Discount Titans

My friend and I are working our way towards a very big game of Grimdark Future, hopefully 20,000 points, which should pit his entire Blood Angels army against my entire World Eater army (plus some allies). This year so far I’ve already managed to add 1000 points to my force with a box of Horus Heresy terminators, but over the past few weeks I’ve been hoping to grow my force substantially in points with little effort and a small budget.

I thought a bunch of Chaos Knights was the way to go and skulked around the local toy shops in the hopes of finding something suitable, but then I happened across a Zyclops toy from Disney’s rather bad Lightyear film. Turned out that when I got it home it was substantially bigger than your average 40k Knight:

Not to worry, as now I had a bigger goal in mind, a Chaos Titan, one that is similar in size to a Warhound!

The Zyclops itself was £6.66 (ominous, although mine is Khorne themed so £8.88 would have been better), naturally I bought two for reasons that are only obvious to wargamers and not the spouses of wargamers. Initially I was nervous about the less toxic forms of paint sticking to the kind of plastic they make toys out of, so I kept things quick and easy, there’s always the second one to really play around with. I was rather stingy in my use of bits as well, both because of the paint not sticking thing and a weird desire I had to see how far I could get with just a paint job.

So after a prime I went in with various texture paints, mostly Typhus Corrosion and Agrellan Earth with a little homemade stuff in all the joints and areas that made my Zyclops look more like a toy and less like a model. Obviously I wrapped bits in chain, that’s seems to be the done thing.

Painting wise it was just a lot of stippling, starting out with a metal base I just stabbed the thing with paint, sticking to the insides of his various armour panels and avoiding the edges for a chipped look.

Then I applied lots of washes. First just a normal black craft paint watered down and splashed all over, then in specific areas I applied oranges and browns to look like rust and some areas were hit with an off white for a dusty look.

I did some streaks down the model too to look like oil leaks or just running water. The execution here isn’t really about skill, it’s just about using lots and lots of different techniques to make this big flat areas have a lot of texture and visual appeal.

The base is an upturned wooden plate/dish thing from the bathroom section of B&M a British discount shop. Not sure what you’d actually use it for in a bathroom, maybe a makeshift frisbee or for displaying shrunken heads?

I based him to match my World Eaters army, and I’m still not entirely sure what their bases represent, but I’m stuck with them now.

It was a good weekends work, and added roughly 2000 points to my force so 1/10th of what I need in total.