The Independent Characters 2015 Hobby Progress Challenge!

Since 2012 the fantastic Warhammer 40k podcast, the Independent Characters, have run a hobby progress challenge on their forums. The goal of the challenge is to have a painted army by the end of the year. All the details can be found in the forum so I won't go into it too much here. Even though I have been in this hobby for almost 20 years I have never had a fully painted army to field on the table. Well that might not be totally true. When I was in high school I probably had enough painted ork stuff to field a fully painted force, but they were so badly painted I don't really feel like they should count. I mean I never even used primer or washes back then lol.

The Inquisition and Rogue Traders

Ever since I read the Eisenhorn series by Dan Abnet I have been interested in making my own inquisitors, henchmen and rogue traders. The work of  KrautScientist over at his blog Eternal Hunt has also been a huge inspiration to me as well.

First up is a rogue trader by the name of Scaar Parghuur. He may look like an ork but looks can be deceiving. 

Starting my own Space Marine Chapter

I've been in this hobby since the mid 90s and one thing I have never done is paint space marines. I've always been into the xenos forces and never had much interest in the space marines until I played the Dawn of War games. Since then I've always wanted to start a marine force so here are my first ever space marine purchases along with my first ever purchase from Forge World and some other resin and plastic bits I bought online. I'm going to be making making my own chapter. I don't have too many details about it yet but it's going to be an Iron Hands successor chapter. I like their close ties to the mechanicum, their heavy use of dreadnoughts, and I've always wanted to use the bionic parts made by Anvil Industries. The name of my chapter is going to be the Gorgon's Fist, named after the primarch of the Iron Hands Ferrus Manus whose nickname was the Gorgon.

Tau Ethereal made from Reaper Bones

I had picked up a bunch of Reaper's Bones figs and one of them caught my eye as a potential female etheral. She was wearing armored boots with a high heel and when I removed the heel they looked vaguely similar to a Tau's foot. I then removed her nose and tried to cut the Tau head slit into her forehead. I couldn't tell how effective my cuts where because the whiteness of the plastic makes it really hard to see the tiny details of the fig. I also removed her pinkey fingers so she would have the correct number. A few Tau bits were added to complete the look.

How to make Crisis Suit hands with plastic rod

I posted this on a Tau forum awhile ago and now since I am starting my own blog I thought I should add it here as well.

The Crisis suits were what drew me to Tau. I love all things mecha and being able to build and field guys in mech suits on a 40k battlefield was too cool to resist. I like the look of the models and don't mind that I have to hack apart the arms and legs to make them more poseable. The only thing I don't like are the hands. The whole tucked in look with just barely being able to see their three fingers just doesn't work for me. I wanted full hands like the suit commander model. I got the idea for using plastic rod to make hands after finding a picture in a google search of someone who had done the very same thing. The hands they had made looked really good so I bought myself some plastic rod and tried to learn how to do it myself.

Here are some of the hands I have made: