Friday Showcase - Woldwyrd

Here is a great model thats really excellent in the game. However I never seem to be able to use him correctly. He needs to be up front to be effective but the second he gets up there he is done for. Clever opponents make sure to take him out! I have tried keeping him as a late game piece that only moves up as the lines have engaged. However by that point his efectiveness is lessened. Maybe someone can tell me how to use him?

Painting the Wwoldwyrd was easy enough. I followed the same scheme as all the Wolds I have, a warm natural grey with some green inlay as contrast. I tried to make it look like 'power' was being focused in the center of the lens bt I am not sure if that worked really well. I think I would do it as a generic gem if I was to repaint him.

Terrain for the New Year

So I to make some more terrain this year. It really is an aspect of the hobby that I enjoy and of course it adds immensly to the game. I don't host any games at home but I do intend to eventually. Therefore it is always good to have a nice selection to choose from.

As I mainly play Warmachine I will be making some pieces specific for that game. The one piece or series of pieces I guess is a trench network. I want the trench to be playable so I am planning on having gently sloping sides that lead up to the trench. I guess maybe that an embankment is a better term or rampart would be a more accurate description. I want to have the pieces movable so fitting them into the surface of a board just doesn't work. This is the best compromise that I could come up with.

Other pieces I am planning include a canal, a large hill, a 5th border legion watchtower and a bog. I am guessing these will keep me pretty busy for the start of the year. However I don't want to stop at just making the pieces. I want to cast them up in resin so that I don't have to make multiples of the same thing. Casting them up while expensive saves a lot of time.

Fimir... a new hope?

So forgewrold have gone ahead and created some models for my all time favourite Gamesworkshop army, the Fimir. It looks like I had beter start saving now. I can't imagine these being cheap. I wonder are these going to be a full army such as was done for the Chaos Dwarves or are these just an ally that some armies can take. The next book out from Forge World is Monstrous Arcana and I can't see that it should contain a new offical army list. Especially as the Fimir don't have all the special toys that the Chaos Dwarves have. Maybe I shouldn't get my hopes up.

Friday Showcase - Tharn Blood Trackers

Here are my Tharn Bloodtrackers. I think these were the first unit I painted after the battlebox. I am not sure between these and the Wolves of Orboros. I am guessing it was the Tharn though as they are much nicer models. I really liked these sculpts when I saw them first. They really capture the wild nature of the Circle Orboros force. They took me an age to paint as they are so detailed. I wasn't really able to paint flesh then, hence the purple colour. It took me ages to get that effect and if I was to redo them I could speed them up by doing my more standard colours. I still have four to do plus the character attachement. I guess they will be some of the next models I do but I am not looking forward to it!

So this should be my last post before Christmas. I may put up a shot of the progress on my Gors on Saturday. In Germany they celebrate on the 24th so I get to have an extra day of good food as I make sure we also celebrate on the 25th when I am here. Maybe by around the 28th I can get back to some painting but don't expect anything too soon I will be bloated from two days of feasting and I will probably need to hibernate for a few days afterwards. So happy christmas everyone!

Ungors Finished

So two days and a restless night resulted in some progress! At the moment I am busy working away on my Gors. Four are almost done and the other eight are underway. These are the older models and I am hoping that the new ones are a little easier to paint.

So here are the Ungors done. Okay I do need a banner but I am thinking that I might leave off all the banners until the end and then do them together as that way they would be consistent. I am thinking of some type of a skull symbol similar to what they are like on the GW models. Its pretty boring but works well. I am not sure on the colours. I guess a drab green background with a near white skull. As I am intending to have a few regiments in the finished army I don't know if there is enough variability in that design and my talents. Freehand isn't my strong point.

I will add some more models to this regiment during a later month. The large spacing bases do leave them looking a little lean on numbers so another five models should bulk them out a little better. The spacing bases are fine a long as they don't have to be clumped together. That leaves larger holes than I want. So breaking up where they have to be placed helps a lot. With a rank of six in the front I can even place on in the front rank which would be nice. So back to the Gors now!

Based and Basecoated!

It can't last long... I once again made some good progress! There has to be a day where I fail miserably somewhere this week. Laziness is an ever constant friend along with his brother procrastination.

I managed to get the Gors completely base coated. These are the old models bought years ago and somewhat converted. I had intended them as a Beastman Warband for Mordheim but that campaign fell through and they have been sitting half assembled and painted for a long number of years. So I pulled them apart and cleaned them down a little. A lot of the heads were replaced as were the damaged arms. One model I had the idea of converting into a half dryad. I am not sure what I was thinking at the time. Rather than dump the model I will hide him in a back rank. Nobody ever sees the models there anyway. I did add a lot of armour to these models with greenstuff. I continued that with some marauder shoulder pads. The less skin to paint the better!

I also managed to base the Ungors. I am not sure why I only photographed half of them! Anyway they are looking good and I intend to progress with them today with the aim of finishing them early tomorrow. Getting the first few done is a good motivator so that I can see the regiment grow slowly with small batches of completed models. I guss the regiment will grow in later months to at least thirty but for now the target of twenty five is fine. I got some highlights put on last night so that has speeded up the process. I think I can get them done tomorrow!

