Tech-Priest, Chaos Renegade and More!

I've been really busy this last week and quite satisfied with the results.
First of all, here's my new Tech-Priest. Its an old artificer-armour marine (formerly known as armour variants). By Copplestone of course.
Back in the days the only Tech-Priests were the Bob Olley ones, but they didn't match the style of the rest of the Imperial Guard. 
Only twentyfive years later I figured this marine could do the job.

This miniature, based on an illustration in Rogue Trader, has the eagle with a human skull icon as shoulder pads, marking him clearly a Marine. But I figured these could be honour badges of some kind, while the man himself is just a normal human being. He does have the size of a standard human. The guy is a bit more tech and not gothic, fitting the direction I want to go with my Guard, allied with Tech gang hive militia.
His main job is maintaining the penal legion and detonating human bombs.

Next is a very old-chool Chaos Renegade. The miniature is from Space Crusade, the Milton Bradley boardgame.  I painted him with Vallejo Black Glaze mixed with green ink, over a grey undercoat. I think  it worked quite well for the original Renegade Giger-esque bio-mech look.

I got carried away with another side project, the Space Bastards. An initiative from the esteemed gentlemen on the Emporium of Rogue Dreams.  These are left-behind space marines. Psychotic fighting machines as in the book, but reduced to warlords, mercenaries and pirates (and ninjas! and lasers!). Some use broken down equipment and gear. 
I succumbed and got myself a bunch of second hand RTB01 beakie space marines. Here converted with Grenadier barbarian torsos and Kalashnikovs from the Assault Group. 
These guys realy dig the Bee Gees.

 "...We drink and rob and rhyme and pillage!"

Last but not least a new pic of a conversion from some years ago. The underhive miner is of course a plastic terminator stripped from it's skulls and baroque goth brooha.
The head is  a ball bearing with sculpted details while the screw is from an ancient Playmobil spaceman powertool.

Rogue Trader squads

Here be a bunch of teams and squads painted months ago for the Lead Painters League on the LAF forum.

Space marines in desert camo. All Copplestone sculpts. Death Eagles and characters.

Marine scouts in Harkonnen colours.

Space ship crew of the S.S. Zarathustra. 20 years of Copplestone sculpts.

Imperial Navy officers with Astropath and Xenos advisor.

 Kevin Adams Rogue Trader and retinue.

Human mercenaries.

Space Orks.

And at last some Fallout style Vault Dwellers.

 
 

 

Bob Naismith Spacemen Files

Bob Naismith is one of the original Citadel sculptors and was reponsible for many of the first Warhammer 40.000 Rogue Trader miniatures. Most notably he designed the first Space Marines and also the dreadnoughts. My favorites must be the space pirates. Second hand these miniatures go for crazy prices now, which I refuse to pay. I may be mad but I'm not stupid.  This pic was nicked from the Stuff of Legends.

Fortunately Bob didn't quit sculpting after he left Citadel, in fact he actually made quite a few science fiction miniatures for many others. I'm going to try to list them all here, in no particular order.



More than a decade ago the Cobalt-1 range was self-released, I believe in collaboration with West Wind or Old Glory. The range was discontinued, but fortunately picked up by Black Hat. I really love the retro style powered armour suits and scouts and rebels in the Mercenary range, but the aliens and characters are also very good.

In the meantime a superhero range was sculpted for the SuperFigs game. Most of them classic spandex heroes but some very useful characters too: aliens, robots, high tech soldiers and very useful henchmen squads. At the moment they're available from Old Glory in the USA and in Europe from Old Glury UK on request.

 

A fairly new company is Blue Moon Manufacturing 

The Aliens and Spacemen range started out with a bit trashy 1950's sci-fi aliens and spaceships but recently a whole range of hard-sf mercenaries were added. Recalling Starship Troopers and the original Alien spacesuit designs by Moebius and Cobb and also new powered armoured marines. In Europe available through Old Glory UK, on request.

Speaking of Starship Troopers, Naismith also did the official S.T. miniatures for Mongoose games. Especially the big exosuits are a good alternative for the old Dreadnought Suits. These days the range is available from Rebel Minis, sold as generic SF now.

 

Last but not least, Warlord Games sells the Judge Dredd miniatures, created too by Mongoose for the old Gangs of Mega City One game.
At the time there were also plastic gangers, but they are not available at this moment. 
The ganger characters and perps are great and of course the 2000AD universe was of huge influence on Rogue Trader, so it all makes sense! One of the Grizzly exosuits got recycled as the Dredd Holocaust Suit.

Naismith also did many plastics for many manufacturers. Still available from Em4 Miniatures are the Space Rangers. Originally released in the 1990's by Hobby Games as alternative 'Space Crusade' style monopose space marines.

He also did plastics and metal miniatures for short-lived wargames like Trinity Battleground and Havok.

Recently I got hold of a bunch of Atomic Café miniatures at half price, and it triggered my old obsession with all things post-atomic. Here be a couple of armoured cars built by the Greasers.

Both are resin armoured cars from the Spanish Civil War by Force of Arms (a range recently obtained by Warlord Games). Post-atomic hot rods. I basically left off the gun turrets of both kits, as these are civilian vehicles.

Post apocalyptic armoured schoolbus.

Empress Miniatures Spanish Civil War armoured truck, with various bits glued on top.

Post Apocalypse gangs

 

Shanty Town

Survivalist convoy

 Some post-apocalypse scenery. Made with bits of plastic toys and trash.

I've been working a bit on the Red Shadows. The putty conversions are done with Procreate. Really recommended, very easy to sculpt with. I'll make latex-rubber pressmoulds of one or two of the heads, because three of the figs in the packs had caps instead of helmets (hence the decapitated figure in the picture).

You can see better pics also in my gallery with other related and unrelated miniatures.