NZ40Kabal- the Doom Legion

Hi everyone  Welcome back!  It's been a quieter couple of weeks on the painting front, but before I get to that some quick admin. Those of you who have been following from the start (thank you so much!) Would have seen that I came over from our old website which unfortunately lapsed and I lost all the content.  I have now uploaded the draft versions I had of that content and added what I think are most of the right photos. If you have recently started following along and want to catch up of the start of this journey you can now find them in the main blog with "repost" in the title.  My monthly budget has come in and has gone a couple of ways. First up I'm heading to a teams event next week. One of our team has Dark Angels, so I'll be using my harlequins. Quick update on how I go next time. Next up I went back to Aliexpress and picked up 200 32mm bases, enough to do a couple of companies worth of marines, I expect about a month for them to arrive. I have some budge

Bikes and Bases -Episode 8 Hi everyone and welcome back It’s been a couple of weeks, and some progress has definitely happened! Bases One thing that had me a little nervous, was that as the chapter has been built, sprayed, and started to come together on the desk, is that the silver is very bright when en mass. Not a total surprise at all, and there are a couple of factors, one being that there is very little other colour, with most of the models unfinished, but the bases are also sprayed silver, adding to the mass of colour. Since my first 100 bases arrived, I decided to base up one of my tactical squads, to get an impression of what a finished squad will look like.  I believe that basing should compliment the model, it provides a frame, and is one of the main things that is seen when viewing the army. As always, I needed the bases to be mass produced easily, but it needed to balance out the silver. Silver, and black, two of the main army colours are very cold and harsh, so I wanted a

Enter the battlefield -episode 7 Hi everyone, welcome back! This is a small update from a marine perspective. Jan budget was already spent on the marines from Doug, so nothing much to report on that front. Some bases did show up, quick note on those, I'm going to be avoiding China forge for this army, but I did need something in the region of 500 bases. Turns out you can get those for 100 for $12nzd delivered from aliexpress. I got in a bag of 100 to test them out, and they are the same as GW ones. I will use these to upgrade the others in the next month or so. The alternative was $70 for 100. This month was pretty hard to resist buying. I had found a good number of deals I would like to buy, but as I need to wait until at least Feb for more budget I resisted.  For my hobby time there was a distraction from the marines. My mate Ben and I had been putting some time in over a few months pretty Xmas on some terrain. These couple of weeks we picked the project back up. We sprayed all t

Lighting claws are coming to town -episode 5 Well Xmas has been and gone, I hope you all got to spend time with family and got time to relax. My general gift guide when I'm in the midst of a project (almost always), is to receive money from family, it becomes easier for everyone as it means they don't have to work out the GW catalog, and I get what I need.  Santa Ben  With some money in my hot little hand I went off to see my mate Ben again. This time we had decided to sort through his remaining marines, Ben would take what he wanted and I would take the rest. After a fun evening digging through piles of 40k stuff we had sorted into a 'Ben' and 'Mark' pile. At this point it became clear that Ben would have been a good way towards his own chapter if he hadn't decided to sell off his back log!  In the Mark pile was another 70 odd marines of various first born varieties including a collection of characters, a few tanks including a land raider and drop pods, and

Chapter review- 2021 Happy new year everyone, and thanks everyone for reading so far. Its been exciting to see that there has been different readers from all over the world, I hope you're all enjoying the project and blog, feel free to leave a comment down the bottom and let me know your thoughts.  Review so far I thought I would kick off the year with an update on exactly where the project has got to. I have been slightly ahead than the blog, so this will get me right up to date for 2021: Purchases The cost so far has been $880 NZD. This has been my budget up to and including Jan 2021. This has got me 547 marines, and 5 vehicles taking the chapter to 51% complete. I am $420 ahead of my budget I had set for myself so far, which is about 4 months which is great. Here is the summary update by company: 4th, 5th and 7th companies all but done, and starting to get some progress on all of the others, with a long way to go on 1st, 2nd and 3rd in particular.  Assembly and painting  My star

