Aug 7 2011

Grey Knights

image021I’ve been pretty busy over the past few months, the game I’m working has passed the feature complete milestone and is about to hit beta so there’s been less time for painting and gaming in general. Despite all that I’ve had a chance to crack on with a few bits and pieces including the start of a new army project. This time I’m doing a 40k army as some of the new guys at work are keen to play with round bases for a change. A string of happy coincidences meant that the discussion about starting 40k happened just before my birthday which fell 2 days after the release of the new Codex: Grey Knights. I’ve never really been a fan of Marines as an army to collect but the new Grey Knights are simply extraordinary. I bought the codex, a bunch of the new kits and then barely had time to paint them, hence it’s taken me until now to get the first elements of the army completed.

The first thing I completed was a squad of Terminators. In previous incarnations of the army, Grey Knight Terminators were the mainstay of the force. This isn’t as true as it once was but Terminators as a troops choice is still an appealing prospect. There are a lot of options in the box and the codex lists a bewildering array of builds for each terminator in a squad. I thought about magnetising them but figured that I was probably going to field them as a mostly vanilla squad so I gave them a mixture of free upgrades and left it at that. The arms were painted separately on some of the figures as the two-handed weapons are held in such a way as to make painting the figure difficult when they are attached.

I wanted to try and experiment with different ways to paint Marines and the method I chose for these wasn’t entirely successful in the end. To start with I airbrushed them all Chainmail, then I sprayed in some Charadon image002Granite/Badab Black into the lowlights. I’m trying to do a similar effect to non-metallic metals but using metallic paint while still keeping the extreme contrasts between highlights and lowlights. Once the lowlights were sprayed into armour joints and the lower facing areas of plate, I started to shade with Mithril Silver and Vallejo Ivory. This part was done with a brush rather than with the airbrush. I hatched Chainmail across the plates to smooth the lowlights a little and then built up the highlights on the upper surfaces before applying a glaze of Enchanted Blue to smooth everything out and to break the harsh silver. Finally I added the extreme highlights in white and ivory.

image025Next up were the Nemesis Force Weapons and I was pretty excited about being able to do these superfast with the airbrush. “Haha!” I thought, “no tedious blending for me!” I masked half of each side of each blade and went to work then repeated the process on the other half. Unfortunately the tape I used lifted the paint off which meant that I had to do so much tidying up with the brush that I ended up practically painting the entire blades by hand anyway. They started off Mordian Blue and then had Ultramarines Blue painted across the flat of the blades before the shimmer patterns were painted in with Ice Blue and Skull White. This is easier than it looks, it’s just time consuming. Very thin paint and very fine strokes in a diagonal hatching pattern are what you need with a few lines outside the main lighting area to provide some relief.

With the blades done it was time to finish off all the detail. The gold was painted with Tausept Ochre before a thin coat of Vallejo’s Oro Glorioso was applied over the top. Then a wash of Brown Ink defined the details before image017the individual letters and other details were then picked out with a Mithril Silver/Oro Glorioso mix. The Stormbolter casings and the pauldron shields were painted with Scab Red and this was highlighted with Tallarn Flesh mixed with a little Blazing Orange. Heraldic patterns were painted on in Skull White and Chaos Black. Someone senior at GW – I seem to remember that it was Alan Merritt but I may be mistaken – once explained to me that red, white and black are ‘good fascist colours which is why they are used so much for the Imperium’. Regardless, they provide a very bold scheme to make detail pop so I reserved their use for heraldry.

The bases are resin Ruins bases from Microart Studios. I bought a bunch of them in all the sizes I’d need for a Space Marines army so I have some at 25mm for power-armoured marines, 40mm for Terminators, 60mm for Dreadnaughts and a couple of 120mm oval bases for a Stormraven and a Dreadknight. As the army has a low model count and every figure is elite, I could justify putting everything on a special base. These were painted Charadon Granite and then drybrushed in Graveyard Earth and Codex Grey.

