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Perry Minitures can be hit and miss with their casting, but the unit looks good.

@carlos: the sticks are just sort of crammed in the hands of the guys with the hoods, and since they barely fit they hold the shrine in place pretty well. The sticks are just resting on the hands of the other guys.

@robert: Yeah, I'm finding the Perry stuff a little disappointing. They look a lot better in ranks than up close.

Suppose that means you could always swap them if you get more hooded guys in the future. That hooded guy holding the shrine is probably the best of the monk sculpts in my mind.

That. Looks. Awesome.

Thanks. I still have mixed feelings about the individual minis, but I'm glad it came together as well as it did. There is another building in the set that I may try to use for a second regiment, taking advantage of what I learned doing this first one.

I agree with Carlos (and others) - the unit looks good and the tilt works for a shrine being carried into battle. The unit looks good, but I'll agree that it's a shame that the figures were disappointing, since painting stuff like that is never a lot of fun. Still, at least they're done now!

Brilliant - That shrine looks super, a really great idea!

In between the sohei I posted last week and the not-quite-finished army project sitting in my painting space, I decided to finish off some things that have been cluttering up my desk for far too long. First up, the Casket of Souls for my Tomb Kings:





I figure this model will work as a balefire catapult in KoW. As with the rest of my TK, I wanted this item to look very, very old. I eschewed gold-plating as in the studio paint jobs, and went with bare stone, as if any decoration has been scoured off after centuries in the sand. I finished all the painting on this close to three years ago, but I wanted to do something to make it more portable. The Liche Priest is pinned through both feet, so he just lifts out. The Tomb Guard were more difficult. The base is a little thin (even on the plastic card) for long pins, and I'm currently out of tiny magnets. For the time being, they are standing on wads of BluTac until I figure out a better solution.




A friend of mine won this mini in a raffle at the GW store in Jimbocho, and having no use for it he sent it to me. I let my then-three-year-old son open the box it was in, and he immediately claimed it for himself. It then sat, unopened, on my desk for about a year, until he suddenly remembered it. We started painting it, and then his attention span ran out, leaving it for me to finish about a year later. I kept his color choices intact, touching up the bone a little bit and giving the whole thing a Soft Tone wash. I also tried an OSL effect for his eyes:


I'll let you decide how well it turned out.

The Reaper has come up very nicely, and the Casket of Souls looks spectacular!

That casket of souls is truly worthy of a "wow!" - Great work!

Yep great skeleton stuff The glowey eyes on the reaper dude are making me reconsider the red I've been using for my own skeletons.

I really like the casket of souls! I like how the lich stands out from the casket.
I also like the osl on the reaper's eyes!

I have three Kings of War armies that I'm working on concurrently: samurai, undead, and orcs, the last of which started this painting blog. After clearing off some space, I found the time to work on these:



There are essentially only two poses for these Greataxe minis, and after trying to rank up the sohei I posted a couple of weeks ago, I think this is the way to go, at least for fantasy settings. Half of the sohei look like they are fighting each other, while these guys appear to be facing another enemy unit. The mantic integral base helps as well, in that the model stays almost entirely within the footprint of the base.

While working on the orcs, I took a gander at the contents of the sprue, and decided to do some orclings as well. Once I got a pile of them snipped off, I remembered something that I had in my container of isopropyl alcohol, being stripped. I ended up with three bases:



Way back when I first started WHFB (at the tail end of 2nd ed in case you're keeping score), I just picked up whatever I could find, including Ruglud's Armored Orcs, a couple of war machines sets, an elven attack chariot, and a couple of packs of snotlings. All the orc stuff got traded away, but I just couldn't get rid of these guys. Their sizes are inconsistent, and most of them are pretty non-threatening, but with five poses of orclings to pad out the bases, I ended up with a pretty nifty little unit. I have enough snotlings for three more bases worth, once I get more orclings painted up.

Finally, one more mini that my son started and then lost interest in:


This is, of course, a wight standard bearer from GW. I despise pretty much every undead model released at the time this one came out-- wacky giant helmets, hands like boxing gloves, skulls that would fit in an ogre's head-- but technically this was an easy figure to paint. The details were crisp and easy to identify, and being metal gives it a little heft. The banner includes yet another howling griffon logo-- one day I'll finish off the sheet!

I have started working on the trio of orc chariots I got from the KS, and hope to have them finished by the end of the week.

