Did I not comment on the undead army? I thought that I had-- maybe because I've left comments on so many individual unit of the army in the past. It looks great deployed all together like that. The 40mm rounds for all the cavalry are particularly inspiring, and I think I'll be doing that when I get around to the Melnibonean cavalry I have waiting in the queue.

Duuuuuude! the Minnies are looking FANTASTIC! love the mix of old and new models and the fact you took the time to add the yellow markings on the bolters is great! I'd love to test your skills and see if you could paint a marine up in the 'Original' Minotaur paint scheme? perhaps a special character or some-such? :-)

 Januine wrote:
Those brazen minotaurs are looking sweet. Really nice job Az. You keeping them parade ground or filthy img them up?

These are Minotaurs chapter, Jan. Brazen Minotaurs are a different chapter. Similar paint job, but they have a black bull's head on a white field.

Minotaurs are looking awesome. I really like the sergeant model.

EDC

Had not even noticed your Undead Showcase, brilliant looking army there. I think it is representative of the relative quietness of the P and M blogs the past few weeks, that and one day this week DakkaDakka was down for around 12 hours (at least it was for me).

As for the Minotaurs I love that the squad includes a miniature that has been hanging around your collection for 20+ years. I think the squad looks cohesive in spite of the mix of metal/plastic and some 15 years between some of the miniatures, and of course they are all painted to your usual excellent standard.

Super squad of Minos there, the colours are just dead on! And speaking of dead, those are shots are just inspirational!

Thanks guys,

I'll likely keep the Minotaurs clean. I used to dirty up the feet of my RT-era Ultras, and I'll likely do it again with another chapter at some stage, but I'm liking these guys relatively clean - and I'm roughly 100% sure that Marouda will prefer them clean.

The plans for them are basically army building by feel with no idea about "proper" list building. I'll have at least 3 Tactical Squads, 1 Sternguard, 1 Vanguard, 1 Assault and 1 Devastator (thanks Damo - will be working your guys). One "normal" termie squad and one probably Tartaros. 1 Spartan LR, 1 or more Washing Machine Dreads, plus Hekate and up to 2 additional Contemptors, plus the names and various "normal" characters. Probably a command squad as well. Not sure on Scouts at this stage. I'll worry about Rhinos and Predators, Razorbacks and Drop Pods later. And yes, I'm happy with the bases. They're slowly going onto the Iron Warriors as I rebase and polish them up.

I'll keep to the 40mm rounds for Cavalry for the time being, as they work well with the skeleton cavalry and obviously the LotR models. though some of the cav might be too big for those. I'll have to work out either those AoS bases or the "bike" bases for those. Probably. 40mm round should work well for the older metal cavalry like the Melinboneans.

There will be at least one Minotaur in the old livery. I'm just not sure how I'll do it yet. I remember Para did one awhile back but used the brass/bronze as a replacement for the yellow.

Actually Thraxas, all of the 2nd ed models have been hanging around for that length of time. I'll probably mix some other old 2e models in as well elsewhere.




Automatically Appended Next Post:
I haven't shown much in the way of WIP lately, just finished stuff - so here's some stuff on the go.




Some grave markers that I've been slowly working on instead of the Undead that I probably should be.



And with the next 4 Minotaurs finished (flock drying on them now, so photos in a day or two) I've started the next next four. Like the ones who are in the flock tub, these are recycled marines from Nerdfest's BAs/Flesh Eaters spares that I bought off him awhile back. The first silver is drying on them now,I'll do the other side tomorrow morning, and then the zenithal from the top after that. Then it's just rebasing, washes, detailing and then finding some arms, shoulders, bolters and a head! Any suggestions for special and heavy weapons for this second tactical squad? The previous one has the classic Flamer/Missile - and just a bolter for the Sergeant. (and yes, I pried that BA shoulderpad off!)

Screw "proper" list building. Has never gotten in the way of my gaming enjoyment with the themes I have taken. Some are obviously weaker than others but I rarely play against the alleged super armies.

The way I incorporated the old school Minos livery on my modern one was to go mostly with the bronze armour, but go with one shin and the opposite shoulder in the old red and yellow stripe pattern, I figured that was enough to be a nice nod to the past while keeping him looking like he fit with newer stuff.

The other way would be, as you say, to just replace the bronze with yellow, and do red stripes over that, which could look really quite cool indeed!

 Archer wrote:
Screw "proper" list building. Has never gotten in the way of my gaming enjoyment with the themes I have taken. Some are obviously weaker than others but I rarely play against the alleged super armies.

This. I generally go with whatever I think is cool, not whatever folks on the internet froth about. I've often found that units some of the online community would snub, actually perform quite well in games. I don't follow the whole power gaming thing.

Loving the Minotaurs so far Az. Looking badass. Also noticed I didn't comment on the undead showcase- that is one fething huge horde of corpses!

I love seeing the LoTR models being given such love! I don't see much of them anymore. Sure wish I did considering my Rohan army never sees the light of day anymore.

Excited to see the rest of the Minotaurs and what the plog will bring, well done on that paint scheme on them too.

Miunotaurs look extremely sexy, and impressive Undead host you have there!

Thanks guys. I've been under the weather quite a bit lately, so I've been plodding along a bit on the painting, I've done bugger-all blogging or photography.



My rather pathetic entry for the Undead army part of the painting challenge in July was a single "swarm" unit that I've only photographed this morning - made up of a trio of Reaper Bones' Bat Swarms (77046: Bat Swarm). (I can't believe they want US$2.99 for them!) Since I have four of the models from their various Bones KS campaigns, I decided to paint the fourth at the same time in the same manner. The base coat was a mix of Reaper's Master HD Colours of Rusty Red and Ruddy Brown. I then washed it with GW's new Nuln Oil Gloss, to hit the recesses hard while staining the upper as little as possible. Then drybrushed with Khorne Red, Mephiston Red and finally Evil Sunz Scarlet. I'm well aware that these are tabletop quality paintjobs at best and that no-one will care how I did them, but the fact is they're pretty crap models that don't really deserve any better, and I'm simply recording how I painted them in case I get another pair of them to make a second swarm one day - purely for gaming purposes. I added the tombstones on the unit base from the Renedra Sprue since the bats were mounted on gravestones anyway in order to tie them in a little with their surroundings, even though I usually dislike "diorama bases" on my own models, as they place the models in too specific a location for figures that will be running around various tabletops.



Anyone actually excited by these? I thought not.
The Rats follow almost the exact same ethos and purpose - though the models manage to be much less impressive. This time the models are provided by Reaper's Rat Swarms (77129: Vermin: Rat Swarm (2)). You get a pair of them this time for your $2.49, though again I'd possibly be willing to argue their value, even for that price. Anyway, once again I had four of the sculpt, and again I mounted them on 30mm round bases from Impact Miniatures, which I'd originally bought to rebase Space Marines but have been using to base various swarm-sized vermin from Reaper Bones so far. Paint was... various browns outside of my usual basing colours, including Model Air Khaki Brown at some point, again with the Nuln Oil Gloss, and then AP Tanned Flesh for their widdle teeny-tiny tails and feets. One day the rats will no doubt be shifted over to my Skaven Army, but I'll need to actually have a few units of Skaven painted before that becomes a worry. I figure vermin like Rats fit in well enough with Bats and Bugs (Sol B shoutout!) to go with the Undead in the meantime. As I finished the the Rat Swarm base in early August, it will also be my weaksauce minimum mandatory Undead submission for this month's paint challenge if I don't manage to get something more impressive done.

And yes, I'm aware that these Bones models started as metal sculpts in greater detail (and multipart for the bats) and the Bones stuff is cheap & cheerful stuff for gamers of various stripes. That's why I painted them, though it doesn't preclude me from pointing out that they're both a bit rubbish, even if they end up looking passable on the tabletop.



I decided to take an all-together shot of all my completed little Reaper Swarms. With the unit bases, they'll do the job on the tabletop. I noticed after taking the photos that I forgot to add tufts to these new ones, so I might have to go back and do that so I can consider them finished. I know I've gone on and on about how crappy they are, but I'm just a bit OCD about certain things...

"but the fact is they're pretty crap models that don't really deserve any better"

lol. Maybe so - but I think you did a pretty belting job on them. They really stand out and look nasty as feth.
Hope you're beginning to feel better. I've been a bit off colour recently and it sucks arse. Totally drains the energy and impetus out. Feel better soon Az and keep up the great paints

+1 on the rats! for so simple a design and paint they really look like a nest of vermin! you've nailed the colours on them Az, great effort!

To be fair, 2.99 is a heck of a lot cheaper than GW's asking price for their bat swarms lol. And the fell bats are even more expensive!

I like the paint job you've done here. Looks pretty menacing!

Nice work on the bats and rats. Very tidy.

EDC

I really like those bat swarms especially the basing!

Thanks guys - you're all literally too kind.

I have always been a big fan of swarms, they are a very tangible and visceral fear especially those based in reality like rats, bugs and bats. And they look grand, nobody expects an A+++ stellar paint job on such miniatures but as it is these are great.

Hope you feel better soon Az.

Those swarms look pretty darn good, especially given that they are mostly-shapeless hunks of Bonesium. I don't think anyone expect Golden Daemon-level work on any swarm, in any material, so good on you for your work there.

Point taken, Josh. (and everyone else)

With the completion of the Aspiring Champion and Bearer of the Missile Launcher, I'm calling the first squad of my resurrected Iron Warriors - started over a decade ago - finally completed. The squad originally only numbered 6 in total, as it was built as part of a force for Combat Patrol games back during a time when CSM could take a Special and a Heavy weapon in sub-10 squads. Unless we were house-ruling that? I can't remember. They keep changing things like that, so I'm not going to get bent out of shape about the minutia of how many special and heavy weapons they can have. I'll dump the three Execution Force Iron Warriors in here for now to bring them to nine, and split the Exes off into separate squads when I have all of the current stuff that needs to be finished after a decade done and start on into totally new squads. At that point, I'll bump these guys to 10 or more as well.



At the suggestion of Dagger & Brush, I've began adding some cabling made from clips of guitar wire to some of their bases in an attempt to give them a bit more "pop" and 3-d interest. I haven't been able to find my copper wire yet, though I may go back and add a few of those when I find them - and add some more guitar wire to additional models at the same time.



My first completed (more or less) Iron Warriors Chaos Marine squad, finished and rebased onto Sector Imperialis 32mm bases. I'm now onto working on the second, close combat oriented squad. After I finish those, I can start on some brand new builds.



My Aspiring Champion, showing off a section of guitar wire added to represent power armour cabling as well as a few hazard stripes. When I started these models years ago, I'd intended to heavily chip and weather their armour and weapons as well as add rust and oil stains to their armour, but I quite like how they look now. Not quite clean, but not too grimy, either.

Lovely job on those iron Warriors Az. Looking cracking. Real smart classic look to them

Iron Warriors look badass. Nice work on the bases, those new GW ones are so cool, but I can see why you added stuff to them.

I just got some and without a few extras they can look a bit flat.

EDC

Those are some fine-looking Iron Warriors. I especially like the added cables. I've read about using guitar strings before, but have yet to try it. Did you find them difficult to work with? Also, you have done a fine job differentiating the bases from the armor. What was your final technique?

Duuuuuude, those hazard stripes are sharp!

Cracking unit there, I really love the head on the aspiring champion, where is it from? It is good to see that the monopose plastics from Execution Force fit in well with the rest of the unit. Painting wise I think you have just the right mix of grime and shine on them.

As for your new builds what units and miniatures will you be gleaning the parts from?

So pretty! the hazard faceplate is just the best touch! looks as good as usual, it's funny how I really like everything you paint and post since it's insightful and unique but these Iron Warriors make me (nay, coerce me) into commenting each time! :-)

The iron warriors are spectacular. Very, very nice paint job. Wouldn't want to paint 2,000 points and donate them to a worthy cause by any chance?

