When I decided to get back into miniature painting and gaming again, I was well resolved not to allow a mountain of unpainted plastic to build up in my closet again. I stand by this. The events of Christmas seem to have upset all of that at least for now. More on that in a bit.
I have an Assembly Challenge going for the month of January. The rules are pretty simple: Just go to this post and tell me in the comments you’d like to participate and you’re in.
I don’t want to fail my own challenge so in that spirit, I strived for a successful week with my new Death Guard forces. My unpainted Legion now stands at six plague marines with a variety of weapons, a foul blightspawn, and of course their ride.
As for the Rhino, I am planning on adding a few things to it. Perhaps a couple of tentacles and I might try and add a little bit of disease to the hull and maybe try my hand at using Milliput on one of the rather bothersome top seams. I don’t want to go crazy with the thing since I plan on fielding more than one APC. Because then I’d have to do that with all of them and there lies madness.*
Now back to the Great Christmas Opening of the Warp.
My husband was kind enough to buy me this beast. It was either that or a Predator and he went with what the game store had in stock.
And what proper battlefield for the Death Guard would be complete without three giant skulls of serpentine? Apparently, that is what my husband thought. I love the way he thinks!
Then on December 23rd and 24th the Warp opened!
Package after package arrived. Some from Amazon, some from Ebay, I think, and other places too. You see, I told my extended family I wanted 40K miniatures for the holiday (in my defense they asked!) and even shared a spreadsheet of my desires in Google docs.
I expected to get one or two kits if I was lucky and maybe a cute t-shirt or festive socks or bath products but instead I literally received everything on the list and then some. I’ll be assembling and painting now until doomsday!
I’m not complaining mind you.
Anyway, this coming week I’m working on adding a bit more decoration to my Rhino, and assembling a Beast of Nurgle, Typhus, and a bunch of other stuff. I’ll be back in about a week with another update.
In the meantime, I hope those of you who are putting together stuff for the challenge have a fruitful January and that you had a nice holiday season.
Feel free, if you’d like, to share what you are working on in the comments.
— Anne of Chaos
* And Slanesh!
Anne's Immaterium 
Looking good Anne! Oh when you manage to get done and have reached Doomsday don’t bother waiting for me as I will have only just started out😉.
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Nice productive start to the Nurgle force there Anne! I really enjoyed reading the stories about your shipwright apprenticeship days and the sand table of days yore.
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Its always nice to see a fellow hobbyist getting spoiled on Christmas and I’d say you’re going to be busy assembling for quite some time. Those tanks can be a bit complicated to build or least they used to be back in the day!
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Thank you, it was very much unexpected. If I had known, I wouldn’t have bought so much stuff to get back into things on my own. I’d have kept it to paints and such.
Yes, those tanks can be complicated, but assembly is an area I’m not too awful at. My dad used to have me “help” him when I was a little girl with his own model projects. I think the most fun we had was building a Bismarck battleship model and the most complicated one was the USS Constitution. All of that rigging and stuff took him weeks! I don’t know how much help I was but I have some nice memories from those days.
So I figure if I can handle being an apprentice shipwright on the USS Constitution at the tender age of 10 or so, I can handle even the mighty Mortarion’s tracked brainchild!
But then again, Hubris comes before the fall, does it not?
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I helped my Dad build model cars when I was a kid which probably opened the door to miniature painting later as a teenager so I can relate to your ship model building in that sense!
Newer Games Workshop kits are a lot more elaborate and finicky but as long as you follow the instructions, you can’t go too far astray so I have confidence in you!
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That is neat and I’m glad you also have good memories of building models with your dad.
I wish I still had those ship models, but they somehow like so many things they went missing over the decades.
Thanks. I’m sure I’ll figure out how to muddle through somehow when I get around to building the thing, but I don’t know. I made a hash of Typhus gluing him together in the wrong order and then I had to cut off like half his torso to get his legs on. But the gods were in my favor–you can’t even tell.
