Originally this was part of the 8 armies initiative that I was doing along with some friends from work. The idea was that we would all build up WFB armies together and play against each other as well as enter some of the local tournaments as a group. Progress has been spotty for most of the people involved and, while most people have at least a couple of units painted up each, no-one except me actually has a playable army. I’ve ended up with about 3000 points of Chaos Warriors with a strong Tzeentch theme and visual connection so I’m scoring it as a win. Some of the units have been showcased here already – particularly the Chaos Knights and the Army Standard Bearer but most of the army hasn’t been photographed properly until tonight so here is the rest of it as well as some writeups for the more interesting pieces.

First up is the Chaos Knight Champion. When I painted up the Chaos Knight unit a while ago, I painted each of them individually as I wanted them to stand out. This looked good but it made it hard to determine which of them was the unit champion as they all looked ‘special’. So I decided to convert up a champion figure who would stand out in a unit of individuals. I cut and greenstuffed a Chaos Steed so that it was rearing up, greenstuffed the rider so he was leaning forwards in the saddle and then reversed the grip on his lance so he would be stabbing downwards rather than holding it at parade rest. After that it was time to paint him and I needed the colour scheme to be just as eyecatching as the pose. For this I decided to go back a little to a slightly older version of the Chaos lore and make the champion a corrupted Bretonnian knight who has succumbed to the insidious wiles of Chaos. This reflects the older, more Faustian background rather than the current barbarian-centric version. The idea was that his original armour and barding has fused to him and become his chaos armour and the iconography of Chaos is bleeding through and subsuming the older Bretonnian heraldry. I did a a fairly simple heraldic pattern – per pale azure and argent lozengy gules, in the first two fleur de lys or. This was repeated on the armour plates of the horse barding as well as on the rider himself, his breastplate is in pale to match his arms and his shoulderpads bear the charges, blazons and fields of the appropriate side too.

Next are a brace of Chaos Sorcerors. I have two in the army, both with the Mark of Tzeentch. One is on foot and generally goes in the Warriors unit, the other is on a Disc and hunts alone. The disc-rider is one of the first units I painted for this army but I never got around to photographing him. He’s the limited edition version released to celebrate 10 years of GW Italy and GW Germany and is a really nice figure. I’ve done him with the tentacles fading from purple to pink with a fairly standard blue and yellow scheme for his armour and robes. The Sorceror on foot is likewise in blue and yellow and I’m particularly pleased with the highlighting on the back of his cloak.

10 Marauder Horsemen were another early addition to the army. These were painted fairly fast but came out looking good despite that. I used these guys as test beds for a lot of the techniques I’d use to knock out regular Marauders as quickly as possible later on. I tried not to make them too uniform so the horses are different colours and I’ve used a limited palette on the riders to make them all individual while still keeping them coherent as a unit. They have spears and a full command group which isn’t optimal and they’ve been left on the shelf for the past few games. I’m pessimistic about their effectiveness in 8th edition and they are a low priority for most lists I build these days. I guess they could be decent warmachine hunters but any army with warmachines is likely to have enough missile fire to shred light cavalry with ease. In a similar state of limbo are ten Chaos Warhounds that were added shortly after the horsemen. These are very quick to paint and also don’t seem to have much of a role any more.

The Chaos Knights have already been featured on this blog so I’ll only quickly recap these. I painted them all as individuals to reflect their status as warrior nobles amongst the rest of the army. Each of them has a different theme going on that transfers from the steed to the rider and includes the barding. Generally these ride with the Battle Standard Bearer who has also been featured previously. I run these guys with the Mark of Tzeentch and the Banner of Rage. The Battle Standard usually carries the Blasted Standard and this combination makes the unit pretty terrifying as it is frenzied and has a 4+ ward save vs all missile fire. Because the frenzy applies to the whole unit, it also means the steeds benefit which can be vital when hitting units with a high static combat resolution. Many people seem to have written off heavy cavalry in 8th but these guys are very often the army’s MVPs.

