Squat on Earth is this?

 Well, the Tyranids did a piss poor job of that. When your whole gimmick is eating things, accidentally failing to eat an entire civilization that everyone thought you had is embarrassing. But I digress. 

Something else which is good at chewing through civilizations is Covid-19. I haven't been able to leave my house in days and it has made me a bit crazy. But after the first couple of days, I was well enough to do some hobby stuff as long as it didn't involve standing for long. So I decided to paint up some of my new Leagues of Votann. I never thought you could sell me on the idea of Squats coming back, but I think they did a good job overall. The lore could do with more flesh and fewer superlatives, but it's their first outing so I'll let that go. 

Now, the various official colour schemes are fiiiine, but they don't quite appeal to me. The reasoning behind them is solid - the Votann are a bit more rational and slightly less mad than other 40k factions. The workmanlike, blocky colour schemes work to reflect a practical and no-nonsense people. But I decided to go with a silver and gold scheme.

The models are, for the most part, user-friendly. They fit together reasonably easily and are pretty civilised for a painter. The one exception is the Hernkyn Pioneers, which seem to have been designed to be as frustrating as possible. But the rest are enjoyable to work on.

This might seem like an odd view, but I quite like the simplicity of the army - a handful of characters and a total of seven units. I think that building an army of them will be undaunting. 

Now I've heard there's been a bit of a fracas among competitive players, but I don't really follow any of that scene closely. I think that they're a nice addition to 40k in general. 

Paint the heads separately. Thank me later. 

I like Orks!

 Orks are cool. I tried to start an Ork army about eight times over the years, but I could never get on with the models for the Boyz. But the new models have changed that. So here are some Orks!

Iron Within, Iron Without

I feel a degree of sympathy for Perturabo. He strikes me as the guy who sticks his hand up in a meeting to point out the catastrophic flaw in management's latest scheme, gets shouted down, and is then expected to clean up the inevitable mess. 

I wasn't going to paint an Iron Warriors army. But I had loads of Chaos Marines knocking about. It struck me that the Iron Warriors colour scheme would be quite easy and satisfying.

I decided not to bother with black shoulder pads. On a test model, I found that they actually detracted.

Sometimes, it's good to just settle on a scheme that allows you to get a nice result quickly!

Fear them

The Dark Eldar (don't make me call them that new name) are the alien race I love the most in the 40k universe. It wasn't always so, and deservedly: when I worked at GW in 2005-06, weeks would pass without us selling any Dark Eldar models. I distinctly remember that there was one blister pack of wyches with assault weapons that was sitting on the peg the day I started there, and the day I finished. but in 2010, they were reborn with an almost complete refit both of lore and models. They are undoubtedly the most horrible thing in 40k (including Chaos!) and they represent the perfection of what GW has tried endless to replicate since: the uneasy mixture of science fiction, mysticism and faerie tale weirdness. 

If I said 'quasi-undead space vampire elves' you'd assume that I was talking about a bad Shudder import. But somehow, it works. As cruel and vile and twisted as they are, there's something... kind of sympathetic about the mounds of shit which they have to plough through every moment of their benighted existence. There's something bizarrely almost admirable about the frantic desire of these wretched, evil creatures to stay alive. Given that the alternative is to have their souls eaten by a dark god who pretty much embodies sadism and is almost wholly their creation, you can't entirely blame them. From devouring the suffering of their victims to restore their withering souls to frantic and ever more perverse surgery to rebuilding their own bodies in oubliettes of horror and pain, the Dark Eldar are ultimate survivors. 

The only problem is that for years I couldn't bloody paint them. I kept trying various lacquered metl paintjobs, but they all looked pants. In the end, it occurred to me that I should stick to what I'm good at: miserably industrial and metallic. They look like Moorcock and Clive Barker had a collision anyway, so I decided on dark silver and gold. The light blue bases and red grass were a way to throw a bit of contrast in it. 

I love Scourges. They're one of the most 'Dark Eldar' things. Both from the perspective that in such a vicious society only messages carried by hand can be trusted and because... well... they voluntarily got a haemonculus to hollow their bones with massive drills and suture wings to their backs without any anaesthetic whilst they presumably feed on their own agony! Because you know... they were bored.