 

image006Next up was a Razorback as a way to test vehicle painting with the airbrush. Again, this was sprayed Chainmail and then the Charadon Granite/Badab Black mixture was liberally sprayed into the angles between armour plates. Successive thin coats of Chainmail were then sprayed in blend these lowlights in and I did a few passes with Mithril Silver over the upward facing plates. Then the recesses in the image005tside armour were masked off and Scab Red was sprayed in there as well as on the cowling for the lascannons. The red was highlighted in the same way as for the Terminators’ Stormbolters and then I wen to work with some freehand. I want the Grey Knight vehicles to look baroque and covered in battle-honours so I painted in a chapter symbol on one door along with some gold scrollwork on the red recesses. The gold was shaded by painting thin lines of black and white around it to make it stand out from the red background and I took the oppportunity to abuse my classical education with some cod Latin on the scroll and the side of the lascannon housing (‘Lux ex Umbra’ means Light From the Shadows). One front glacis was painted with heraldry that will eventually match a Strike Squad Justicar  and the other got a numerical designation in accented gold.

image011The lenses  in the cupola were painted in much the same way as for the Nemesis Force Weapons, thin hatching patterns of Ice Blue and Skull White over a Mordian/Ultramarine Blue base.  Some final highlighting on the edges with ivory and the tank was done. I didn’t paint the interior on this one but I may well do for future tanks. I have a half completed Stormraven which has got as far as a detailed interior and a basecoat on the outside so far, any Landraiders will also have detailed interiors for sure.

Overall I’m enjoying painting these more than I expected I would, the figures are gorgeous and by stretching myself with the ‘true-metallic metal’ technique I can learn more about painting through these. I haven’t got the technique down properly yet but I have a few more squads to paint and I’ll keep experimenting with each one.

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You can see more photos of the finished Grey Knights as well as some work in progress shots on this gallery page.


Apr 10 2011

Warriors of Chaos Army

image034Today I pretty much finished my Tzeentchian Warriors of Chaos army for Warhammer Fantasy Battles. There are a few things that may get added some time down the road, but there’s nothing that it’s missing. I have two unpainted Spawn along with a handful of Warriors and Knights that are still on their sprues that I could add and at some point I may work on a Warshrine and maybe convert up some Chaos Ogres if I feel the urge but I’m not in any hurry to do so. My next project is beckoning and I want to draw a line under this one so here’s a look at the army I spent most of the last year building up.

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.

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Jan 4 2011

Skaven Doomwheel

p1020193The newly minted Warhammer players who started their first armies in the middle of last year have been regulars at my painting table, drybrushing skeletons, washing Clanrats and agonising over exactly the right shade of turquoise for Dark Elves. Back in November it was Jan-Eric’s birthday and boxes of Skaven were well-represented amongst his haul of presents. I bought him a Doomwheel and also gave him a painting voucher, I offered to paint any one Skaven figure for his army. He didn’t have to think about it for too long before simply handing the Doomwheel back with instructions to do what I could with it. So, this is another centrepiece figure in a long line of things I’ve painted for somebody else.

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 p1020079tried 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.

p1020163My 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.

p1020086Next 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 onp1020190 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.

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


Oct 10 2010

The Long Road to Konstanz

The winter tournament season is back on track again with back-to-back tournaments at Konstanz in the last two weekends.  Seetroll ran their ‘Grosse Spieletag’ last weekend which featured WFB, WH40k and various CCG tournaments as well as random boardgames happening spontaneously around the venue while this weekend was the Warhammer Fanatics’ tournament run by a local club. These were my first experiences of 8th edition competition and the first proper tests of my new Warriors of Chaos army. Unfortunately I didn’t get any usable pictures from either event but I’ll be updating soon with a general look at how my servants of Tzeentch are coming along.