A block of Marauders grew organically over the army’s evolution. Originally there were 15 but as 8th added more benefits for larger blocks of troops they expanded in stages to their current headcount of 30. These have flails and are usually fielded in horde formation. I’ve painted them with a palette of only five or six colours to tie them together and they are definitely fast and dirty as far as quality of finish is concerned. I also have Wulfric the Wanderer and, when playing in a game where special characters are allowed, he joins the Marauders to give them his special deployment rule. In other games he’s either left on the shelf or is fielded as a regular Exalted Champion.

A Warriors of Chaos army of course should have Chaos Warriors in it and mine has 19 in a single unit (the extra spot is usually taken by the Sorceror on foot). As with the Marauders I’ve tried to mix the colours up while sticking to a fairly limited palette. I’ve used four or five different armour colours and three or four different cloak and fur combinations. These were all painted very fast – for some reason every time I played at a tournament I’d discover that my list required more warriors than I actually had ready to go so I’d spend the night before each event speed-painting half a dozen more.

Finally I have my block of Chosen. These are somewhere between the Knights and the Warriors in theme. I’ve made them all different but not to the same extent as the Knights, rather there are repeated colours in the unit but they are in general more individual than the warriors as befits their status. The champion has stone coloured armour, the rest are a mix of dark blue, pale blue, red and purple with one in particoloured blue and red armour.

You can find more images including some work in progress shots on this gallery page.

Firstly I started by figuring out how I was going to tackle it. The Doomwheel is a very complex kit which is practically impossible to paint once assembled. I don’t particularly like painting parts separately though so I tried to work out what the smallest number of lumps I could make it into was to simplify the painting process. It turned out that this number was twelve. The central frame was the largest piece with the driver installed, and the rest were mostly single components or very small assemblies. Everything was then undercoated white and I got stuck in!

Firstly I painted all the metal parts with Chainmail, all the wood with Scorched Brown and the outside frame was painted Mechrite Red for now. I then painted Dwarf Bronze over some of the parts that I wanted to be bronze or copper. Golds and bronzes don’t cover well so I find that it’s best to paint a basecoat of silver on first then to paint the bronze or gold colour on top of that. I put some base colours onto the driver and the crewman to see what worked and settled on a fairly plain red, grey and green scheme for them both apart from the driver’s leather armour which was painted with Graveyard Earth.

My view of the Skaven is that they aren’t particularly concerned with keeping their stuff in pristine condition, nor so they worry too much about tetanus so the next step was to dirty up the metal. First I washed it all with Devlan Mud mixed with a little Badab Black to patinate it and give it an overall grimy look before highlighting it up again. Next I applied layered glazes of Snot Green and Gryphonne Sepia to all the bronze  areas, in total I applied four of these glazes alternating between the two colours to get a nice deep colour. Finally I highlighted with a touch of Shining Gold mixed with Chainmail. The silver metal was given a single glaze of Snot Green and then two coats of Ogryn Flesh before being rehighlighted with Chainmail. Finally I attacked it with Blazing Orange to create rust spots. For this step I simply dabbed it on erratically with the point of a brush to create randomly shaped blobs along the centre of the metal areas. This was then shaded where necessary with Devlan Mud painted into corners and crevices. Blazing Orange looks far too bright on the palette but it is pretty much the exact shade that actual rust goes when applied to dark metal.