Assembled and so let the Games Begin!

Yesterdays progress was good, everything is assembled and ready to go. I think I can get everything basecoated and based today. Having an airbrush really helps as I can spray them all khaki. This is the base colour for the skin tone and not having to paint on all that skin is good! I can immediately worry about the other surfaces and details. I am going to keep these the same colour as the test model.

These are the new Ungor models, I have to say I am a little torn between these and the older ones. The fur is going to be annoying to paint on these. It is much finer detail with each strand being much much smaller. The older models had coarser fur which was simple to bring highlights up with. I put the models on larger bases to stretch them a little further. It saves me buying a few more boxes which is great with the way the prices are, especially for Ungor. A few bases of 40mm with only two guys on them get lost in the mass of a regiment and nobody has yet ever complained. It adds to the disorganised look of a beastman mob!

So coffee is done and a Game of Thrones is playing... time to get the brushes wet!

Beast Week Begins

So it is the week before Christmas and I don't have as many beasts done as I need to hit the targets for this months Tale of Three Gamers. So this week is being given over to getting those beasts done. I have twenty five Ungor to do and twelve Gor. Thats a tall order but I do have some help in the fact that I managed to get most of them assembled last week. I am hoping that a days worth of basecaoting will see most of them done to a basic standard. Then breaking them down into subsets of six will see me get through about nine a day on average. It is a tall order but I think I can manage it.

I have almost all the books from a Song of Ice and Fire here as audio books so that should keep me distracted from the insanity of all day painting. I also have plenty of time but thinking on that I do need to do the Christmas shopping at some point. I am hoping to be done by Thursday evening so on the 24th I don't have to pick up a paintbrush at all, instead I can bask in the glory of a one third done army!

Friday Showcase - Kreuger the Stormwrath

So here is another model that I have painted for the Circle Orboros but never used. There are quite a few models in the collection in the same boat. I am looking forward to getting my cards so that I can finally have these on the table. 2012 looks like the year of the Circle. I painted Kreuger in the usual autumnal theme of my Circle Army. The model is awesome, nice and simple but very striking. This means that there is not too much detail to obsess over and I like that. I gave him a two tone cloak that came out nice. The orange colour is actually Bestial Brown highlighted with Bleached Bone, both from GW. It makes a wonderful warm colour and I used it a lot throughout the army. I actually have to go and buy a new pot of it as the Vajello equivalent doens't have the same tone when mixed for the highlights. Kreuger's skin is suffering from the same purple tone that I have on the Tharn models. Sadly nothing will be done to change it. I rally don't have the energy to go back and redo the failures on these models. Still it came out fine enough and from across the table nobody will hopefully notice!

Forest Bases DIY

A few people have commented on how I do my basing for the Circle Orboros and my Chaos Army. I thought I would put up a step by step to show how I go about it. It is fairly simple and is a lot lot cheaper than resin bases. In my opinion it looks a lot better too.

1) The base is just some standard GW sand. I stuck some broken cork on in the corner as a rock. I like the texture this provides and it takes drybrushing really well. I also stuck on a small twig that I found outside during the Autumn and left to dry out for the last few weeks. I paint the entire base in Scorched Brown(GW) making sure with the cork to get into all the cracks. I actually used Charred Brown from Vajello here as I have run out of Scorched Brown. It is a little less red but this doesn't really matter on the bases.

2) Here you can see how I paint the basic pieces. The cork gets drybrushed in a dark grey and then drybrushed in progressively lighter shades of grey. This leaves a dark brown in the cracks thast more natural than black. The sand is drybrushed first in Bestial Brown and then in Snakebite Leather. Finally I drybrush the twig with Khemri Brown and then with Denheb Stone. The wood in the centre I do with a mix of Bleached Bone and Snakebite Leather. Both the twig and rock then get a wash with Devlan Mud.

3) So these steps are pretty simple. First I try to put some moss on. The material I use for this used to be sold by GW but for the life of me I have no idea what it is called. I usually put it on the rocks and sometimes on the branches also. I put it in lines looking like it is growing on damp patches and rivulets of water. It isn't very noticable once everything else is put on but it adds to the realism of the piece.


4) This is where I put on the static grass. I use a mix I made myself. I wanted to get a lighter shade of green than is standard. It is easy to get a bright green but I didn't want it to be too visually strong. So I got some of the old GW dead grass and added it to the mix. I also added a small amount of the Scorched Grass. The mix is quite nice and I will be sad once it is all used up. I like to add lots of small patches of grass rather than larger ones. I think it looks better. For the static grass I water down my PVA a lot and apply a large drop of it where I want the grass to stick. This helps the grass to stand a little and so it doesn't look as flat. I will eventually use Grass tufts but for now I want to keep everything standard in the army.

5) Here I want to simulate some small bushes or undergrowth. A plant thats clinging close to the ground. For this I use Woodland Scenics Clump Foliage. Its supposed to be stuck on their tree armatures but I find that small pieces make really awesome bushes. I do use the tree armatures for terrain and I keep the colour between the ground cover and the canopy different. When sticking the bushes on I like to kep them close to other textures on the base. I don't like to have them looking like they are an 'island'. Getting them in close to some of the grass or the rocks is great. It looks much better. Sometimes if I have braches looping upwards I will put the bushes under the branches.

