Classic Chaos Beastmen (150pts).

This blog was originally set up, some years ago, to chart my progress in creating a Nurgle army from the classic Lost and the Damned tome. Along the way I have been easily, inevitably and enjoyably sidetracked by a plethora of new ideas, miniatures, games systems and competitions, but for now I've decided to come back to the project and try and complete it! Ive finished my Warhammer 3rd Edition Chaos Allies Contingent, which have the same basing, so I looked back at my many incomplete Lost and the Damned units and decided to tackle the unit which needed the least amount of work.

I had painted half of these classic Chaos Beastmen some time ago, and I remembered collecting them so that they were a disparate, ragtag bunch (certainly not just goats), of different shapes, sizes and races and of course choosing some of my favourite sculpts from this era along the way.

Here’s the now completed unit:

I've painted their skin with a variety of tones, trying to unify them slighlty by keeping the colours slightly drab and pastel like, and as always allowing the basing to tie them together further. 

The banner is painted from an image in Fighting Fantasy's Army of Death and is held by a Beastman that was regularly headswapped in Dale Hurst's iconic Tzeentch warband from White Dwarf 135, something I had always wanted to do since I first saw the article in 1991 and here I've done so with a new, plastic plaguebearer head added to the Citadel lead body. 

Here’s the original illustration  by Nick Williams, as found in Fighting Fantasy: Armies of Death:

The last part was to construct a movement tray, which is really more of a display tray to hold the unit together. More on how I do this in a future post.

So then that’s 14 Beastmen, with standard, making a total of 150pts.

Chaos Allies - Minotaurs

As my Chaos Allied Contingent grows, I've had to go up to the attic and take photos of them on my scenery table - my small photo set up on my desk is too small - especially when 6 Minotaurs are all lined up together. You've probably seen most of these in previous posts, but this is the first time I've taken a shot of them all together on a movement tray; assembled as part of the Allied Contingent.

Retinue table challenge - 4 Minotaurs

Continuing my nearly complete series on collecting all the possibilities of rolling a Chaos Warband retinue from The Lost and the Damned, I present 4 Minotaurs:

They don't rank up too well but there's another 2 from the Citadel Minotaur Lord range which will be added to these to make a unit of 6, and as a complete collection they all rank up just about fine.

So I just have 8 skaven currently sitting on my painting desk to go to complete this challenge and then I can take a much anticipated (by me at any rate) photograph of them all together.

Slowly, by following this path, my small collection of models is gradually becoming a chaos allied force and on it's way to becoming a full blown, 3rd Edition Warhammer Army..

The Minotaur Lord of Lords

My final minotaur from the Citadel Minotaur Lords range is the mutated beast with dragon claw, skull head and, bizarrely, an old leather boot on one foot. It's a decent pose but again I felt the neck was too short, so extended it slightly and greenstuffed some fur on his new neck. Here he is with his little nurglings friend giving us the (dirty) moon:

The paint scheme was inspired by the wonderful brushwork of Don Hans, who uses vivid bright colours in multiple glazes to get a glowing paint scheme. I went for a range of yellow and orange glazes on the skin, highlighted up and then glazed again. I shaded with some cool blues and used a turquoise glaze for the dragon claw and some of the deeper recesses of skin. Here are some examples of his work:

I didn't even get close to hhim a vibrancy of colour but I'' still pretty happy with the results. I'll need to do some experiments with some oil washes next to try and achieve this richness and depth of colour.

I'll post some group shots of the minotaurs next...

Minotaur Lord 2

Following on from my last Minotaur Lord which featured some heavy converting, mostly for fun; this minotaur needed converting out of necessity - it was missing an arm and the torso had seemingly been welded to the legs. The original pose has always struck me as a little odd too so some re-positioning also occurred. And this is what I ended up with:

It started out like this. Arm and weapon missing and unsightly welding around the belly:

Now of course I forgot to take wip photos of the changes, so you'll have to imagine my processes. 