Next up I decided to tackle the various bits of Warpstone and for this I figured I’d try my hand at some object source lighting effects. Essentially this is where you paint on the reflected light from a point source to provide the illusion that it is actually emitting light. Firstly I painted the Warpstone chunks themselves, these were straightforward Goblin Green with Sunburst Yellow and Skull White highlights along the vertices. Then I got to work on the reflected light. Shining a coloured light onto something changes the colour of that thing to a combination of the two colours (the colour of the light and the colour of the object that it’s shining upon). This works exactly like mixing paints – which is handy for figure painters! There are curved bars around the four smaller pieces of Warpstone, two on the front and one on each side bar. The inside surface of each of these was overbrushed with Goblin Green and then highlighted up to pure Sunburst Yellow. I also used the lighter shades of these highlights to highlight up the inside of the central framework where the big chunk in front of the driver would reflect onto and around the open slats in the boiler thing that the driver is connected to. This makes it look as though there is greenish light seeping from whatever hellish machinery lives inside there. If I’d been clever, I’d have foreseen that I would be doing this and would have extended the effect to the inside surfaces of the wheels as well but I’d already stuck the wheels on by this time and it was too difficult to get a brush in there reliably thanks to all the spikes. Never mind.

The wood was washed with Devlan Mud and Gryphonne Sepia before being drybrushed with Graveyard Earth and Codex Grey. In the photos it comes out a little pinkish but in reality it’s a much darker and grubbier brown. The red metal was also dirtied up with layered glazes and washes before having bits of Chainmail applied to it to represent peeling and chipped paint. I tried to imagine where Skaven crewmen might have worn down the paint and gave those areas an extra highlight of Mithril Silver to represent the shininess of constant use. The rest of the exposed metal was carefully glazed with a Badab Black/Gryphonne Sepia mix.

Finally I assembled the rest of the pieces, painted and flocked the base and presented it to its new owner – who was very pleased with it. I am also happy with the way it turned out although I am kicking myself for not being able to finish the object source lighting properly.  It’s a fine tabletop piece and I’m sure that Jan-Eric will get a lot of use from it.

You can see all of the pictures associated with this project on this gallery page.

I took the Chaos Warriors that have been slowly taking shape over the summer and Mario took his new Tomb Kings. Originally the plan was that he’d come over to my place yesterday and we’d have a few tutorial games to get him up to speed with the rules as he’d never played WFB before, what actually happened was that he had to do some work-stuff at very short notice so he sat at my table working on his spreadsheet while we discussed the more theoretical side of the game and I bashed out a few speed painted Chaos Warriors to bring my list up to size. This meant that the games at the tournament today were his first ever. “Don’t be a wuss” I said over his concerns that he might not be ready, “You’ll figure it out, it’s not rocket surgery.”

There was a Warmachines event happening simultaneously with the WFB tournament in the same hall so there were only ten players which is about half as many as usually show up. Mario met his first opponent, a Bretonnian player while I was matched with an Empire opponent. My general was a level 2 sorceror on a disk who didn’t manage to do much of anything during the game due to having only one useful spell (Gateway) which was always shut down by the pile of dispel dice that my opponent was able to muster. As soon as he died I realised I’d bought him a Spell Familiar so he should have had a bit more utility. I also realised about this time that I had paid for a Chaos Spawn but I’d forgotten to pack one in my case so I was down a bunch of points. These things collectively displeased me. Despite my forgetfulness and the loss of my general to a wildly optimistic round of shooting from some Pistoliers I easily won the game mostly thanks to the Chaos Knights and their superhuman ability to kill things. Wandering across to check on Mario, I was heartened to find that he’d won his game too so Team Acony was off to a great start.

Next up for me was a High Elf army and Mario faced off against a Skaven horde. This one started badly for me and went downhill fast. My Chaos Knights smashed into a mid-sized unit of White Lions and got butchered due to some terrible dice rolling for armour saves. Only the army standard bearer survived and I just managed to keep him alive long enough to finish off the last survivor from a unit of Dragon Princes who had previously been on the wrong end of an Infernal Gateway. My hero popped the last Prince then fled and died. Without my Knights, I was very much on the back foot but the Warriors managed to pull things back a little. It wasn’t enough though and the game ended with a convincing Elven victory. Across the hall, Mario had been tabled in short order but had learned from the experience.

