With the newly released Grey Knights I couldn't resist ordering a few of them to build another small army.
My plan is to have in time 7 or 8 different race armies of at minimum 1500 points, to be able to play with friends and all enjoy as much variety as possible, but as I'm the only one that buys them...
It is also quite nice to paint different models and in different colors, I noticed some time ago that both of my armies were too dark and greenish in general.
Right now I have this armies:
- Space Marine Dark Angels: Endless army, one day I should count the points, but I can play just with a Deathwing sub-army if I want.
- Orks: Another big one. I have almost all models I want (as with the Space Marines) but also is a huge green swarm with lots of orks and heavy stuff (2 dreadnoughs and the like).
- Genestealer Cult: All my old and new Space Hulk Genestealers, the old and new hybrids, patriarch, mages, a Carnifex (big badass and awesome miniature) and one tank small conversion I will show once painted (someday...). Very specialiced and probably not suitable for all battles, but I wanted my genestealer horde to become a true cult :)
- Dark Eldar: Kabalite warriors squad, 3 reavers and one mandrakes squad. right now the smallest army, whenever the 2nd wave of DE miniatures is launched I'll probably expand it.
- Grey Knights: One normal squad, one terminator armour squad, a brother captain and the Stormraven I'm currently building.
Also they have as allies two inquisitors and two assassins (models I bought a while ago and couldn't use with the Dark Angels due to Codex restrictions!).
I also bought a Chaos Space Marines battleforce, Terminator lord and Soul Grinder.
So the total is 6 armies so far. Most of them unpainted so not worth taking pictures (what is painted is already in my photo albums).
In the future I will probably add an Eldar battleforce and some Necrons (which rumors say will be revamped soon), and that will probably be all. Increasing ranks but remaining races like the Tau or Imperial guard do not engage me enough and have just one or two nice-looking miniatures for me to collect and paint.
Having said all that, I can focus on the initial idea of this post, divided in two parts. First, my progress assembling a "little bird":
I've also learned to not glue everything before painting, so the pilot and cabin aren't glued to allow me to paint everything in detail.
The Stormraven is huge and heavy (and I haven't finished yet), with an amazing level of detail. I'm looking forward to paint it and try metal highlights (it's going to be for the Grey Knights). An expensive (at least for GW range, compared with Forge World items is even cheap XD) but awesome model.
And the second part of the post is that having enough time to paint seems to be a difficult task for me. Anything below 1 hour is not enough, and usually when I have at least that much spare time is after midnight and my pulse is not perfect due to starting to feel tired.
So in painting I advance slowly, quite slowly. But I do advance something.
I finally finished painting the remaining details of Azrael, my Dark Angels army commander. He had a few details still unpainted (weapon, head and banner pole/angel figure at the top), so I finally did them:
I also have started to paint the ork Stompa, not only because it will look great, but also because has 6 fragments unglued waiting for being painted, so now it is both unusable in games (at least without blue-tac) and taking a lot of space in the shelves.
Those are two finished fragments, the back gretching with a drill, and the head with the Ork Kaptain giving orders.
I am currently painting the main body to glue this pieces and then glue each remaining fragment as I finish with them.