To which chapter do you owe allegiance? Episode 4 Well now I have a plan, and have dived in and bought some marines, I need to work out which chapter I'm going to paint. Rather than just picking up something at random, this will be driven by the paint scheme, which feels a slightly backwards way of doing it. When you are starting out a project, it's worth taking the extra time to think through your scheme and how you will achieve it. One big mistake I made last time was coming up with a scheme that was great on a small scale, then trying to paint it hundreds of times. This led to no end of pain through the painting and basing process which I'm very keen to avoid this time. I need to be conscious that any scheme I choose will need to be replicated 1000+ times. Because of this I need to find a scheme that is easily replicated, fast but effective and able to be done in bulk. Although marines do tend to look best with careful edge highlights, I really don't have the time or

BENevolent BENefactor -episode 3 Well, I had originally planned to talk about my choice of chapter but I decided that it would be more exciting to buy my first batch of marines! Buying on a budget  There a few main ways that I have sourced models in the past when looking for good bulk deals: Friends Direct trading sites (such as Facebook market place) Ebay Trademe (similar to ebay but with some differences) I'll try and talk about how I use each of these when I make a purchase with them, but today I'm going to go see a good mate, Ben.  When buying from friends I'm always cautious about making sure we are both happy with the outcome. In this case I had been chatting to Ben about my plans, and he lives at the intersection of Has a lot of space marines  Won't ever paint them all Wants money We had had a few chats about what I was after, so Ben went digging through his older minis and managed to find a big pile. At the same time, I went on a bit of a round up of what I had

Hey everybody  Well I made it to post number 2, so that's progress! Since I've decided to go ahead and do this, what I need is a strong plan. As discussed last week I don't have the budget to over buy, so before I end up with hundreds more tactical marines than I need, I'm going to take some time working out exactly what I need to buy.  Chapter structure  So what exactly is in a space marine chapter? Basically a codex marine chapter consists of 1000 space marines, plus various support. It's divided into 10 companies of 100 marines.  1st company- 100 veterans  2nd- 5th battle companies- 6 battle line squads, 2 close support squads, 2 fire support squads  6th-7th tactical reserve companies- 10 battle line squads (6th is often bike mounted) 8th company- 10 close support squads  9th company- 10 fire support squads 10th company- 100 vanguard marines and scouts. Each company also has a captain, 2 lieutenants, a company champion, ancient, and attached chaplain and apotheca

Hey everyone  Just recently I took a large project of mine to a battle ready state, a 42k craftworld and harlequins project. While there is still some work to get it finished, there won't be any more purchases to do (until any new models come out), and any remaining details I'm happy to chip away at over the next year. This left me in need of a new project. The eldar project was filled with highs and lows, but overall I really loved doing it, so as it finished up I was ready to sink my teeth into something new. I really want something that would compare in the fluff with a full craftworld's warhost. I also wanted something with a clear start and end point, this would stop it turning into something never-ending, or running into repeated expansions.  There was one thing that fit these self imposed criteria, and inspired me enough to commit, a force that could crush any foe into the dust, conquer star systems and go toe to toe with anything the 40k universe could throw at it:

Hi everyone and welcome back  It's been a funny couple of weeks for me, with a bit of sickness for me and my kids sapping a lot of my energy, so there wasn't a huge amount on the progress front, and most of it not on marines! A couple of months ago, my podcast co-host Haydn mentioned he had a couple of intercessors and reavers sitting around he was happy to donate to the project. I very happily took him up on the offer, and we finally managed to catch up this week and do the hand over. Turns out there was much more than I envisioned, and he gave me; 5 multi part intercessors  5 multi part reavers 2 easy to build intercessors  1 lieutenant  3 multi part inceptors  6 easy to build space marines All for the price of, quote, "love and affection" and the promise to paint him up a model at some point in the future.  Here is everything built up: Last episode I showed some of the models I had painted for sale. The good news was that all but 1 sold! This allowed me