It’s Inbox Tuesday!

Every few weeks we like to raid the What's New Today inbox and see what hobby everyone's up to. At the moment there's a lot of Warhammer 40,000 miniatures being worked on, which is definitely a good thing considering the little teaser video we showed off yesterday. You're going to need plenty of guns over the coming weeks I can tell you! To get you in the mood for some galactic warfare, today's post is mostly centred on the grim darkness of the far future, including a few Space Marines, some Inquisition troops and even some Chaos Renegades - essentially a duel between good and evil (with an Inquisitorial grey area in the middle). To kick things off though, I thought I'd show off a couple of beautiful Warhammer figures before we got stuck into the guns and power armour:

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  Yesterday we featured Tyler Mengel's Tomb Herald conversion. Well he also sent us this picture of his Ogre Firebelly, which we thought was too good not to put on the blog. Tyler was inspired to apply for the 'Eavy Metal job that we had advertised a little while ago, and so painted this miniature with a straight-up simple paint job that emulates the 'Eavy Metal miniature. We think he's got it pretty close!

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  Rebecca Page, who painted the white Cockatrice in Friday's post, has also been working on this Dark Emissary (I sense a Storm of Magic theme to her painting at the moment). We loved the subtle source lighting that was used around his eyes and on the gemstones hanging from his cape, and the use of the vines from the Warhammer Basing Kit around his feet.

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  As promised, here are a few power armoured warriors, this time from Mark Hawkins. His Deathwing Terminator Standard Bearer involved a lot of bitz-hunting, sculpting and converting. Mark feels that the freehand banner was probably the most challenging part of the model. Using the example in Codex Dark Angels he (in his own words) mucked about a bit with the dimensions and proportions to make it fit on the banner from the Space Marines Command Squad. Mark has also issued a challenge to anyone that can work out which miniature the head is from. If you think you know, write up a comment on Facebook.

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  Take one plastic Terminator, some green stuff, a handful of spare parts, and a lot of paint and something like this may be the result. After a fairly lengthy paint job (mainly due to Mark's passion for freehand painting), Mark finally completed Captain Belatro of the Ultramarines. Despite his fondness for non-codex colour schemes, Mark decided to stick to the Ultramarine Chapter colours for his model, though decided to add in a fair number of white panels to personalise the armour (white is also the mark of a veteran in the 1st Company).

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  A little while ago I took a trip down to Warhammer World and met up with Chris Nelson, who'd previously sent me a picture of his Inquisitor, Mathias Kyron (using the model of Hector Rex). The red armour was painted using a basecoat of Scorched Brown, blended up to Scab Red and then washed with Leviathan Purple. A second layer of Scab Red was then applied, then blended halfway up to Space Wolves Grey before Chris washed it a second time with Leviathan Purple. In games, Inquisitor Kyron generally caries a Daemonhammer and a Nemesis force sword into battle, the shield is just there for the cool factor - Chris' next modelling project is to build a cherub minion to carry the force sword into battle.

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  This is Inquisitor Lord Thaddeus Mydor from the Ordo Hereticus. His force sword was painted using the technique in White Dwarf for mirrored blades - not an easy technique by any means, but Chris has pulled it off admirably. We were also very impressed with the smooth bone armour on the troopers in the Inquisitor's retinue. Chris basecoated the armoured areas with Bleached Bone, washed it with Badab Black for shading and then reapplied the Bleached Bone. Skull White was then added to the Bleached Bone for the highlights.

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  And now we're onto the evil stuff (they're definitely not misunderstood, these guys are proper evil). Chris Poole sent us these Chaos Renegades which genuinely look as though they've just escaped from a trench somewhere on Vraks. The filthy grey clothes are nicely complemented by the orange streaks of rust and the green foliage in the bases.

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  Sometimes we even get pictures sent to us from our staff, including this version of Abaddon the Despoiler by Jon Hart. Jon decided that a normal Chaos Lord wasn't quite mighty enough for the huge Apocalypse game he was playing in, so he grabbed the Abaddon kit, a plastic Terminator Lord, and an Ork's hair Squig for the top knot, and built himself a mighty Abaddon to crush the Imperium (or at least try to... 13th time lucky and all that).

As many of you will know, we've also got a couple of Painting Competitions going on at the moment. This Saturday (the 29th) our Hobby Centres will all be holding a Dreadfleet painting competition, where you can enter your best painted fleet or individual warship. Check out this blog post and your stores' Facebook page for more details. Here in the web team we're also running a Dreadfleet painting competition and we've already received quite a few entries, including the two below. To enter, all you need to do is send your entries to the What's New Today email address, with the chance to win one of ten stunning pieces of artwork (one for each warship). For the full terms and conditions of our competition, check out the bottom of last Thursday's blog post.

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  This version of the Bloody Reaver was painted by Mario Petit. All of the stone areas were painted with Fortress Grey followed by several washes of Devlan Mud to provide shading. The rocks were then given a final light drybrush of Skull White on the top edges. The sea was painted with Hawk Turquoise followed by a drybrush of Ultrmarines Blue, a wash of Thraka Green and a final light highlight of Skull White for the surf.

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  Rob Vassel sent us several fleets of warships, including his rendition of the Shadewraith. Currently Rob has sent us pictures of all of his warships from the Dreadfleet and the Grand Alliance, which means he now has an entry in each of our ten categories. Remember, you can send in pictures of your warships to us at any time and, if you're lucky, we might even show them off on the blog in the near future.