My son Marcus is six. About a year ago, I gave him a pile of old plastic ork and space marine figures I had sitting in a box. He had become enamored with "daddy's soldiers". I had already given him some extra HeroClix figures, but it was time to introduce him to WH40K. I have been out of the hobby for quite some time, but I played a couple games with a friend about 2 years ago.
At first, the 20 or so marines and 20 or so gretchins/orks were sufficient to stay his curiosity of my "real" 40K armies. He had been really good with my D&D figures, and my HeroClix figures, but I was still reluctant to share my most prized soldiers!! As I came across more minis, I added them to his collection. Unfortunately, the marines I gave Marcus were sans backpacks and guns... they were the uni-body sculpts that the gun smooshed into the chest from the 3rd edition box set and from basic space crusade. He eventually realized my "mistake" and on occasion would ask me to find the missing pieces.
I recently started up painting again, and have really been enjoying it. As I sat out at my workbench "toiling" away, Marcus became more and more interested in what I was doing. So I set him up with his own station and let him paint his marines. Now that he was sitting next to me painting, he made up a sort of chant while he worked... "My marines are missing their guns and daddy's wont fix them..." HA! HA!
About three weeks ago Marcus came to me very seriously and said "My marines need to be fixed with the guns from your green box. Please make my marines whole" I was taken aback by his stern and serious request. So I made it a mission to make his solder complete. It took about three days tearing through all my bitz boxes and work area, but I eventually found most of the missing pieces.
As I started gluing the various guns and packs on, I got it in my head I would make them into squads. It was going to take some converting to make the minis wysiwyg, and I promptly dug into my bitz boxes to see what I could come up with. After some searching and some "inventiveness" I found enough figures and bitz to make the following:
- 1 Terminator Librarian
- 2 10-man Tactical squads
- 2 5-man Terminator squads
- 1 10-man Assault squad
- 1 10-man Devestator squad
For added durability, I decided to make all the arm conversions with pin joints instead of just gluing them. This is something I have rarely needed to do for my personal armies. Other challenges for this project were the jet packs and heavy weapons.
With all this converting, I couldn't leave it there. There were 6 colors of plastic (tan, grey, red, yellow, blue and dark blue). Plus, over the years I had painted and repainted some of the figs (for both my SM and CSM armies), and Marcus had begun to slap some paint on too. However, this project never was meant to be such an undertaking. I did end up stripping the worst of the figs, but pretty much went to task painting up a fledgling Salamanders army. I am almost done with the force and will be highlighting some of the steps in later posts. but here is a sneak peek.
Salamanders!
ReplyDeleteGood to see more of the finest, non-codex'd army.
Thats a very nice army your son has, good balance of squads and sure to cause some problems to tanks or Monsterous creatures.