Miss Captain Bear's Miniatures

In continuing my adventures into Battlefleet Gothic, I expanded my initial library of parts. I added plenty of weapons and attachments, lots of greebles, and a bunch of goopy alien parts. I have some miscellaneous Space Marine models and have been thinking about converting them to be like Infested Terrans - and they'll need an Infested fleet!

After finishing up the Hierophant's weapons, and finishing up the Zoanthropes conversion, I wanted to do some scratch-building IRL. I have been doing a lot of digital sculpting, and while I really enjoy it, it's definitely different than playing with clay and glue and scissors. So I turned my sights onto a really simple and easy project! The Battle-Egg!

In continuing with my interest into both scratch-building and the game Tonks , I was inspired to make this build while playing the video game Cyberpunk 2077. There's a part of the game - I have no idea if the game makes all players do this quest or not - where you steal a hover tank from the military faction and use it to deter some scavengers. The design of this tank was the typical stylish, flat-black ultra modern military tacticool style, but it definitely made me curious if I could replicate it in the world of Tonks!

I've talked a little bit about the magazine 28 in the Tonks post , and continue to find it a source of inspiration. They are really fascinated painting in a John Blanche style (Dubbed "Blanchitsu", a term I find odd and don't really use) and I have long wanted to try it out. After a game of Kill Team with my half-painted Thousand Sons models - in which I lost handily, curse of the unpainted mini for sure - I decided to just go for it. So here's Miss Captain Bear's official guide to painting Blanche-style!

I'm a big fan of 28, a magazine about tabletop, miniatures, and art . In addition to great articles and jaw-dropping minatures, they also have put out several different free indie games. One of these games is the game Tonks, the full rules of which can be found here . A while ago, I scratch-build two Tonks for myself, and here they are!

In my last post , I talked about maybe someday separating the sculpts into the Norn-Maggot and the Astropath, Miria Castillon. These aren't remotely close to playable units, I have no idea where they'd fit into actual game, but I'm just having so much fun sculpting original creatures I'm not going to let that stop me!

In continuing with my Retro Tyranids and flush with the newfound excitement of a successful 3D printing escapade, I almost immediately started working on a Screamer Killer. I've talked about in my Tyrant Mechanicus list briefly about kitbashing and clay-sculpting a modern (ish) Screamer-killer Carnifex, but I always thought the elongated head and whole goofy look of the old one was absolutely charming. I also wanted to make it modern scale - the 1992 rogue trader sculpt was roughly the scale of a Dreadnought (It was intended to simply be an alien Dreadnought). The modern Carnifex... is not that scale. But we can make one that is!

So, it turns out my "minor notes" about my previous sculpt were still wriggling in the back of my mind. Irritated, I decided to take another whack at it, incorporating elements from the backstory I had written in the meantime. This technique was inspired by the Tyranid blogger  Mr Pink , who I'm a very big fan of. I'm paraphrasing here, but he talks often about letting the intended role of a Tyranid guide it's design. A sort of form-follows-function. And I think that was what made me feel like redoing my sculpt; it was an incomplete execution of my core idea. So I got back to sculpting!

Years ago, I used to be into the Star Wars X-Wing miniatures game, and I thoroughly enjoyed playing it... right up until they bumped the major version and rolled out version 2.0. I was aghast that they would bilk me like that; it required a full re-purchase of every rules card, and while I'm sure there were ways to upgrade less expensively, I just was incredibly disillusioned. I'd hitched my wagon to the wrong game!

This is fluff lore for my Retro-Tyranid army, the "Primeval Behemoth".

As a sibling post to my Tyrant Mechanicus list, here's the collected units in my "Primeval Behemoth" sub-faction of my overally Tyranid army. You'll notice I use creatures from both armies in battle reports, sometimes, they used to not have enough points to make up a full army individually.

Like I mentioned in the previous Epic-Scale Heirophant post, I had to start over with my weapons after having made some mechanical versions. I pivoted, deciding to instead make something a little more faithful to the Epic scale model, and thus also beginning my Retro Tyranid army. Thus, I needed to fabricate a Razor Claw and a Biocannon.

Warhammer's Epic scale miniatures are always a huge source of inspiration for me. You can tell the designers were freed from the limits of (relative) size, at least in terms of concepts. I'm sure they had been gazing at concept art like below longingly, excited to be able to play them on the table. Interestingly, both the Hive War (The Epic Tyranid rulebook) and the 2nd Edition Tyranid Codex came out in 1995, so I guess they didn't have to wait long.

Because of my mutual love of both Zerg and Tyranids, I thought it'd be fun to compare and contrast them.

As I play more and more WH tabletop, I'd love to post and talk about the games, and mostly just to document pictures of my stuff. However, my version of a battle report is going to mostly be to post pics and maybe write a few miscellaneous thoughts down. I'm not going to do hardly any details or stuff.

I was finally able to track down the origins of the image of an old retro Heirophant in my Epic Scale Heirophant ! Entirely thanks to a helpful comment at the very bottom of this article by Mr Pink, I was able to find it on the internet archive ; But, for the sake of posterity and hopefully a little more web-search-ability, here are images of that specific article and a transcript for searching and accessibility readers!

I mentioned a while back about playing in a Thanksgiving "Tanksgiving" mega game. It was funny, since my main faction is (As you may have gathered) Tyranids, I didn't actually at the time have any playable tank-sized models. I did have a completely unassembled Flying Hive Tyrant, but it was nowhere near complete. So I pulled out some old models from when I first got into WH, and basically just bought random kits online and assembled and painted them without a larger plan. 

This is fluff lore for my Norn Princess sculpt that sprang to mind while designing her miniature. If you'd like to read more about that, check out that post!

This idea started from Starcraft's Queen of Blades. She's an iconic, larger-than-life character that the story centers around in one way or another. Her design is a banger, right from the early days of SC1, with the green-and-brown coloration. And more than that, I really like her role as a empathetic, human-adjacent character that players can get emotionally invested in the Zerg faction through. So my goal was to make an equivalent heroic creature for my Retro Tyranid army!