By
kristof65
So back in December I decided that one of my hobby goals for 2022 would be to finally complete painting one of my 90s era 40k forces. Upon inspection of my forces, my Sisters of Battle army seemed the most likely candidate to start with, as it only has 24 figures and a vehicle. Up on my whiteboard I have a spot to track my progress on the army with a goal of working on them at least a little bit each month, with the intent of having the army complete before midnight Dec 31st.
These are going to be from my own made up Order of the Ebon Tower, with a color scheme of cream/ivory armor, purple cloth with red linings and purple weapons. The symbol is a black tower using the same decal I used for my Soldiers of Dalend models, seen here. This is not a coincidence - the black tower decal was originally designed specifically for this army, it just got repurposed for my fantasy Dalend soldiers.
Eight minis and the Immolator were partially painted with crappy 90's paint jobs (using craft paints), eight were simply primed white, and 8 were unassembled.
As inspected the partially painted ones, I didn't see anyway to make them look good with such a crappy base coat on 25+ year old paint. So into a can of Simple Green they went - though I now regret not snapping a photo of that bad paint job:
That was Saturday. Monday night I pulled them out and scrubbed them with a toothbrush which took off about 75% of the paint, and threw them back in. Tonight I pulled them out and did the toothbrush thing again. They're mostly clean now - trying to figure out if I can get them any cleaner:
Those of you who have more experience stripping with Simple Green than I do - is this as good as I'm going to get?
These ladies are primed white already, still trying to decide if I want to use a white, gray or black primer as my base coat. I'm leaning towards white, but am still undecided. If I use something else, these might have to go into the Simple Green as well.
Next are the eight that were unassembled, plus the backpacks for them and the primed ones. I spent some time cleaning flash off of these, putting them on bases, etc. My standards for prep have gotten higher since the 90s - I could see marks of previous half-hearted prep efforts.
So for the backpacks, I've filed off the fleur-de-lis in preperation of putting my decals on. I did a much better job of filing these smooth than I did back in the 90s, so those stripped ones are going to have to get filed to match. Instead of using decals, I may try to figure out how to stamp something out of green stuff, or 3d print something.
I will probably leave the fleur-de-lis on the seraphim's backpacks, as I don't want to risk messing up other details trying to file them off.
The final part of this project is the Immolator tank.
As you can see, I sculpted (poorly) some towers for the Rhino doors, but I decided those weren't to the quality I am capable of now. So I fired up Fusion 360, and designed a replacement door with better detail:
It's on the 3d printer now, so we'll see how it comes out.
I'm pretty happy with my progress on this project this month, so I'll probably set it aside until mid-February and go back to painting Warmaster for my upcoming game.
Look for another update then - and poke me with a sharp stick if you don't get a monthly update from me.
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