6) The final step is the leaves. These are great and they instantly make your base pop. They are actually dried birch seeds and they are pretty easily gathered and dried. If you have any of these trees in the area you can gather them just before they fall in Autumn and dry them in an oven. A few catkins will provide enough for a couple of armies. I like to cover whats left of the blank areas of the base with these. It leavs the sand base peeking out from under all the cover you have stuck on and thats how I envisage a forest floor.

Tharn Wolfriders, finally done!

It is a bad picture as I couldn't get the focus to work correctly however this is the proof. They are done! Well actually when I was taking the photograph I noticed that I hadn't done the bases. I just packed away the models once the painting was done, I had had enough. I think the problem with the Tharn in general is that they have a lot of small details and it takes a lot of attention and effort to get them all done. The wolves were really nice to paint, especially as I went for varied colours with them all. That meant I wasn't getting annoyed painting the same colour over and over again. I think each wolf took about an hour of painting in total whereas the riders took far far longer.

Here is a much better shot of an individual Tharn. Hopefully you can make out the detail a little better than on the unit picture. I am guessing I need a decent tripod to get unit/army shots. You can also see that I made an effort and got the bases done. So the unit is finally finished. I went with a more normal human skin tone rather than the purplish colour I got before when highlighting their skin on other units. So now I am moving on to doing some solo's and getting the Beastmen for the Tale of Three Gamers done. I want to make sure that I hit the dealine this month at least!

A Tale of Three Gamers - Month One

Hopefully there is no Mayan Dragon destroying the world today, if so I think you can ignore this post and see the more important issues! Anyway I haven't managed to get a post up on our Tale of Three Gamers for a while. Slow progress and being sick hasn't helped thats for sure. We all failed to meet the target but hopefully in Month two we can make up the short coming a little. Alan had too many holidays, lucky him. Gar damaged his wrist, unlucky him. I was too distracted, silly me!

Here is the progress I had made as of the deadline. The chariot was almost complete. I really under estimated how long it would take me to get everything done. I thought the model would be fairly simple. The chariot was really difficult to attach to the two hounds and took quite a lot of fur sculpting to get it done properly. I am still not 100% happy but it is better than the two Tuskgors. I would have liked to get a collar or harness sculpted on there but with the sheer volume of fur I assume that it would be next to invisible.I only had the two hounds to do and I will get them to match the hounds I have done before. I am pretty burned out on painting hounds but I have maybe twelve more to do for this army at some point so I had better get used to the idea that I am doing them soon. The crew were handy enough to paint. I followed the basic sample model I had painted before as far as the colour scheme. I am not sure about the red shoulder armour. The colour is nice and dark but I am not sure if it suits the green? I am not changing it now but I might not use it as extensively as I had intended. I wanted it for all the armour in the army, especially on the Bestigors. It would also be a nice colour on the banners but maybe the green suits that better? This month I will finish the chariot and then get into the meat of the army. I want to have at least one core unit done and therefore I have choosen to do some Ungors. I think 24 is a decent number to start with. I will eventually expand the regiment to at least thirty but that would be a bridge too far at the moment! To accompany them I will paint 12 Gors with additional hand weapons. That means I have two fieldable regiments and a good foundation to build upon in the following month.

Gareth will be catching up which is fair enough. Maybe next time he will watch his step on the stairs! So thats thirty clansmen for him. Alan has set a more ambitious target however. He is endeavouring, despite Christmas on the horizon, to get the Cavalry from last month, a wizard and a chariot done. Looks like chariots are popular! So stay tuned for a progress report and some photographs next week from us all!

Friday Showcase - Pureblood Warpwolf

I missed a post last week due to lying in bed with a temperature. As a treat I thought I would put up one of my favourite Circle models, the Pureblood Warpwolf. I remember falling in love immediately when I saw this model. I really think that the sculptor did an awesome job, something the Circle are lucky with. I wanted to follow the studio scheme and that meant white. I really don't like painting white, who does? However I did it and I think it came out okay, the shading is a little more subtle than is optimal but otherwise it is fine. Thankfully there was enough armour and leather to provide some good contrast to the white. In comparison to the other models in the predominately dark army the Pureblood really stands out. Thats fine as he does provide a great centerpiece sculpt. I just fear what the new plastic incarnation will be. I can't imagine it ever approaching the awesomeness that is this sculpt.

Sick

Thankfully I am not sick anymore. I came down with a nice dose of the Man-Flu last week and then combined with that I managed to acquire a gum infection. So no painting has been done for a week. It was in a way nice to get a break. I did manage to get the Tharn finished before I was sick and I will get a photograph up. It was really nice to get those Wolfriding ladies finished. I only have four of their foot slogging sisters to do and thats them done. The models are great but I hate painting them! I also have some progress for the Tale of Three Gamers to put up, I will try to have it ready for tomorrow.