Thousand Sons Army - Warhammer

I took these pictures a while ago, but I forgot to put them up here. Here is my thousand son army. The only thing that is missing are two rhinos, but here are my 1,850 points of thousand sons.

There's all of them together. Terminator lord, sorcerer lord, a 5 man unit of warp talons, a 16 man unit of cultists, a 10 man unit of chaos space marines, a 10 man unit of terminators, a 9 man unit of thousand sons, and then the heldrake.

With that said, let's start at the top of the list with my thousand sons terminator lord. Sometimes I swap him over to a terminator sorcerer just to double down on psychic powers, but it depends on how I'm feeling.

 Then comes the sorcerer. I can run him a bunch of different ways. I can say that he's just the thousand sons sorcerer, or, I can say that he's a sorcerer lord. Typically though, he gets jammed in a box with the other nine thousand sons. I have also been known to say the staff is a ranged weapon. Seeing as a lot of those options above don't allow for two melee options, that staff has been a bolter, a combi-bolter, and even the artifact flamethrower where you get to torrent strike with it.

 5 man unit of warp talons. It's pretty simple and straight forward. There's not too many options for them, but now they have glowing eyes, so at least they've got that going for them. 

 16 man unit of cultists. This used to be only 10, but then I put in some extra time and finished up the rest of the group, just in case I wanted to bring more of them. They're typically the last thing I do in my list and they soak up anything extra that couldn't go into other areas. I know that I should give them a bit more credit because they're great bullet eaters, as well as objective secure, but here they are.

10 unit of chaos space marines. This picture is blurry, but if you've been on this blog for any time, you should know what these guys look like. I'll put in a few extra pictures of these guys blended in with the entire team, but they're also typically thrown into a rhino and bused around the table to where I need them.

 10 man unit of terminators. Ahh these guys never let me down, except for every single time that they do. Seriously, I love them, but every time I've put them on the field, they've been cleared off in no time flat, mainly because they take an entire army's fire for a round to wipe them out. The best they've ever done is going from a ten man unit to a three man unit, when they faced up and tanked an entire 2,000 points worth of cannons from Astra Militarum.

 9 man unit of thousand sons. These get thrown into the other rhino with the sorcerer above. They're impossible thousand sons unit (because they have melee weapons and pistols instead of full on bolters) but I like this look tot hem instead of the typical one where there's not much diversity. If the sorcerer above it only the unit sorcerer, the dude with a sword (in the front) just turns into a random thousand son with a big ol' sword. If he's a sorcerer lord, then the dude in the front, turns into the unit's sorcerer (which means in the rhino that they're jammed into that they'll have two sorcerers).

 Heldrake! My thousand sons helldrake. The last piece to this puzzle. Here's all of the pictures that I have of this baleflamer, torent blasting, flying beast of awesome!

There you have it, 1,850 points of chaos space marines. All painted, all based, all up to the quality that I want them to be at, and all ready to wreck face in the name of Tzeentch.

I Don't Sell - My American Life

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/133/sales

When I worked at ROI, I started out as a translator. That was my job. I was supposed to take what they had and then update it into a different language so that they could do their job. I didn't have to talk to customers (much) and at the very most I only had to do customer support, and never, ever had to sell.

Unfortunately African Mango went the way of the dinosaurs, and fell apart. I was given the option of either getting fired because they no longer needed a Swedish translator, or switch campaigns. I needed money, so I switched campaigns.

I met with my new boss, Brett Wood, and he explained what I needed to do. The only problem? I hated sales. I had no desire in any way shape or form to ever do sales over the phone. I hated telemarketers, I never wanted to be a telemarketer, but I was in a position to telemarket to companies.

For the next few months, I was in sales, and I hated it. It wasn't even hardcore sales, I was doing the first contact for information for actual salesmen to follow up on, but I wanted nothing to do with it. I hated the product, I hated my job, and I hated sales. As I told Brett a million times, I don't do sales.

As much as I try to make it a mantra that I'm not a salesman, I wish I was.

Part of being a good author is knowing how to sell the book. People that don't know how to write, but know how to sell, they'll get published. Good authors that don't know how to sell their book and make contact with others, they're like me and never publish. I don't know what it is, but I just don't like sells, and I hate even more talking about myself.

That's the worst part about it. If I'm selling or talking about someone else or whatever else, but when it comes down to something that I have done or want to do, I'm a horrible salesman. I get awkward when it comes to talk about myself, and I get nervous.

The most recent example is with Dream Analysis. I had a real opportunity to become "That guy" on facebook, and spam everyone with it. Instead I think I mentioned it one or two times, and even then I didn't even push it that hard. I think I just left a link for one of them and never said a single word about what it was or what was going on. Even this blog, I write it as though I have a huge audience, and honestly I'm sure that if I whored out a bit more, I could get some regular visits, but I don't because I don't like to sell myself. Everything I do runs into that problem. If I just sold a few things a bit better I would have more followers, more readers, and more money, but I don't like it, and I don't know why.

Part of me hates sales because I feel like I'm forcing people into things that they don't actually want. For example with ROI I was pushing Visa cards on companies that didn't need or want them. If people actually wanted to read this blog, they would read it, I shouldn't have to sell it. If people want to read my book, they'll read it, I shouldn't have to push them. But I know that as much as I hate selling myself, I need to do it. It doesn't happen that way. The only way people can ever find me and appreciate me, is to sell myself. The only problem comes that I don't know just how much I'm going to have to sell, and that is when things get icky.

