Oldhammer 40K

Thanks to grantinvanman for pointing out that the paint set from back then is water based acrylic instead of latex and that it still might be good. Let’s take a look at the paints.

I did open and use all of them back when I painted in 1996, so that might be a problem. I tried shaking all of them and only the purple wash made liquid noises. Time to open one.

That semi-solid plug runs down the length of the bottle. It can still paint my finger blue when I poke at it – I don’t think that it will spread very nicely on the models though. Let’s try the tentacle pink

Well that’s liquid-ish, but doesn’t really flow anymore. I think it’ll be more trouble than it’s worth to try to use these paints now, so I’ll have to find colors that are close.

I also looked at the purple wash. I couldn’t get a good photo of it, but it was still liquid. It looks like it is a chunky liquid, but this one might still work. If so, that can really help with the color matching since my original paint style was slathering purple wash all over the model after painting the blue and brown parts. After the wash, I’d do the white claws, bone spurs, teeth, and eyes.

Speaking of the white parts, next thing I want to do is to try to make them less solid white.

Looking over my ten genestealers, 7 are painted and need to be finished, 2 are basecoated in black paint (just a light layer of black paint brushed on, making sure to not glob on so much paint that it fills in the details – I tend to just use a spray paint can/rattle can of latex paint now, but that can be tougher to control and not glob), and 1 is still in the original blue plastic. I want to get models to complete, so I’m going to take this one at a time. I’ll start with one of the painted ones that should be “quick” to finish.

First issue is that they obviously spent time outside of boxes in all these years and have a layer of dust on them. I am happy to see that in all these years of knocking around in boxes/moving across thousands of miles the paint hasn’t chipped off and still looks good. I think I can use a dry paper towel to knock off most of the dust and then a gentle clean up with a damp (not wet, wrung out so it is just damp) paper towel. I suspect that after 30 years, the paint should be pretty fully dry. I wouldn’t use damp towel on a freshly painted model – several days of drying should be ok though.

That got the dust off and the paint held up. While cleaning the dust off the model, I realized that I never actually glued them together, they are just push-fit together. One more item on the list of things needed to complete the model. I’m going to continue to hold off on the gluing while I think about the next step.

Now that it is clean and I’ve looked it over, I’m actually pretty happy with how the model looks. I’m going to say the painting being done when I was young and less shaky, combined with my eyesight getting worse over time means this looks like a respectable paint job. The only thing I want to finish off is the white on the claws and bonespurs is too clean and uniform.

I have two ideas – use Army Painter strong dip (dark stain basically) or do some brownish-pinkish drybrushing where the claws emerge from the chitin.

Sorry this is in multiple parts, I’m fighting the project system to get the initial updates added. At least it makes me look really active…

In 1998, I moved out to Colorado since my roommate needed a roommate again and my job allowed me to live where I wanted. I picked up the 3rd Edition box set for myself (and didn’t like it much since the default rulebook rules removed most of the things that made the tyranids fun to play). I also picked up the Chaos box set at this point and made some ebay model purchases.

We still played a little bit, but adulting takes up a lot of time and effort so things got packed away. Through many more years of moves and life changes, I still managed to bring along my boxes of models while picking up the 3rd edition codices.

The nice thing about getting old is that memory is an imprecise thing, so occasionally you get happy surprises. I was a little sad while looking for my models that I didn’t have the 2nd Edition Tyranid Warriors or Carnifex, but lo and behold when I unboxed everything – I have two mostly assembled Tyranid Warriors and an unassembled Carnifex! Yay past me, good choices!

Lots of words to say that I started this about 30 or so years ago and it’s probably about time to finish. Haha, that’s a joke – it’s just time to do a bit more before I pack them up for another 30 years.

My idea is that I finish painting up the tyranids and the chaos forces and then I can do some White Dwarf inspired battle reports (good things those old issues have moved along all this time as well) using 2nd edition, default 3rd edition, first 3rd edition chaos codex and 3rd edition Tyranid codex, and finally the second 3rd/4th edition chaos codex.

While in Toronto, I remember also getting a biovore and some spare spore mines, a blister pack of two hormagaunts (unbelievably expensive when I was thinking about the fact that I usually ran a horde of 40 in my army), a set of ripper swarms, a Hive Tyrant, and Kharn the Betrayer at the store. I had painted the biovore and some spore mines at this same time; I think I painted the one hormagaunt as well. I’m vaguely sure I painted the hive tyrant a few months later.

If I’m going to work my way through my miniatures* pile of shame/pillar of pride/pile of potential, I guess starting at the beginning is as good as any.

I grew up in Ohio and one of my friends back in 1991-92 told us about a new game where you could build armies of aliens and fight each other. I don’t even remember him saying the words Warhammer 40,000 – but looking back now I believe he was talking about this. We never did anything more than make wild plans one night to see if we could get armies going – I’m pretty sure we didn’t even have more than a little sales catalog thing for it at that point.

Fast forward a few years to 95-96 and my college roommate had the Warhammer 40k 2nd Edition box set. We spent many weekends building many different army lists, filling our living room floor with terrain and the few models that he had built, and then seeing how it all went when the dice were rolled. We even managed to find some of the codices and I got a copy of the Dark Millennium psyker expansion at our local stores. During this exploration time, I really enjoyed playing anything that wasn’t space marines or imperial guard, especially the tyranids. I just loved to see my swarm of hormagaunts and genestealers scything through whatever was in front of them; My second love was Chaos just for the sheer variety of things you could have in your army; Orks were fun every now and then for the unpredictability of “will they do something spectacular and take out half of the enemy army, or will they do something spectacular and take out half of their own army”; Eldar were another army of interesting choices and terrifying tanks.

After college, I spent the summer in Toronto and found that there was a Games Workshop store there. I went several times and this is where the pile starts. I picked up a box of genestealers, the tyranid paint set, and some brushes. I remember a few late nights in my room painstakingly brushing on a black undercoat, painting the chitinous bits in blue, mixing up a brownish color for the fleshy bits (I didn’t like the official paint scheme for the fleshy bits), putting purple wash all over the blue and brown, picking out the bony bits and eyes in white, and painting the ovipositor in red. I managed to get several “done”, but didn’t even finish the full set of 10.

*I say miniatures since as with any good hobbyist, I also have my board game, TTRPG book, video game, sci-fi/fantasy book, business book, jigsaw puzzle, and card sleeving backlogs also.