Stormy Teacups

I’ve been busy; back in August I was part of Team Wales for the European Team Championships in Montreux. Then there was some work stuff and then I went to the US for a two week holiday. Thus it is that I’ve just got around to reporting on the ETC as well as updating with a new figure that I finished just before heading off on holiday.

The ETC is a hardcore team event where you bring your filthiest list or you go home. I played it back in 2009 with Team Ireland and this year I was invited to play for Team Wales at relatively short notice as they needed to replace a last-minute cancellation.  I thought I was lucky when the Welsh asked me to use a Warriors of Chaos army as it would mean that I could use an army that I already had rather than paint up a new one in a hurry. Unfortunately, the particular niche that my army was intended to fill in the Welsh lineup required a fairly specific build and I ended up having to paint up almost everything I needed anyhow. The only parts of my existing army that I could use were my Sorceror on a Disc, my Chaos Knights, my marauders and my Chosen (which were pulling duty as halberd armed Chaos Warriors in this list). I had to paint up 50 more Marauders, 11 Chaos Warriors with Halberds and a mounted Chaos Lord of Khorne to bring the army up to spec and this was bolstered with a Hellcannon borrowed from one of the other Welsh team members.

Somehow, and with significant assistance from my wife, that lot got painted up in the three weeks or so that I had before the event and I took off to sunny Montreux. That part of Switzerland is a beautiful place and Montreux itself is particularly stunning.  I was staying at a Youth Hostel just down the lake shore from the event hall and my walk to and from the tournament every day was just incredible. The ETC itself is held over two days with three games on each day. Our first game was against the Greek team who were a good tip for the winners’ podium and so we weren’t expecting to take much away from that. Sure enough we got destroyed – my game vs their Dark Elf player ended 16-4 against after a methodical demolition job. The Hellcannon did well to eat a War Hydra in close combat but that was the only real bright spot for me. Next up we played team Norn Iron and I was feeling good about this as every time I’d played them in previous events, I’d won. Sure enough, I blew through their Dwarf player and scored 15 points for the team. Our final opponents for the day were team Netherlands where I got schooled 20-0 by a Vampire Counts player.

After a hard day of wargaming we headed into the town where we quickly realised that Montreux is not for people like us. Unless you are fabulously wealthy your entertainment options are going to be extremely limited. We sat and had horrendously expensive pizza and then sat on the beach drinking spiced rum until the small hours. The whole weekend was blisteringly hot and, as the town is sheltered by the mountains, there is no wind so the air stays warm even at night.

The next day we were ready for more punishment and we were drawn against Team Belgium to kick off. I played against a Dwarf army that was practically identical to the one I’d murdered on the previous day except this time everything went wrong for me. Another 20-0 shoeing ensued. After the Belgians we were drawn against Hungary where an Empire army proceeded to pull my army apart and then jump on the bits. Some horrendously bad dice sealed the deal and handed 20 gift-wrapped points to my opponent. I don’t like to blame the dice too much in games because generally losing due to dice means that you are leaning on luck rather than good play to win, however this was about as bad as I’ve ever had and I’m not sure that I could have done things differently. My Sorceror failed 7 leadership tests in a row and fled off the table, 8 out of 10 Chaos Knights failed a strength test and were killed by a Dwellers Below, 34 attacks from halberd-wielding Chaos Warriors of Khorne scored 4 hits and no wounds on the Arch Lector, two hits from a mortar killed an entire unit of Marauders in a single turn. Stuff like that. Finally we were drawn against Team Scotland who ended up beating us narrowly and me handily. By this point there was nothing to play for for either team so we all kicked back and had  a relaxed game. I played another Empire army and, once more found that I had no way to protect myself from his magic and warmachines. Still it was a fun game and we’d hit our team goal of not coming last.

In the end we came 24th out of 28 teams and we were thrilled to win the award for most sporting team. We celebrated with more spiced rum on the beach then I bade farewell to Captain Matt and the rest of the lads and headed back to the hostel. I took a lot of pictures over the weekend; pictures of Montreux can be found here while pictures of armies and miniatures from the ETC itself can be found here.

After my adventure in Switzerland I had a couple of weeks before I was off on a real holiday to the US. In that time I managed to finish painting up an HQ choice for my Grey Knight army. The figure is Castellan Crowe but I will generally be using him as a standard Brotherhood Champion and attaching him to a Razorback squad. Following my experiments with the armour of the Grey Knight Terminators, I decided to try a different tack for Crowe. His armour is heavily shaded and highlighted with Charadon Granite and Vallejo Ivory respectively. Rather than leave the silver areas flat and highlight the edges, I chose to accentuate the curves of the armour plates by painting in the sharp reflections and then contrasting these with deep shadows in a non-metallic metal style – although I was using a metallic colour as a base. This was much more successful than the Terminators were although it was time consuming to achieve. Originally his sword was blue but I painted myself into a corner when I was doing the banner and needed a strong colour that would contrast with the blue field of the banner and so I repainted the sword yellow and repeated this for the chained blade on the banner itself. The runes on the blade were done in blue and a weak object source lighting effect was added by means of a blue glaze. The other detailing was done to match the Terminators except the cloak which was painted a pale yellowish brown to complement the sword and had a triple stripe painted on the hem with some freehand lettering added.