• He was cut across the midriff and re-positioned at a nice angle
• A plastic Orc axe was added to his right hand.
• A tentacle was made from wire and greenstuff for his left arm and then a Genestealer claw behind this.
• Loads of greenstuff  was applied to create a much more rounded belly and additional hair was then sculpted over this

And then he was painted. I hadn't painted very much with black so I had a go at trying to use as many dark tones as possible, using greys and blues to highlight with. It made a nice change from using my usual pastel colours:

Next up I'll be recreating one of my favourite Minotaur paint jobs from an old White Dwarf..

The Minotaur and a tale of butchery and salvation.

During the last month I've had some hobby time out partly enforced by work commitments and partly lack of motivation. So to get out of my slump I painted up a conversion I completed some time ago. Now I have realised recently that I've always subconsciously divided my work into two distinct camps; convert the fuck out of new plastic or carefully collect and paint old lead. I give no value to plastic but hold the lead in a high regard, mostly because of nostalgia and of course the fact that it is oop (certainly from Citadel anyway). So I thought it was time to change that, I'd always been inspired by the lead conversions from White Dwarf back in the day, so let it be my turn to return to something I thought nothing of as a teenager in the 80's. Time to break out the jewellers saw and the pliers and get to work...

Now I didn't approach this willy-nilly, I chose a lead model that I wanted to paint up (i.e. it is one of my complete collection of the Citadel Minotaur Lords) but one in which the sculpt is a bit shit and could be improved upon by me. With this sculpt I always felt that the head looked odd without a neck and that the arms were disproportionate (i.e. Too short) and strangely tethered to the sides of the body (no doubt due to casting constraints) so I chopped it all off and ended up with this:

A new pointing arm from an Ork was added to give him the look of a leader and a mid-hammer minotaur head that had a bit more menace about it:

Now I didn't want to completely discard the chopped off pieces and decided to re-use them on the conversion. With the head I thought that it would be fun to make a three headed minotaur with the new head in the middle and the old one (and a re-mould of it) on the other. I'm a sucker for symmetry. So I used the Instamould to get a cast of the head:

And filled it with milliput initially:

Which really didn't work so went with greenstuff the second time around which really worked surprisingly well: 

I also re-used the club which I had earlier cut off; attaching it the belt behind him:

And re-sculpting the haft with some milliput:

Here with the two heads re-attached and banner pole inserted:

And some additional work on the pole, garden wire wrapped around the paper clip to help me sculpt a gnarly old tree and a plastic vulture perched atop:

The final greenstuffing on the banner pole and some old-school mushrooms on the base:

And then decided to add some plastic horns and a bell to add some more detail:

Now of course there was another source of inspiration with this build; John Blanche's esteemed minotaur banner bearer which also has multiple heads and a myriad of other conversions:

So I too went to town on the banner design, following a more obvious route of Greek Mythology for the banner image:

I think it's an improvement on the original.

Now onto the rest of my collection of Minotaur Lords...

The often spotted winged minotaur

I don't know why Minotaurs are so prone to grow wings in the Realms of Chaos. Perhaps it's because the size of the model fits well with the size of model wings that are available, or perhaps because their bestial nature lends itself well to the idea, or perhaps we've all been subliminally affected by Dale Hurst's wonderful Tzeentch warband that was showcased back in a White Dwarf many years ago. Anyway, I seem to have seen a lot of them and thought it was high time that I added something to this exclusive oeuvre:

It was the wings themselves that caused some problems at the painting stage; I wasn't sure how to proceed, so after some discussion on the Oldhammer Facebook group, I decided to explore the idea of pale blue wings, as per the body colour, but with darker blue tips, like this photo of a Heron which I used for inspiration:

Thank you to whoever it was on the Oldhammer Facebok page that suggested this colour scheme, it worked out really well and ties in with the colours used on the torso. We are very lucky to have such a great, creative and supportive community. I had to glaze quite a few layers of blues and greys with a few delicate drybrushed hightlights for it to work, but I'm really happy with the outcome. Not sure he looks particularly Nurglesque, but I can deal with that.

Originally I had the plan to add zebra stripes, as Dale Hurst did so successfully in his iconic warband:

But I found that with all the straps on his arms etc, that it would look way too busy. And because I remembered that I have done this to a minotaur before anyway:

I've got a few more Minotaurs to convert and paint, so as to create the D4 quantity which I could potentially roll up on the retinue table. I'm looking forward to making them appear more in the guise of Nurgle though..