After the Greataxe and snotorclings last week, I got into a greenskin mood. Digging through the pile of orc stuff I've had lying around since the kickstarter, I decided on a troop of chariots:







The chariot itself was pretty easy to assemble, despite suffering from most of the failings of restic. In the end, I just did basecoat-wash for pretty much everything. The final effect works well enough, IMO. In posting these photos, I noticed that I missed the teeth on the drivers, so I'll have to get to those before I seal the models. My one complaint: the chariot's wheel base is pretty much exactly 100mm, and with the scythes attached they can't rank up as a unit. Other than that, I think they'll work just fine as part of the army, if not as display pieces.

The Orcs, Snotlings and Chariots all look great, Josh. I commend you for sticking with it through the assembly of the restic chariots as well. Did you have to heat-treat them?

Actually.... it seems like the scything wheels will stop them from being flush when you put them next to one another. Good thing they can no longer be fielded as individual units and now need to be clumped up in sets of three minimum... /facepalm

Thanks. I prefer the look of Mantic's orcs over that of the current GW version, and they are easy (and therefore fun) to paint. Assembling the chariots wasn't to bad-- only the platform needed to be heat-treated, any other warping fits with the slightly ramshackle feel of the army. The thing with the scythes is pretty irritating, however.

Great job with the chariots. I just started to dust off all my sprues of mantic orcs to get ready for the new edition. I never got any of their chariots, instead I've repurposed my beastmen chariots. Can you offset the chariots by setting the middle one back far enough for the scythes of the outer two to fit between the pigs and the frame of the center chariot? I know it won't look right, but could make it work for the unit.

Recently, I have been cycling through my three Kings of War armies as I decided what to paint so that I don't get bored and just stop painting altogether. Last week was orcs, so this week I cranked out a unit for my undead. Digging through my box of unpainted skellies, I came across these Dream Warriors, by RAFM. I saw these models at my FLGS more than 20 years ago, and decided then and there that I had to have them. I painted up two of them to the best of my ability at the time, realized how time consuming they were, and put them away. They had been languishing in the big box of shame until my son asked to see what unpainted undead model I had lying around. While he was bashing a few skeletons together in "battle," I saw these guys with new (or rather, much much older) eyes, and figured out how I could paint them quickly and possibly effectively-- I'll let you decide if I was right.

Here's the whole unit together:


For basing, I was inspired by the illustrious Azazelx, who has been basing his most recent work on round bases and then blutac-ing them to movement trays for KoW. I prefer square bases for fantasy minis, but these guys just don't fit on 20mm bases. Instead, I mounted them on 25mm bases in ranks of four, which is the correct frontage for a legal KoW unit. Problem solved!



The biggest issue I had all those years ago was making them look ethereal. I did a lot of wet-blending on the two that I finished, and the result looked good enough at the time, but it took forever. Looking at them now, I see tow distinct parts to the models: the ectoplasm and the armor/weapons. I decided that these models are the spirits of long-dead warriors, called back and bound to their ancient suits of armor. All the ghostly parts are Army Painter goblin green, dryburshed up to white at the hightlights. The armor is AP gunmetal, glazed with Payne's Grey, then washed with Gryphone Sepia to make everything look aged but not corroded. I did some OSL on the weapons and their eyes/hemets, with varying results.



The greens look darker in person. I may go back and darken things up a bit.



The face on the guy on the left reminded me a lot of the climax in Raiders of the Lost Ark, and I tried to capture that here.



I like how the Sepia wash brought out the details on these spears (or are they pole arms?)



The guy with the tongue and Doc Brown hair delights me to no end.

I have enough models from this set for one more unit this size. They were a lot of fun to paint, which is true for just about any RAFM model. I wish they got more love from the community, because they have a nice range of interesting/unique sculpts that aren't tied to any specific ruleset. Maybe I'll add some random monsters or investigators to the queue...

Dag. Some of those call of cthulu minis may end up getting bought. I guess I never really looked into this company, but a lot of those figures would work well for pulp alley.

I like the dream warrior dudes, definitely got a surreal ghosty thing going on.

 GrimDork wrote:
Dag. Some of those call of cthulu minis may end up getting bought. I guess I never really looked into this company, but a lot of those figures would work well for pulp alley.

I like the dream warrior dudes, definitely got a surreal ghosty thing going on.

