Wargaming Workshop

Wow, it’s been a long time. A full year since my last post. I blame the Blood Angel project. In the fall of 2012 I had this crazy idea that I would do another 40k army. I built quite a few of those in the earlier part of the last decade, even won a number of Grand Tournaments. Eventually I shifted interest back into the smaller scales and left the world of 40k behind for close to decade. But the interest lingered, and all those videos of beautiful armies on the internet eventually won me over again. So I bought a few hundred models and went to work on a Blood Angel force.

And it was painful. I made the big mistake of approaching the this project like one of the many 6mm or 10mm I built in the last decade: assemble everything, base coat everything, detail everything, finish. That works great for an EPIC or Warmaster force where I can bang out the entire force in a couple of months. For a 200+ model 40k army it drained me of all motivation within weeks. Detailing the 200th shoulder pad kills you inside. The only thing worse is finding out that @#$%#%^#$% Games Workshop doesn’t make their metal shoulder pads at a consistent size scale, thus forcing you to throw away and paint a new batch of 200 shoulder pads (yes, it happened – and assembly line painting of course only discovers this at  the end of the line…). Eight months into the project, I still didn’t have a single model truly completed. Big mistake.

The second demotivating factor was the development of 40k over the last year, or at least my perception thereof based on what I see online. Instead of a visually appealing skirmish battles in the 40k universe, the 40k game seems to have become an exercise of pushing as many disconnected models onto the tabletop: flyers on a tabletop not even large enough to be their airfield; alien monsters fighting side-by-side with humans; armies with more characters than troopers; tanks that drive sideways; and, worst of all, Blood Angel armies that sit back on the base line. It has become a truly weird game – and looks even weirder when you watch it.

Between these two factors, motivation slowly drained out of me and the project stalled. And with it all other painting projects stalled as well. At least until a few weeks ago when I summoned the energy to jump back into the fray and finish at least a few models. I gave up on the vehicles, for now, but will be slowly wrapping up the infantry units (and post them here). First in line is Mephiston, or at least, my proxy thereof. The real model is quite dated so I made this from the Dark Angel Librarian, a Space Wolf head and assorted bitz.