Thanks guys. I'm quite happy with them. Especially as they're finally finished. Sure I can add more models and bump them around, but the individual models there are done.

 JoshInJapan wrote:
Those are some fine-looking Iron Warriors. I especially like the added cables. I've read about using guitar strings before, but have yet to try it. Did you find them difficult to work with? Also, you have done a fine job differentiating the bases from the armor. What was your final technique?

An extra layer of thinned black wash in the end. I've used several coloured washes on the bases anyway - rust, blue and brown with a little variation in the floor metals so they don't look too monotone - especially since I'm calling them "space ship flooring" instead of concrete and dirt, etc as they're technically supposed to be.

 BrookM wrote:
Duuuuuude, those hazard stripes are sharp!

Thanks Brook - stuff like that plays well to what I think is my biggest strength, which is small freehand details.

 Thraxas Of Turai wrote:
Cracking unit there, I really love the head on the aspiring champion, where is it from? It is good to see that the monopose plastics from Execution Force fit in well with the rest of the unit. Painting wise I think you have just the right mix of grime and shine on them.

As for your new builds what units and miniatures will you be gleaning the parts from?

The AP's head comes from the Metal IW upgrade parts, though with the horns cut off. It's a MKIII head with an armoured mask over the top, much like the new/current FW Breacher models. The new ones will draw from the same sources - CSM, Berserker, SM plastics, IW Metal ugrades and old CSM metal shoulders, but with newer plastic SM, Calth and FW Armour Marks and upgrade parts added into the mix. Though I also plan to have a squad of "Traditionalist" type IW in Heresy-styled MKIII armour without any modern or chaotic markings on them at all. Also a squad of IW Khorne Bersekers is something I've wanted to do since I read Storm of Iron many years ago in Iron, Black and Brass. So those as well.

With luck I should have some more stuff for you to comment on soon, Damo. I'm trying to finish 4 more Minotaurs based on the stuff I got from you earlier in the year. Then just the Sergeant build and one more for them to be done. I'm kind of going back and forth between the two sets of marines, though overlapping as well.

 Archer wrote:
The iron warriors are spectacular. Very, very nice paint job. Wouldn't want to paint 2,000 points and donate them to a worthy cause by any chance?

I don't see myself donating them anywhere after finally getting them started properly after so many years, but I do hope to paint 2000 points and beyond.

Those bats are awesome! They look almost like something a vampire would turn into or some kind of magical spell, what with the silky bloody red coloration. Excellent

And those Iron Warriors... damn. I mean damn. I dunno but they're just speaking to me. Making me... I can't express the feeling... not nostalgic because I never had any but like... regretfully quasi-nostalgic for having never done any of them myself... i'm not sure that makes sense lol. Did you do anything special for the metal? Something about them is just getting to me, really fancy. My finished models shelf is jealous of them.

Those are great like the cleaner look I don't imagine Iron Warriors dirty to proud for it.

The Iron Warriors have great pop, I think they look lived in while still being well maintained.

I'll ditto thr thoughts on the swarms: they look like aswarm of nasties, which is great.

Yeah, those Iron Warriors look the business. Nice work

Thanks again guys. I'm very happy with them so far. I've pretty much done the renovation and re-completion on the next couple of them, so I'll get them up next time I've got time to take some photographs.

 GrimDork wrote:
Those bats are awesome! They look almost like something a vampire would turn into or some kind of magical spell, what with the silky bloody red coloration. Excellent

And those Iron Warriors... damn. I mean damn. I dunno but they're just speaking to me. Making me... I can't express the feeling... not nostalgic because I never had any but like... regretfully quasi-nostalgic for having never done any of them myself... i'm not sure that makes sense lol. Did you do anything special for the metal? Something about them is just getting to me, really fancy. My finished models shelf is jealous of them.

Thanks Grim. The metal is a mix of drybrushing in several layers over a black undercoat, but the top layers were done with thinned metals (GW Ironbreaker and then VMA Steel) and then washed with variously thinned black and (in parts) dark brown. Trying to get a... well, a kind of oily, slightly grimy/used/lived-in look to the metal. The brass/bronze is done in a slightly patchy and inconsistent way with various metals from VGC Tinny Tin through various coppers, brasses to the newer GW Golds, but without verdigris added - since I figure the IW would be too proud to let that happen. Wear and tear is one thing - the badges of war - but allowing corrosion to set on their armour? nonononono!

Ironically, I see the opposite - the slight greenish tinge to the Minotaurs' armour in the same light - a badge of honour to have a very subtle mark of age and time on their armour. But not thick verdigris.

Cracking bunch of Iron Warriors, Azazel. Usually their paint scheme doesn't really do anything for me, but these guys are great

I've been a little burnt out from blogging for awhile, though in the interim I've still been painting (if not playing - winter sucks!) Rather than go into the uninteresting trials and tribulations of my life, I'll just get on with it and see how it goes. These models were finished last month, and so are part of my pledge for August's entry of the Tale of Gamers Paint Challenge.

I know these models are ugly as gak, but in my defence, I purchased them a long time ago, around when they were released, and they were at least a step up from the initial offerings. I attempted to.. well, not "fix" them (because just look at them) but make them look a little less terrible and fit in with my Iron Warriors who I had started at that time. I did so by turfing their original heads and replacing them with ones from the plastic Chaos Knights kit. I also felt that their "weapon hand" loadouts were on the wrong side of ridiculous, and so moved some stuff around, and added in a few plastic bits. They still look terrible, but hopefully less terrible than the stock models?



The colour scheme is the original one I came up with all those years ago. I felt that "mutated meat" looked far better than the pinky flesh that GW's official scheme came up with, particularly against the metal and hazard-striped look of the IW scheme. In what was pretty much my first use of guitar strings, I added a couple of extra cables in places on the models, very sparingly.







In the recent "renovation" of these two, I've gone over some of the metals and re-weathered them in spots, rebased them on the new GW plastic bases to go alongside my other Iron Warriors (and added a bit of guitar string there). After the new layer of varnish, I also went over all of the flesh by highlighting in spots with regular red paint and then with both Blood for the Blood God and Spirit Stone Red in different "patches" of the flesh, which gives it a glistening viscera look - but with some variation and unevenness to it. This stand out in person more than in photos, but you can see it best in the left arm and hand of the Obliterator above.







I believe that I have one more of these guys in metal, but I'm damned if I can find him. I know I only painted the pair at the time since one of the initial targets for my IW was for a small "Kill Team"-style army of about 600 or 800 points, and I only planned to use two Oblits in that force. I did recently find another six (!) of them in finecast which I had picked up cheap on eBay a few years ago with a thought of being able to do more with them than the metal ones. So... that might become a thing? I've got some other things way before them in the queue right now, but I guess I should consider painting them before GW releases a new version that causes me to lose all interest in the ones I have...



The last "Family Photo" pic just works to show them alongside their uninfected brethren. Their armour shows a lot more corrosion, discolouration and muck than the regular Iron Warriors. I'd say that the Obliterators are much less interested or able to properly maintain their armour. Especially as it's now fused to them.

Hm.. I wonder if Gal Vorbak models would work well as Obliterators or Mutilators? They always struck me as the most awesome Possessed models, but maybe there's something to be had there?

Nice, icky work there. I particularly like the haedswap. I never thought that the stretchy-face Thing heads worked very well on these models.

You could be onto something with the Gal Vorbak subbing as Obliterators or more perfectly Mutilators. But do they have the bulk to make it work?

Nice Oblits, the head swap works really well, as does the red with the metal/yellow/black.

EDC

gruesome!

Good to see you back Azazel's, and even better that you have been painting whilst away from the blogging. The oblits look great, and the little modifications really help make the difference. As you say the red flesh looks a lot better than the pinky tartare look from GW.

Good luck in finding the missing metal miniature, and it will be awesome to see these combined with the finecast ones you have.

Crikey Az - you've made a mad improvement on them. The head swap to start was definelty a wise move. That kit really is a nasty ugly piece of yuk but you've certainly elevated them. Great job.

Yeah, I think the head swap is lovely. The big thing it does is to make them look less like "space fantasy chaos ogres" or something. Yet as ever with helmets, it somewhat dehumanises them too. Overall it's a really good look. Super Meat Boy meets chaos knight = win.

Good stuff here Azazel. The Obliterators carry the Iron Warriors paint scheme pretty nicely.

Nice and gribbly. The oblits are a bit doofy for what is a fairly interesting concept, but you've done a good job with yours.

They are awesome I was thinking of starting my own small Iron Warriors force to go with my Black Legion force - got any tips?
I also share your dislike for the Obliterator kit but you've done a fantastic job making it look a lot better. Tbh you needed to include something like Obliterators, as long range firepower really does fit the fluff of the Iron Warriors and yours look extremely cool. Good Work!

Thank you all, I feel that they're decent, and I'm happy enough with that. The headswaps certainly help a lot with that.

 DaemonColin wrote:
They are awesome I was thinking of starting my own small Iron Warriors force to go with my Black Legion force - got any tips?

Uh... go for it? What kinds of tips do you mean? If I can help with suggestions on some aspect than I'm more than happy to do so.


I've gotten a little more done in the last week or so, but while I'm waiting on the final touches of letting flock dry and photo taking, here's the three models at the front of the current paint queue. Doesn't mean they'll be finished next, but I've been working on them the last few painting sessions.



I've never really been a fan of "blue librarians" and have never painted one as such, but I thought I'd experiment (partially for my eventual for my GK and DW) by adding some metallic blue panels on this guy, and of course blue and gold work well together. The red robes are because I've been using those as a part of the Minotaurs due to their Spartan lineage, and the cut of his robe works well as another common element. I'm a little concerned with potentially having too many (almost) primary colours at work on him, though between the red, blue and yellow (gold). I've got to figure out what colours to use for his ribbed cabling, and the same for the Dread, for that matter (using red for the non-ribbed there). The dread is simply an AoBR plastic with a couple of bits of Minos brass etch added. I might add some hanging tabard bling later. Not sure. I can always bling up a second dread.

The Mordheim elf has been WIP for years (back as far as when I for a time added flock before finishing and varnishing - WTF was I thinking?) - and I've finally gotten to work on him again with a view to completing him within a few days/the next few painting sessions.

I'll get into cleaning up the monthly pics in the Tale of Painters soon.

Nice work Azazel. Love that minotaur dreadnought. I love the blue tint on the librarian.

Awwwwwww, that elf!

The blue looks excellent on the librarian. I think it will be perfect for the grey Knights.

Not commented in a while, just lurking.

Those Iron Warriors look great, and the elf's posing is pretty neat.

That librarian is going to look great when he is finished.

I've painted up a couple of units of "Fir Bolg" Skeletons from Brigade Models now, and this makes the third. Or the fourth, depending on whether I count those spearmen as one or two units, as they can make for either a Horde or two Regiments. I know I've got another 16 archers (two troops of 8) to paint as well, so once I clean up my desk in the next week, I'll spend some time cleaning the archers up and then hit them with the spray can. This time, we've got Skeletons with Sickles.



Staying with the same colour scheme I've used on their predecessors and in keeping with the rest of the army - Red and Black, Iron and Brass, Rust and Verdigris, Cadmium-Red wood - and Bone. The tabards and cloth this time have been given a Par Chevron in red and black.



