Great big Elf Dragon!

One of the cool things about the Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge is that there are bonus rounds, which normally have a single word criteria, encouraging you to paint whatever you like that fits the theme.  I use it as a great way to get something I already own done as the deadline prompts me to get on with it!

When the "Flight" round was announced, my thoughts went immediately to the dragon I'd undercoated and done nothing with.  Once again the challenge worked it's magic in getting me to get something done!

Originally intended as a mount for a dark elf sorceress, I couldn't find all the bits I wanted to use for her so I went with an elven lord instead - I plan to use magnets and get the sorceress ready so I can use both with the same mount and get her done later.

Big old kit, nicely detailed and a nice use of a "tactical rock" to give the Dragon the illusion of flight.  I went for the cold blue colour as I do like the selection of paint colours from GW (The Incubi Darkness ones).

 

Really pleased with it and looking forward to getting it on the tabletop.

30k odds and ends and AoS Dark Elf artillery

As the title said, a few bits and pieces from me, still concentrating on my themes for this year, AoS and 30k.

First up, 30k.  I must confess a slightly unhealthy obsession with the Contemptor class dreadnought.  This is the 6th one I've painted up and I want more..... this one is a plastic one from the Betrayal at Calth set but I wanted to convert it to match the Thousand Sons I started a few weeks ago so I did a head swap with a 40k Daemon Prince Magnus head.

Magnus was the Thousand Sons Primarch/head honcho in 30k times and as he turned to Chaos and survived, the Chaos gods turned him into a Daemon Prince and so he is still alive as a massive scary chap in 40k.

The sword is also from the Magnus kit (it's a dagger for Magnus to give you an idea of his size!) and there's a pleasing symmetry for me in using the future Thousand Sons kits to convert the 30k Dreadnought.

Loads of decals from the frankly brilliant decal sheet that Forgeworld produce.

Next up are a couple of Apothecaries for my Salamander 30k legion.

I started the Salamanders a couple of years ago but never got around to finishing the apothecaries.  One had a metal backpack which made him overbalance, and so I shoved them in a box in a huff until I recently got of my backside and bought a plastic one and finished them in two days!  So much the way of wargaming toys, ignored for 2 years, finished in 2 days once properly started...

These chaps help keep the legionnaries alive and when they can't, they harvest their "gene-seed" - the organs that make them more (and less) than human.  The shoulder pads and arm equipment are from 40k marines, but they work really well with the Mk IV bodies, heads and legs.  I went with white panels to mark them out, but I suspect, given the treachery of Horus' mob, that this will only mark them as juicy targets rather than save them under any war conventions.

These are Dark Elf repeating bolt throwers, which have been around in one form or another since the start of WFB.

These are the newest versions and are made of the big mistake material Finecast.....

The only benefit was being able to use a hairdryer to straighten out the bits that had gone wobbliest.... but if they just made them from plastic they wouldn't have gone wobbly in the first place!

Still, I do like the design and here's hoping they can skewer plenty of enemies.

Lastly, this chap from the Silver Tower boardgame.

He is a "Stormcast Eternal" - the new race GW shoehorned into AoS for all the fans of space marines to buy.  He's a big chap (40mm base) as GW like to bulk these guys up.

Took me ages to get around to him as we've played through (and really rather enjoyed) the Silver Tower campaign already.  I kept the armour and cloak cold colours and went for a nice warm topknot to finish him off.

Games 6 & 7 of 52

Still going strong on the gaming and we've managed to get two more games in.

Game six was another round of Zombiecide: Black Plague. We've nearly gotten through most of the starting missions now and this one was fun but didn't pose that much of a challenge in the end. We’re pretty up to speed with Z:BP and a lot of it does seem to hinge upon the necromancers and the strategic removal of the spawning points as you eliminate them. We managed in this game to remove all the spawning points furthest from our end goals so in the end we grabbed the last objective and legged it whilst the legions of the undead started to conga line their way across the board to us.

Good fun but not as hard as some of the missions have been.

Game seven was a more involved affair as Urn and I are heading north to Lenton in Feb and we needed to get an idea of how to play AoS. So we slapped some units on the table ignoring points and balance and just had at it. Seraphon and Undead (Me & Junt) vs the Dark Elves (Urn and his lackey) as an unlikely scenario but we didn't care!

Set up was an un-informed sort of thing as we had no idea how it would affect the unfolding events.

We soon got stuck in though with the Seraphon rapidly closing with the Dark Eldar in a great mob of tooth and claw.

Their allies sent in the cavalry….

….but this was to prove to be a step to far as the rest of the Skellies didn't make much ground as they failed some charges. Yeah. They stood around a lot! Bone idle if you ask me! Geddit? Bone? Idle? I’ll get my coat.

The lack of skeleton support proved to be the undoing of this strange alliance as the Seraphon got ground down despite some early gains.

It got lonely at the end for some of them.

TTFN!

More Dark Elves and an epic confession

Following on from Executioners the other week, some more nasty Dark Elves for AoS/Warhammer/insert other fantasy ruleset.

First up are 10 Cold One Knights.  I tried to do some research into what these should look like, but I found there was almost no reference works at all on giant riding lizards.  Imagine my surprise and chagrin as I discovered that not even Sir David Attenborough has done a programme on them.... I obviously penned a letter outlining my disappointment in this fact to the BBC.

I decided that I quite liked a blue colour that I had from the GW range with a suitably theatrical name - Incubi Darkness - and research on blue lizards showed that the underbellies were often a lighter shade of the same colour, so that's what I went for.  I went for bone coloured horns for contrast.

The Knights who ride these are the nobles of Dark Elf society, so nice shiny armour for them, with red trim and shiny red shield designs.

