'Monstrous' from JamieM: Dark Eldar Monster/Vehicles

Hi all, it's been a while.... sometimes the painting gods smile on you and you get all the time you need (well, at least some time anyway) and sometimes you get absolutely no time at all..... and that's kind of what the last few weeks have been like for me - a combination of work and personal stuff has conspired to rob me of time.  There's probably a wall of text coming, so feel free to jump to the pretty pictures if you prefer ;)

Now, before I complain too much, I should point out that one of the things getting in my way was entirely self inflicted... namely a gaming tournament I'd agreed to play in.  I don't normally play in tournaments, they're too much like hard work and "winning" can become the thing, so I'd rather spend time with my mates playing normal games.  The one exception I make is the Doubles tournament for Warhammer 40k at GW HQ in Nottingham that they run a couple of times per year.  The reason I like it is that it gives me a chance to buddy up with a mate of mine who lives the other side of the country from me, about 3.5 hours drive away and we Brits consider that to be "a long way away" aalthough I appreciate it translates in American/Canadian to "virtually next door".  As I don't see him too often, it's a great excuse to make us get together for a weekend of geeking out.

The other thing related to this post is that I absolutely LOVE converting models.  It's one of the reasons I like fictional stuff so much, I can just do what I want to and not be constrained by real life.  The Games Workshop stuff is perfect for this as I maintain that GW produce the widest range of quality kits on the market - not necessarily the best pieces, but the widest range.  And sadly I've gotten out of the habit of converting.  I think this is because I have so much stuff on the shelves of holding that I feel like I don't have the time to convert and should just "get stuff painted" instead as converting is very time consuming.  What I like about converting is when you show your mates of someone passes the gaming table, spots what you've done and says "that looks cool".  I hadn't done anything worthy of that for quite some time I felt like that was an important part of my contribution to the hobby to hopefully inspire others as I certainly enjoy and am inspired by other people's conversions, more so than a good paint scheme.

Anyway, after the last doubles tournament I'd promised myself that I would do a bunch of conversions for the next one, so I dutifully purchased all the parts that I needed...... and left them on the shelves.  Three weeks to go until the tournament and I finally badgered myself to do it, despite the lack of time!  It did mean the converting used up a lot of my painting time, so instead of painting all of the figures I'd prepped and undercoated for the challenge, I was prepping again..... anyway, thanks for sticking with me, here's the first one

"So what is it?!?" I hear you ask through the magic of the internet.... well, it's a dinosaur with a howdah holding three evil elves with massive guns.  It's a Ravager made primarily from a Troglodon.

GW has two parallel worlds, Warhammer Fantasy (now Age of Sigmar) and Warhammer 40k.  The fact that both are exactly the same scale and essentially copy standard fantasy tropes for races (elves, dark elves, humans, ogres, etc) means they are ripe for conversion across the two systems.

The Howdah is totally scratch built from a variety of other kits, both fantasy and 40k.  I needed two Ravagers for my army, so here's the second one....

I tried to make them as different as possible by converting the neck to go look the other way and use a different tail and the Dark Eldaar (Dark Elves in space) are all different on the howdah and steering.

The Ravager is essentially a gunboat, intended to take out opposition tanks and heavies with three massive guns, hence the three Dark Eldar on the back, dancing around to get the best shot.

I lost track of the amount of kits I took things from for these conversions, but boy was it awesome fun and has reignited my creative spark.

On the weekend they fared very well and tallied a lot of kills.  The also died a lot as the Dark Eldar are the epitome of "glass cannon" armies and use wet cardboard for armour.

Next up is another conversion for the same army - this one is an Elf Griffon (no longer available so picture attached instead of a link) to be a Raider

As you can see, this is the troop transporter version of the gunboat and the theory is that the Dark Eldar are agile enough to hang around on the outside of it.

Another scratch built howdah (using the bottom half of the steps used on the Ravager conversion) and just the one lunatic with a massive gun on this one.

The hard line highlighting wasn't perhaps my best choice as I'm not really neat or patient enough to make it work really well.  I am pleased with the overall effect though as I've learnt that often with painted figures your eye will make up for it by seeing what it "should".  I got plenty of "dude, that's cool!"s through the weekend, so mission accomplished!

I do have another Griffon/raider converted , but I didn't quite get the hard line highlighting done (it's one of those jobs that's hard work so I tend to shy away from actually sitting down and doing it) so perhaps I'll pop it on in another post in the next few weeks if I get it done.

Overall then, 3 28mm vehicles for 45 and 10 full crew for another 50 to add 95 to my slightly anaemic looking total...