The standard came from one of the other Fir Bolg skeleton sets, and working out how I'd create the banner took a bit of time. Eventually I settled on a cloth banner, cut from the material taken from an old pair of shorts and fixed with PVA. The Hero is actually their Skeleton Leader with Axe model, with the axe cut and trimmed into a sickle of sorts. I painted the second of the two champions with the same Par Chevron, though reversed. I'd like to move him to a different unit down the line, and perhaps replace with a drummer, but another £3.50 for a drummer feels a little steep when the champion - a mod of the same base figure plus two troopers runs £4.00 by comparison. I dunno. I'll figure it out later. I'd originally planned on giving the two champions different shields as well, but when it came time to complete the command figures, I realised that the shield I'd initially selected would not have looked good angled at 90 degrees, and by then I had already ended up using the last "horned skull" shield on one of the troopers, and didn't feel like tearing the superglue-and-greenstuff mod apart.





Only two sculpts, unfortunately. I like having one-piece metal sculpts for these models, but I do wish there was a little more variety in the number of sculpts, like there typically was in the Old(Hammer) days. The shields also reveal that rather than having given the models that lack sculpted shields freehand shields, I used some of the old-school, 20-year-old Warhammer Undead shield decals that I found recently. Once again, these guys were painted using the "Warm Bone" method, starting with a cheap cream spray can from the local hardware store - with much of the work done bit by bit during lunch breaks at work. The final work was completed last Monday, so these guys also qualify as my September Undead entry for the Tale of Painters challenge.


As per usual, the final shots show them off blu-taced down to a regiment base for KoW - which I really need to get around to playing again sometime soon. I've not done much tabletop gaming in the last couple of months, as it gets a bit too chilly out in the War Room, and as a result my regular gaming sessions with the group for the past few months have been digital (The Division, Destiny, Dead Island) rather than tabletop-oriented. Hopefully the weather can actually change a little now that Spring is here, and we can get some wargaming and tabletop gaming done again!

Those skellies are brilliant . I love the designs on the shields and banners

The skeletons are really nice, I like how you did the bone colour

The brass etch really adds to that Dread, it is a simple miniature but I still think it works as well as the more complicated kit. Am looking forward to the Mordheim elf as well, such a classic.

The Fir Bolg Skellies look excellent, the weapon swap champion and fabric banner really set the unit apart, as excellent as ever.

Love the skellies. The use of cloth rather than paper for the banner is inspired.

Fantastic skelemen Az!

Thanks guys. I've got more skellingtons to come soon! There's a bit of a backlog to photograph and write up. I do like how well the cloth banner came out, so I'll definitely be using that again on more units.

Did you start with white cloth and paint it or dip it into watered down paint?

It was a section of tan summer shorts material - a bit thinner than t-shirt material. After cutting to shape and size, I painted thinned down PVA onto the bottom part and then hung it off the model using superglue so the "hang" would be right. Went over the last bits (the superglued ones) with PVA once it had dried.

At that point, I just painted it - more or less as normal. This one is deliberately ragged, because undead. I'm thinking of using the same technique on the High Elf banner that's been cockblocking the completion of my Swordmasters unit for over a year.



While working on the Giant Slayers a few months ago, I ended up with quite a few metal slayers on my desk. With many models, especially those that I don't plan to paint in large batches of cloned models like skeletons or bunches of plastic rank & file. These guys - the Troll slayers were the second batch to be finished. I've got another half-dozen partly-done/barely started slayers on the bench to work through, so I'm sure they'll get back into the queue. Probably after I finish the dozen Vikings I'm working on - I'll have the first few of those to show off shortly.



These guys were a lot of fun to paint, but they also managed to cockblock me for a good month or more. Probably closer to two months. The issue was working out the tattoos. Yeah, I know. The thing is that I really wanted them to look "legit", so it took me ages to come up with designs that I was happy with. The runes in the back tattoo read in Dwarvish, while the ᛟ (Othal) rune on the shoulder is a rune that denotes "Odin".



It actually seems quite difficult to find Troll Slayers - as opposed to Giant/Daemon/Dragon Slayers - which strikes me as a bit odd. I didn't note the dates on the tabs of these guys before I started them. I just assumed that they were from the same era as the pile of Giant Slayers ('93-4) but looking through the catalogues on SoL it seems that GW used the Marauder sculpts for a solid decade or more. I only spotted these guys in tiny pictures inside the awful US "catalogues" from the mid-2000's stuffed into painted units.



My growing gang of Dwarven Slayers. These guys will eventually make up a full unit, but I'm doing these guys very much piecemeal - so it'll be a while before there's a full unit of these guys done.

Some nice stunties there Azazelx! Love the classic stripey pants.

Those are some nice Slayers. Are their hair/beards all the same colors, or are you introducing some variation in the orange? The photos look like the latter, but that may be a trick of the lighting.

Lookit dem dwarfs. Excellent

Thanks guys. And yes, Josh - the hair is a bit different. basically, every batch of dwarves has the hair done using more or less the same techniques, but with slightly different colours. I basically just paint their hair without recording the exact colours, and since I've got a whole bunch of red-browns, reds, oranges through to orangey yellows, it gives each group a slightly different look so the overall group has some variation without needing to go into pink or black mohawks.

I've finished some more of my many Reaper Bones figures that fit under the rather broad undead umbrella that I use. No stretch this time, though, as they're a bunch of skeletons. Originally sculpted by Bob Ridolfi, the Bones versions - somewhat predictably - suffer from mould lines, wobbly weapons and soft details. Still, they're not the most terrible models and they're good enough for RPGs or even standard troops on the table.






As usual, these guys were painted piecemeal over a period of time, mostly at work. They were a bit of an experiment - primed with the spray can and done in the normal manner, they were as sticky as all hell for awhile, but the acrylic paint over the top and the polyurethane spray seems to have settled it down. I skipped the decals on these guys because I didn't want to "waste" 20-year-old decals on Bones models and instead did the shield designs freehand... and of course they came out far better than decals would have.



They're a pretty odd number to make a unit out of, with nine models. Bones II backers got one of each, while they're now being sold in sets of three of each sculpts. I usually make a regiment from a dozen models, since they work out about right when based on 25mm rounds for the correct footprint of a KoW regiment.



With nine models here, I'll just shove the archers out of the front rank, and add a couple of random skeletons to make up the numbers. Turned out I could only find two, but good enough. I'm calling it a done regiment, but if (when) I end up with more random skeletons down the line, I can split or remake these guys into 2-hander, sword and board or archer regiments. For the time being, it gives me a second Undead unit for September's monthly Tale of Gamers challenge.



The unit is filled out with a couple of spare skeletons. One (the archer) is from Bones 1, and the other is from Dark World, a boxed Not-HeroQuest game from the 80's or 90's which I've rehabilitated figures from previously. It only gives me 11 so I'll have to sort out a 12th, but I'm still calling the unit functional for now.



And finally, as is the norm - the completed unit shot.

I wrote the following thoughts along with one of the first batches of Bones Skeletons I posted, and they're just as relevant now, so hey.

As models go, like many Bones, these do what they say on the tin, in a very basic manner. I'd really only recommend them for roleplayers. If you're playing D&D and want some cheap and cheerful skellys for your adventures, then these are a perfectly serviceable way to go. They even work okay if you're the kind of roleplayer who never paints their models, or just gives them a wash to bring out the detail. For wargamers, there are many better options out there, (especially for $2 each/$6 for three.) Still, I already owned these, they pass the three-foot test, and they've now gone from Unpainted to Painted, and we know that every time a miniature gets painted, a Kitten gets their Wings, so it's all good.

Those are fantastic, especially given that they are Bones. I still have a mostly-untouched Vampire pledge that I just can't seem to make myself crack open-- all that stark, snowy white really intimidates me.

I'd recommend opening it up, debaggie-ing them all, and then sorting them into different themes: Undead, Elves, Dwarves, Mosters, Chaos, terrain, etc and then storing them with the other figures of that theme that you own. That way it's not so much "painting Bones" but something mixed in amongst your Undead or Elves or whatever.

Also makes it easier to go through them and sort which figures you're going to set aside for your kids to learn to paint/give away/etc.

 Azazelx wrote:
I'd recommend opening it up, debaggie-ing them all, and then sorting them into different themes: Undead, Elves, Dwarves, Mosters, Chaos, terrain, etc and then storing them with the other figures of that theme that you own. That way it's not so much "painting Bones" but something mixed in amongst your Undead or Elves or whatever.

Also makes it easier to go through them and sort which figures you're going to set aside for your kids to learn to paint/give away/etc.

That's a pretty good idea. My son loves looking through my unpainted stuff already, it probably wouldn't be too hard to get him to help open all the little bags.

Nice skeletons, both the new and last batch. I really like the 'champion' from the last unit.

EDC

Those are pretty good Skeleton minis. Reaper minis look quite different-- in a very good way-- when nicely painted.

Those freehand shield designs are fantastic. They put my efforts along similar lines to shame! Really impressive work. Does kinda make me want to paint over my own skelly shields though. A how-to guide would be fantastic, if you ever get a chance.

Thanks Gents. I appreciate the feedback. This batch of Bones models is a lot nicer than the ones from Bones I. I didn;t go in for the core pledge of $100 worth of random junk in Bones III, so no more Bones skellys for me for awhile. I just said Bones too many times.

I'll do what I can next time I paint some undead shields, Ian. Hopefully it comes out as a reasonable guide.

These boxes are not on the hillside, nor are they made of ticky-tacky, but they are (almost) all the same.

Ok, this is a scenery post, and a simple one at that, as it deals with a few pieces of minor scatter terrain. A long time ago, I backed Mantic's Mars Attacks Kickstarter, and amongst all of the stuff that I received (and still haven't used.. shhh!) was a few sets of the scenery accessories.


Credit to Iron Saint’s Children of the Kraken Blog for the picture.

Naturally, I forgot to take a photo of the Accessory pieces before I started on any of this stuff, and Mantic's photos don't show them very well. It is in fact a very good gaming set. It turns out that I had four of them. Unless I find another 1 or 2 in boxes someday. I actually started painting the post boxes and rubbish bins back in summer, about 9 months ago, but managed to mess up the salt weathering. So the whole project went into limbo. A few days ago I spotted the box-barricades sitting on my painting desk and so decided to clean them up in a vaguely useful way - by painting them!



So here they are. Exciting, no? I kept them as generic as possible so they can work in as many settings as possible, from historicals through moderns, zombipocalypses and to sci-fi in about 28 to 38,000 years' time. (When most things are still oddly recognisable when compared to nowadays.)



I also found a couple of resin crates that had been bought in the 90's and sitting around part-painted for years, and spent the whole of 10 minutes that it took to finish them as well. I have the attention span of a flea, sometimes... I think they're probably originally from some set by Grendel/Scotia Grendel, since that's where most of my really old resin junk originates from.



Finally, some Zombipocalypse survivors, Space Marines and Dwarves help out with showing the scale and how they fit in decently well with all three disparate types of model. They're a little on the small side, and while they'll work well as meeples for barricades in games of Zombicide, they feel a little like those annoying foot-high "walls" that videogames use to keep our otherwise athletic heroes from straying outside of the designated play area... They might work better stacks on top of other items to create useful cover, but even as is they make for decent ground clutter.

I have very few regrets about backing the MA kickstarter. The street scenery is great. You'll get a lot of use out of those boxes.

Ah! Scatter terrain. Should take no time at all, but for some reason it takes ages...... (looks at pile of terrain )

Good job on the crates, wish I'd known about Kickstarter back when Mars Attacks was funding. I've heard backers were treated well.

Can I ask what you thought about Mantic as a company? Their latest Kickstarter is called Star Saga and I'm wondering about backing because it has some good minis and apparently will come with solo rules which is very appealing. But then I have a hideous amount of backlog, so it's probably not a sensible thought .

