Finally updating with a couple more shots from when I laid out the army group two weeks back:
I finished painting that converted melta cannon I'd been working on a few months ago
I really like how it turned out; it doesn't look like it was a kitbash, and it's performed admirably already in a game of AT18 (just ask captPiett; his Reaver took three bad hits to the torso when my Reaver died in a magazine explosion!). I kinda wish I'd made an attempt to mold & reproduce it... but if I ever need more than one melta cannon in a game of Epic or a down-scaled game of AT18... something's probably wrong. Both of the new Warhounds are in the back of the photo there as well. Their patterns don't match because they're going to wind up in different squadrons - I realized too late that I'd left two with basically the same legs pose unpainted
![:{[]](./images/smilies/headbang.gif "Headbang")
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And there's the big guy - this one's a little desaturated because of background lighting, but I think it has the best angle out of the photos I took of him after NEAT. It was not as hard to convert a "loyalist" Warlord into a "chaos" Warlord as I'd feared - at least not to the same "chaosified" standard as the other Warhounds and Reavers in my force. I trimmed down the stylized axe symbols into spikes wherever possible, and the biggest Forgeworld Chaos Star brass etch works pretty well cut down the middle and bent to fit the curves of the shoulders. If I didn't have all of the flame details the shoulders would seem a little bare, but that'll be a problem to solve for the Banelord. Finally, I liked the titan legions "cog & T" symbol on the shoulders too much to completely do away with them... so I found a reasonably-sized horned skull detail component and trimmed it down to mount over the icons and convert it into something more corrupted.
I think just about everything else has had a feature at some point in my painting log here, so I'll close with a shot of my workbench as of this evening:
Dreadnought reinforcements for my Iron Warriors, more guns for the warlords, another demi-century, some crusader proxies, and some properly chaotic Thunderbolt replacements from the Vanguard range. I trimmed the spike details off - I kept snagging my fingers on them, so leaving those on wasn't going to be a winning solution - but the silhouette blends in with the Forgeworld flyers a little better that way anyhow. I've been retrofitting my titans' bases with 1/8" magnets, too - those Tech Priests in the front from Vanguard are going to get some magnets and will be used as markers to indicate which titans have Veteran Princeps or the Legate onboard in future games.
Along with all of this, I committed to an AT18 league at my FLGS that kicks off 7/12, so as if I haven't painted enough titans yet, I have another two plastic Warhounds and a plastic Reaver to paint up in Legio Tempestus livery ahead of the 12th (minimum game size is 700 points for the first 3 weeks), so there might be a few updates on those coming around the 4th, especially if next week is rainy.
