Praetorian Medusa

The second in the line of Harness pattern artillery vehicles is now ready for paint. This is a medusa, made using plumbing parts for the main weapon.

Quite happy with the end result. Not a huge fan of the skirts but that's to hide a couple of miscast roadwheels. Had it not been for the Band of Brothers timeline I'd have ordered some more resin and cast another set but never mind. Adds a bit of variety if nothing else :)

Ammobunker Newsletter

Hey cool, the latest newsletter for the Ammobunker is out, and they've included a piece about the IG Designer I'm building. Always cool to get a little publicity.

If you're not a member over there it's well worth a visit. I'm a member of a lot of gw related forums but AB is pretty much the only place I post. There's no bitching and petty arguments, no over zealous mods editing your posts before you've even hit submit, and no fething whinging about prices. Just a lot of very talented folks showing off shiny stuff.

And now I sound like an advert so I'm going.

Praetorian Platoon Command Squad

And the final part of June's build (you can see why it went down to the deadline!), the platoon command squad. It comes with a commissar and vox caster.

Nothing too ingenious here, though I am quite happy with the vox caster model (on the left above).  Painting is a little ropey in places, rushing doesn't help when you paint as slowly as I do!

Praetorian Ratlings

Third of four parts of June's build. These are Kindred from Hasslefree Miniatures.They're sculpted as ww1 era soldiers but I thought their rifles were suitably sniper-esque and the tin hats could be painted as piths.

I love the sergeant, I think he's probably my favourite model of all the out of the box sculpts in my army.

Praetorian Griffon

Another part of June's build, the Griffon artillery. This is the first of my Harness pattern vehicles, another one is in development.

I decided to use the FW thudd gun rather than a traditional single shot mortar. Just preferred the look and when the gun shield fitted the gap in my vehicle I new it was destiny!

I tried to get a more WW2 feel for these, I think they look slightly Wespe with the open tracks and big metal guard.

Cadian Auxilliary Truck

Part of June's BoB build, this is the chimera transport for the Cadian Auxilliaries. It's based on Dave Taylor's trucks (check them out, they're immense). I've tried to do my own take rather than recreate his (I didn't use his templates, just his ideas), but that's possibly more to try and hide my inabilities to do what he does rather than any artistic reason.

Still, I'm very happy with the result. Had a go at photos in natural sunlight, not sure if they're better or worse but here they are.

As with every other month was a bit rushed so some of the details aren't perfect, but it's painted and it still surprises me when that happens. So many of my models are just plain white plasticard for years.

IG Designer

Can't believe I haven't mentioned this in my own blog! I've been working on a uniform/regiment designer tool for the Imperial Guard. There are some great ones out there for many of the other races, but aside from a decidedly limited cadian designer that GW put out many years ago there's nothing for guardsmen.

So I thought I'd fill that gap. There's still plenty to do but here's the current feature list:
 

• 5 pre-created regiments to start your design
• Interchangable elements from all 5 regiments
• Three colour palettes and custom hex code entry
• Saving and loading of designs

 

Try the IG Designer 

Next big thing I'm going to work on is a camo designer. Not entirely sure how it will function yet but I want to make it a free as possible whilst still being save-able (which probably means a range of recolourable precreated patterns).

Would love to hear any feedback. Once the camo tool is done I'm going to promote this around a few other forums and move it to a sort of open beta type phase. If it proves popular enough I'll work out a slick user control system so you won't have the rather clunky url get string method of saving, but we'll have to see.

Praetorian Auxilliaries

Woah got to remember to update here more. Things have been hectic but progress is definitely being made on the Praetorians for Band of Brothers.

Here's the final part of May's entry along with the Leman Russ seen previously.

These are old school Cadian Shock Troops I bought when they were first released. I stripped them down for this project and painted them in line with the uniform guides I posted before. Quite happy with the results, although painting them was hellish. You forgot how hard it is to paint nasty old metal models when compared with sharp new plastics. It's the interpretation bit I can't do, where there's a huge chunk of metal because they can't do undercuts, and you have to try and guess what colour to paint it. Bah.

Anyway, moving swiftly on.