I've backed a lot of Mantic's KS, but at this stage, I have no trust that they will deliver in full what they promise to - because they have never actually managed to do that. Mantic are a company I want to like, and they do have some good products. Well... KoW is very good, but they seem to take the "close enough, good enough" route way too often - both with sculpt quality, rules quality, model materials, etc. Mantic's KS appeal has also dropped like a stone to me in the face of GW's renaissance - speaking for myself at least, I'd rather buy a copy (or two) of Prospero next month than risk yet another Mantic kickstarter clusterfeth that will deliver a Wave 1 in 12 months and Wave 2 another 6 months after that, followed by needing to follow-up. They've not yet delivered a KS that I haven't had to contact them to get fixed up - which can take months of back and forth emails and even direct contact with Ronnie. On top of this, regular material changes, content promises being broken, lettign Jake just churn out what he wanted to for Dungeon Saga and pretty much ignore the things he wasn't personally invested in (co-op play, solo play) and I'm just over their Kickstarters. Sure, they've told us that they have a new team and "this time, it'll be different - we really mean it this time!" But they've been saying that each time for quite a few campaigns, so I consider myself burnt.

Their... I'll call it incompetence and ignorance to still have not worked out how Hub shipping works makes it even harder for me to back given changes that are happening to AU import laws. We're about to have GST (VAT) on all imports with no minimum threshold in the middle of next year - so KS with hub shipping are still appealing. So CMON, and even first-timers like Age of Conan and Siege of the Citadel have figured out what Mantic still have no idea about. Add to that their hefty shipping costs for KS as opposed to free shipping from many retailers when buying retail (including Mantic themselves!) and it's just another reason to avoid.

So the take-away from all of that is that Star Saga will be worth keeping an eye out when it hits retail and big discounts. I consider the risk and additional "hidden" costs of backing (shipping + duties) to be too high. Especially when things like The Burning of Prospero are on the edge of release to retail.

Ahem.



Since this became a thing a couple of weeks ago (along with a roof leak that has had half of the house lights out of action only the night before), I haven't been doing much proper painting, and typing for a week was limited to pecking at the keys with one hand. While I'm now only wearing the brace at work and to sleep - and only a small amount at home, and can now type with both hands again, neither painting nor blogging have been all that much of a thing, and my cleaning up of the paint desk got halfway done (underneath) but I only got as far as cleaning up the Old Citadel/Coat D'Arms/P3 style pots that were scattered about. I'd been wanting to write up a post about the second squad of Minotaurs Space marines I finished recently, but my mood hasn't been great enough to concentrate on it, so I'm doing this one instead on the scenery I've just finished up with last weekend.



I have done a little bit of painting of sorts though - more simple scatter scenery. These crates come from the various DUST Tactics boxed sets I've accumulated over the years. Like so much in my collection, they sat around unused for ages before I got them out and primed them with PSC US Armour and Dunkelgelb Warspray cans. I did that several months ago, before winter set in and made spraying in any form very difficult. Since I could do very little else with my wrist as it is, I got Marouda to help me out over the weekend and tried out the Plastic Soldier Company spray stains that I purchased several years ago but have avoided using on my models in favour of more controlled washes and so forth applied by brush. I didn't really enjoy using them, but they did the job - especially once I went over them with a drybrush afterwards (and a little dark spot wash on the US ones). I completed them with a gloss polyurethane varnish afterwards for hardiness, followed by Testor's Dullcote to give them a nice matt finish.



The Axis crates were painted in the same manner as the US ones, though painting them and even looking at them now brings huge annoyance, as the assembly line workers in China seem to have mis-assembled several of the crates, as they have three different types of end-cap mixed across two different types of chassis. Still, if I don't look too hard, I'll be able to get past it.



This style of supply drop canister is loosely based on the Abwurfbehälter that were used by the Fallschirmjäger during WWII. The real ones went through several iterations - beginning as wood and finally ending up in a metal style that was the most common and well known. In WWII the Abwurfbehälter had specific markings that denoted their contents, though in the case of these Dust ones, I've decided to keep mine entirely without markings - so as to be more generic to work more easily across more games - From DUST (if I ever play it) to Konflict '47 to 30&40k, various 28mm Star Wars games and hell, even moderns or Bolt Action.

Firstly Az - my goodness! I hope your arm keeps getting better. I had a serious infection in my left hand a few years back which got me hospitalised for nearly a week. I knew it was bad when on the first day the surgeon said he'd have to consider amputation. I was lucky it started settling and I didn't turn in to a one-armed bandit. I had to wear a brace though for weeks and it irritates like mad so I have a vague idea about what you're putting up with. Get well soon.

Good on you for doing the scatter terrain. I really like the effect to be honest so I'd be chuffed.

Thanks for the honest Mantic assessment. I get that vibe from reading around, but good to hear from someone I know. The stretch goals do look very appealing for Star Saga and I would really love to find a solo tabletop mini game with good minis. I'm just not sure yet about forking out for yet another game when i would rather find a way to play the recent GW games solo having bought them because of the great value for money. And of course I'd rather buy more GW stuff - that Genestealer cult Goliath is pretty gorgeous and the banner bearer

Loving the scatter terrain. If the crates are really bugging you feel free to send them to me and I will take that stress off of you ;-)

Well, they're done now - and like so much other stuff that's not fun when working on, once they're finished I feel much better about them. I've got some Sedition Wars crates and barricades on the go now, but with the wind how it is right now I don't think I'll be spraying them today... we already had a huge branch torn off the tree in front of our place and I think I'll have to go re-brace the rear fence when the wind eases. Hope you're holding up well!

Sounds like you've been having a rough time of late, man. Hope the arm issue sorts itself out soon.

I am in a similar boat to you in regards to Mantic. GW have been laying siege to my wallet this year with their new stuff. Haven't bought a scrap of Mantic since Dungeon Saga, and I've not painted anything save for Plague from DZ and a nasty looking troll sculpt. Restic put me off so much that I had to wait for their HIPS Plague models, which I've yet to receive.

Nice looking terrain, all that stuff will add up to make a really interesting battlefield! Going back a bit, seems I forgot to comment on the latest batches of Dwarves and Skellies, looking good!

Hope the arm clears up soon!

 TP^DC Deputy Manager wrote:

I would really love to find a solo tabletop mini game with good minis.

If you're open to the fantasy side of things, check out the D&D Adventures System games (Wrath of Ashardlaon, Castle Ravenloft, Temple of Eternal Evil and one other whose name escapes me). The rules are fast, simple, chaotic and fun and are played solo/co-op, all the Monsters are controlled by cards that list the action they take in certain circumstances. The models range from rather good to appalling, but as it's all pretty generic fantasy, you're one Reaper/GW/Mantic/Red Box Games order away from quality replacements should you want them.

Yeah, I'll second the D&D games. Actually Para - did I get you those last things for it? If not, please PM me with a reminder of what they were..

Yeah, I'm pretty sure I got those, thanks!

Crates are looking grand, particularly considering how simple the models are, and the relatively small amount of time and effort you spent on them in terms of stages (though I guess there were several layers of drybrushing?).

I'm really behind when it comes to painting stuff. New term started at work a couple of weeks ago, and I am teaching five days a week and trying to get my PhD written up in the evenings. :(

 Paradigm wrote:
If you're open to the fantasy side of things, check out the D&D Adventures System games (Wrath of Ashardlaon, Castle Ravenloft, Temple of Eternal Evil and one other whose name escapes me). The rules are fast, simple, chaotic and fun and are played solo/co-op, all the Monsters are controlled by cards that list the action they take in certain circumstances. The models range from rather good to appalling, but as it's all pretty generic fantasy, you're one Reaper/GW/Mantic/Red Box Games order away from quality replacements should you want them.

Thanks for the suggestions. Sadly fantasy hasn't ever really appealed to me, but good to know there are potential AI systems out there.

Sorry for derailing your blog with this Az

No worries TP^DC.
Someone has updated the Space Hulk solo rules, based on the ones from the Deathwing expansion for the original:
http://colorfulminis.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Dice-Roller-Space-Hulk-Solo-Rules-EN.pdf

Apparently Execution Force has solo rules as well. (Haven't played it yet). And then there's Zombicide.

I know some older board games like Gears of War have solo rules, and you could easily swap in a Space Marine model to replace the Gears.


Ian - there were 2 layers of drybrushing. At least on the US crates. I can't recall if the German ones had 1 or 2.

Thanks Az. I'll take a glance

I finally completed the last of these guys a few weeks ago now. As is usual, they (almost) all got started together and then kinda got split into pairs and trios to get through the detailing stage. I enjoy painting marines more as individuals, and it becomes less of a grind, so it works for me.







The sergeant is a bit of a bits-delve. New tactical legs, a 2nd edition powerfist, Anvil Industry "Vanguard" (not-Mk8) chest and cape and topped with a Puppetswar "Temistokles" head. I had to carve off the lower part of the PW helmet to allow it to fit into behind the gorget. The pteruges on both figures come from Anvil again, and the plasma gun came from my stockpile of FW bits. I went RT-old-school with the Plasma Gun paint since it fit in perfectly with the Minotaurs' weapon casings - red with copper coils. I considered doing something more fancy with his cloak, but he's just a sergeant and pure red works for Spartans. I'll get jiggy with someone else's cloaks down the road, I'm sure.








Something interesting about this squad is that with the exception of the Sergeant, they are all recycled/rescue marines - all of the torsos and legs came from Nerdfest09, when I purchased the scraps of his Blood Angels/Flesh Eaters force a few months ago. The heavy bolter guy was actually complete and painted by Nerdy and sent as a gift, so he had more of a touch-up to match the rest of the squad (and a FW resin shoulder added along with a new "Spartan" head replacing the bare head that will in turn go on a Carachodon or Flesh Tearer in the future).

The others were in various states, and so most have new heads and all have new arms, as they tended to be more CCW-geared - though a few were headless and many were 'armless anyway. I bought a couple of sets of Minotaurs pads off FW several years ago, and between the sets there were a few miscasts. FW were kind enough to replace them (their CS is pretty damn good) and so given the theme of this squad, I used a few of those pads here as well. Hopefully they don't stand out unless you're really looking for them! The second marine here is the "Corporal" who will be the second combat squad leader. He was chosen because of the small tabard and MK8 torso.








These three are just standard tactical Space Marine troopers. I tried to match up the shoulder pad types on these guys. Another Anvil Spartan head makes an appearance here as well.








Finally the last three of the squad, including another Spartan head and one marine that had been given some "battle damage" to one of his armoured greaves. The BA arm and bolter came out fine when painted in a non-BA style, and really I'm very happy with how these guys came out - especially as they're almost all "recycled" marines given new life. As these guys were completed in September, they count as an "additional unit" for my Tale of Gamers painting challenge. I need to try and get something finished this month for the challenge, but it's going to be bloody hard to do so...

Next up for the Minotaurs will be a Librarian, Captain (or other officer type) and a Dreadnought. I'm waiting on a Devastators box to steal an open right hand for the Captain, and I need to get some very thin plasticard for the Dread, so both of those have stalled out. Once I get back into painting then, I think the Librarian will be next up...

That's a nifty squad of marines. All the after-market bitz make everyone stand out. I particularly like the white outlines rather than solid white tactical squad markings on the shoulders. Were those freehand?

Awesome squad there, the Sergeant is superb!

Yeah those are great! Good luck with your continued recovery.

I really love your Minotaurs, such a clean and neat look that works perfectly for the color scheme. Good luck with the arm - I wear braces like that at night to mitigate my finger/hand RSI.

Looking Great, which minotaurs are they the original ones or the lords of Terra's lackeys?

You really are not having much luck of late Az, hope that things pick up for you.

Minotaur wise they look great, the mixture of Third party bits really makes them stand out, the burnished armour looks great.

I will add to the chorus. The miniatures are looking excellent. Just the right amount of additional bits to make them stand out and look unique without messing with the overall.

