Flying space gnolls!

One of the unit types in Grimdark Future's "jackals" army list is vultures - canine beastmen equipped with jump packs. Gnolls, of course, are feliform rather than canine, but they have impeccable scavenger credentials. 

 I used space-marine backpacks with space-marine shoulder pads over the exhausts to create the appearance of mobile-jointed jets. The weapon arms come from all over the place.

Space gnolls!

 Kitbashing Frostgrave gnolls into sci-fi versions is something I've been doing since the kit came out. These guys are the picking up of a project I was working on about a year ago. Happily, the kitbashes I made then work as a unit of "jackal" trackers for Grimdark Future plus a couple of heroes (one very big - a converted Wizkids gnoll).

I painted these figures very quickly, chiefly through drybrushing, with a few select layering-and-highlights areas (the black hyena-like features and the red weapons and armour). Drybrushing can look quite rough, but I reckon it's appropriate for dusty scavengers on some desert planet.

More space orks!

The band of space orks is slowly growing. I'm going to mix eras and manufacturers entirely freely for this project; whatever these little green men are, they're going to be a widely variable species. 

 

A converted space orc

 

Here's the latest in an occasional series of "stick a gun on it and call it a spaceman" - the best and most nostalgic form of miniature conversion. This is a Grenadier orc by Nick Lund; he'd lost his sword and helmet spike, so got a plastic gun and plume as compensation. He should fit in nicely with the converted EM4 (ex Grenadier) plastics in the previous post.

Kitbashed space orcs!

A friend of mine who used to play a lot of 40K suggest that we give One Page Rules' Grimdark Future game a tryout in the summer, so that he can use some of his exquisitely painted armies. I haven't played 40K since the first edition, but the OPR rules look nice and streamlined: a bit of Song of Blades and Heroes (with the Quality stat); a bit FUBAR (with the alternating activations); and a bit Kings of War (the general streamlining): all good things, and the rules and list-builder are free to boot.

I was planning to paint up a lot of first-edition 40K space orks for the summer session, but I'm aware that time and work commitments may limit what I can do (and I don't want to rush those old treasures). But I have no qualms about speed-painting kitbashed EM4 plastic orcs (wonderfully cheap and readily convertible). I converted one to sci-fi a while back, along with an associated metal Nick Lund Grenadier orc, so I thought I'd convert a few more. 

One welcome discovery has been that the new Frostgrave cultists have bulky arms and gloved hands that work nicely with the EM4 orc torsos. The arms (and chainsaw) of the figures in the first photo come from that kit. Stargrave scavenger arms and various other sci-fi bits make up the rest. 

As far as I can see from the Grimdark Future rules, the orc profile is all about aggression rather than toughness (as in the original 40K, where T4 was an ork's main advantage). So these smaller, rather simian orcs should look the part so long as they're armed to the teeth. 

 

A kitbashed chaos warrior

 

Here's a quickly kitbashed chaos warrior with a similarly rapid paintjob (lots of wetbrushing all over with a reddish brown to start with). I put a few of these rogues together the other night to use up various bits and pieces from the bits box. 

I much prefer Citadel's original chaos warriors, with their weird variety and Moorcockian vibe, to the later almost uniform armoured behemoths. So this fellow's a bit of a callback to that sort of thing.

Slightly better shots of that little Grenadier orc (auto-enhance be damned!)

Since I got a new phone (because the camera in the last one was in very poor nick), I've been somewhat dismayed by the photos I've taken of miniatures. Depending on the light, they've been ending up almost "rasterised", with the brushwork looking a lot cruder than it does to the naked eye - as in the bottom photo in this post and in all the photos in the preceding one.

I noticed that when I first looked at a photo, it looked OK, but then an automatic "enhancement" kicked in and made my highlights and shading look a lot rougher (as below). Apparently, this is because of an unstoppable iPhone feature called Deep Fusion. For the two photos above, I got round this in slightly convoluted ways. For the first, I took a screenshot of the photo as soon as I'd taken it - before Deep Fusion had its wicked way. For the second, I took a "live" shot and then went into the breakdown of that and selected a still (Deep Fusion leaves it alone). 

The focus isn't great in either case, and I've downloaded the Halide app to see if that will help. But even the slightly unfocused shots above are better - and more true to life - than the unnaturally sharpened image below.