Just finished painting another clan for my Epic Ork army. This time it's the flashiest and shootiest of all da Orks, the Bad Moons.

They are nowhere near as good as I would have hoped, even though I've painted them quite adequately by my own standards. This is because many, many years ago, I ruined most of the models by spraying them with a crappy fluorescent yellow spray paint, and realised too late that the spray had filled in a lot of detail on the models.

Subsequent attempts to strip the models were slow and laborious, and did little to remove much of the paint. And without wanting to wreck the plastic models by risking any harsher chemicals, I sighed and left them as they were.

You can't really tell on these low quality pictures, but if you look close at the infantry, it looks like they are slightly melted almost, as so much of the detail is obscured.

But I guess at a glance they are ok, and as they are yellow, it means I am done with one of the more frustrating and difficult blocks of models that I needed to paint.

So, time to focus on something else...

I finally gave up trying to fully strip the Ork Battle Fortresses, and got them as good as I could. However, there was a problem when I came to re-assemble the Gibletgrindas. I never really caught on when I first glued them together back in the 90s, that the top tower doesn't fit anywhere near correctly into the base. I ended up taking them to work to use a little grinder to take some bits off, and have used to milliput to fill in the gaps.

And now they're good.

Put an order in recently for some more paint, and I've spread my wings a little in order to try some other manufacturers. I still got some GW base paints in order to mix them in with some old paints I have that are very thin and watery. They've worked for the most part, so that's pretty good.

However, as two of my current gold-ish colours are also very thin and near useless, and my old silver dried up, I bought some P3 metallics. Very disappointed is all I can say. The silver is just about usable, but the gold is just as thin and weak as my others. Shouldn't have bothered. The red however is very good, but that is also a base paint so should have heavy pigment. Really like the Vallejo paint so far, but ording over the internet has left me with a dark green colour that I didn't really want. I was hoping it would be more of a military green, but whatever. I can deal.

I've also picked up plenty of paint tubes for the imminent terrain slopping and drybrushing fest that I'm going to have. Got plenty of terrainy things just sitting there waiting for it.

As I've been doing a lot of painting recently, I've been trying to use a wet palette for the 2nd time. When I tried a few years ago, I though it was a waste of time and quickly dismissed it. When I came back to it and looked into it more, I think it was because the paper I bought wasn't really proper wet palette paper. So instead, after having a bit of a light bulb moment when getting very messy eating some Greggs pizza, I thought I'd try to use a Greggs food bag. And holy shit it works a treat. I've been using this for most of my recent Ork and Tyranid efforts. I just cut out little squares as and when I need them.

Just gotta be sure to use clean bags though. Don't think the models would appreciate being slathered in Greggs pizza grease.

And in good news, it's been a long time coming, but I've finally finished painting another army in the form of my Epic Tyranids. Took a while to flock their bases, as I think the PVA glue I've got is shite, so I had to do them twice. But they're all done and varnished and ready for action.

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For some weird reason I thought it was two winters ago when I started my big push to finish my Epic Tyranids. But as I look back I see it was actually three, just after I finished my 40K Nidz. What the hell? Has it taken me more than two whole years to paint probably my smallest Epic scale army (not counting the unofficial Androids?).

I seriously doubt I'm going to be anywhere near my 4 army target. I just paint too slow, and don't have enough time. Still, I've been pushing pretty strong these last few months, and will continue to.

So at last, a full Epic army is complete, and like their 40K counterparts before them, it is the Nidz who take the honour.

At least the other armies shouldn't be as hard to paint as this one.

Well, maybe the Orks.

And Chaos.

And probably Guard.

Sigh.

Not wanting to let the Tyranids have all the fun, I've also been doing a lot of work on my 6mm Ork collection. The Evil Sunz and Bad Moonz are part way through, but I've fully finished my own clan, Gwapstik's Boyz. These ladz will be waiting to put the boot in on the Nidz or any other enemy that crosses their path in the future.

Been having some fun (not) recently trying to put together all of those MDF terrain pieces I bought a few months ago.

The only one I've managed to get anywhere near completion is the Space Elf Soulward, and even that has seen me making some heavy modifications.

With the way it's supposed to be assembled, there are these two clips that hold the pieces of the wood apart and leave huge gaps down between them. I figured this would be an arse to paint, even if I tried to paint it before I assembled it.

So to get around this, I glued all the wood "panels" pretty much flush with one another, then used filler to cover up the much smaller gaps.

It's going to take some tricks and fiddles when I paint and weather it to cover up some dodgy bits, but overall it will be much easier.

The other MDF terrain pieces have completely stalled, as it seems the laser didn't really cut them out very well. You can see on the image here on one side how good the cut is, but on the other the laser has barely broke the surface.
It means I've been having to go along with a stanley blade and try and cut everything out rather than try to punch them out and damage them. Pissing annoying.

I was looking for something good to strip some old metal models, and one suggestion I found on Youtube was cellulose thinners. Unfortunately, I've dunked and scrubbed these old Battle Fortresses twice, and some of the paint is stubbornly resisting. I guess I'll have to find something better.