Oh yeah, and I managed to lose a fiddly little bit of hose that is supposed to be glued onto the front of his armor, so now I have to make something out of putty, though I did decide to have it be a burst or rotted out hose so I glued a drool bit from a Beast of Nurgle box where one end of the hose would attach so maybe it was the guiding hand of Nurgle all this time that caused it.
At least I didn’t have any mishaps gluing together my new Poxbringer to replace the old one that I can’t find. I wonder if he is in the same place as the Bismarck and the Constitution?
Is there a Sargasso Sea for miniatures?
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Making the best of tough situations is always good when it comes to assembly. Patience can go a long way too but that isn’t always easy to come by! With GW’s modern kits, there are some really fine bits that are easy to break or lose if you aren’t careful so that’s good to keep an eye out for when working with them too.
There might be a Sargasso Sea for miniatures but I’m not sure what it would be. GW’s kits are the most complicated by far on the market but they do give detailed assembly instructions so as long as you follow them, you can’t go too far wrong, I wouldn’t think.
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That Plagueburst Crawler looks mean! 🙂 I smiled when I read you’d asked for 40K miniatures – less well-informed family members might have thought “Where are we going to get that many from?”!
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Hahaha … yes, that is true. Most of them had no idea what “Warhammer 40K” was, but they all know about miniature gaming. My dad was a huge WWII gamer, which was how I got into the idea of miniatures growing up. He had a sand table he built and had a hobby area down in our cellar that he made really nice. So when family visited they always got to see it.
I did anticipate the “Where are we going to get that from?” question and in my spreadsheet I included links to both Amazon and the Warhammer website.
I thought of everything, you see. I just had no idea it would work out so well. When I’m done assembling all of this lot, along with the stuff I’ve ordered before the holidays myself not realizing I was going to get swamped with miniatures by family, I should have enough to keep me painting for about a year, lol.
Yes, the Crawler does look mean. Certainly looks like it would be fun to build and paint. I could see putting some barbed wire on the front of it or something,
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😂😂😂👍🏻
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Nurgle is traditionally very generous with his gifts, and it sounds like your family is too! Now for the fun part, getting it all built, painted and onto the table. 🙂
I’ve made a start on my stuff for the challenge, got the trolls done plus a few other odds and ends that weren’t planned but still needed seeing to.
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Haha, yes, I enjoy that my family makes a big deal out of the holidays. My grandparents did, my parents did, and I do my part as best I can to help keep the traditions alive too. 🙂
Yes, you are right, I have a massive mountain of plastic, when you add of all of that to what I innocently bought figuring I’d have a reasonable amount of stuff to put together.
As much as I like playing with my toys, I’ve decided this time around that I’m not going to play in live games with other humans with unpainted models. I’ll play against unpainted models but not with them. This will help me, I think, from building up a huge pile of unpainted stuff to go with my huge pile of currently unpainted stuff.
I might try and figure out if I can get AI to play a game of 40K with me though to teach me the current ruleset. And since I’m going to have a respectable Nurgle force in addition to my Death Guard (based on what my pile is right now) I might finally learn to play Age of Sigmar as well.
The Nurgle models I’m seeing coming out for Sigmar are gorgeous and many of them are useable in both games without proxy so why not?
That is good news about your trolls. Glad to hear you have made a start!
Last night I prepped a Poxbringer and glued it together this morning while I was having my morning tea. A strange but surprisingly nice way to wake up.
What I’m doing to try and keep making a dent in everything is work on assembling models at least one hour a day until I have everything done or at least until the end of January.
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These look great Anne, and look forward to seeing what alterations you do to the rhino. Sounds like you had a bumper Christmas with all that you got.
Have done some construction already and can be found here Wargamesculptors Blog: LET’S GET THE PARTY STARTED and here Wargamesculptors Blog: WHAT ARE YOU WEARING ?
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Wow, I checked it out and you are definitely having a productive time with your mini art, and I think it is cool too that you’ve already made some nice assembly progress too.
As for my Rhino, I probably won’t go crazy with it, but I do want to experiment with green stuff/milliput to see if I can model where the metal on the hull would tear when there is a tentacle sticking out of it.
Been prioritizing putting together Nurgle Daemons now, because I unexpectedly have a lot of them now.
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