Howdy folks, it has been a long time, too long in fact. Anyhow it’s time to get back in the swing of painting and relive the torture of back pain from poor painting posture!

I’m in the process of refreshing all my 40k stuff (and there’s a lot of it – at least 7 armies that I can remember), I decided to sort my Iron Warriors out first as I thought it would be quite straightforward. Then I got a bit carried away but nevertheless they are nearing a tabletop standard I’m happy with.

This army was originally painted way back in 3rd edition when the glorious 2nd 3rd edition CSM Codex was released. I’m sure a lot of people will consider it very beardy etc and it certainly was very good but I remember it more as having a huge amount of variation and viable builds whereas the prior 3rd ed codex had seemed more like either berserker or plague marine spam.

Out of the woodwork came all manner of CSM lists, Night Lords, Iron Warriors and Alpha Legion were more widely seen and it was refreshing for sure.

Anyhow, this army was painted for Mayhem 2002, somewhat frightening to think that’s 15 years back. I used this army extensively for a number of years as Iron Warriors were very strong, I remember having a list with 2 defilers, a basilisk and 2 defilers to max out on Ordnance (you killed everyone in a transport on a penetrating hit of a 6) but it never happened! I’ve got a really old, small and rubbish photo of the army at Mayhem 2002 with the most stupid looking defiler ever, what on earth was I thinking!?





So having brought the army out of storage in June the basilisk was in many pieces and I’m not sure if it’s legal anymore so that was immediately put to one side.

It’s weird, looking back at this now I quite liked the yellow, but on that day I didn’t so it’s gone completely! The army was originally painted when I was highlighting everything into oblivion, highlighting to white was commonplace! That’s left the army looking far more bright than one would normally expect, perhaps these Iron Warriors do a lot of cleaning?

In order to tone it down a bit I decided to do some quick weathering, rust in this case using Ryza Rust, it seems a very versatile paint for this purpose based upon how much you water it down (I watered it down a lot for these models).

I also wanted to try some new things out whilst I was getting my eye back in, I got hold of some Nihilakh Oxide and have been using it quite liberally to add some other colours in rather than just silver.

I wasn’t completely sold by the obliterator models when this iteration of them were released, lots of small guns wasn’t cutting it for me so I converted them to have big guns on them, some of these had been damaged in storage hence the ones you see above which need more work done on them.

Three old faithful obliterators. The original army was painted in a week or so, one way to speed the process up was to paint flesh as metal, the marine (or whatever an obliterator was originally) slowly becoming absorbed into the machine.

The terminators were a later addition to the army. At the time I had 3 squads of 3 with combi-plasma and power weapons (very characterful and not power-gaming at all honestly). The conversions at the time were rushed and I just couldn’t bear to look at them so all the combi weapons were ripped off and from the trusty bits box 8 storm bolters and a couple of heavy flamers were obtained.

You can see in the above picture the new tenth terminator who is awaiting the mithril silver highlight. I did go into a local GW and ask for the modern equivalent, I was sold Runefang Steel but it doesn’t seem anywhere near as bright, has anyone else found that issue or was I sold the wrong paint!?

The trusty 5 man squads with lascannon are in the process of being updated too, the black seems a little flatter than I’d like so I may give it a heavily watered down gloss varnish.

Another new paint job above, these models are very quick to paint, the only areas where time needs to be taken is for the eyes/targeters.

My old trusty dreadnought, I need to do sanding on the plate to the right of the sarcophagus amongst other small jobs.

I stripped the paint off (or more accurately tried to strip the paint off) the dozer blade. I used dettol and whilst it does get a lot of the paint off it leaves a sort of dried jelly substance on it which I still need to get off. The vindicator had daemonic possession as -1BS wasn’t a big deal if it meant you ignored shaken and stunned (iirc) and the modelling of that had left the dozer looking naff.

So what’s next? Well I need to get a lot of small jobs done like the mild gloss varnish on the black, refresh the bases (imo basing makes a huge difference in how good an army looks) and then try to work on getting better photos, I’m using a new lighting set-up and using my bridge in manual mode, whilst it means I don’t need to do any photo editing beyond cropping it is making everything seem very bright, something I’ll need to get my head round, I suspect it may just be due to the reflective nature of the metallic paints but we shall see!

Anyway, hopefully I should get it all sorted out over the weekend so watch this space.

One last thing, does anyone have a recommended photography backdrop rather than using white or black?

Rupert xx