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Sep 28 2010

Chaos Battle Standard Bearer

chaosbsb2 The eight armies project that we started a few months ago has slowed to a trickle. While everyone is still keen to crack on with their new forces, various distractions such as house moves, long visits from family and a greatly increased amount of work to be done at our office have conspired to limit the amount of time we can sit down for a few hours with a bottles of plastic glue and jars of paint. Nevertheless, time marches on and the tournaments that we were aiming for are now alarmingly close. In fact there’ll be one next weekend which will be the first test of my new Warriors of Chaos and then another the weekend after. The first of these tournaments is a doubles game with each player bringing a 1500 point force. I’ll be playing alongside Mario and his Tomb Kings if all goes well and my army at least should be completely painted for then.

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 chaosbsb1 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.

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The full Warriors of Chaos Gallery is available here.


Sep 22 2010

Octimising My Armies

I’ve written another column for the good folks over at Wargaming Ireland. Read about my plans to bring my armies kicking and screaming into the new edition! Share your experiences either in the comments over there or right here, I’d love to open a discussion on how other people are dealing with this.


Jun 24 2010

Knights of Chaos

Two updates in a week? Truly some foul sorcery is at work here! Actually it’s a side effect of being off sick from work for a reasonably long time, I’ve had time to crack on with painting as it’s one of the few things I can still do while I convalesce.

unit2Anyhow, the latest addition to the collection of painted figures is this unit of Chaos Knights. My Warriors of Chaos army has a Tzeentchian theme to it and for me, the standard black and brooding colour scheme doesn’t really work. Additionally as these are amongst the most elite warriors in the army (actually they are pretty elite compared to most things in any army), I wanted them to be individualistic and unique. So it is then that I decided to paint them each with a different colour palette to show their status as the warrior nobility in the warband. These are really nice models and come with a variety of options for heads, shields and weapons – more than enough of each to avoid any duplication. They are also big, the barded Empire warhorses as used by the Knightly Orders for example are about two-thirds the size of these monsters. You will need to take care when assembling them and when attaching them to their base to make sure that the unit will rank up (mine doesn’t) as they overhang significantly on both sides of the base. I’m expecting that I will buy a second box for a larger unit (hello 8th edition!) and they will be planted at the extreme backs and fronts of their cavalry bases so that they can rank up between these. That’s something for another day though.

green1The first figure I completed was the champion. Actually he may not be the champion after all as I’m still somewhat undecided. All of the figures that aren’t carrying a standard or a horn could reasonably be used as the champion as they are all distinctive enough. This guy at least has a lightning charged sword which may tip things in his favour. He’s painted over a white basecoat (they all are actually) with Orkhide Shade which was washed with Thraka Green and then highlighted and glazed with a variety of greens and purples to get a nice rich effect on the armour. The horse is Thraka Green over the white undercoat and then highlighted and tidied up with thinned down Goblin Green and Skull White. sword1

I did the sword purple with purple lightning all over it and this is a cool effect that’s easy to achieve if you take it a step at a time. First paint on very thin lines roughtly where your lightning will go, these can be quite broad and should be about a half shade above the base colour – the same sort of difference you’d use for a highlight. Then you highlight the centre of these lines in a slightly more erratic way so that the highlight follows more closely the final line of the lightning itself. After this you paint in the lines of the lightning bolts in a very pale colour,  I printed out some photos of lightning to use as a reference for the way that it forks and flashes to and fro. These lines need to be very thin and some need to be  painted in as almost invisible wisps in very thin paint. Finally take some pure white and highlight parts of the line, major branches and so forth. It’s time consuming to do it properly but it looks really nice.

bone2Next up was the Bone Knight. I put this guy together specifically thinking that his weapon, shield and armour detail would look good in bone. He’s done in my normal bone style which is yellowing and aged looking rather than stark and white. It starts off as Snakebite Leather and gets highlighted up with Bleached Bone and Skull White. His horse and the detail trim were painted grey and the mail barding on the horse was given a pale bronze effect by washing Chainmail with Gryphonne Sepia and then highlighting with a mixture of Mithril Silver and Burnished Gold. standard1