With the mood that I'm in right now, I'm most likely going to back off from this. I'm not a salesman. I know that I should be, but right now I want to get back into the joy of writing. I want to write what I want to write, and not have to worry about the stupidity of selling my books. I've been thinking way too much about how people think about me lately, and that's no good. I'm just going back to thinking about what I want to think about, doing my thing as best as I can, and enjoying life. Focusing too much on stupidity and other people hasn't been making me happy lately. It's time to write and do the things that I want to do.

What To Do Next

For six months I've been working on one project - my thousand sons army.

As you have seen (and will continue to see) I am VERY happy that this is my first army that I've completed, but there's always the next project.

The next projects that I have ready and lined up are as follows -
Make my Thousand Sons army into an apocolypse force. We're talking two demon princes, a second terminator lord, a third rhino, finalize the maulerfiend, a second unit of thousand sons, chosen, raptors, another lord, and then 23 marines. I've got a lot to work with here, and there's enough diversity that I could honestly spend the next few months working on them for a while and be just fine with it. The good side to this is that it gives me more diversity with my army. By adding that much into it that will be painted and ready to go, I could go as large as an apocolypse battle and be happy to field something because I'd be ready to throw a STUPID amount of points at the table. This is most likely the option that I'm going to go with because I should finish what I start. I still have more to work on with this, and I need to finish it.

I also have the option to finally go back to my roots and do some more vampires. I've got a horde of models (literally) just sitting around, and I've got a lot to do with them. I've got units of grave guard, ghouls, dire wolves, black knights, hexwraiths, and all sorts of undead goodness that need some time. The good time to this is the pure numbers of them. With the massive amount of numbers, I've got a massive amount of work, the only down side to this is that finding a game to use them in is near impossible.

Then there's the elves. None of them are painted (or at least none that I'd like to take credit for, there are still those that I painted while in Karlskrona). That reminds me that I should send something to Elder Ringer, and show him the obsession that he's implanted. With the elves, I have a fresh army. I start with nothing and can make them look and be however I want. It's daunting because I have that freedom, but at the same point it's a great thing because I can do whatever I want and that's just down right freeing.

Now I just have to figure out which one I want to do.

In other news, tonight my personal goal happened. There were two things that happened tonight and both of them were exactly what I have always set as a goal for myself. The first was that someone would look at my paint jobs and go 'wow, I want mine to look like that' or something along those lines. It's a low mark, but I wanted someone in the hobby to look at what I did and then be shocked that I've only been really hardcore painting for about six months, that they would look at what I have and want that for their own army. The other thing that happened, I've always wanted someone to look at what I have and then be shocked that I work with junk paint from Walmart. I'm not using expensive paints, or expensive brushes, I'm using things that you can buy for small moneys, not lots and lots of money. Tonight was the night where skill, not a thick wallet, made things look good.

Thousand Sons Heldrake - Warhammer

I'm keeping this one in drafts for a while, but I want a photo log about how I made my heldrake the way I did. Here's all of the steps I took and how I got from blue on blue with more blue, to the final product.

I started it off with a dark blue base, dry brushed a light blue and then ink washed a regular blue. It was just blue on blue on blue for the excuse of saying that I had at least three colors on it. Sure, they were all blue colors, but I had them on there. 

From there I painted in all of the sections that I wanted to do the color blend on the bottom of the heldrake red. I wasn't quite sure how it was going to look, so I played it safe and did the bottom first.

I thought it didn't look too bad, so the top got the red treatment as well.

The tricky part about the color blend was that I was working on a blue base with a red on top of it, meaning that a strong yellow was near impossible. What I did to try to fight this was that before I even tried to start fighting the color blend, I lined in each cell half yellow and half red. This way I could come back and do a few layers of yellow on the yellow (typically by the time I got to the blend it was at least two or three layers) so it was strong enough.

Then came the hideous task of blending every single cell. I didn't worry about going over the lines too much, but I will never ever do this ever again.

Slowly but surely I worked my way through each wing, and remember this is just the underside.

It's slowly progressing, bottom right wings are shaded, others are not.

Once I got an entire side done I went back over it with blue to clean up all of the painting over the lines and to really exaggerate the cells. This one simple thing made each cell pop a lot more than I was expecting and it almost made me question a further step down the path where I do the metals.

Finally both sides of the bottom got done.

With the piece half done with color blends, it was time to tackle the top. The same thing happened. Each cell was first 50/50 red and yellow and then I went in and color blended each one into a red to yellow gradient.

This is the one where I really realized just how much the blue lines made a difference. You can see that the top picture isn't bad, but as soon as each cell gets outlined in the second picture, things look significantly better.

 That got me to this point. The only thing I needed to tackle was the face, with some REALLY small cells, so I went out, got a new detail brush and tackled those.

 After that it was time for the silver to come in. Top, bottom, everywhere I could get it that made sense to me. Officially it was supposed to be a light blue silver color, but I could never see the blue in the silver.

 To get a blue tone to the silver I washed it in a blue wash/glaze, I don't know, just regular paint watered down a whole bunch. You can see it in the next pictures. In the first picture there's only the blue wash on the top wing, and then in the second one you can see just what that blue wash does to everything else. It finally gets that hint that the silver isn't silver, but some sort of blue metal.

 With that done I did some edge highlights, and then based it.

 And here's my happy little Thousand Sons Heldrake with the rest of his army.

The best part about all of this, the ROUGH math behind all of this is that I started late November painting the marines, and have slowly been working through this army to now (which is the start of June). I do have two rhinos, that are just blue boxes (exact same paint job as the heldrake before any of this started), but I now have a fully painted, 40k Thousand Sons army. They are all the same color scheme, all of them are based, and all of them were done by me. In 6 months, I have made my 1850 points of an army, and I'm going to go out on a limb and say they look pretty good.

And now that I have this rediculously sexy army. . . it's time to sleep.