Their CoC stuff is top notch. I have 20-30 ghouls that I have used for my various undead armies for years. I even picked up a copy of Pulp Alley just so I could use (and justify painting up) some of the many, many investigators I have acquired over the years.

Those minis look really cool! I like the ghostly green.

The models and the paintjob you've achieved on them both look fantastic and really appropriate for KoW. Will you be using them as Wraiths or Revenants?

I'm looking forward to seeing the second batch of them painted up as well. A nice little addition to your undead force, and there are a couple of them that look like they'd also make very nice Army Standard Bearers as well, to get good use out of the extras.

You've reminded me that I've got some of those old RAFM Ghasts myself in one of my boxes. I should pull them out and see if I've got enough of them to make it worth, basing and painting them for KoW as well. I've got at least 2 packs worth (4 figures) but we need a few more.

I love the metallic on them. I need to work out a way to paint nice muted bronze-type colours.

@Azazelx: I'll be using them as wraiths. I have a set of Citadel's Nightmare Legion that I use as wights/revenants. The next set of dream warriors got pushed back a couple of steps in favor of some other RAFM monsters and something for my samurai, but I hope to have them done by the end of the month.

@slinky: Yeah, metallics can get pretty boring as there is only so much variation out of the pot. Washes and glazes work wonders.

Ah yeah, love the Nightmare Legion. I never had them myself, but I painted them for someone back in the day. Sadly they're hideously expensive to buy these days so I doubt I'll stretch myself that far. Are yours painted up yet? I'd love to see them!

Also... Undead Samurai? I've never heard of those. Now they would really be something else!

After agonizing for so long over the Dream Warriors, I decided to try something a little simpler to clear my palate:






These are, or course, Magwa and Jo'os, a special character from the KoW goblin list. They are supposed to be mounted separately, but given they have a single profile, it seemed pointlessly fiddly. Jo'os (the mawbeast) got a simple paintjob of Army Painter monster brown, with a couple of drybrushed highlights followed by a wash of Devlan Mud, while Magwa is just basecoat-and-glaze. The whole thing took about three days (one hour at a time first thing in the morning) to finish.

Up next: samurai!

I've never seen them before. Cool models and nicely painted!

Nice looking Mawbeast and handler there!

When I posted the photos of the wraith about a week ago, I mentioned in passing that I have a regiment of the very old Citadel Regiment of Renown called The Nightmare Legion that I will use as revenants. Having mentioned them, I haven't been able to get them out of my head, so while waiting for a basecoat to dry on the the samurai that I'm working on, I decided to pull them out and see if they still work. Most of my older painted miniatures are still in the same plastic container they were dumped in the first time I moved house, and everything is pretty dinged up. So, I decided to put the samurai on hold and see about updating these guys to my current standards:


The three on the left in this photo had their shields pop off, leaving the skulls damaged. I did some touch-up work on them, but there wasn't much I could do without scrapping the shields and starting over. These guys will be in a back rank, I think.





The rest of the unit survived their ordeal remarkably unscathed. I touched up their loincloths/pants, and redid the metal on their weapons. My technique for bones hasn't really changed in the last twenty years or so, so I didn't need to do much there.


Since the commanders will be front and center in the unit, I did a little more work on them. Their capes got a new oat of red, their armor and weapons, as well as boots and belts, were repainted and washed to bring them in line with my more current work.


And then there is this guy. The original standard pole broke off years ago, as one would expect with a thin shaft of lead, so I remade it into something a little sturdier. The more educated and refined among you have no doubt identified the image on the standard, but for the hoi polloio, this is my freehand rendition of the cover art from Megadeth's "Peace Sells...But Who's Buying?" The unit benefits, I think, from being a little more metal than the average unit of skeletons.

Speaking of which:


Here they are all together. The mathematically-inclined will have noticed that there are only eighteen in the unit. I have another 5-6 more unpainted that I will add to finish the unit off some time in the future.

As a bonus, I also found these guys:



The guy on the right is a pre Realms of Chaos-era Chaos Wizard that I thought looked more like a necromancer, the guy on the right may be a Liche by Harlequin? Maybe? Some company who tried to compete with Citadel around the time of WHFB4e or so. They were somewhat hit or miss, but I like this guy well enough.

Next update:samurai, I promise!

You've done those ancient minis proud! Love the designs on the shields - Very effective indeed