I tackled the standard bearer next, and I’d decided I liked the idea of a yellow knight. Blue and yellow are traditional colours for Tzeentch and I wanted to feature them both. I didn’t want this guy to look like a Tonka toy though so I kept the yellow dirty by painting it onto a Snakebite Leather base and highlighting with Bubonic Brown and Golden Yellow in a hatching pattern rather than as a smooth highlight. The banner was done on a base of Hormagaunt Purple and highlighted up with various blues. Finally a starfield was painted on with a Tzeentch icon painted in as if it were a constellation. I may redo this later as I’m not 100% happy with it but it’s good enough for the tabletop at the moment.

musician2By now the end was in sight and I went for the musician. This was the blue one to balance the yellow standard bearer. The base of Mordian Blue was give the same treatment as the green armour on the first knight although this time using blue and purple washes and glazes. It was highlighted with Ultramarine Blue and curlicues painted in with very thin Enchanted Blue on the flat parts of the armour and shield. The metallic pieces were painted Mithril Silver and then washed with successive layers of watered down red, blue and purple inks. They were then highlighted with Dwarf Bronze and Burnished Gold. This was an experiment that I had no idea on how it would end up but I’m happy with the result.grey1

Finally I tackled the lancer. My Chaos knights will all be fighting with hand-weapons but, in the interests of making the unit look less uniform and also because I really liked that particular weapon, I equipped one with a big choppy lance. This guy was originally going to be white but I decided that this would be too bright and so it ended up a very pale dove grey. This is Codex Grey with a Devlan Mud wash and then highlighted up with Fortress Grey, Space Wolf Grey and Skull White. The horse is Devlan Mud over the white undercoat and then highlighted with Graveyard Earth and Kommando Khaki.

You can see more pictures of the Knights on this gallery page.


Jun 22 2010

Steam Powered Undead

skarloc1I bought a portable photo-studio and as a test of its capabilities I decided to photograph my Cryx Warmachine army. These pictures are taken with the same camera as all the others on this blog – it’s a Panasonic Lumix DMC-LZ7 of about 4 years vintage. This is a reasonable quality camera falling somewhere far to the south of a DSLR but a couple of steps above a basic point-and-shoot. Mostly the problem I’ve had with photography is lighting the subject; ambient light is too dark while spotlights and the camera flash are far too harsh. Previously I’ve got around this problem by using the inbuilt camera flash with some thick paper held or taped over the bulb to diffuse the flash. This mostly works although the results can be pretty variable.photo4

I’ve wanted to improve the quality of the photography and short of dropping a couple of thousand Euro or so on a decent DSLR and a macro lens, I figured that lighting would make the biggest difference to my set up. It turns out that I was right. I found a ‘Portable photo studio’ from an eBay reseller for £28 and I’m very happy with it. Basically it’s a folding lightbox with two separate 500w spotlights and a camera stand. The whole thing folds neatly away into a sturdy polyester case which includes pockets on the outside for the lights and other hardware. It couldn’t really be described as professional quality gear but for change out of thirty quid it seems like good value.

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So anyway, having taken delivery of my new toy, I was eager to play with it! Here is a quick run through my Cryx army for Warmachine. I picked Cryx for the same reason that I ended up with most of my armies – I really liked the models. While I was working for WAR in Dublin we had a short office campaign that took place in the cellar beneath the company HQ, I did reasonably well there and found that I quite liked the way that the Cryx played on the tabletop as well. Since then I’ve taken them to a bunch of tournaments here in Germany with varying amounts of success, generally I find that I either get a caster kill fairly quickly or I lose.

These figures were mostly painted over the course of a couple of months approximately two years ago, they are definitely table-top standard rather than display standard and some of them are showing signs of battle damage. To begin with, our campaign only allowed units from the Prime (Mk.I) book and Escalation, since then I’ve only added the Nightmare to the army. Thus the army doesn’t include any epic Warcasters, nor any of the character or ally units such as Cephalyx. I will eventually add some of these (in fact Lich Lord Asphyxious is on my painting table at the moment) and I’ll write them up as separate projects as they are done.