Really nice work on those minotaurs. The hues in the armour are very nicely done.

Thanks guys,
The arm is mostly good now. I'll still wear the brace to work this week to prevent me from forgetting and reinjuring it, and I'm still wearing it to sleep for the same reason. I don't need it during the day at least.

The Tactical arrows aren't freehand, they're off the Minotaurs FW transfer sheet, which I recently found out has been discontinued. Sonofa... Just means I have to be even more precious with the transfers on the sheet I have...
These are the "modern" Minotaurs. The cold, sinister enforcers of Imperial Justice. What I find with "alternative" marine bits - loyalist or chaos - is that when mixed in with official GW parts they really enhance the models, but when models are made entirely (or mostly) of aftermarket bits they just look like cheap imitations. Even when they're actually more expensive.

And now something new. Well, recent.

Another pair of Bones painted up a few weeks ago, this time it's Sandra Garrity's Pillar of Good and Pillar of Evil from Reaper's Bones line, from their second Bones Kickstarter.


Reaper Bones 77246: Pillar of Good with Citadel Reiksgard for scale as the model has a feel of nobility and goodness. I don't have any painted SigMarines at this point, so it fell to the knight in shining armour to provide the reference model. No Sir ForScale here!


Reaper Bones 77247: Pillar of Evil with Citadel Dark Elf for scale. Seems this marble pillar is a bit crooked.


The pair of these were my first, very rough attempt at painting marble. I'd already started in on both of them before I decided to go with a marble effect rather than simply stone, so perhaps the colours aren't what they could be. I also based both of them on 32mm citadel bases with a metal washer superglued underneath to give them more stability. As you can see here the Evil pillar isn't entirely straight because Reaper Bones! They're not bad pieces, especially for the KS price. Both styles would work better in pairs, but I only have the one of each and I think sourcing a second one of each and then trying to match-paint them is too much mucking about. They're also probably both more suited to "inside dungeon" type settings than outdoor battlefields.

I used the new "Gloss" versions of Nuln Oil and Axgrax Earthshade on both to see how they perform - the Gloss part not being especially relevant as I varnish my models, but the way that the pigment behaves. I think they did both work well. There was a wash of off-white paint used on the "Good" pillar in an attempt to embed the veins "under" the surface a little. I considered dulling down the bases with some pigments, but I figured that keeping them shiny keeps them a little more flexible in setting.

Anyway, these were pretty quick and easy to do, and it's another two models done.

And there you go again Az, I love those Minotaur's you do so started working on Asterion Moloc again for Whaley Lol! you just make them look so cool!

The marble looks fantastic in my opinion. Great work! These would make great objective markers for matched play AoS. I might need to look into these :-)

I love that evil pillar you've done there. Looks pretty creepy!

I'm more in love with general Pineapple you got there, great to see him!

Lurker popping out into your thread here.

I really like your take on the Minotaur, I've never seen them painted like that before. It's probably my favorite, truth be told. Especially the heavy bolter and not mk8 marine.

I agree that mixing bits is the way to go, as an entirely anvil industry or Kromlech bit Marine looks out of place IMO.

That knight looks really good too, and I hate it that your arm got hurt. I hope it recovers swiftly.

Az, they Look fantastic. Superb stuff. Love the helmet swaps. Really great looking squad

Those pillars look amazing in the marble style. Very effective. Gorgeous work.

Those bone towers are really cool. The marble effect you've achieved on both is very good.

Also, awesome work on the Minotaur squad, love the head on the sgt.

EDC

Thanks all, I'm happy enough with the marble pillars for a first try, though I do see a lot of flaws when I look at them. I've got another green marble thing on the go for a friend, though the marble part was done at pretty much the same time as these but on a slightly different base, and then eventually when I do something else I'll try to improve on it. It might help if I know that I'm going to try marble when I start it, and not partway through... Opposing objective markers are a good call, Bottle. I might well use them as that. Thanks for the idea!

My arm is finally free. Last night was the first night I've slept without the brace in 3 weeks, and I even turned the light power back on downstairs last night, so following a week of work and a bit of rest this weekend, I'll hopefully get back to the painting! I've even got the plasticard I need to progress on the Minotaurs Dread, and the Devastator squad arrived, so now I've got the right hand I was waiting on for the Minos hero.. So it's all looking good.

Glad to hear that you're on the mend. I like those pillars-- nifty scatter terrain like that really livens up a game.

Glad that you are near as damn it up to full speed again, I am very eager to see what you do with the Minotaur Dread as well. The pillars look great, I always find that terrain is a nice little break from painting 28mm infantry models and it is good that you used those as a test for the project for your friend.

Thanks guys. I've got some more scatter terrain on the go, and I've now got the plasticard that I need to raise the dread off his base by about .75mm so I can continue it. I've still been relatively quiet on the blogging (and interacting with other bloggers) front as of late. Aside from my wrist injury which has now almost fully recovered, work is heading into the end of year madness that won't stop until a couple of days before Christmas, which has resulted in my heading up to bed around 7pm to watch TV/YouTube videos until I fall asleep not long after on quite a few occasions. Likewise, the three weeks we had without lights downstairs put a bit of a damper on things, and as a result, lots of my spare time has been spent in Destiny's latest Rise of Iron expansion instead of painting. The local spate of horrendous weather - though not a bar on what some of my friends around the world have had to cope with - has also made things like spraying and even painting impossible for days on end at times.



But, I have gotten some things finished. Here is Aenur, Sword of Twilight. AKA "That Mordheim Elf". I've had him since release, and it naturally took quite a few years before I started on him, and then stopped for quite a few. I started him at least 4-6 years ago and probably longer than that - during the brief period where I decided to add the static basing flock to unfinished, unvarnished models for some unfathomable reason. I do remember having a mental block on him around the embroidered pattern on the inside of his robe - and that was it! Shoved aside for a good half-decade. He's been back on my paint desk for over a year now, originally part of the "finishing things off" kick I got onto in the latter half of 2015.



To tell the truth, I'm still not totally satisfied with the patterns on the inner robe, but the addition of some patterns inspired by the triskele combined with vinework create a kind of flowing look that I deemed to be good enough to complete the model with.



In the end I decided to paint all three of his gems in red, rather than the green or blue tones I had been considering. There's something to be said for models that don't have a spot of red on them, but in this case I think it works - on the outside he wears a cloak of natural tones, with only the brooch and his earring a hint of the elven finery that hides underneath.



Aside from Mordheim, he will of course be able to find use in various fantasy roleplaying and gaming instances - from Pathfinder to any dungeon crawl boardgames - and I'm sure I'll find somewhere for him to stand in the Elven KoW army.

I really like the choice to go basic concealed on the outside, but under the cloak is all the elven bling. Really effective choice.

Great stuff there, Azazel. Love the cloak

Very nice. He looks just right.

Aenur is such a classic sculpt, possibly the definitive Warhammer/Old World Elf for me. Great to see him brought back to life with a fine piece of painting. I kind of see where you are coming from with the inner robe, but most of us would just leave it plain, so it is no issue for me. Exceptional work on the face, great blending work there.

Thanks guys

Some time ago now, I backed the Stonehaven Miniatures Dwarf Kickstarter. The Kickstarter managed to pretty much deliver on time and provided a rather nice assortment of Dwarven RPG tropes for a very reasonable price. They have run several other campaigns, both before and after but none resonated with me in the way that the Dwarves did, so it's been the only one I've backed, since a bunch of random gnomes, halflings, half-orcs or even elves don't resonate with me in the way that Dwarves do. They've got a nice little line of trolls as well, but at US$20 a pop plus international postage, they're out of my impulse shopping range. Still, they have a nice range if you're looking for an RPG-themed model from any of the ranges they offer.

Anyway, this post isn't here to be an advert. It's to show some models~!



The three that I've painted so far. I found another trio part-painted in a figure case the other day, so I might get some more done before the end of the year! The Stonehaven models have something about them that's a throwback to the late '80's-early '90's. In some ways it adds to their charm and in others it makes aspects of the models quite meh. Many of them are quite "flat" in the same way that many one-piece models of that era were, and while the details are great in some spots, they're a bit flat and plain in others - particularly on faces, and especially on the females (and that skull above!) They're nice models, but their sculptors are no Perrys, Prows or Adams.



This guy was started quite some time ago - probably not long after I received my KS models. For some reason he lagged out, and was finally picked up and completed a few days ago alongside Aenur from the previous update. I went for a Dwarf Slayer look, as I figure that a bit of spiky armour doesn't preclude the seeking of an honourable death in combat. I tried to add some tonal qualities to his weapons and armour to make them look well used without going down the road of rust and decrepitude. He'll be incorporated in with the other slayer models I've shown and worked on, and will likely have an additional role in my eventual larger dwarf projects.



Speaking of decrepitude, here's the Undead Dwarf. The main feature of this model is his arms and armour, to which I've tried to make look both uncared-for but still in use. Hence not going to town with the rust effects. The skull sculpt is lacking a little in terms of definition, and I didn't want to (couldn't be bothered to) paint in depth in the maxilla, so I painted it "as is". I do like having some non-human undead, so he'll probably find a home in the Undead army in some form eventually, as he was started long before I began to raise the undead hordes.



Dead? Knocked out? Drunk? Or just sleeping? That series of questions explains why this unconscious dwarf is painted and simply laid on a round, plain brown base devoid of all "context markers" like blood, grass, weapons, shield or a helm, or even a beer stein. I wanted to keep this fellow as non-specific as possible so that the model can be as flexible as possible. he could lay slain on a battlefield or lying unconscious on the dirt(y) floor of a cell or a dungeon. He could be passed out in the horse stables after way too much boozing. Whether he's being used to mark the long sleep or just a nap between goblin-slaying, this guy is done!

Awesome work!

The not-Slayer really benefits from not being as over-the-top as pretty much all the GW ones, something about that sculpt gives a sense of war-weariness and resignation rather than the maniac look you more commonly see on Slayers, as if he's pissed that 'he's just too damn 'ard and still hasn't found anything capable of giving him the death he's seeking.

Thanks Para. I've got quite a decent amount of Slayers to work my way through here, and I think once I finish with the mid-late 90's ones it'll become a lot more interesting.

Wow - Haven't caught up with your blog for a while, but those dwarves are amazing!

Dwarves look really good. I like the undead one, need more variety in undead models. Just because humans tend to be the creepy Necromancer types doesn't mean they would try to raise anything.

Yeah, so I haven’t been blogging for awhile now. It happens around this time of year – from September to the start of December work really heats up. This year, I’ve pretty much been working every day at work, after work, on days off and on the weekends for the past few weeks – so I’m tired as <pick your profanity> right now.

What I did manage to do for the first month or so was keep on painting, if not blogging or taking many photos, or being active online. This is one of the things I managed to finish. The Reaper Bones pillars I worked on in October were in many ways a lead-in to this model, which I’ve painted for Tarmor, from the Dragons of Lancasm blog. At this point it’s actually been painted for… well, over a month. 6 weeks perhaps? I dunno. We don’t manage to catch up often due to work and conflicting schedules, and so hobby things tend to go between via some mutual friends, and with work the way it’s been I’ve seen less of them lately, and kept forgetting to pass it on when I have…




Almost every time I see this model, the above Simpsons quote pops into my head.



Dating from about 1985, This model is something of a rare breed these days – something I’ve painted for someone else, which is pretty much something I never do anymore. I just don’t have the time these days, and I have way too many models of my own – and I certainly don’t need the money that I used to get for commissions back in the 90’s anymore.



