The start of the blog and my first conversion

Hey guys and gals
So I have finally decided to start up a blog about my main hobby Warhammer fantasy and Warhammer 40K. Now I haven't exactly been in the hobby very long but -as is my nature- I'm an information sponge. I've read alot, talked to as many people at my friendly local game store as were willing to talk to me, contacted a few people I have encountered on various web forums and talked to one very experienced friend of mine. Unfortunately this leaves me with a lot of theory but little practice. Hence the blog! My hope is by adding one more motivating factor (that is getting work done on my latest project so I can post about it here) I will spur myself on to more and better experiences to have and then share here. Kind of like an infinite loop (did I mention I'm a software developer by day?). And on that note I will share my current work on my very first conversion!

So I've done the typical conversion jobs that almost every one does. Using the extra bits and bobs on the sprue to add some character to a specific model or make a unit commander even more unique. However I have recently started work on my very first unit that does not have a model created by Games Workshop. Being primarily a dark eldar player I suspect I will have to do this quite a bit in the days to come. Currently I am working on the Razorwing Jetfighter heavy support option. I'm not as flush with money as I would like so I wanted to try to limit this conversion to a single kit plus any random bits left over from my small dark eldar army. To that end I found a picture of another razorwing that someone had made out of a fire prism tank a Vyper as well as another kit I didn't recognize. Using this model as a starting point I purchased a fire prism tank and started butchering it. The general ideal being to use the turret as the cock pit and the body of the tank as the wings after it has been cut in half. Here are some shots of my progress so far.

To start I began building the the turret of the fighter more or less the way it was described in the instructions. I made one small alteration in that I cut the original head off the gunner and replaced it with a spare head from one of the Ravagers I recently built. Actually as a funny side note this is the third head the model has had. The first was the original, the second was a helmeted head that I found out after doing some blue tac builds would be to high to allow the canopy to close properly, and then this one.

Among other weapons the Razorwing Jetfighter is armed with two dark lances (or two disintegrator cannons but I'm not a fan of them). As I like to stay as close to What You See Is What You Get (or WYSIWYG) as possible I have decided to make some changes to the nightspinners that come with the kit to serve as mounting points for the dark lances. I figure the look should be right with two center mounted dark lances, two missiles per wing and bottom slung mounted splinter cannon.

In the process of doing some blue tac builds I realized I will have to paint the inside of the cock pit before I assemble the rest of the turret. So a quick blast of primer and some paint later I have gotten to this point. I still have a lot of work to do with the painting on this one. The inside walls are going to be bolt gun metal, the screen of the console will be a green color while the buttons will be a red and purple. Its kind of hard to see in this picture (the picture quality isn't great but my hands were shaking to hard this evening to get a better pic) but his shoulder pads are both silver to denote a vehicle operator in my army. This is part of the rank and function based color scheme I am using for my kabal which I will go more in depth on in a later post.

Thank you for reading my very first post ever. Feel free to leave any question, comments, or suggestions. As I lack anything that even resembles a life I will get back to you fairly quickly.