All that out of the way then, let’s take a look at the figures.

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These two are my most commonly used Warcasters. In particular I like to bring a stealth-heavy army with Deneghra leading it. I’ve tied the army together by using a fairly limited palette of dark grey  and corroded bronze with green and pale grey accents. Silver metallics are used sparingly and mostly as contrast. The bronze colour is a custom mix of Tin Bitz, Chainmail and Shining Gold, this is then washed with a custom ink mix of Dark Green Ink, Chestnut Ink and Black Ink before being highlighted with Burnished Gold and glazed with Hawk Turquoise. The grey is mostly Shadow Grey highlighted up. For some figures such as the Skarlock Thrall the grey is applied over a dark brown basecoat to provide deep shading.banethralls2

Green is used for the detailing in the steam engines for the necrotite glow. This starts as Goblin Green, washed with Dark Green Ink and is then highlighted with Scorpion Green and Skull White to produce a glowing effect. A similar pattern is used for the thrall runes on the Bane Thralls’ axes.

reaper1Of course the centre of any Warmachine force are the ‘Jacks and mine is no exception. My force includes a Reaper, Slayer, Nightmare, Stalker and five Bonejacks of various types based on the Defiler hull. These again use a mid-grey main colour with metallics for the exposed machinery and various spot colours. The Reaper that you see above left features runes in Scab Red on the hull and weapons, other ‘Jacks have patterns painted in with a slightly paler grey this breaks up some of the large, flat surfaces and also helps to identify them on the battlefield.

Finally then the army is rounded out by a selection of Thralls. I love the damage that Bane Thralls can inflict and I’m also a fan of the problems that Bile Thralls can cause the enemy, they are awesome suicide troops and bloatthrall1no sane opponent will let them get close. I have a Machine Wraith which I love the figure for but which hasn’t really worked out for me on the table so far, my sole Pistol Wraith likewise has been a disappointment. I suspect that this is a case where adding a second one would make a huge difference in the effectiveness of both types. My favourite solo however is the Bloat Thrall, this thing is just horrible and attracts a lot of attention from the enemy. Painting it was a lot of fun too.

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Check out the whole collection on the Cryx gallery page.


Apr 9 2010

Train Keeps a Rollin’

sorceror1lotsaskellies

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 aloknightswipng 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 skavenwip1but 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. nightgobbossquigs2greenskinbeasts

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.

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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.

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Oct 22 2009

Valkyrie

final2_s This is a project that was supposed to be a birthday present for a friend. Because I am rubbish (see the chronicle of my Fantasy Daemon army for more on this) I missed the birthday deadline by a hair over two months. A three week trip to the US didn’t help but there was still plenty of time to get the thing done if I’d applied myself. Anyhow. I finished it yesterday and it’s currently on its way to its new owner so here is the project journal.

The Valkyrie is a really nice kit, I like the look of the vehicle and the image that it projects. It’s also made very well, this is a pretty solid kit and is actually fairly heavy despite being all plastic. The different sub assemblies slot together with a high degree of precision and the mechanical joints are very strong.

Before I painted it, the first step was to decide on a colour scheme. The best solution would have been to paint it to match the rest of my friend’s army but, as he’s in a different country and I wanted this to be a surprise, getting a colour match would be a problem. So I decided to pick something interesting and let him worry about the thematic continuity. As Paul is something of a military history buff, I wanted to reflect that in the theme and the obvious parallels to the Valkyrie in the real world are troop carrying assault helicopters like the Mi-24 Hind or the UH-60 Black Hawk. Having looked at a few colour schemes however I found that they didn’t really work for me. 40k is a very idealised setting and so I wanted something that was almost a caricature to reflect that. In the end I decided that my theme would reflect Cold War era Russian jet fighters like the MiG-21 or the MiG-15. I decided against camouflage and went with a flat grey scheme with some dark red to break it up.

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