Stormy Teacups

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.

Anyhow, 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.

The 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.

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.

Next 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.

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.

By 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.

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.

At some point over the past few days, the following thoughts popped into my head in po particular order:

• My wife is somewhat interested in Warhammer
• I have two painted Warhammer Fantasy armies
• I have one of the spiffy Citadel gaming tables that has been used precisely once since obtaining it the day they were released
• I only normally get to play at tournaments
• My wife has never actually played WFB

Clearly then the answer was to challenge the missus to a round of toy soldiers!

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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.