 