Shard's Neverborn Project

[Shard of Magnus]

I've had an on again / off again relationship with chaos in 40k (and Fantasy Battles) over the years. The result of that is a lot of unpainted daemons for projects that were shelved or stalled out as editions changed. The local group has recently started planning a loose narrative campaign around the Badab war and a revisit of 5th in general, which got me looking at what I had in the backlog. I probably won't play many games, if any, but I had a decent enough number of daemons that I'll decided to work on them. It will help reduce the backlog if nothing else and it would be entertaining to field daemons with the army wide deep strike rules from back then. And who knows...maybe 11th edition will do something interesting, and I'll end up using them for that.  More likely is that I'll use them as stand ins for a Daemons of the Ruinstorm Horus Heresy force.

 

So, what is in the queue for this project at this point you may ask? The following has been pulled out of my vault of the unpainted:

Khorne

Bloodthirster

3 blood crushers

10 bloodletters

 

Here is an older Herald of Khorne I did long ago. I have completely forgotten what I did for the skin tone. Given that I have switched paints and painting techniques since then, I think I'm going to skip trying to make anything match. May end up repainting parts of the herald at some point and/or rebasing him. The sword never worked out how I intended either.

 

 

Tzeentch

Lord of Change

Burning chariot of Tzeentch (may break down to individual models to bulk up units, may leave as is and use it as a herald for 5th edition games) 

12 pink horrors

14 blue horrors

14 brimstone horrors (mostly painted but never based)

3 screamers

3 flamers

 

Here's the last Tzeentch themed figure I did, also from long ago. 

 

 

There are also several half-converted chaos spawn and acquisitions I had intended to use for daemon prince conversions. There may be more. I thought I had kept more stuff rather than disposing of it. However, I can only rummage through the pile of shame for so long before it becomes depressing.

 

In a perfect world I'd like to get all of this done over the next couple of months.  It's certainly doable although very low odds given my work schedule and painting progress recently.  If I can get this done by end of year in addition to the Horus Heresy projects I have then I intend to treat myself to a Be'lakor model. Surprisingly, I've never picked up any of the versions of him despite being on my favorites list! 

 

 

[Dr_Ruminahui]

I look forward to seeing your progress.

[Shard of Magnus]

With this being a long weekend for me due to US holiday, it was time to carve out a bit of time to work on my neverborn.

 

Most of the work was on the bloodletters that I vowed for February in the 12 months of hobby event. Managed to get the first two stages of red done on the flesh and I'm hopefully I'll be able to get them mostly done before Tuesday.  Also finished fiddling with the cork for the 24 bases I need for the bloodletters and brimstone horrors; and got them primed to maybe also get some paint this weekend.  Didn't take any pictures at this stage but will take some before Tuesday.

 

I had mentioned that the brimstone horrors were painted (years ago) but not based.  Here's a photo of one of them to give an idea of how they look: 

 

 

The main constraint when they were painted is that I wanted to avoid the yellow-red flame...partly because it's commonly done and partly because trying to paint realistic flames was something I struggled with at the time. I still might not be able to pull of red-yellow flames - I haven't tried since I did these! The brimstones were small enough that what I had wanted to do didn't quite work out and I had to improvise. I'm happy with how they turned out but also wonder if I get another unit to try again. Or if I should touch these up. Regardless, it will be good to finally have them on bases after all this time. They don't exist in 5th edition so I guess I will need to proxy them as horrors if I need a larger force. The group won't care as long as they are painted, but it will bother me a little bit if I do use them as proxies.

 

For once, I haven't looked at points or tried to build a list before painting. I'll probably do that in the next 2-3 weeks to get a feel for unit gaps should I play in the 5th edition campaign. Planning to also see what using them would like in 10th or crusade. I haven't really played 40k since 6th edition and I know 11th is around the corner. But...40k games are trivial to get so it's worth considering should I make enough progress with painting.   

[Shard of Magnus]

Halfway done with the bloodletters I vowed for February in the 12 Months of Hobby challenge.  Which is good as we're halfway through the month! More details and insights into how these are turning out in my latest blog update. 

 

 

Hoping to get the unit 90-95% finished by Sunday. If I can reach that point, then I should be able to get everything wrapped up before month end. 

 

Also have started thinking about whether I will eventually want a second unit to field. I do want to get farther through my backlog before I pick anything new up. But it does feel a bit constraining to only have 10 bloodletter now that I'm starting to look at building 5e lists.