...Then jumped right in to getting paint on 'em! Without my main distraction machine around, I've been getting in a good amount of brush time, and have essentially been batch painting the lot! Still a ways to go yet, but they're coming along nicely so far. Really been digging the look of the new GW sculpts overall, and for the first time in years I'm finding that in many cases I actually prefer the GW aesthetic to FW's take on the Mechanicum - the Robots being the main exception, the FW versions have been phenomenal while the GW ones leave me a little cold. They're not bad by any means (and I feel they're much better in person than they seem in photographs), but the Castellax and Vorax are just light-years better sculpts. The Skitarii as basic troops are far nicer models than the tech thralls (granted, the thralls should be less menacing being armed rabble), and the upcoming magos model in the GW line I find far cooler than the slug magos on the FW side. It's cool and creepy, but just doesn't grab me. When all is said and done, I think there's room for both - they're intended to be radically different things and as a long time servant of the Machine God I'm ecstatic that for the first time in 30 years not only are there official models now, but there's two danged armies worth of 'em! Hah!
More to come soon!