Cheryl Cole does Warhammer 40,000!

The lovely Cheryl is a neighbour of mine and I think she is quite gorgeous but I was rather perplexed by her outfit whilst singing "live" (conveniently large microphone there, Cheryl) on the X-Factor on Sunday. It seems that she and her costume designer (get a new one quickly!) had taken their inspiration from the Warhammer 40,000 Imperial Guard line.

I think if Cheryl was my commissar I would be appropriately inspired to lead my troops gallantly against the alien horde too. Maybe GW should made a Cheryl Cole Commissar figure; I'm sure it would go down well with their main target market.

Here she is in a Wargames Foundry Future Wars Outfit. Now that's much better!

Tanks for the Memory..

My favourite Airfix tank!

I've always liked tanks. My first wargaming at school was Western Desert WW2 and my friends, Bean-Kid, Cesspit and Jimbo built dozens and dozens of Airfix Kits and mixed them in with many out of scale RoCo minitanks and fought vast battles in our dining room on our 7' x 7' board. I still have many of these and my little boy quite happily manoeuvers them across the carpet in very unhistorical clashes with Japanese, French and Russian tanks. I then started buying the ESCI tanks at university but made very few and now sell them off for outrageous prices on eBay -£42 is the record for one Italian tank!.

I also started to build some of the Tamiya 1/35 tanks kits while I was at school: the Tiger, the Hanomag halftrack with Panzer grenadiers (when it came out - I still remember the Military Modelling article on how to build it), the Stug III (complete with snowy base) and my favourite, the Jagdpanther.

I love the new Chieftan metal kits and have bought a Panzer III (unbuilt, as yet) but still feel a bit queasy about WW2 wargaming.

Blamma blamma!

However my little boy's new interest in Warhammer 40K (which they play at school) has suddenly made me realise that I can build big tank models without worrying about depicting a war where my family fought on both sides (British and Austrian). So today I visited the happy smiling people at my local Games Workshop and picked up a Space Marine Razorback. When I opened the box it brought back all sorts of happy Tamiya feelings but I can build it without feeling guilty about being a war-mongering, fascist wierdo, as it's all make believe!

Yippee! Still need to get the Zulus finished first though!

Space Marine Terminator Stage 1

Well, this is my first Warhammer 40,000 figure and I have now undercoated it and done a nice rubble strewn base. Looking at all the detail it is actually quite daunting but I will have a go. I'm even using (horrors) acrylic paint! I will do the arms separately.

I have had to create a new 40k folder in the wargames section of my pc. How embarrassing! I am far too old to be painting this! I was born well before there even was a Games Workshop!

Warhammer 40,000. Surely not?

No academic historical justification whatsoever. They are toys!

I have been buying White Dwarf for the last few years solely for the Lord of the Rings stuff. I also occasionally read the Warhammer articles but always ignore the 40K pieces as I have no interest in weird looking SF armies blasting away at each other at sub-medieval firearms ranges. But. Having looked at the free figures with this month's White Dwarf I thought; maybe I might paint them as an exercise. Then I thought, "these are really nicely detailed". Then I thought, maybe I can have a go at painting them in a non-pristine GW way. Just as Star Wars revolutionised the depiction of the future (I know, it was really the past) so shouldn't these figures look battered and grungy. Maybe I can paint them in a battleworn way. Inside the magazine was an article pushing the new boxed set, Assault on Black Reach, and it wasn't a huge jump to thinking, "maybe I will just pick this up and play a game with my little boy". Sadly, there is a GW shop exactly 170 yards from my new office and I soon found myself having the sort of, longer than you intended when you went in, discussion with one of the in-store Moonies/Scientologists. Anyway they promised to get me a set a day early and I am really really thinking about it. This way madness lies, for sure!