Friday, July 11, 2014

(40k) Space Gretchin... FROM MARS!

The loyal readers of the blog may be a bit concerned after the reading the subject of this post. 

"Viscount Eric, are you suffering a stroke?  You typed 40k in the title?  Unless it's Squats or old-school Genestealers, you normally wish GW got struck down by a comet."

Obviously, an explanation is in order. 

Last week, when I stopped by my FLGS, Emerald Vale Games, the store was going through a lot of positive change.  For starters, they had acquired the adjacent storefront and had just finished knocking out a portion of the wall from the "old" store.  If that wasn't exciting enough, their first GW-direct order had arrived and I gasped and guffawed at the prices ($16 for primer?  Does it prime the figures while you're at work?)

After hearing about the plans from Joe, and his apparent trading of his soul for Warhammer High Elves, I spied a smallish box hiding among the others. 

Oh my Lord, they still make Gretchin.  

I loved the little scamps and their hordes of poorly hitting mass effect autoguns in 2nd Edition.  Calculating 12 GW figures of any size for $16.50 is a bargain, out came the plastic for the strangest impromptu purchase I have made in years. 

The plan was to the have them cleaned assembled and painted over the Fourth of July holiday.  Ha!



The figures had character screaming at me in the store.  Try as I might, I perused the GW shelves this week, and the other Ork products just seemed vanilla (and that should be a major insult to that army.) These may very well be my modern Martians for my Gnomish Space Marine game.  Or it's simply the kickstart of my painting to visit the next Gnome Wars unit to celebrate World War I.



The mathematically aware may notice that I mentioned the 12 minis, the box says 11, and the pictures only include 10?  The Orc Rutherd with his faithfully salivating squig hound are going to be based separately and are about four projects back in the queue.  I have enough random GW orcs that I might as well paint them all as Hill Martians.

I did run into one problem getting these guys painted, besides a level of individual detail I'm not accustomed to.  I had been picking up the bottles of Army Painter paint to keep my pledge to try and buy something at the store each week, no matter how small.  The Crystal Blue went on as the base with one coat.  The Deep Blue worked great watered down for shading.  The Electric Blue, I discovered, is rather metallic and shiny, so I dare say, the gretchin/martians shimmer...  It's subtle enough that I don't mind using the same battery of paints to do the WH goblins I snagged on the cheap a couple of years ago.

Next Up on the Painting Block:  The Imperial Guard... of Gnomish California

And just to be safe, since we're dealing with  Games Workshop (© and ™ Games Workshop and painted by myself and posted here entirely without their permission)

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