More pictures of Crowe are on the Grey Knights gallery page.

This past weekend I was in Münster for the European Team Championships. I was there as part of Team Ireland’s WFB force after being recruited at Warpcon back in January. As those of you who have been following this blog will know, this event was the reason I needed to collect a Daemons of Chaos army at short notice (those of you who haven’t been keeping up can read the story of sleepless nights preparing 1400 points of Daemons in a week in the previous seven or eight updates).

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My daemon army was finished and now I needed to see how it would work on the tabletop. So off to sunny Warrington I went for the Four Nations ETC Warmup tournament. I was part of Team Ireland and we were up against Team Norn Iron, Team Scotland and Team England. My recent experience with high-level tournament play has been patchy at best. I was at the 2008 Irish GT (where I came about 20th) and the last major tournament before that was probably a GW staff tournament back in the late ’90s. To say I was rusty is something of an understatement.

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Woo! I got everything finished last night finally. This was despite feeling distinctly crap when I got home from work and taking a nap till 9:30. The Heralds aren’t finished properly but they are complete and will be more than ok for the tournament tomorrow. I’ll be flying to Manchester this evening straight after work and heading over to Warrington. Expect a tournament report on Monday.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with how the army came out. The painting standard is on the low side of acceptable but it’s all complete and mostly pretty neat. It’s going to get tidied up and completed between now and August but I don’t feel too bad about putting it on the table this weekend.

The complete army

Almost at the end now. I took some time last night and sat down to paint without rushing as I want these last two figures to be of a much higher standard. I doubt I’m going to have time to really go to town on them but they will be neater and closer to my regular standard than the others. I’m also highlighting and shading rather than simply inking everything.

Slaaneshi BSB in progress

Front view

Tzeentchian Herald in progress

There is still some work to do on them and I’ll not be going too crazy on highlighting and detailing but they’ll stand out nicely I think and shouldn’t be too hard to finish to a basic standard tonight. And with that. I’ll be done!

Read the final update here.

I’m almost to the end of this paint frenzy now, last night I finished the last 7 Horrors and the final 9 Daemonettes making the army complete apart from the two Heralds. I even found time to stipple a pale blue over the Screamers which has improved them dramatically as you can see in the picture below.

Still pretty horrible but definitely better

Last of the Horrors and Daemonettes

Converted Masque

As you can see the Masque of Slaanesh is pretty easy to convert into an Battle Standard Bearer, I cut the double-ended mask off, drilled a hole through the hand and then passed a short length of brass rod through it. The banner itself is from a mounted Chaos Marauder sprue. She’ll be painted up tonight and tomorrow. In progress pictures to follow.

Finally here are the scores.

Points Painted Today : 252 points

Points Target Daily: 200 Difference: +52

Points Target Overall: 1200 Points Painted Overall: 1032 Difference: -168

Figures Painted Today: 16

Figure Target Daily: 10 Difference: +6

Figure Target Overall: 60 Difference: -2
Read the next update here.

Yesterday was another evening mostly spent preparing things. I stuck together the last of the Daemonettes and the Horrors including the converted command group, converted my Masque of Dlaanesh into a battle standard bearer and assembled the Skarlock. I was going to convert him to be more Tzeentchy and less Cryxy but he’s not easy to cut about due to the flowing ribbon thing that goes from his hand all the way around – replacing his hand with something else woudl require finding some way of either removing that ribbon entirely or working it into the conversion which I’m not really up for trying at the moment.

I did get some painting done however, I mostly finished the Horrors, they just need some detailing and basing and I put the main shade on the Daemonettes. Both of those units should be finished tonight leaving me with two days to do the two Heralds which should be enough time to do a better job and maybe even tidy up the Screamers too.

Here are some pictures:

Musician and Standard Bearer for the Horrors

Mostly complete Daemonettes and Horrors

Painting with inks

Some people have asked me about painting with inks and how to avoid common problems. Firstly I think it woud be useful to talk a little bit about what inks are and what they are not. Firstly, they are not simply thinned down paint as a lot of people seem to believe, they are a very dense pigment concentrated in a thin medium. Those of you who use Citadel colours should note that there is a marked difference between the old citadel inks and the newer range. The old range were true inks while the newer ones are designed to be used as washes and tints rather than as inks. This means that the newer ones aren’t as pigmented and have different covering properties – mostly they have a much higher surface tension meaning that they cover more evenly and don’t flow off the raised areas as much as inks tend to.