I'm rather pleased with the colours and the lizard skin.  I kept the clashing red and blue as the rest of my Dark Elf army wears red and there's no way the nobles would change their clothes to better match riding beasts!

In a stroke of luck genius strategic planning, the shield design on the leader as the same as one of the decals that I had, so the standard bearer gets designs for both the unit itself and the Lord in the bottom corner.

Next up, another lizard..... a ruddy big one. 

Imagine my surprise when I found out that Sir David Attenborough also hasn't done even one episode on many headed hydras in their natural habitat!  Fear not, another missive to the BBC has been sent to admonish them for this clear oversight.

I stuck to the same colour scheme as the Cold Ones as I figured perhaps they were related.  A nice bright crest was added as the natural world seems full of poisonous animals with bright colours to demonstrate how dangerous they are to scare predators away.

I wouldn't fancy being one of the two handlers of this beastie....  They're some old metal Dark Elf animal handlers instead of the one that come with the kit as I wanted to be different.

I also discovered that its very hard to take a picture of a many headed large beastie whilst capturing all of it.  I went for some muted blood effects too.  I'm not normally a huge fan of these, but I got to wondering when painting it how many heads it would use to attack things, so I added some effects to one claw and two of the heads as a result of my idle musings.

These two units had their first outing last night and did jolly well - the riders dove into action and were dragged down but the Hydra killed lots of stuff, for fun.

This completes most of what I want to get done for the Dark Elves and so my attention should now probably turn to 30k...... and it might do if I hadn't got into conversation with a couple of fellow bloggers who heartily recommended Epic to me.  One failure of willpower on my part later and I had procured this on eBay.

I shall hopefully be diving into this in the not too distant future as I do like the look of the game.

AoS Warhammer Dark Elf Executioners - painted!

It's great to be back in the AHPC and I realised in past challenges that the key is getting something quickly done first..... so I completely ignored my own advice and did a big unit in one go instead....!  Hence it's taken me nearly three weeks to make my first submission but the lure of the challenge has had me painting far more than I would have done previously.

But enough of my silliness, my first post consists of 30 Dark Elves, specifically Executioners.

Dark Elves are generally the bad guys and it's no exception with this lot.  These are the chaps who perform all sorts of horrible executions of the Dark Elves enemies, usually involving the ridiculously large double handed swords that they carry.

As you can see, they take being scary to another level by wearing skull faced helms.  I decided to paint these in a bone scheme to serve as lacquered armour.  The only one of these enigmatic fellows who doesn't wear such a helm is the leader.... Is this because he is the only one allowed to speak for the unit?  Is it because he has killed enough enemies that he is allowed to show his face to allow his reputation to scare the enemy?  Or is it because whilst clipping them off the sprue one helmet fell on the floor and no amount of crawling around on my hands and knees searching and cursing could find it?  I guess we'll never know....

I went with a relatively simple scheme of silver, red and gold to keep the focus on the helms and huge swords.

With regards to rules, we've started playing Age of Sigmar from Games Workshop...... a somewhat controversial game as, in a fashion all too familiar to GW watchers, they utterly botched the launch, succeeding in alienating almost all existing players and putting stupid rules in for some units (including such gems as "if you can get your opponent to look you in the eye during your turn, re-roll hits for your medusa" and "if you pretend to ride an imaginary horse during Magnus' turn, he gets +1 to hit").

Fortunately, they've rowed back from the silliness with further releases and it turns out there's a pretty fun game under it all.  It has it's problems, being essentially a first edition after all, but we're enjoying playing and it has our whole group energised and painting.  I've kept to square bases instead of the round bases GW now provide and recommend for the game as I'm old school and I can then more easily use these figures for other mass fantasy wargames rules.

I'm pleased with these guys and there are plenty more AoS figures to come if I can stick to my plan.  I've painted up the maximum sized unit because I owned this many from a bargain eBay auction win (still on sprue!) and then have options on how to use them.

Dark Elves - I actually painted some miniatures!

Yep, as the title says, I actually painted some miniatures!  These are for my fledgling Dark Elf army for Age of Sigmar, which is actually more fun that I initially gave it credit for.  Having played a game or two, I promptly went out and bought a metric tonne of figures for it, showing my usual levels of restraint when a new game appears on the horizon.... First up is the bulking up of my Spearelf unit to the maximum 40 elves, because if you're going to go, then go big

Nice and simple red and silver colour scheme and quite an imposing sight for their enemies.... I've stuck to the square bases (don't judge me) as most of them were already on square bases and this means I can always use them for other mass battle games should I feel the need.  And GW are even faffing around with basing for 40k ("use whatever feels appropriate") so I'm fairly happy they won't ever become unusable.  And I get points for being old skool.

Alongside them go the first of my entirely new units.  This is a unit of 20 Xbow elves.  I picked the models up from ebay and some of the helmet crests have broken off..... but I actually think I prefer them like that so I may have to break the rest of them to match.

More red and silver to keep the theme going.  The eagle eyed amongst you will note only 18 in the photo.... the standard bearer still needs a decal or two and one of the Xbow elves needs a new magazine so they're still loitering on the painting table.

Next up is a couple of heroes to lead them into the fray.  These were a rather special and very unexpected gift from the BFG after I gave him the Stormcast Eternals that I'd got from the starter box and so I wanted to get them painted up quick sharp

In the new rules, the sorceresses are the main leaders of the troops ( a cynical gamer would suggest that this is due mostly to the fact that GW don't have a fighting leader not on a dragon in their current range.....) so she was painted red and silver to match the troops.  The assassin was really rather good fun to paint and I'm pleased with the muted red armour and highlighting on the black cape.  He may eventually end up on a larger base to stop him toppling over in a light breeze though!