15 - Imperial Guard Veterans Squad Sniper

One shot, one kill. Specialist Ruddard reporting for duty, sir! It might seem like I'm churning out these miniatures fast and furiously (what with the ork post going up just yesterday), but in the spirit of full disclosure, the Ork Boy had already been practically completed and sitting on my desk waiting to be touched up and varnished for about a week when I started up on Ruddard. So, I'm still painting about 1-2 miniatures a week. Which probably seems very slow, for sure. Now, this isn't for lack of motivation. In fact, painting during the wee hours of the night, after my wife has gone to bed, is incredibly relaxing to me. I just paint very slowly. And carefully. And I think I almost enjoy assembling and converting models and building bases more than painting, so alot of my hobby time goes into that as well.

Specialist Ruddard, astonishingly enough, was originally intended to be the sergeant of my Veterans Squad. The pic on the right shows what he looked like when I first assembled him. Gone are the pointing right arm, the Catachan head, and the left hand chainsword with sergeant's arm patch. Instead, I replaced his head with a hooded Wood Elf Glade Guard, his right and left arms with standard Cadian lasgun arms from the Shock Troops sprue, and glued a Glade Guard cloak to his back. I also made some conversions to his lasgun - I cut the barrel off an Empire Pistolier's rifle and used it to extend the lasgun's barrel, glued a scope from, I believe, a Space Marine Command sprue, and made a bipod from a Dark Elf Repeater Crossbow. Overall, Specialist Ruddoch has been my most enjoyable and satisfying conversion to date. I think I did a decent job converting a Standard Guardsman into a reasonable facsimile of a Cadian sniper. Click here for more pics.

Also, the paint job represents my ongoing attempt to incorporate highlighting into my painting routine. At the moment, my highlighting skills are tentative and clumsy. I still do not have the brush control to paint thin enough nor straight enough highlighting lines along the upraised edges of things. Also, my blending skills are non-existent. Well, I didn't expect it to be easy.

I'll close this post with a pictorial comparison of my Veterans Squad and my Standard Guardsmen squad. I like how the conversions for my Veterans has allowed them to look every bit the grizzled survivors of hellish dystopian battles while my Standard Guardsmen almost look like children in newly minted uniforms in comparison.