From AaronH - 28mm Imperial Guardsmen from GW (105 points)

My next entry in the Challenge is 21 Imperial Guardsmen from GW. These are 28mm models, mostly plastic. I can't stand the 40k rules. I bought an army of these guys before I realized that though. They've sat, assembled and undercoated for years.

A friend and I are planning a campaign for 2016. We'll see if it gets off the ground, but if it does, these will be the core of my ground forces. We'll be using the Chain of Command rules for the ground combat. To start we'll play them out of the box. Once we have a handle on them we'll mod them for Sci-Fi, things like hacking, ECM, teleportation. They are candidates.

The full group

This batch is one squad of ten men and eleven odds and ends.

Rear shot

The rifle squad is a Sgt, a Vox-Caster and eight riflemen. I haven't added any support weapons into a squad yet, but I have the options and will sub them in as appropriate.

The rifle squad

These men are veterans of the Malvee militia, returning home after several years fighting off-world. They have arrived just in time to defend their home from invasion.

A hard bitten Sgt.

The odds and ends are a dismounted armor officer, Vox-caster, missile team, melta gunner, plasma gunner, two grenadiers, two flamers and a Corpsman. The bases are done in my standard desert pattern.

Odds and sods

The officer can be identified as an armor officer by his lack of armor. His sword is a chain sword that I filed down to be a power sword. Several of these models are metal.

No armor, not infantry

The metals are very sharp, very nice poses. They are less bulky than the plastics which are, frankly, not GW's best work. The plastic Cadians are all badly proportioned and some of the sculpts are very soft in places. The metals suffer from none of these problems.

Plasma gunner. I elected to go with the traditional blue plasma chamber.

You can see the difference between the gunner above and the grenadier below.

Grenadier. Not as well proportioned. The faces have great character though.

These men are from the 1st Battalion, 5th Malvee Infantry. The V is for the 5th. The single dot represents the 1st Bn. This is horrible OPSEC but it's fiction and I wanted to give these guys a little bit of color.

Armored officer attached the 1/5 MMI Regt

These models are solid and unremarkable; which is appropriate I guess. I now have two squads, since I finished up another nine models while I worked on these. They don't count as I started them years ago. I'll be finishing up enough models to start playing during the Challenge. These are a nice filler unit. Easy to paint a bunch of them and a change of pace from the more complex historical models that will be most of my Challenge fare.

Great work Aaron! I quite like the desert colour scheme you've chosen for their uniforms, especially the judicious highlight of their green shoulder armour. Nice.

I agree with your assessment of many GW plastics. They were often over-scaled and soft in detail, while the quality of the metals you could usually bank on. That being said, you've done a wonderful job on both here. Bravo!