On a more successful note, I had to fill in a little gap on this Epic Ork Warboss on boar, where I'd glued the two models together. Once that was done, all it needed was some paint.

Lots of other painting has been going on the last couple of months, and I've been going back and forth between my Epic Orks and Epic Tyranids, as these are the first two armies of the four I'm hoping to finish this year.

I'm pretty happy with my progress so far, even though I doubt I'm going fast enough to paint 4 armies. I might have to switch to an easier-to-paint army like my Epic Eldar or Androids.

I'm especially happy with how the Gargants have turned out, though I'm having more fun with the Nidz. It definitely helps to fight the boredom when every unit is a different colour. With some of the Nidz, I'm leaving them the colours I painted them way back in the 90s, but just re-doing them much better.

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Ages ago now I started work on all of my Epic buildings from the old 1st and 2nd edition box sets, as they were in a right state. I separated all of the card walls from the plastic roof sections. Said plastic parts then got a good scrub to get them clean before I undercoated them, along with a few models that I was planning to work on at the time.

It was at this point I decided to go no further. I just think it will make much more sense to get a 3D printer to make new walls rather than try to use the old card walls again. And to me it will make more sense just to paint the entire buildings when they are all assembled.

There's nothing stopping me from painting the ruins from the Epic 40,000 box though. Yeah, maybe I should get to that...

These pictures here show the progress of the Epic ruins I was building last year. They've pretty much stalled at this point as I wait for better weather in which to spray them.

But I'm really happy with how they look so far.

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My heavier, metal Epic models got a couple of little upgrades. Firstly, I finally decided to put them in a proper carry case, as they have always just been lying in the bottom of a box up to this point.

And one my Andrayada Titans got a new base, as its old one was twice as big as it needed to be.

That other base will instead go to the Hierophant Titan, when I eventually manage to paint it.

I don't think that will be too long now though, looking at how few Epic Nidz I've got left to do.

Can't wait.

A couple of months back I was absolutely flying along in my attempts to make new terrain. Since then, a couple of other things have claimed my attention, as well as work kicking my ass as usual.

So though I've got nothing new finished, I thought it time to put a bit of an update here, almost as a form of motivation to make me get these things done.

First, I've been working on maybe the most ambitious piece of terrain I've ever done. It says a lot about how simple my other bits of terrain are if this is the most ambitious, but at least I'm pushing myself a little bit.

What triggered it was finding an old He-Man toy in the loft, which was part of the old Castle Greyskull set. I've kept this thing in storage all this time, because it looked like something wargamey could be made out of it. And nearly 30 years later, its time has finally come.

Though the opening was a window for the old MOTU toys, it always looked to me like it would be a good cave entrance for smaller wargaming miniatures. So I set out to make something of that type. However unlike my old tomb entrance, I wanted this to be a functional cave, that models could enter.

Cue lots of cutting up wood and XPS sheets to build up the cave. I completely made it up as I went, with no planning whatsoever, and that is why the sides of the terrain piece all have completely different styles. Not something I'm particularly happy with, but it is what it is. I'm sure as hell not spending all those hours again to redo bits of it.

There was a big hold up while I tried to find a little bit of time at work to cut out a roof section. But now that's done I can start trying to figure out exactly how I'm going to complete this thing, and what kind of final look I'm going to try and go for.

And it doesn't look like much of that old toy will even be visible when I'm done, but I guess it's done its job as more of a motivational piece.

I've been working on other terrain pieces, such as bringing the old 2nd edition Epic Space Marine buildings up to scratch at last. I've only owned them since 1992!

But together with the Scoobster, we put an order in for some more MDF terrain. As I'd got lots of Imperial-type terrain, I decided this time to mostly go with more Eldar inspired pieces. I was also mindful of trying to pick things that can be used in 6mm as well as 28mm.

I've only put one pack together yet, so this is yet another thing I've got to get back to.

Scoob decided to go very 40K heavy on his MDF terrain, with a bunch of new stuff for his Orks. He's already put them all together, and I got to see them last week. They look cool with a bunch of his Orks lined up inside. A proper Orky paint job will finish them off real good.

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While Scoob's new terrain was all set up, he came up with the idea to have a bit of a muckabout battle using the old 40K 8th rules. This is because we don't have access to 9th yet, and our own rules are a long way off (as we've got to finish the Epic ones first).

We each took charge of our respective Space Marine Chapters, in the Storm Tigers and Bringers Of Death, and set out to kill two Ork characters before our own characters were defeated.

I ended up going for the Ork Warboss while Scoob went after the Big Mek. We both had chances to succeed, but some crappy rolls (especially for my Devastators) saw our bold attacks fail and our characters got taken down by the Orks in short order.

While it was good to get our 40K stuff out for the first time in a while, all it did was reinforce my belief that the official 40K rules are no longer for me. The game is just so stale, bloated, and boring.