Urien Rakarth - The Ending

Many moons ago I had a poll up on this blog looking for a non-Space Wolves character for me to tackle. Urien Rakarth turned out to be that character. Finally I can now say that the challenge is complete. As a complete change to painting marines, I enjoyed it very much. I am hoping that all Dark Eldar are as fun and straight forward to paint as Mr Rakarth.

For the painting I tried to stick to the Dark Eldar painting guides that can be found in issues of White Dwarf. Unfortunately my scanner is broken, but I will post an update showing how close I got to the intended result once I have it fixed.

Now with various Dark Eldar units on their way to me and a whole Slaaneshi/Noise Marine Army to paint up and the remnants of my Space Wolves to finish, I have plenty of work on my plate and hope to keep the updates flowing as I progress with all three of the armies mentioned.

So without further ado, here are the few pictures I have taken of my completed Master Haemonculus.

Two Week Update

The last two weeks have been very busy, I have been gaming a fair bit and have also got a decent amount of painting completed.

On the 40k gaming front I have been involved in four games, using both my Space Wolves and Chaos Marines.

The Space Wolves have seen action against both Blood Angels (which resulted in my only victory), and against a combined Imperial Guard/Tyranid force which ended in a draw. Both games were great fun and very bloody with nothing out of the ordinary occurring.

My Chaos Space Marines also took part in two annihilation battles, the first against Grey Knights which resulted in an incredibly bloody draw in which I had a fully functioning Land Raider still functioning at the end against one Grand Master and a Razorback. Again it was a tremendous match up, which also saw me using a Defiler (which downed the GKs Storm Raven in turn 1 with its Reaper Autocannon) and Chaos Dreadnaught for the first time.

The second battle for my CSMs resulted in what can only be viewed as a complete massacre, the kind of which was not dished out by my marines, but by my Eldar opponent (who was also coincidentally the opponent in the Blood Angels and Grey Knights games). Sunday is obviously the day my dice gods put their feet up and took a break. To only take out 10 Fire Dragons and 3 Eldar craft (Wave Serpents and the like) in four rounds when I had Obliterators, Dreadnaught, Defiler, Land Raider and Abaddon on the table is failure on a level I had not even thought of before today. Oh well, next time I will revert to less heavy weaponry and focus more on increasing the quantity of fire the army can produce.

On the painting side of things, I have now got the main base on all the armour plates on the Defiler and just need to add a few more layers of colour to make the plates a solid colour. I have started focussing on the autocannon arm, putting a base of Dheneb Stone on to build up the edges of the armour plates to a gold colour. Hopefully next weeks update will have the autocannon arm complete and some progress on the body of the Defiler.

Much of the week has been spent completing Urien Rakarth. He is much closer to completion than shown, with only a few details on his face and armour to be highlighted now. I will post a complete update on Urien in the next couple if days.

I have also been working away on a terrain building/ruin. I will try and grab a few pictures to include in next weeks update, but the piece has been mounted on a thin piece of plyboard, with basing materials glued around. Hopefully I should get this sprayed black within the week then I can work on painting it up as well.

The only other ponderous thoughts I have had this week revolve around either building myself an Haemonculus Coven to follow on from Urien Rakarth, or further my experience in the wargaming worlds by expanding my horizons into Hordes and starting up a Trollblood warband there. Can't for the life of me decide which to follow though, all thoughts are very welcome!

Urien Rakarth - The Beginning.

In my splurge of activity over the Christmas/New Year period I finally got around to piecing together the metal version of Urien Rakarth, the narrow victor in the poll I had running on this blog a few months back. If you remember that then I salute you!

Outside of assembling Rakarth (which was a challenge in itself) I have also now based the Haemonculus and have sprayed him white, which leaves me to start on the paint job. I will be doing this alongside the painting of the Defiler I put together as well recently.

So far, my thoughts on the model of Urien can be summarised in the word argh! His little arms spent more time glued to my own fingers than anywhere else. Eventually, however, my persistence paid off and I had those limbs set in position. With hindsight, and also stated in another post of mine, I should have used a little bit of green stuff in each socket to help hold the arms in place.

I have also decided that I will be using Urien alongside the painting guide for Dark Eldar from a White Dwarf from last year. I will attempt to follow the painting guide in there, as written and instructed, so that we can see how closely the guides need to be followed to get their results.

In the next update I will let you all know what issues of White Dwarf I will be using, as well as detailing any progress made against the associated painting guide. I will also have more pictures to share with you all.

Hobby Update

It's a new year now and as such I have finally made my way back to the hobby side of the Warhammer 40k universe after a 5 month break from it.

As you may be able to see from the picture I have kept my self busy over the Christmas/New Year period by constructing a Daemon Prince, Defiler and Dreadnaught for my Slaaneshi Army, 5 more Terminators for my Space Wolves and finally put together Urien Rakarth as a side project to painting marines.


 

My aim for now is to keep this blog updated with my progress, both in modelling and painting, of the models pictured and those acquired throughout the next year. I have the Space Wolf Terminators from Forge World to put together and a few buildings to construct. I am aiming to base coat all the models shown by the weekend, and start painting the Defiler by the end of the weekend.

So there we are for now folks, the models are pretty much complete, just need the bases for the Daemon Prince and Dreadnaught to arrive so that they can be fully put together.

Just a quick note on Urien Rakarth, which I will come back to in another post, but how frustrating is he to put together? I'm not sure if it's down to the fact I am more used to handling the chunky Space Marine pieces, but I found the fixing of his little additional arms to be ridiculously hard. Most the time they ended up glued to my fingers or dropping off before the glue had set.

With similar models in the future I would be tempted to put a little blob of green stuff in the hole, squeeze the arm in place, then remove any excess GS from the model instead of going with superglue directly.

Hope you all had a good New Year. See you all in a week or so!