This is a Chaos Terminator Lord model kit by Games Workshop:
I bought this a few months ago. I’d always wanted to assemble and paint a Warhammer model, and this guy was inexpensive and looked good. Here’s what I found inside the box:
And here’s a close-up of the parts still on the runners:
As someone with a decent amount of experience assembling model kits from Bandai or Kotobukiya I was a bit taken aback by what I saw. For starters this is not a glueless kit. For seconders few – if any – of the connections have tabs or slots to strengthen them. For thirds the pieces are strongly attached to the runners and would need quite a bit of cleaning up after removal.
In short, it looked like a pain.
And that was before I saw the instructions:
These are the instructions to make a ‘Chaos Terminator Sorceror‘. If you want to assemble it as a (melee style) ‘Lord’, you’d use the other sheet of instructions. Both ways have multiple possibilities, and you can see that during assembly you can mix-and-match parts as you see fit. Unlike a Gundam (where the weapons and sometimes even armor is removable and replaceable) this kit is final once made due to the gluing.
Assembly took a while and was a fiddly as I had feared/expected. To be honest it wasn’t really much fun at all! But I think my final version looks fairly nice:
If you’re going to make a kit like this I strongly recommend using a low viscosity glue that can be applied with a brush since you’ll want to put tiny amounts in very specific locations.
Building the kit is only half the fun though, since it must be painted! Master painters can make these tiny kits absolutely come alive with their skilled paint jobs. For instance here’s an example of what someone did with this very model (remember it’s about 2 inches tall):
Looks great doesn’t it?
Here’s where I ran into a bit of trouble. In short: Warhammer paints are bloody expensive! The basic Warhammer 40k space marine paint set of only five colours is about $20, which was more than this kit. If I wanted to buy all the recommended colours for this particular guy, it would have cost about $65! That’s probably ok if you’re building an army to play with (since Warhammer is a miniatures wargame), but crazy just for one tiny kit. I needed another solution.
One option was to take it to a Warhammer store and paint it for free since they encourage that. This would be great were there any Warhammer stores around here. I went into one in England and was tempted to spent an hour painting one of their free miniatures just for fun but didn’t have the time.
But it was during our very same trip to England that the solution appeared in the form of a freebie attached to a very inexpensive Doctor Who kids magazine:
Most people will look at that and think “Oh free magnets!”. I looked at it and thought “Oh free paints!” And in vaguely Space Mariney colours as well! This was my salvation, and months after assembly I finally had the means to complete my Chaos Terminator Sorceror.
Here he is:
I think I’ve done him justice wouldn’t you agree?
Stunning.
Anecdote…
In the ’90s, PG had a stack of GW boardgames – and, as a result, an army of genestealers. When it came to painting them, we decided we didn’t like the traditional blue’n’purple colour combo. What’s more, we made a rule that no two figures could look the same.
So we painted every one of the alien bastards in a DIFFERENT two-colour combo, some of them using metallic hues (PG had loads of Citadel paints, too). The overall effect was awesome. When they were together on the board, it looked like a genestealer disco.
I approve of that anecdote!
At first when I was painting this dude I thought I’d go over the fine detail with a gundam marker once the paint dried. But he looks good enough so I won’t 🙂