When I first saw the model, my initial thoughts were to do it in what I guess is a pretty “traditional” manner – painting the spine in bone, and firey red-orange bodies and tentacles crawling around the red eye. After a bit of quick reflection, I visualised pretty much the exact scheme I’ve actually painted it in. The spine and ribs sculpted out of a dark green marble, while ethereal spirits writhe around the eye of Sauron, which sucks the light from the creatures around it – providing a nice contrast, and an ersatz eye socket effect.



As the ethereals and the throne itself create a rather cold feel, the warm colours of the eye – the redness of the iris and the yellowed eyeball – create a nice contrast that makes The Eye of Sauron really stand out.



While basing is an important thing to consider, there was a kind of dichotomy at play here. I used a rolled-edge base as I wanted the throne to be raised up a little to represent its importance and also to protect the model – old lead chips easily. At the same time, I wanted the floor to be rather understated and generic – both so the model can be used in different settings and also so the actual throne remains the complete focus to the eye. To this end, I went with a simple texture on a rather dull grey. It will fit into dungeons and the like, or also outside if needed, with only a slight greenish tinge/glow to where the floor meets the edges of the ethereals.

Now I just need to get the thing across town to him…

Great to see you back!

That green marble effect looks wonderful

I feel you with regards to how busy these last months of the year are, happy to see you've made a return, no matter how small it may be.

Welcome back. That's a pretty wild model.

Thanks guys! Hopefully I'll manage to get a lot more posts up now, and get through the bits of stuff I've painted in the interim as well. Here’s a model I apparently completed last year. I figured this out because I just found the photos dated 4th July, 2015 in my “Orcs” folder.



I purchased this model back in the 1990’s, left it to sit in a box for a decade or so, and then started it – only to leave it in that part-painted limbo for a few further years. Given that it was completed last year in May-June, it would have been one of the initial models that led me to my “finish things off” push of the second half of 2015. Back int he day it was a Heartbreaker model, from the people who brought you WarZone 1st and 2nd edition. These days the model is owned or licenced by Ral Partha Europe, who prefer to be called RPE since they now have little to nothing to do with the original Ral Partha. Thankfully, we can safely ignore the convoluted backstory and still simply and easily just buy the model if we’re interested, along with its brethren. And no, I’m not affiliated or reimbursed by RPE – or anyone else for that matter!



The yellow and black dag pattern is something that dates the model as well. I probably wouldn’t do the same these days, I’d keep the copper/bronze scales, but the patterned trim would probably just be done in a quick and simple cadmium red-brown. Similarly, the skulls would probably be done in a metal – either copper or steel – rather than as carved bone. I’ve moved away from painting every skull or bone I see on armour as bone. Regardless, it’s a great armoured orc figure, and I feel that it still stands up well today. The default sculpt looks quite 2D, but simply bend-rotating the axe head forward helps that aspect out a lot.

I’ve been doing some rebasing of “leader”-type and larger figures onto 32mm bases of late. I’ll have to have a proper look and decide if this guy is an appropriate candidate…

That is a lovely Orc sculpt, just so much character. I like the dag pattern a lot, definitely a throwback to the 90's when they were all over Orcs and Orks but just too much work for me. I am of the strong opinion that almost everything looks better on 32mm bases, it just amuses me given the kerfuffle that surrounded the topic when they were released with the new BA Tactical kit.

Nice work on the throne, really 'eye catching'

Ork is cool, I really like the black/yellow dagger pattern.

EDC

I love the throne. Looks like something out of an Elric story.

I have been away too long... those dwarfs on the last page are awesome.

As are the minis on this page. Damn that chair is creepy. Hang in there, keep at it, low it off for another month or three, whatever best promotes your own mental well-being.

The throne is super creepy. Would be a fine addition to a dungeons and dragons set up.

Really like the ork. Could easily fit into a sci fi or fantasy setting quite easily.

I like heartbreaker minis - especially their goblins!

That chair is so cool! and your paint job certainly brings it to life (so to speak, it's a chair after all)

That throne is nicely creepy and weird. Good call with the colors.

It's interesting how the Citadel "house style" for orcs and Orks really influenced, and was influenced, by so many other ranges of the time. That mini, or the Black Tree Design orcs, work better with GW's 90s models than GW's current models!

Great work as always!

Thanks guys, finally finished work for the year and starting to try and find time to catch up on things now. I've still got to get that chair back to its owner, hopefully in the next week or two now. It's no wonder that a lot of the Heartbreaker orcs (and others) work so well with GW's 90's orcs - they're sculpted by the same guy. Kev Adams did a ton of work for other companies once he left GW, and he's still pretty much sculpting the same stuff now - for Foundry's new line.

And on that very me topic, I have a couple more orcs to share today. These were started god-only-knows how long ago (seriously, I have NO idea) and finished during the long period recently where I was too busy and burnt out by work to post much – but still doing what I could to get some painting in.



The smaller one is from 1993, so the early days of WHFB 4th edition. He’s definitely a variant sculpt to the commander to the 1992 Rock Lobber. I’ll have to find, build and paint it. I may have even painted the other crew in the past few years, so that should theoretically be an easy unit to reunite and complete. Anyway, he’s listed in the Black Catalogue 4 (1994 filled with 1993 models) as “Orc with Sword 4”.



The larger orc is found in the same catalogue. Called “Orc Big’Un with Mace”, this pair is clearly from the period where the interesting names of 3rd edition and before had been dropped to be replaced with upfront descriptions. I actually rebased him recently onto the 32mm, as there was quite a lot of overhand on the 25mm round I had him on. I plan to continue to drop large orc models onto the 32mm bases.

Both will eventually find use in various games including Kings of War, though I’m not sure what as exactly for the big guy. Their orc list is lacking pretty severely in decent analogues. When I recently read that KoW plans to add more units to the Orc and Goblin armies, I suggested to some members of the RC that they add something to represent the archetypes of “bigger meaner orcs” and “barbarian/berserker orcs” I was brushed off since they were clearly analogues to Big’Uns/Black Orcs and Savage Orcs, while they want to go in a more original direction. This from the people who started out by bringing us a range of alternative WHFB models for Orcs, Dwarfs, Elves, Chaos Dwarfs and followed up with the highly original Space Orx, Space Skaven, Forge Fathers (Space Dwarfs/Squats), and the Uncharted Empires book filled with rules for not-WHFB armies. I mean, I really do appreciate the rules, but don’t even pretend that there’s a precedent of being particularly original. I don’t actually begrudge Mantic their "not-" origins, nor do I begrudge any good attempts to make something new or turn an old “joke” concept into a new, interesting thing. The space skaven concept is ok, but the name "Veer'Myn"... it's right up there with "Mon'Keigh for primary-school level idiot humour.

To be fair, we’ve seen the old “Codex: Fishmen” joke work out well with both Tau (GW) and Naiads (Mantic). But instead of orc berserkers or badass huge orcs, giving us the pun-tastic "flying pigs" as their "original" alternative...

Hope you enjoyed my models and my Christmas Eve Mantic Rant!

Nice work on the orcs, as usual. I love the Gobbo Green skin, and envy the sculpted shields.

As far as the Mantic Orc army list, I'm pretty happy with it as it stands. Of course, my orcs are all Mantic models, the vast majority of which are from the KoW1 Kickstarter, so I don't really have anything that isn't represented. That said, couldn't you simulate savage orcs and Big 'Uns using magic items?

They are soooooo cool dude! I'm now going to go and see if I've got any

I miss the days when orcs looked like this.

Classic Orcs are awesome. Something about them was just fun and made a game which ostensibly violent and brutal just that little bit amusing and lighthearted.

Looking great! Ruglud's armoured orcs were my favourite orcs from around that time, sadly sold mine in the wilderness years for beer money

Thanks guys - I have a few more classic orcs on the way, but they got shoved to the side as I've kept starting up new models in the last few weeks. Also, at this point in time I'd like to wish you all and your families a Merry Christmas!

Josh - I might look into that, but it's a bit of a weak workaround that the RC keeps throwing up. Back when they were playtesting UC, I suggested a few variants for Werewolves since I have a pile of the Confrontation plastics, which can be armed with spears, or dual wielding, or other stuff. They agreed with me, but said that they probably wouldn't get around to it and so their suggestion was to use Magic Items. Which doesn't work so well when you have large armies (you know, KoW's whole thing) and more than 1 unit of that given type due to the 1x limit on magic items (especially with bloody werewolves being units of 3-6). They're also flat priced, rather than properly priced and balanced in the way that units of different sizes are.

The sculpted shields fit well with their belt buckles/stomach guard that has stylised suns/ogre face on them, which is why they both got them. I tried using the gemstone paint for the red on the shields to give them a richer, laquered look. The tragedies of youth, eh, Slinky? I sold off my entire, multi-platoon Imperial Army/Imperial Guard army made of 1e IA metals, 1.5e IG metals with plastic arms, original sentinels, a couple of squads of supporting squats, mole mortars and tarantulas... I bought my first Amiga secondhand with the funds off my sister's then-husband. Nothing like family to look after you and rip you off a little when you're young, eh?

Nice lookin' Orcs.

This is what I’d planned for my Spooky Halloween post! Zombies! Yes, I finished these that long ago. Instead, it’s my Boxing Day post, because… Zombies?

Now that I have some time off work, I’ll be able to take photos more frequently, and so once the small backlog of painted stuff is gotten rid of, I’ll be much more up to date. I’ve got a couple of mat reviews I’m keen to get onto as well, but it won’t be for a few more days that I get a chance to go out to the War Room and start cleaning it up (which it needs, bigtime!)

So anyway, these guys were started right on the heels of the second dozen zombies I painted for KoW, back around May. While the plan originally called for a fourth set to follow these – making either 4 regiments or 2 hordes in KoW terms, my Zombienthusiasm is pretty much completely sapped now, as opposed to fired up after finishing the first dozen Zombies. The Mantic figures are nice ones, but there are so few interesting combinations, even with Mantic’s Ghoul parts thrown into the mix.



As you can see, I went even further afield for kitbash parts on these guys. The additional parts beyond the Mantic Ghouls this time came from Mantic’s Sci-Fi zombie sprue, the new(ish) Citadel Ghouls, and two crawlers drawn from Wargames Factory’s Zombie Vixen set who can be seen at either extreme of the crawlers above. I wanted a little bit of gender representation, and the closest I could really find were the WGF set, which is, well, a little average. The figures are a little bit too sexualised overall, but more importantly are verrry spindly compared to even the Mantic models, so the only ones that really were able to fit in were a couple of crawlers. As you can see above, I finally found that errant model that went missing from the very first dozen, and so he got finished as well alongside these guys – next to his twin. I guess the next batch will only need to be 11 zombies, then. My favourite amongst these 5 has to be the one reaching for the sky. I rotated the “base” and added a bloodied femur out front this time to give a different “sitting down” look rather than just going with the usual crawler setup as I did with the wonder twins next to him.



The second rank has what are probably two of my favourite zombies of all the ones I’ve painted. The gruesome fellow dragging along half of a well-chewed corpse, and one I call “go home zombie, you’re drunk!”. The stein comes from a plastic GW dwarf kit while the arm-with-meal comes from the current GW zombie kit, as does the ruined face which fits zombies much more than ghouls for me at least. The legs on the two leftmost models both come from Mantic’s sci-fi zombies kit, but they’re generic enough to fit in here. I’ve continued to simply use dark grey/black rags for my zombies rather than a more realistic option of mixed clothing for equal parts “night horror” and “army colours” reasons.



Finally, we have the rear rank. An overly-hunched over female sci-fi zombie torso and head, another dismembered pair of legs (because I am nothing if not economical with my model parts!), another sci-fi zombie torso mounted on fantasy legs and super-dynamic zombie. Unfortunately I couldn’t get the camera low enough to really capture the details of all their heads and faces. The sci-fi model chewing on …something is an odd duck, with poorly-defined details, so you’re not quite sure if he has a gigantic mutant mouth or has a normal one and is simply pulling the sinewy muscle up from his hands. I just covered the whole mess in blood in the end and stopped worrying about it.