Painting with inks can save you a lot of time as the colours will tend to shade themselves meaning you can save a couple of steps with a single coat. On the other hand, you’ll be dealing with a much reduced palette and inks don’t mix together very well – a darker colour will completely overwhelm a lighter one.

One of the common issues that people have is that the heavily shaded effect you get when you paint the inks on doesn’t always remain once they are dry. There are two separate points here that contribute to this.

Firstly don’t paint inks onto primer. Undercoat sprays leave a very porous primer coat on a figure and this will soak up the ink really well leaving you with a flat pastel effect rather than the shading that you wanted.  Paint the inked areas white (or whatever other base colour you’re using) first and apply inks onto paint instead.

Secondly, inks take a long time to dry – especially if you’re slapping them on as a wash. In that time they’ll do what gravity compels them to do and the excess (which is what you’re using for your shading) will run off. You need a secret weapon to make them dry before this happens. I use one of these:

Additionally note that for very strong shading effects or for particularly deep colours, you may need to apply several washes to an area to get the right depth of colour.

Hopefully that helps.

Anyway, here are the latest scores, as I said above though I should be back on track by tonight.

Points Painted Today : 0 points

Points Target Daily: 200 Difference: -200

Points Target Overall: 1000 Points Painted Overall: 780 Difference: -220

Figures Painted Today: 0

Figure Target Daily: 10 Difference: -10

Figure Target Overall: 50 Difference: -8
Read the next update here.

Well I’m still pretty sick but not bad enough to stay at home instead of going to work – besides I need to skip out early on Friday to catch my flight to the UK so I have to be a Good Employee for the rest of the week.

I got the Horrors done last night. Like the Daemonettes they’re pretty basic. I gave them a basecoat of Tentacle Pink thinned with Magenta Ink then washed them with Leviathan Purple before picking out some details (teeth and tongues mostly). I’ll add a picture later as the batteries in my camera gave out before I could photograph them.

Tonight will be the last of the Daemonettes – 9 of them including a command group – and I’ll also stick the rest of the Horrors together ready for painting tomorrow. That will leave me Wednesday and Thursday to do the two Heralds, which hopefully will be enough time to do them to an acceptable standard.

So the running scores then are as follows:

Points Painted Today : 120 points

Points Target Daily: 200 Difference: -80

Points Target Overall: 800 Points Painted Overall: 780 Difference: -20

Figures Painted Today: 10

Figure Target Daily: 10 Difference: on target

Figure Target Overall: 40 Difference: +2
Read the next update here.

Yesterday was a pretty bad day, I’ve been sick with some kind of flu so I’m low on energy and finding it hard to concentrate. I spent most of yesterday and this morning curled up in blankets on the sofa which has put a serious dent in my productivity for the weekend (it’s also why this update is later than normal).

Despite that I got the Screamers and Flamers done by mid afternoon today and I put together half of the Horrors – I would have done them all but sticking Horrors together is pretty much the opposite of fun and the battery on my dremel needs to be recharged again.

This latest batch of daemons are pretty horrible and they are definitely on the list for repainting before the ETC proper in August, they will however do for the 4 Nations.

I liek kullurz

I expect I’ll be able to blitz the Horrors tonight as they’ll be a lot easier to paint than to assemble.

Points Painted Today : 390 points

Points Target Daily: 200 Difference: +190

Points Target Overall: 600 Points Painted Overall: 660 Difference: +60

Figures Painted Today: 12

Figure Target Daily: 10 Difference: +2

Figure Target Overall: 30 Difference: +2

This looks pretty good so far but I need to finish the Horrors tonight to stay on schedule.

Read the next update here.

When I stopped work on Thursday night I had 20 Daemonettes in various stages of completion. Yesterday I managed to finish them all off to a standard that isn’t too embarrassing which puts me neatly back on target.

They certainly aren’t going to win any prizes and I’ll definitely be tidying them up between the 4 Nations event and the ETC proper but:

1. They’re painted
2. The paint is very thinly applied so I can easily overpaint them later if needed or even just respray them

Girly daemons

Here’s a close-up, as you can see it’s predominately inks with some very basic highlighting.

Today I’m going to tackle the Flamers and the Screamers with the big paintbrush and stick the Horrors together. My plan is to try and get the units out of the way this weekend so that I can spend some time on the Heralds during the week.

Scores on the doors:

Points Painted Today : 270 points

Points Target Daily: 200 Difference: +70

Points Target Overall: 400 Difference: -130

Figures Painted Today: 20

Figure Target Daily: 10 Difference: +10

Figure Target Overall: 20 Difference: On Target!

Read the next update here.