Chaos Guard

   One of the biggest changes in 40k fiction of recent years is how Chaos armies are portrayed. There was a point where a chaos army was just a 1st founding traitor company with spikes on and a bunch of cultist cannon fodder to show they are bad guys, and if traitor guard existed it was generally portrayed that a regiment had just gone evil for some reason. Now we are seeing desperate, mixed armies of fanatical cultists, multiple different marine legions and later recruits, plus other factions, none of which have all the equipment they need. Then if traitor guard are shown, they are much more nuanced with a variety of sources of recruitment, not all being voluntary, and units generally being made of recruits from multiple sources.

   This is all a long way of saying my Chaos Marine army needed a Guard component. I've wanted to do a chaos guard army for years but could never get a build that I liked, however, in 2019 I bought some bits from Anvil Industries to test out an idea, liked it, but then got stuck on the colour scheme. In the end I've gone for a bland colour scheme that I don't think would look too out of place in a regular guard army, with the equipment mostly showing that these aren't of the Emperor fearing variety. They are mostly Cadian bits (from the Genestealer sets as it's weirdly cheaper) and Anvil Industries upgrades to stop them looking too uniform.

   Below is my first squad for this project:

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Werewolves But Smaller

    I'm trying to have a bit of a tidy up in my man cave and one of the things that is taking up space is presticked (figures glued to lolly sticks) models sitting in neat rows on top of boxes. I'm still aiming to get some of the real projects moving and getting some of those figures finished, put onto proper bases and put away, but in the meantime I picked a more interesting set of sticks and started painting. 

   I think I bought the werewolves from Blue Moon via Old Glory UK in one of my Napoleonic orders as a bit of curiosity. They are a tad big compared to regular 15mm figures, but they are also fantasy monsters, so do we really know how big they should be? I have absolutely no plans to do a werewolf army, but with element bases as a unit I can get away with a lot more variety in units, I don't need to explain why 7 models have 6 or 12 wounds, it's enough to know the base is taken off once the threshold is hit, so I plan to do a few different bases of unaligned hordes that can be used to boost other collections. These werewolves can either be used in my Undead army, or in my Roman or Goth army in a fantasy game.

   The werewolves themselves are painted as a mix of wolf species just to make them more interesting using my timber wolf and coyote (seemed similar enough to a red wolf) recipes with a few slightly plainer colours added in*. I figured the overly large wolf should be jet black to stand out.

*and a fox but we don't need to go into that

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Last Few Bits - Winter

    With the realisation of how little I had left to paint for my Winter WW2 Germans, I decided to just crack on (with the bits that I knew where I'd put them). A second MMG just because and some infantry from the sprues I had left over. I'd built my last 3 squads to match what a German squad should be on paper for late war, 2x smg, lmg and a panzerfaust, so I used the opportunity to add more options which meant 3 more panzerfaust and rifles, then 9 assault rifles (3 with panzerfausts).

   Its been really nice being able to just sneak 5 or 10 minutes of painting in at a time and just getting figures moving again. I've still got a kuberwagon for this project somewhere but it's got to turn up before I can paint it, otherwise I'm done for the time being.

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Marder III

    Completely unintentionally I've made two posts in a row on the same project, nobody is more shocked than I am. Painting the Howitzer from the last post turned out to be motivating enough, that the next day I sat and built the tank I have picked up to go with the project and then went on to paint it the day after that.

   It's a Warlord Games plastic Marder III with a couple of crew head swaps and a metal winter figure to replace the plastic commander, I just felt like someone in the tank needed slightly more heavy duty winter clothing. I'm pretty sure I picked this tank up instead of my normal Panzer III or IV as it was about as close a tank to the Soviet SU-76 that the Germans used, and I do enjoy playing with my SU-76's.

   The kit is by far the most fiddly tank I've ever put together, not helped by the fact the sprues don't have part numbers on them so you have to constant flick back to the first page of the instructions where each part on the sprue is labelled*

*It took me far longer than I am proud about before I realised I should tear the first page out and use it as a reference.

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Medium Howitzer

    The first new non-new project post for a while, but there are more coming I suspect. The other thing that got our juices flowing at Salute were not new releases at all, my brother talked himself into buying both Necromunda and Bolt Action, both rules I would recommend trying. While Necromunda initially worked onto my desk first, a unit for Bolt Action beat it to being finished and that's a medium howitzer for my late war winter German army. It was built and sprayed ready, but had just fallen behind the new shiny, which made it a great candidate for jumping the queue.

   As you can probably tell, I've added the front of a Rubicon Models WW2 horse and cart set as a horse drawn limber for it. I've just got it into my head that I want my Germans to be a tad less mechanised than they are usually gamed as and once I saw the Rubicon kit I had ideas straight away. I probably need some kind of ammo wagon, though.

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