From the Ground Up

Tonight I am officially launching the modeling part of my Stonecutters army project. Yup, another marine army... hooray, right? But unlike the other times that I've done Space Marine armies, the Stonecutters are conceptually my own creation and will hopefully reflect something of myself in its realization. It's all basically a joke and meant for fun, but I'm still going to take the hobby side of this as seriously as I can precisely because it will be my personal contribution to the insanity of the 41st millennium.

To that end I am scrapping my first idea of using some old marines that I had assembled years ago but then never went any further. I built around forty of them but couldn't decide whether I wanted to do Crimson Fists or Scythes of the Emperor. I painted a few from each chapter but was not happy with either and just sort of moved on to other projects. I thought about using them for the Stonecutters to save time and money, but having looked at them recently I know they aren't going to do as I envision wanting a lot more customization on each individual. I will therefore be starting entirely fresh with the Stonecutters which is probably as it should be. I can at least use some of the old marines to test out color schemes and figure out how to paint the new guys.

With that in mind I've been checking out various lines of resin bases as that seems like as good a place to start as any other. I've played around with some resin bases in the past here and there but that's been it. This time however I'd like to try using them for the whole army if possible. While looking at the styles for bases I've been trying to imagine how they might fit my vision of the Stonecutters but wasn't entirely satisfied with the ones I found. Until today, that is. Dragon Forge fortuitously released today a new line of bases called Sanctuary and I knew right away that this is what I wanted for my army. Sticking with the inspiration of Homer the Great, I like the idea of having some fancy flooring for my guys to stomp on. I picture the army's setting as the inside of their secret (i.e., totally obvious) fortress-monastary which I think will be well represented with this style of base. I'm placing an order with Dragon Forge tonight and will now try to decide what to put on top of them. I've got lots of random marine stuff around the house and I'm sure there will be enough with which to start, it's just a matter of finding them.