His name is John...

So, I finished up some miniatures:

Master Chief(s) FTW!

I've painted enough different armaments to be able to use him as a third colour in redvsblue games (when I get round to sorting out a ruleset and playing some that is);

As well as some that will be more useful for playing Master Chief vs Covenant games;

As well as some that I think are cool - although I accept that the Cortana miniature isn't really much use for gaming, but worst comes to worst it'll make a nice objective marker for capture the flag type games! And yes, I did paint over a Super Rare Active Camo Master Chief clix fig.

So, with these finished, it brings the tally to:

68 vs 90 = -22

which is a leap back in the right direction, and brings the 28mm Halo project one step further along (although I realise that I might not have previously explained the steps in the wargaming Halo plan):

1.  redvsblue (aka PVP) - only needing 6 spartans per player (for the different weapons I'd chosen to use), once twelve miniatures are finished this step is ready to game, although more miniatures can always be added later!
2. Halo - Assuming I'd already painted some Master Chiefs for redvsblue, all it would take would be a couple more Master Chiefs and a handful of Covenant to be able to play some 'dungeon crawl' type games, similar thematically to the main Halo trilogy (and later expandable to include the Flood etc)
3. Halo Wars - Paint more of everything and they can be used for larger scale (ie squad-based rather than skirmishing individuals) games, up to and including vehicles! The general plan being, that anything from one step can be used in the higher steps - so, I need Master Chief with a plasma Rifle, great, I've already painted him for redvsblue! I need three Spartans with a variety of weapons for Halo Wars, great, I can use a red one, a blue one and a Master Chief for that! (and so on and so forth).

Red vs Blue and first problems with the new gw pots...

Bam, finally got around to finishing my first two sets of Spartans for some Red vs Blue action:

The blues came out a little darker than I thought they would, but all in all we're good. Painting these was a bit of a nightmare, with lots of referring to the Halo Encyclopedia to work out where various bits of armour ended and undersuit begain, but once the basecoats were blocked in it was pretty much plain sailing. However, they did have to wait a fortnight or so until gw released their new paints so that I could get a bright enough pink to paint the needler ammo... which leads me to my next point:

Although the new lids are great at staying open, when you close them the triangular bit doesn't pop back out to it's starting position, they get caught under the lid and get forced into contact with the paint, leaving you to have to pop them back out with your finger and get covered in bright pink paint. But I digress...

Finishing these two squads of six brings the tally to:

39 vs 68 = -29

Not bad, and if I can remain focused enough to fnish everything currently in front of me that'll be another 18 off the total... Before I go to salute and we see another swing backwards...

Spartans Assemble!

So, rather than cracking on and starting to paint my converted spartans in fetching shades of red and blue, I thought I should probably convert some more to make enough for a four-player game. I'll use Master Chief for one player, but that meant I still needed seven more minis...

To start with, pistols:

I had to convert two, since there isn't already a Master Chief fig with a pair of pistols (although I'll use the Master Chief I'd previously converted for him, as that way it's only the M.C. figs that are stood on various large chunks of scenery...)

Whilst converting these I had a sudden thought: what if, rather than cutting through arms, wrists etc to convert them, I just wrenched the whole arm out? Turns out they're held in place with a handy Tetris-piece shaped plug (which you can sort of see here):

Which you'd think would make arm swapping fairly straightforward, no? Turns out they're positioned somewhat differently in different figures, resulting in the following:

All hail surrender Spartan! He amused me briefly, but a little bit of cutting, some liquid green stuff and a dab of superglue later, and he became the Spartan you saw in the first picture.

I won't bore you with individual shots of each of the other five:

From L-R:
Battle Rifle (that was originally going to be on the sniper model, but I just couldn't get the Sniper Rifle to sit right so they got swapped);
Shotgun (using a Brute Shot body so it looks like he's rocking back in response to some suddenly appearing threat);
Sniper Rifle (I think this one's the body of a carbine wielder on a random pair of legs from my halo bits box);
Needlers (legs from the leaping carbine figure, looks a bit like he's doing ballet though...);
Plasma Rifle (I used the energy sword body with an arm swap and some hot water repositioning to make it look like the rifle had just overheated and burned his fingers, because that's how I imagine it happening whenever I play the Xbox game...)

So with these done, that brings us to two dozen:

Bammo, I'll base the rest once this post is up and then they'll be ready for undercoating (which probably won't be until the weekend).