Speaking of Dark Eldar who do weird things because they're bored... Wracks. It's one thing to be a freakish flayed Frankensteinian surgeon creature with a cheese grater grafted to your face. It's another to have ended up in that state because you thought it was a good idea having seen the results beforehand. It's the truly frightening thing about the Dark Eldar: the bizarre debasements they inflict on themselves as much as others. 

Their big brethren, the Grosteques, are pretty unnerving too. I'm not keen on the model, so I made mine from Vampire Counts Vargheists and spare Talos bits:

On the other end of the spectrum, Incubi are cool just because they look slick and martial. I really enjoyed painting their helms. 

My final offering for today is a Lhamaean. Again, I'm not too keen on the official model. It's not a bad model, it just doesn't seem to quite fit the aesthetic of the Dark Eldar. So I did a head and hand swap on a Dark Elf Sorceress. Simple!

I have to be in the right mood for Dark Eldar. Although they share some of the visceral horror of my Nurgle stuff, the mood is very different. Nurgle is all about grime and corruption and decay. With Dark Eldar, it's about perversity and invasive cosmetics, about life at its most desperate and demented. 

I might go and paint some cats or something now. 

Genestealers

I'm back.

Genestealers fascinate me. I like how they satirise different things: they satirise grassroots movements, but also the authoritarian perception of those movements. You could well imagine McCarthy accusing someone of being a Genestealer.

The 40k universe at its best is filled with moral complexity, but in a simplistic sense we generally consider Genestealer Cults as 'bad guys'. But I'm not so sure. We should remember that the Imperium which they seek to subvert is almost absurdly brutal and callous, particularly to the working classes of industrial worlds which Genestealers seem to favour. To use a completely random example off the top of my head, you could see an Imperial Governor ordering his workers back to the manufactorums in the midst of a deadly pandemic against which he had taken no real action.

Then again, the Imperium is famously brutal to anyone who doesn't look like their ideal. It's little wonder that there are populations in the hives who are open to the call for rebellion. Imagine living in a world where you work hard, pay taxes and the Arbites still treat you worse because you look a bit different. It's no wonder that the Genestealers can sow unrest. 

I didn't do any conversion to these models because they really don't need it. They're really beautiful sculpts. I decided to use the same flesh tone as I would for a caucasian human because I feel that visual familiarity enhances the innate horror.

Kharn the Betrayer

Kharn the Betrayer is one of those 40k characters who has done well from age. When we were first introduced to him in the early 90s, he was a butcher, pure and simple. A psychopath battering his way through anyone who got in his way with neither thought nor remorse. With the Horus Heresy novels begnning in 2006, we started to see a bit more depth to 12th Legion's most infamous son. Kharn was, bizarrely, the most restrained and controlled of the World Eaters. Indeed, he dogged attempted to instil some leadership and discipline into the savage legion, standing in for his largely disinterested gene-father. In the end, one can only assume that his endless attempts to keep the World Eaters together ultimately drove him too far and turned him into the maniac we know and... love?

I love most of the model, so I decided to paint him. There was only one problem: I really dislike his head with its silly rabbit ears and gawking features. I wanted him to look dangerous, threatening and vaguely gladitorial. So I replaced the head with a Maximus helm and a plume. The original head is interal to the body so this involved a bit of sawing and planing down.

I've never liked the idea that the World Eaters painted their armour a cartoonish red after the Horus Heresy. For a start, it seems like an odd thing for a gang of neurally sabotaged lunatics to do. For another, it seems like a strange choice for a legion whose main aim in life is to constantly whack people in the face with massive chainsaws. Having red on their armour wouldn't seem to be something they'd need to make additional effort for. Bot mostly, I just don't like it. So I painted Kharn with the pre-Heresy colour-scheme. This would help show the stains.

The model has an incredible sense of motion, and I though that I should stain him to reflect this. I used Vallejo Russian Spash Mud to give the impression that he's running at full speed, and then flicked speckles of Blood for the blood God across the model, especially to the front and right-hand side. Look at the arc Gorechild is describing: whatever enemy Kharn has just ripped down, a spray of blood is going to fall counter-clockwise across him. 

The only non-blood red I used was on the plume, and I counter-pointed this with the green of the plasma pistol. Overall I'm quite happy with him.