For the final game, I drew a Skaven list (a different opponent to the one who’d demolished Mario) and Mario was matched up with a Dwarf army. My game was very back and forth with many points that could have swung a decisive victory for either side. Highlights for me were Gatewaying the Plague Furnace off the table in my first turn and having my Marauder Cavalry survive the battle after actually managing to kill things. Low points were having a Skaven unit break my Marauders and clip the General as they pursued, the next turn the Marauders rallied, the general lost combat but didn’t die and the pursuing rats hit the Marauders again who they broke again and pursued into the general who was already fleeing and thus had to flee again – right off the table. Sigh.

In the end though I’d killed almost everything on the Skaven side and had managed to preserve most of my expensive units (characters aside) so pulled out a win. Mario hadn’t been so fortunate however, he’d found out the hard way that the only army that can beat Skeletons in a long-drawn out meatgrinder are Dwarfs and at the end of his game there were still a large number of stunties standing up while none of the Khemrian forces remained on the table.

Out of the ten players who took part, I came third and Mario placed eighth. Both of us tied for most sporting player and I won the best painted army (by dint of being the only player at the event with a fully painted force no doubt). A good time was had and those of the group who didn’t take part still turned up to watch and cheer Mario and I on so even though they didn’t play, they still got a little stoked for action over the winter.

This figure and twelve Chaos Warriors are the only parts of my list that weren’t already painted. I’m confident that I can crank out a dozen warriors in a week so it was a relief to finally declare this guy done and move on. It often happens to me (and I’m sure every other painter in the world) that I’ll start working on a figure and it just won’t come together. The figure will then get sidelined while I work on other things and sit partially done on my painting table for ever – let me tell you about my Dwarf Rangers that probably need less than two hours work to finish off but have sat in a case for four years. This figure was one of those that I couldn’t get on with at first. It started off as simply the normal metal Chaos Lord on Daemonic Steed figure with no modifications. I liked the figure but had no clue how to paint it – especially after I finished the rainbow-hued Chaos Knights regiment that you can see in this update.  Somewhere along the line I decided that I needed a mounted battle standard bearer and this figure seemed an obvious place to start from. The conversion is very simple; the hammer was cut off right above the hand and was replaced with a spear from the Marauder Horsemen sprue. The banner itself and the banner top also came from the Marauder Horsemen and I swapped the head for one from the Chaos Mutation sprue.  I also decided that I didn’t want the steed to be a Daemonic Mount but instead to be a ‘normal’ Chaos Steed so it got rebased onto a regular cavalry base.

When it came to painting this figure I really had no idea how it was going to end up. In the end I pretty much just threw paint at it until I could see something worthwhile emerging then tidied that up. Originally the armour and barding were to be a pale rosy lavender so I started with a bright pinky-blue basecoat and glazed it with Hawk Turquoise. That didn’t work so well and I ended up repainting it in a greyish purple which ended up getting highlighted and declared good enough. The horse was going to be black with flamey accents but that didn’t look so good with all the detailing on it so it ended up a chestnut colour instead with reddish hair. Finally the banner. I painted it blue then yellow, highlighted that right up and then sketched in the freehand design in the centre using Black Ink. Once I’d got something I was happy with I blocked it in and highlighted the pattern. At this point I realised that somehow I’d finished it. This was a nice surprise so I built up a taller base from smaller square bases and greenstuff to help him rank up properly (he overhangs the sides of a base even more than the plastic Knights do) and slapped some varnish on him before I could talk myself into doing more. He’s a little fussy and there are some messy areas but from 3 feet away he looks fine.

The full Warriors of Chaos Gallery is available here.

We’ve been keeping up steady progress on the 8 new WFB armies that were introduced in the previous update. Dawn and I have made the most progress by far but things have been coming along nicely with the others too. Grazyna has begun work on her Empire Knightly Orders in earnest while Mario has been assembling a horde of skeleton warriors. There was a bit of a pause due to the Easter holidays but despite that a lot has been completed. Dawn has painted most of her initial 500 point force and I have completely painted mine (ok, it was only 27 figures but still…). Dawn’s initial unit of 20 Night Goblins has been done as have all of her Squigs and the mounts for her cavalry. She only needs to finish off the Goblin and Savage Orc riders to hit her first target.

