DE Models, Woo!

Got out to the FLGS this weekend and picked up my first couple of models in years. Set out to get a codex, but they were all out of the books. They had gone through all 30 they had ordered for launch by the time I got there on Sunday. Crazy!

So instead of the book, I picked up a box of warriors. This, plus the one I preordered a few weeks ago, puts me up to 2 boxes of warriors down and the entire rest of an army list to go. Woot?*

I want to take a minute to talk about how awesome these models are, though. I mean, they are quite attractive. Very clean and precise details, and a LOT of them. Not only that, but on the pieces I have done so far, there has been very little cleaning required.

I am probably more anal about mold lines than any other aspect of 40k models; I will spend hours cleaning mold lines off of as few as a dozen models, and am not above "altering" details just to be rid of the wretched things. That being said, I blew through the DE models in no time at all.

A lot of the mold lines fell on places where they almost didn't even require removing anyways, like on the edge of armour plates and such. Anywhere that it was across open plastic, the lines were very small almost to the point of not being there at all. I still had to get rid of them, but I wasn't spending time scraping down a millimeter of plastic so much as I was just sort of smoothing out some tiny ridges. I didn't finish them all, but what I did manage to do went very smoothly.

DE have a lot of spikes, though, many of which have mold lines going right down the middle of them and into the little valleys between. It's not so bad to clean with an X-acto knife or small file when they're spread out a little, but some of the little spikes, on the lower legs for example, were nearly the width of my blade apart from each other. Made not so bad by the fact that, as I mentioned, the actual lines were very thin, but it was still a bit of a hassle.

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* - Did I mention that I'm going to be building this army rather slowly? The cost of entry for this hobby is so high, and there's no way I could justify dropping a few hundred dollars all at once. At the rate I intend to hobby the models into existence anyways, there really isn't any point for me to have more than a box or two at a time. I figure I'll buy a box or two, assemble/paint/base them and then when I'm done (and/or tired of doing those units) pick up the next box. I won't be getting into the gaming side of things at breakneck speed this way, but it will be a lot more comfortable for me and my schedule and will give me more time to focus on getting them painted to a reasonable standard. When it comes to aesthetics, I am:

a) A totally anal perfectionist.
b) Pretty terrible at painting.

With a little bit of math, I can safely say that a+b=I might be here for a while...**

Also, right now my list is as-yet unfinanalized. I've got it relatively figured out (I think...for now, at least) but I'm not 100% sure just yet. The only thing I can really say for sure that I'm going to need is a shit-ton of warrior models and skimmers. Didn't want to buy a raider just yet (I'd like to get some more painting under my belt before I go on to vehicles. Maybe it'd be better the other way around, practice on the larger model before going into the tiny details, but those large flat areas worry me. I can't just leave them solid, but frankly I'm fairly terrified at anything I might have to do to make them more interesting.) so I figured I'd knock out some warriors.

** - Got a test model painted a little while back, so I can say firsthand that this will likely be the case. It came out what I would consider slightly less than acceptable and it still took me several hours to complete.***

*** - I don't think I watered my paints down quite enough and my paint ended up going on way too thick. Oh yeah, and I never finished it. A couple of hours basically just to get it basecoated with some tiny lowlighting. Actually, that's only mostly basecoated. I'm missing some colors that I wanted and/or I just didn't want to deal with trying to paint some parts of it since it was just a test model. In retrospect, what the heck was I doing the whole time? I blame Jeremy Wade.

I've been meaning to put up pictures of it, but I keep forgetting and/or coming up with reasons not to. I'll do it sometime soon, with any luck.