And now we finish up in the usual manner. Group shot and unit shots. Once I get at least another dozen zombies done, I’ll take another big group shot of the two hordes. After doing a fourth dozen Mantic zombies, I’ll probably do some Citadel zombies and see how a couple dozen of that very different style of model turns out.

Very nice zombies. I particularly like the slight variations in skin tones. It gives a hint of individuality that zombies don't usually have. I have to agree with you on the gut-munching Dz zombie. From the front, he's obviously eating someone, but it's impossible to make out any detail from the side. It's the same complaint I've had about all the HIPS models I've worked on this year--two part molds have to sacrifice lateral details that metal or restic can keep.

You, Theo and Thraxas are delving into some pretty hefty zombie obsessions... Such heresy must be dealt with!

Great stuff, Azazel. Say what you will about Mantic, but their Zombies are fantastic.

Thanks guys - I like to vary the skin tones in an attempt to keep myself a bit more interested. It helps to break up the monotony of painting essentially the same things over and over - it's the same reason I keep delving into the bits boxes to find alternative heads and arms and such for them.

I agree AoV - I think their zombies are probably their best models. Certainly right up there, as I haven't yet seen the newest Warpath stuff, nor painted the last KoW stuff, but I'd put them above the Lesser Abyssals and the Lizardmen for sure (and both of those are decent kits). I just wish they had more options!


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Hm, I just looked up my painting "numbers" for this year and last year.

Last year I got 388 done.
This year so far I have 367 done - so over the "base" target of 365, but 20 short of beating 2015. Unless I can get a lot more done in the next 5 days...

Loving the Willem Dafoe zombie.

Thanks. I'd like to say that he was built with Platoon in mind, but it was just a lucky coincidence (and I noticed it once he was built, too! )

Next up is something a little different to the norm. A bloke at work, who I’ll call “Cannon” and I accidently found out that we both collect and paint toy soldiers last year, when I happened to be carrying a few LotR models past him at work and he was “hey, what are those?” and then to my shock recognised them as LotR models. Sometime earlier this year, he gave me a pile of spare Vikings, in what I think was at least partly an attempt to get me to paint something non-fantasy. There were some nice figures in there, and they’re a mixture of Eureka, Foundry, Crusader, Gripping Beast and possibly others. I’m really not sure of all of their origins, so I’ll have to ask him to let me know which are which so I can properly tag them.

So without any further ado, here’s the start of my SAGA Viking force (and also my KoW Historical Viking force)



A lot of the more subtle highlighting on these guys just hasn’t come out in the photographs, particularly on the shields here. The guy on our left is a Eureka Miniatures model, but I’m not sure about his blurry-faced friendo. Shields are both freehand, and in retrospect I probably should have done something fancier on the red-and-white since he’s got a real leader feel to him, but he was the figure I painted first, so I wasn’t yet confident in freehanding Viking shield designs.



While there’s plenty out there regarding Viking shield designs, you’d think that figuring out realistic Viking clothing colours would be a reasonably easy task, but it was much, much harder than I expected. I noticed initially that Foundry et al have their models painted in much the same way as their Celts – all stripey trousers and colourful patterns. I wasn’t so sure, so in doing some research online, I found quite a bit of contradictory stuff. The TV show “Vikings” had at least one full-time researcher, but then, it’s a TV show. Of course, some random guy on the internet decided to “big man” himself when I dared in a forum to suggest the show as one potential source of painting inspiration and bothered to lecture me on how everything in it was wrong. I guess he must have been there in the 10th century.



In the end, I decided to avoid the whole “stripey trousers” look entirely. I’ve got Celts to paint down the line and so they can have the plaid and stripes. I’ve kept the Vikings to solid colour for the most part, with a mixture of bright colours (especially on shields) and more muted, earthy tones.



I’ve got a pile of plastics to paint later, so I’ve decided to go richer overall in tone with the metal models. These models are where I’ll draw my Warlords, heartguard and other elites from, and so these guys are much more the professional Viking “soldier” and more likely to have visited Albion on “shopping sprees” as well as travelled the Mediterranean or even served as Varangian Guard. Based on these loose ideas, the metal models are much more likely to be wealthy and so afford more colourful clothing, as well as richer shades of colour. The two blokes below really fit that ethos to a tee.



The Foundry models are in the typical chunky style, but have a lot of character to them. There’s a bit of Brian Blessed (in a ginger wig) to the right guy, and they’re both the sort of figures that Space Wolves seem to want to channel. I’ve got a couple of half-painted Wolves squads I should finish one day as well… and some more actual Wolves half-assembled.



I enjoyed the freehand designs on these guys. I’m especially proud of the raven. The cross designs look a little wonky, but the photos are of course blown up to quite a few times their actual size, so look much straighter in person. I decided that I might well use transfers on a lot of the Viking models, but all of the metal models would get freehand shields. Even when doing “red” cloaks, I’m trying to avoid the bright reds of my fantasy models in favour of darker, slightly earthier reds – while maintaining the richness of colour.



The group shot. These guys could comprise of half a KoW regiment, but more importantly, Warlord, hearthguard and a spare model) in SAGA. These initial six were finished back in October and so are a belated Tale of Gamers Paint challenge photo entry. I’ve got another batch of five just waiting on their last man before I show them, and a few more now on the paint desk.

Those look really cool buddy Nice job!

Love the bird design on the ginger guy's shield.

Looking good!

I think you do need to tart up the warlord's shield - his underlings will never respect him otherwise

Nice and clean, with a good amount of contrast in there to make them pop without looking like an eyesore.

If you are looking for inspiration for clothing and the like my wife recommends you give the Viking Sagas, the original ones she says, before sensationalist nonsense took over. In particular she says The Orkney Book by Donald Omand (the Viking Chapter in particular). It describes the sort of pelts that they would wear (which tended to be very muted with only basic geometric patterns).

You have opened a subject close to her heart with these guys as she absolutely loves the Orkney Islands and they have a lot of Viking history up there. She has studied up there in the past (and excavated several sites). "So put all Hollywood nonsense aside and ask yourself what textiles they would have had at hand and the natural colours and dyes they would have had available. All about functional clothing."

Sorry just our two cents.....

Nice finish for the year on that last page. Good on you for sticking to your goal. I didn't have one, and didn't make it either

Thanks for the feedback, everyone!

@Slinky - I've added some small Ravens to his shield - I haven't had a chance to photograph it yet, but it'll be coming in about 2 or 3 updates' time. It has helped it out a lot.

@Archer - thanks. I did a fair bit of reading before starting on them, and eventually found a few pages with example dye colours. Of course, I don't remember where I saved them, but simply googling "viking dyes" turned up a bunch of the same images. So while keeping those in mind, I'm still happy to give some richer-coloured outfits to those who might have served as Varangian Guard and also allowing for items that may have been picked up in trade/pillage up and down the rivers and coasts of Europe. These aren't the village-bound Vikings that we're dealing with! Obviously, - my style of painting for the shields can be a bit bright and clean, and they'd look more realistic if I dirtied and damaged them, but I like the "clean" painted look, and we know that Vikings were clean and cared about their personal hygiene. Rest assured, I won't be doing any tiger skins, though!

@Grimdork - I didn't get my December task done in the end. I tried to paint up 40 models, but then as we got right up tot he line I still had their overly-detailed, embossed shields to go, and my wife bought me Watch Dogs 2 last Monday. Which I spent 17 hours playing in my first session last Wednesday or Thursday...


Anyway, on the topic of Vikings, I have a couple of their inspired-cousins - Dwarves to share today. These, like much of what I’m showing at the moment were painted during the latter months of 2016 when I was too busy to post. Basically, my free time was right down, so I spent a few months where my “hobby time” was spent painting instead of writing posts and following blogs and my “gaming time” watching YouTube videos before falling asleep for the night. Reaper Miniatures really has some lovely models for wargamers. We all know that their bread and butter is the D&D/RPG crowd, but the effect that this has for the wargamers is that their models tend to have a lot of character to them, and so make great low-level heroes, individuals and unit leaders (as long as you don’t mind some uniform variation amongst your usually-quite-uniform plastics. Since I’m an old grognard and love my old metal models this isn’t a big issue for me. On the other hand, they’re not especially cheap. They’re not expensive, or anywhere near the prices of GW’s hero models mind, but if you were looking to make a unit of Reaper metals, well, they’re not so cheap as to make that an easy option.



Anyway, I saw this guy somewhere online at some stage, and knew I had to have him, so I picked him up. He’s sculpted by Tom Mason and alternately known as Dwarven Pathfinder Grunt with a slotta or in “broccoli base” form, as Bregol Jagstone, Dwarf Ranger. Oddly, despite the “Pathfinder grunt” moniker, I can only find a single other dwarf pathfinder by Reaper, so…

When it came to the figure, I of course got the slotta version, so he fit in immediately. Anyway, with his wrench shaped axe and hooded cloak, he could easily go in any of several directions as far as paint goes. I chose for reasons unknown to me to go with the “ranger” look and painted him with a series of naturalistic colours – a series of greens to give him some variation and red-browns to give the model a nice rich tone. I have a box or two of AoW’s dwarf rangers somewhere, so one day he’ll no doubt lead some of them. He did get a great ginger beard, since I felt that fit the sculpt and palette nicely.



Stonehaven’s sculpting is a little uneven, but many of the figures have a definite old-school charm to them. I’ve shared a few of them a little while ago, and will have more soon as well. They’re clearly also going for the D&D/RPG market that Reaper aims at, but that’s ok by me, and I’m sure it’s fine with roleplayers, who obviously have an absolutely huge range in what their characters look like. This model is their Anti-Paladin (Death Knight, Shadow Knight, etc). As such, I painted her armour with metallic blues with a sea-green/black tabard and gloves, and bright red hair as a nod to my old (non-dwarf) EQ character. Her sword doesn’t quite reach down to the ground (at least on my casting) so I hid it with a little skull at the front and a tuft of grass at the rear.

In game terms, they’ll both work well in RPGs and various board games. Bregol will have a place leading some Dwarven rangers, or as an Artillery guy in the interim (because wrench-axe) and the Shadow Knight can no doubt have some sort of spot in the Undead or Chaos armies. Until I get the Chaos Dwarves properly out and about, anyway…

The armor on that dwarf lady is sublime! Is it NMM?

Great work! The Ranger in particular is really well done colour-wise.

Thanks guys - Nope, the armour isn't NMM. It's just me playing around with different shades of metallic paints and washes. I bought a bunch of large Vallejo metallic bottles a couple of months ago, so it was a chance to play with them.

I'm really happy with the colours on the ranger as well.

Yeah, the ranger really "pops", he's lovely

You've been very prolific since I last swung by! Love the zombies on the last page!

EDC

Thanks guys. And after a bit of work today, I'm up to 86 completed models for the year. Of course, that includes 40 tank traps that weren't too gruelling to paint, and 40 dwarves that I started in November and might have finished at the very end of December if Watch Dogs 2 didn't happen... causing both my failure to produce anything in December for the paint challenge and to beat 2015's number with 2016. I guess on the other hand, it gives me a good leg up in 2017 to beat my total in 2016 (and maybe, 2015?).

86? Ye gods

The two new additions are excellent, keep it up!

Part Two then, of my Vikings. These figures were mostly completed in 2016. On the 14th of November if my record-keeping is accurate. Of course, I then realised that the horn-blower who wasn’t yet finished should really have a shield as well, and so completing the sextet went into painting limbo, since the horn-blower isn’t exactly my favourite model from the bunch. Since I had to paint a Viking shield for another model a few days ago, I did this one as well.



