On the Workbench [June]

 

Greetings!  Things have been busy around the old homestead recently with family birthdays, vacations, and other warmer weather activities.  This has put a crimp on the 262Krieg hobby time, but no worries.  I'm still active and new projects are underway.  

Today, I'm sharing some recent builds I've done while taking a short painting break to refresh my inspiration.  I like to move back and forth between painting and building to mix things up and prevent burnout on any one aspect of the hobby.

This month, I built five more First Legion Destroyers to round out a squad of ten (shown above). Then I moved on to assemble five more Interemptors that I also had waiting on the to-do shelf.

This brought my Interemptors up to ten men as well. My challenge here will be to do a decent enough job with the painting to make sure the new recruits blend in well with the squad veterans. This brings my Dreadwing strength to 20 marines and one character, a Legion Moritat.

Lots of Forge World stuff seems to be sold out and not returning so I went ahead and purchased a few new models which I'll be sharing in future posts to round out this force of Horus Heresy era Dark Angels.  I take long enough with these projects that things are almost always OOP by the time I'm painting them. 😢  Fortunately, I have plenty of storage in the 262Krieg man cave to tuck these models away until I can get to them.

 As a final workbench project this month, I was inspired by a blog post to finally convert a Ravenwing Talonmaster for my Dark Angels 40K army.  I have a bunch of bikes and speeders, but never modeled the Talonmaster, despite having all the necessary parts.  So I took a partially painted speeder from my collection and set to work removing some bits and adding others.

I have ample Ravenwing bits form various upgrade sprues so this project really was a no-brainer to put together. I have to say that being able to fly a hovering speeder AND fight with an immense power sword is one of the things that make the Ravenwing truly something special. 😂

I used a Black Knight shoulder pad to represent the Talonmaster being drawn from their ranks. I figured that Talonmasters are likely permitted to keep their Black Knight honors. I've kept the original back and arms required to fit in the speeder, but added new heads (and a chest for the Talonmaster) to further call out their esteemed rank within the Ravenwing. I chose to avoid any hooded heads as I think they look out of place on bikes and speeders (the force of wind in their faces and all that).  I like the sharp beaky helmets for that. It's really kind funny how we can suspend our disbelief for so many things, then get hung up on something specific like keeping hoods on while riding bikes and speeders. :) 

All of that aside, I think I put together a reasonably Talonmaster conversion.  I mean, it's barely a conversion as it is, since all of the key parts come form the Ravenwing upgrade accessory sprue pretty much for the purpose.

That's my show and tell for today.  I'm getting back to painting and should have some new WIP posts up soon.  I'm still going though the process of setting my inspirations.  I'd really like to have my Titanicus stuff completed; but I also want to see progress on Blackstone Fortress characters and both my 30K and 40K Dark Angels collections.  Clearly, I can't do it all at once! I miss the seasonal blogger challenges that help me narrow down my choices.  Heh.

I hope you and yours are staying safe out there.

Cheers and Happy Gaming!