Games Day UK 2012 - Armies on Parade

It's difficult to ignore that the main highlights of this year's Games Day were the CSM and Horus Heresy models on display and their respective books. However, there was plenty of other things to look at! Let's start with the Armies on Parade entries. There were some incredible dioramas on display here. Whilst some had just thrown a few models onto a board others had commited those models to stay there rather than just recessing them in. Anyway, here's a selection:

The harlequin entry above looks pretty nice but the main reason it was attracting attention was the razorwing on top of the building that was floating with the aid of magnets!

I really loved this Orky entry, in particular because one of the pilots had misjudged slightly and ended up like this:

The following Tau entry was probably my second favourite out of the lot. The army was themed as a Farsight breakaway faction and featured a flyer conversion, lots of flying suits and generally lots to look at.

The entry above was the eventual winner. This is the only shot I got of it however as to be honest I wasn't particularly blown away by it. Don't get me wrong it was brilliantly done but I felt there were better offerings out there. The next one shows that money can't buy taste. Whilst there's a disgusting amount of expensive Forgeworld models on there they aren't particularly stunningly painted and seem to have just been thrown onto the board. I'd have been disappointed if this one had won as it would belittle the tremendous amount of effort others had put in.

Finally, here's my favourite entry of the lot. I must say I'm surprised it didn't win as there was a huge crowd around it for the entire day. Perhaps everyone was too busy studying it to remember to vote! The thing I liked about this one was how it felt like an actual scene from a battle rather than just an army on a display board. The falcon emerging into realspace is beautifully done. There are also some lovely details like the wraithlord trampling a marine to death and the jetbikes zipping along.

Games Day UK 2012 - Horus Heresy from Forge World

Here's a selection of my pictures of the massive Istvaan III battle that FW had put together:

Painting the Dark Vengeance Models

As you should all know from looking at my attempts to paint various things over the years, I'm not an expert painter. Therefore I'm not going to write a guide. However, my good friend Jamie is a far better painter than I am and he's written a series of guides to painting the Dark Angels from the boxed set that I thought I'd share with you.

Part 1 - Painting the Tactical Marines
Here Jamie goes through the basics of painting the standard dark green DA power armour. He also gives some tips on painting the power cores of plasma weapons. I'm always a big fan of Jamie's models but I don't think the photography quite does them justice at the moment.

Part 2 - Painting the Ravenwing
This post covers the Ravenwing sergeant. Not only does this demonstrate the technique for painting the bikes but also the cream coloured cloaks and the sergeant's face. These techniques can be applied to the other models in the box such as the tactical marine sergeant.

Part 3 - Painting the Deathwing
Finally Jamie goes on to paint the Deathwing sergeant. Here he shows us how to paint the bone coloured armour of the terminators as well as the green cloaks that go with them. He also demonstrates how to paint the power weapon.

I've probably not sold these to you guys very well but it's definitely worth taking a look. At the moment I'm busy painting up Dark Eldar (more to come about that) so my DV models will have to take a back seat as I try to get the DE ready for Blog Wars 4.

We're off to Games Day on Sunday and I have to say I'm pretty excited having seen some of the images coming out of this month's white dwarf. I'll write a little about all that tomorrow and then next week there'll be a full report from the event with tons of pictures.