Before all of this happened though, I decided to base the discworld miniatures I had on the cobblestone bases I'd made:

I added a few patches of rough sand to mucky it up a little and voila, done! Well, not entirely. Note the green stuff under Rincewind's boots, where I made an epic fuck-up. After spending so much time coating those bases with PVA to protect them from the harshness of aerosoals and chemicals, in a moment of unthinking ridiculousness I pinned Rincewind to his base. Yep, I drilled through the protective coating into the poor, defenseless foam and poured in superglue. It promptly started dissolving, prompting a bout of swearing and and a rush to pour enough green stuff into the recently created holes to try and plug them up... I think I'm going to brush undercoat the bases before I spray them though, just in case anything else goes wrong...

WOMP day six!

Yep, hadn't planned today as part of the week of mega power, but ended up with an hour spare and thought I'd crack on with the remaining conversions for Halo: Red vs Blue, and ended up with these (and a bloody finger, but the less said about that the better):

The plasma gun wielding chaps are faily similar, admittedly, but there's only so much I could do (short of making him into a crouching pose, but I've not got a great deal of those legs...)

As always, the conversions were exceedingly simple ('ware, ahead are terrible iphone pictures!). For the crouching needler wielder, take one kneeling sniper model:

and chop him in half at the waist (handily, Spartan armour has some handy bumps at the back and sides of the waist that you can use to make sure your cut is straight):

Next grab the poor sap that's donating his torso:

and likewise bisect the poor fool:

As I'm sure you've guessed, the next part is simply glueing together the bits:

Voila! Needler Spartan!

Likewise, the plasma Spartan was as straightforward (and I took less pictures, the steps remain the same though):

Plasma Spartan + legs from the previous Needler conversion =

Newly posed plasma Spartan!

With these two finished, that's everything for the basics of the Red vs Blue project done:

Two poses of each of six options (pistols, battle rifle, shotgun, sniper rifle, needlers and plasma rifle), read for basing and painting. Well, I say ready, the sand I'd ordered arrived this morning, but rather than normal basing sand the padded envelope had two bags of fine sand. Bugger. Alas, dust-fine sand won't take a drybrush, so hopefully it won't take too long to sort, and then eventually I'll be able to get these into the painting queue... And once these are done, I can make a start on some Halo Wars project fun...

There can never be enough Energy Swords...

Wow, half-century post, bam!

Well, my afternoon/evening has been spent prepping some Halo minis ready for WOMP, starting with various iterations of the faceless hero, the Master Chief:

The plan is to have various miniatures with different weapon loadouts, to allow some sort of weapon-swap feature when it comes to actually wargaming Halo. Due to a lack of minis / not wanting to prepare so many versions of the same character that it puts me off painting them, I ended up with seven differently armed chiefs (although I have another three or four weapons on generic spartans that are ripe for conversion, as well as having to decide whether to sell or paint the 'active camouflage' (read: see-through) Master Chief with Energy Sword that I have...)

Once that was done, I cracked on with converting and rebasing some bog-standard Spartans:

The plan for these is to be able to run some PVP redvsblue games, again with weapon swapping - entirely arbitrarily, I think six different sets of weapons is good, as it allows for some D6 rolling fun. As well as painting them red and blue, I wanted each pose to be different too - thence ensued some weapon swaps and the joy that is reposing plastic miniatures using the Turkish Bath method:

On the left is the original (and, in all honesty, a little silly looking) Snifer Rifle armed Spartan. A simple weapon-swap with a Battle Rifle armed Spartan and voila! We have a new pose!

The same goes for this chap - an SMG armed Master Chief had his sidearm removed, the gap filled over with liquid Greenstuff, and then had a new pair of arms grafted. Voila! We have a new pose!

And then... well, you get the idea. At this point, I've got the first four weapon options finished, from left-right, front-back: Dual Magnums, Shotgun, Sniper Rifle and Battle Rifle.

Once all these are done, it's ready for the tabletop! and then I can go back to bigger ideas - either Master Chief versus hordes of bad types, or some sort of Halo Wars-esque battle type games (along the lines of what Halo Tabletop Waraming is planning).

Due to the limited number of sculpts and poses available, I'm going to have to do a lot of converting to try and make this project look more interesting (handily, I've plenty of ideas bubbling away, like converting a Brute Chieftan with a Gravity Hammer, since my secong Master Chief with Fist of Rukt came broken...). And anyway, research for this project is a lot of fun...