Meanwhile on a different painting table not so far away, Adam and Caz have been working through their piles of plastic. I gave Adam a painted Warhawk rider for his birthday to use as a hero and he’s added a large unit of Dryads to form the core of his force while Caz has been up to her elbows in Ghouls.

On the gaming front, things haven’t been so good. We had a couple of battles to get people familiar with the rules and the different army dynamics. Mario faced off against my Warriors of Chaos first and then against Dawn’s Greenskins and found that 500 points of Tomb Kings is not a very solid force at all. We’re going to push for 1000 point armies which will help him out a bit but he’s definitely going to find things are an uphill struggle in smaller games.

My initial 500 points is entirely done now. It consists of the Sorceror on a Disc, 10 Marauder Horsemen and 15 Marauders with flails. I also painted a familiar for my Sorceror which is magnetised, a second magnet has been greenstuffed under the disc so that he can ride shotgun as required. Next up for me are five Chaos Knights and a converted battlestandard bearer.

As it happens the eight players are four real life couples; there’s me and my wife Dawn, Adam (the friend who started this whole thing off) and his wife Caz, Mario (the Game Director) and his girlfriend Grazyna and finally Jan-Eric (my boss) and his girlfriend Sarah. Conveniently all of us except for Grazyna and Caz all work for the same company which is also located within scatter range of the local game store.

There was a bit of deliberation initially over army choices but eventually we all figured out what we wanted to play. Jan, Sarah and Grazyna have never played before, Mario, Dawn and Caz have played a bit but Adam and I are the only ones with any significant experience in painting and gaming.

• I’m doing Chaos Warriors as I have a few boxes that I won just before leaving Dublin that have sat in the cupboard of shame for the last year or so.
• Mario is doing Tomb Kings
• Grazyna eventually settled on an Empire army after debating the merits of Bretonnians and Lizardmen
• Dawn will play Orcs and Goblins
• Adam has started a Wood Elf army
• Caz will be fielding Vampire Counts
• Jan-Eric is a newly fledged Skaven player
• Sarah has chosen Dark Elves

The last few weeks have seen our dining room table overwhelmed by six new armies being assembled and painted (Adam and Caz preferring to paint at their own apartment). The new hobbyists are getting painting and modelling help from those with more experience and in general it’s a pleasant way to spend an evening.

It also keeps me honest as when I’m painting by myself it’s easy to get distracted and wander off to do something else, whereas with a bunch of us painting together I tend to just get on with it and finish things. As a result I’ve completed my first unit instead of doing my usual trick of getting it half done then leaving it for months in a semi-complete state. On the left you can see my Marauder Horsemen unit which are awaiting varnish.

Jan has been blitzing his Clanrats to build confidence before starting work on Queek Headtaker and Deathmaster Sniktch. The photo here shows them mostly basecoated with a wash to come.  Mario and Grazyna have made inroads into the Tomb Kings, Dawn has been painting up Night Goblins archers and Squigs while Sarah has found that the plastic Corsairs are trickier to assemble and paint than they look. Grazyna got off to a bit of a late start compared to most as she spent a while agonising over which army to play. In the meantime though she helped Mario with his cavalry.

Bearing in mind that some of the people involved have never before tried painting miniatures, these work in progress photos aren’t too shabby at all. Everyone is keen to come across and do some more painting and tea breaks at work tend to revolve around purchasing decisions and discussions on paint schemes. I’m looking forwards to adding another army to my collection and having a group of friends to share the hobby with.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be reporting on the progress that each army makes and reports of the battles. I’ll also ask the various players to write about their experiences and print those here too.