Thousand Sons Terminators Part 4

So my first weekend off in 3 weeks and I spent the whole weekend addicted to 40K in one form or another!!! (I worked from home 2 days during the DC blizzards). Again trying to find more time to do regular updates.

Saturday I went and played in a great Tournament hosted by Inner Circle Gaming, Day . Great tourney overall, Won 2, lost 1, all good opponents, and I think I defeated myself with a risky move and a bit of miss-measuring! (I thought I was closer to an objective then I was!)

Sunday I started work again on my Terminators, finishing the prep work and priming of all the arms, all 36! Why 36? Well as I magnetized the Terminators I wanted to be able to play them as loyalist or Chaos right away, and in either position I wanted to be able to field any of another options. The thought of painting them all in the next could weeks or so is a bit daunting, but the second set of these guys will be MUCH easier as I will already have a lot of the weapon options finished and can focus on bodies.

Thousand Sons Terminators Part 3

Working updating more often, but a busy week at work... I hate playing catchup!

I know the Gold looks a little rough, one of the downsides of using a GW gold mix, but once it's washed and highlighted it will clean up. Some more WIP shots in the next couple days, The bodies and heads are finished, working on modeling the arms.

Thousand Sons Terminators Part 2

Sorry for the delay, The weather in Greater Washington D.C. area took a turn for the worse. Between the lost power, almost 4 feet of snow (as of tonight, total accumulation) I got a bit behind…. One would think this would create the perfect storm for sitting down and finishing some mini’s…

So what do you get when you combine a Techmarine, Thousand Sons CSM, a few Dark Angels bits, Terminators, Magnets and a bit of plasticard?????

A Thousand Sons TechTerminator!!!

The first generation of this used the popular Pre-Heresy Terminator shoulderpad conversion that’s floating around on the web, as seen in the picture, however after completing 10 sets of these, carefully gluing, cutting and shapping I found that is a huge flaw in this style of shoulderpad… The first time I primes the WIP Figures the cardboard ”sprawed”.. It warped, stretched, and got fuzzy...

After hurling a mini against the wall (kidding) I stripped all the figures as best I could, and restarted. After a little trial and error I ended up this time using a simpler shoulderpad design, and using very thin plasticard layered together. I lost some of the WIP photos from the second generation shoulderpad without paint, but as I am progressing this is what the ended up looking like.

The shoulders were a multi step process. I got into Microsoft paint and designed the basic online using the Pre-Heresy Shoulderpad TuT as a basis for my starting point. I copied and pasted the image into Word, cloned the image 10 times, and loaded 0.010 mm thick plasticard into my inkjet printer... After some trial and error I realized that if I clear coated the sheet as soon as I pulled it from the printer it would bind the printers ink almost instantly without altering the image at all. I then followed the Tut, the only exception is using 0.020mm plasticard as the second layer of the shoulders. . To bend the plasticard I heated it in boiling water and curled it around a brush head while dunking it in cooler water.

More soon!

Thousand Sons Terminators Part 1

This is actually an older project I had sitting on the back burner for quite a while. I got distracted by a new home purchase, a couple models needed for tourneys and overall just intimidated by scope of the project.

I wanted to build 10 Terminators to start with that could fit in the loyalist part of the army I am planning as well as the current “traitor” line I Am fielding, and as my greenstuff skills are still building I went with a major conversion based on a released figure.

I am basing the core of the figure on the newer Techmarine line, scratch building shoulder pads, cutting off and drilling out the heads, magnetizing the arms for convenient arm swaps and overall giving them a “Thousand Sons” feel. Overall I think I am going to end up with Terminators that I can display with pride and will be the core to the bit of fluff I am trying to write to explain my loyalist, post heresy Thousand Sons

Question of speed....

Slowhammer….

A term a friend of my mine coined in reference to slow Warhammer players… either deliberately slow turns to stall in a tourney, a classic “chess” style player that ponders every move, or the dreaded indecisive player who wants to take back a move 3 back, and re-measures 6 times…. But what about slow painters?


Being new to the hobby and trying to pick up higher level skills quickly to make my conversions shine brighter I am finding I am getting slower the more time I paint, not faster.


This whole train of thought (a bit stream of consciousness due to a 16+ hour work day) is brought on but a comment a player made at a team tourney I played in over the weekend. When asked how much time I spent on a figure I quoted 60+ hours, painting and converting, he looked shocked. Then when he inquired about my more recent projects he insinuated exaggeration.. He told me how he painted 3 figures in one night and I lauded him, but after spending 3 and ½ hours painting just the gold trim on 3 of my Terminator conversions (pictures coming) I am more confident that my numbers are spot on… I do most of my brush work with a 00 – 1 as I learn control, take the time to thin my paints, mix them well, and all of this adds up to long paint sessions that result in little progress but figures I am “satisfied” with. I do it between the other demands on my time (work 50 – 60+ hours a week, fiancé, dog, house etc) which means I don’t have a lot of long sessions, just an hour here, 2 hours there, etc…

I guess the real point of this thread is to ask, is anyone else out there a slow painter or is it just my personal drive for an ever increasing level of perfection that’s dragging projects down? Comments please….




Someday I hope to be at Golden Daemon caliber, both in quality and speed, but until then I will keep slowpainting…