218: My Painting Table

I'm almost finished my current job, and in fact it'll signal the end of an entire career for me, and the end of a journey that started when I was 8 years old in a hospital bed, but that's probably a story for another time.  On the upside, I'm going to have the month of August off work, so should be able to make some good progress.  It's not all gravy for my hobby though as I imagine I'll also be a little busy, with a 10 day trip to my wife's family retreat in Northern Sweden, replacing the kitchen in our flat, a lot of training and finally my first OD triathlon on the 25th August and a half marathon in September.

On that note, last year my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, she's OK now, but to celebrate this fact, my family are all running the Great North Run (biggest half marathon in the world) to raise money for Cancer Research UK, if any of the readers would care to make a little donation, it would be greatly appreciated, my justgiving page is:  http://www.justgiving.com/a-gosling

Anyway, that's enough unloading from me, onto the modelly goodness:

I can't quite believe it, but I'm starting to see the end of the road for painting the main troop complement for One Force.  Here's the second 5 men in Mk IV armour.  A little different here as I was able to pick up a set of the Legion type Mk IV armour, and sell on my regular type, which will add a little extra variation to the unit.  I've also tried to make up as many of the different weapon loadouts that I want for the force - Volkite Chargers (counts as plasma), extra regular bolter arms, pairs of chainswords to represent Mark of the Wulfen if I use them as Space Wolves (or just for the fun of it), an extra bolt pistol for the Sergeant model, and of course the regular and jump backpacks.  It means there's actually a lot more to paint than just the 5 actual marines.  You can also see that despite the use of bionics for some of the arms, I've run out of appropriate shoulder pads for the force, so am experimenting with casting up a couple of copies to cover those few extra arms, hopefully they'll come out well enough that it doesn't really show.

I also finally got around to filling the gaps on the side of the Storm Raven with some plasticard plates, so I've undercoated it and I'm hoping it'll be similarly quick to paint as the Vindicator I showed last week.  I'm pretty sure I'm going to go for an Air Force style grey for its colours, with some spot colour green to tie it into the rest of the force.

Plenty of weapon options again as its fully magnetised, and I just don't know what will work.  I'm pretty set on using the multi-melta on the front, as I can't really see the point of the heavy bolters, but maybe the missiles could work???  For the turrent, I would have thought the Assault Cannons would be a good shout as they can pump out quite a bit of S6 which has a good chance of hurting other fliers, especially with rending, but do people out there think the Lascannon is a better bet???  I guess with twin-linked, it might not be so much of a dodgy option, but then you've got 4 S8 AP1 missiles under the wings that can do the job of a Lascannon just as well I would have thought.  I'm pretty sure there's little to no point of taking the plasma cannons as being a blast weapon, they can't do anything against fliers.

So what do you all think, what is a nice effective way to load out a Storm Raven (other than in a bin of course for all you haters :D)

Cheers - Andy