His mate in the picture above is one of the smaller figures amongst my metal Vikings, but he’s got a bearing to him, both in the pose and especially in the facial sculpt. Like he’s the sort of bloke you wouldn’t want to mess with. The horn-blower on the other hand looks like he has a big plum for a head, but the ruddy cheeks work for his pose.



Of course, now that I’ve finished it, I’m happy enough with the horn-blower’s shield. Simple, but neat and effective. I went with more muted yellows than I usually do, from almost white into an ochre, rather than orange.



I believe that the larger of these two is a Viking Hearthguard model, and he’s a big chunk of metal. Since he’s chunky and quite well-geared, I gave him a deep red cloak to suggest wealth, and grey hair and a marked face to suggest that he’s both a veteran of many battles as well as (probably) some lucrative international bodyguarding duties. His friend here is painted in simpler, more muted and earthy tones. I tried to “streak” the paint in his shield to suggest a less wealthy origin. Damn, at this scale, the blown-up photographs really emphasise every flaw in the freehand shield painting. They look much neater and straighter at their actual size of 10mm or so.



The final pair are amongst my very favourites of all my Viking models. I think these two are both by Foundry again, but it’s the dynamic posing that really works on these for me. Not a lot more to say about these two. I like the models and I like the way they turned out with paint and their shields added.



These models, like the first half-dozen will be used for SAGA amongst other things. I’ve got a nice selection for my Hearthguard, and the others will make up a unit of Viking Warriors for the time being. I’m still short a model for a final warrior or my Warlord, so I’ll have to get some more done soon. I’ve just finished a few more Vikings, so once they’re dry and flocked I’ll have them up here as well. I can see a lot of the metals here being spread out amongst the plastics eventually to use as unit leaders.



When I got to the second half-dozen of my Vikings, I’d decided much more consciously to paint the shields with a palette that complimented their bearers’ clothing and overall colour scheme. I’d been doing this to an extent with the first set, but I’ve been much more aware of it since then. A flaw in the way I used to paint years ago was trying to get too many colours onto my models, when a smaller palette with more variation of those colours works better for the models far more often.

Damn. No love at all for the second batch of Vikings? Ouch..

Today’s figure is another that was finished back in 2016, that I’m only just getting around to sharing. Like it says in the title of the post, this guy is one of Marauder Miniatures’ MM27 line of Giant Black Orcs.





One of the many ranges released by Trish* and Aly Morrison’s Citadel offshoot Marauder Miniatures were Orcs and Goblins. The Orcs, with their scale mail and Mongol-style helmets were a real highlight of all of their ranges, with a style that remains distinctive even today. Subedai has recently showcased some fantastic looking converted boar boys using these same models.



Part of the Orc range that was a little more limited were the Giant Black Orcs, released around about White Dwarf 128 (August 1990). There were apparently only four sculpts, and so they seem to be designed more as an appendix or supplement to Citadel’s existing line – though back then Black Orcs were an ill-defined thing as far as actual models go. Just pick out your bigger orc models and divide them between “Big’Uns” and “Black Orcs”. I’ve got to say that these Black Orcs were not Marauder’s finest work by a long shot.



Black Orcs of course derive from Tolkien’s Uruk Hai, which GW had a range of, though those seemed a bit “normal sized” even back then. The only distinct Black Orcs to that point were Nick Lund’s Giant Black Orcs from 1985 – also a pretty indistinct set, and Lund’s Regiment of Renown: RR18 – Eeza Ugezod’s Mother Crushers. Citadel’s Black Orcs wouldn’t get their own distinct style again until the mid-1990’s, when they launched that terrible range with the huge horns and ridiculous looking axes. It wasn’t until the early 2000’s when the current, heavily armoured design debuted with the metal range, to be updated a few years later with the current range of plastics – now called “Ironjawz ‘Ardboyz”. The current/2004ish design is easily the best iteration of Warhammer Black Orcs in my opinion, being both distinctive and badass looking.

What does this mean for the Marauder model above? Well, he’ll eventually be rolled into whatever Mantic call Big’Uns in Kings of War (hm… Ax, Greatax, Morax… nothing there that really works for Big’Uns or Black Orcs… I might have to fudge something for our friendly games.) He may occasionally be used in RPGs, skirmish gaming or maybe even Silver Tower. Do they have an Orc character for that yet? I’ll figure it out later…

*Now Trish Carden

Sorry was out of contact with work and have only just started to get back into the hobby swing so missed the second round of Vikings. I think they look excellent. The sculpts look really nice not out of scale or sort of shrunken like a lot of smaller miniature companies seem to get.

The orc looks suitable Ye olde. Reminds me of some of the models that got me into my addiction. I still remember the first model I ever painted was an orc and it ended up with bronze skin. Didn't undercoat it and the paint started wearing off very quickly.

There really is an ogre feel to the heads of some of those old orks isn't there.

I really like all the vikings you have shared. In fact, they inspired my work on the shieldmaidens in my own blog. I'm still amazed at your freehand skills.

Thanks guys. I'm still working on a few more Orcs and Vikings. Hope to have some more up soon. Today though - more dwarves.

In November last year, for some reason I got it into my head to delve into one of my figure boxes and paint up a bunch of Dwarves. Specifically, to go through and paint a bunch of the Battle for Skull pass plastics that I’d picked up from eBay, WargamerAU and my mate, Damo. I think the idea popped into my brain since I’d been painting and finishing a few Slayers around the time and getting stuck into other random dwarves (which I’ve been sharing recently).



By mid-November, I’d actually gathered them up, and selected the figures I was going to paint, and then got into them properly over December. Batch painted, they’re no works of art, but since there were 40 of them and work cranks itself up around November into December, I didn’t get them finished before work broke up for Christmas, as was the plan. All because of their overly-complex sculpted shields. After a few days of rest, I got stuck back into them again, but Marouda bought me Watch Dogs 2 which then proceeded to eat all of my time after I installed it and started playing it. I seriously played for near-17 hours the day I properly started it. From 8am until 1am. Sure, that’s with breaks, but still… I’m finally done with the game now, by the time I got about 2/3 through the story it had started to drag a little, and the result was that after an incredibly strong start I didn't even play it every day to get it done.



These were a pretty quick and simple job for me, though every element is still highlighted and shaded, I did so with an intent of making a solid tabletop standard, rather than my usual care. At one point, I decided that I wanted them to look more work and war-weary than some of the others. Like they’ve been on campaign rather than having just left the keep in freshly washed uniforms. This was because I’d been looking at my unassembled boxes of Warlord’s Napoleonic French Line Lancers while washing my brushes (which I’d bought to turn into some sort of not-Brettonian army). I got to thinking about how Napoleonic uniforms in miniature form always seem so bright, perfect and pristine when the actuality would have been much more filthy and worn. Like in that Napoleon show with Boromir Stark in it. With that percolating in my mind, I decided to hit them all with a brown wash, but then brighten up their axes, helms and paint the shields last – as I felt that Dwarves would always look after their wargear above all else.



I mentioned the shields earlier. They were a hassle, and basically the reason these figures weren’t finished in December 2016, which would have broken my 2015 record/target and not caused me to fail to submit in the final month of the Tale of Gamers challenge I ran on Dakka. Of course there were other reasons. Watch Dogs 2 and burnout/exhaustion from working every day of the week for a period at the end of the year, but the shields were the final hurdle.

If I were painting these models with no “history”, I’d probably have simply painted the Hammer-and-Anvil motif a nice bronze, much like the Dwarf-Mask bling on the Standard bearers. The thing is, when I started to paint the models, I realised that the same design was much older, and is featured on the (Marauder Miniatures) Dwarf Shields that one of my old, Oldhammer Norse dwarves has (and I have a few of these shields left to break out). Since I wanted the new to fit in with the old, being from the same clan(s), I wanted to make sure that they matched. Which meant going from a simple paint/wash/drybrush scheme to one that needed 10 different colours/applications. While keeping it simple. When doing it to almost 40 models, that takes time. Bleugh.



What’s next for the Dorfs? Well, I appear to (almost) have a complete BFSP set between the various secondhand sets I’ve purchased. I’m just short the Dwarven rifles, so I’m going to see if I can get another unit or two painted before I burn out on Dwarves…

Very nice work, especially considering that those are essentially identical models. How many Dwarfs do you have altogether? It seems to me that you have enough to play Dragon Rampant or something of that size.

Love the BFSP Warriors! I have those gems in my painting pile. If you can get the Thunderers I do recommend them as they are some of the nicer sculpts in the box (although I like the miners the most).

 JoshInJapan wrote:
Very nice work, especially considering that those are essentially identical models. How many Dwarfs do you have altogether? It seems to me that you have enough to play Dragon Rampant or something of that size.

Painted or unpainted? These are most of the painted ones, plus the Slayers and random adventurers I've been showing. Unpainted... maybe 400-500 more if you count the Mantic models. I plan to make two forces from the lot - a "normal" dwarf army and a slayer-based one.

 Bottle wrote:
Love the BFSP Warriors! I have those gems in my painting pile. If you can get the Thunderers I do recommend them as they are some of the nicer sculpts in the box (although I like the miners the most).

Sadly I only have about three of them, which is a shame. I've got a unit of the metal ones, though that I picked up from eBay. I want to paint up my gunpowder dwarves as a sub-clan and call them the "Bullet Club". I'm working on cannon crew right now.

400-500? Dang, that's a whole army's worth. How many armies do you have for KOW/9th Age? I'm glad I'm not the only one with a problem...

That's a mighty throng of dwarf kin there buddy. Been super busy I see!

I didn't fully appreciate just how small those models were til I went to Warhammer World the other day, and looked at the big Dwarf vs Skaven diorama there. Took me ages to find Josef Bugman in that thing.

You could totally pull off an Ironweld Arsenal force for Age of Sigmar with all the artillery pieces you have to hand.

How many armies? I'm going to say all of them. And pretty much easily themed multiples of all of them. I honestly have no idea how many. Call it collecting since the late 1980s, not selling anything off since the mid-'90s and a serious buying frenzy over the last year or two.

I've still got some work in cleaning up the War Room, which got turned into a dumping ground over the second half of 2016 due to piles of work and it being a bit cold out there. I'm hoping to get some AoS games up and running as well as so much else, and I've got the General's Handbook to hand as well as several of the digital books.

Oh wow, I LOVE those dwarfs. They are so well painted for being a mass of nearly identical models. Color scheme is ace as well.

Noice Dorfs Az. Musta been a long stretch doing all those shields!

I had that really tall big-un orc with the giant sword. He was always falling over, Top heavy! These days I would fill his base up with scrap lead.

Nice paint job on the dwarfs, especially the shields. I am not really a fan of the Warhammer dwarf aesthetic, but you've made the best of it I am sorely tempted by some of the new FW LOTR dwarfs, however...

The dwarfs have buckets of old-school charm. Lovely work for a whole unit of tabletop standard dudes.

I liked the Vikings a lot too, but haven't had much time to comment lately. Must update my own painting blog here with the stuff I did over Xmas.

Thanks guys. The dwarves don't have anywhere near realistic proportions like the LotR ones do, but I've got enough nostalgia for the style drawn back to the Perry's old work, so I can forgive it. In retrospect, I think the more complex shields came up better than bronze would have, even if they took (a lot) longer to finish.

To use a phrase I seem to use a fair bit - Something completely different today:



I have to admit, I couldn’t remember what these things were called and so it took literally minutes of playing internet detective to figure out what the game these things are from was called (and what they are). Armed only with “(illegible) games, 1992” on the bottom of their integral metal bases, google, wikipedia and BGG, I figured it out. Hooray!



I bought these figures back in the ’90s for a few reasons. None of which had anything to do with Legions of Steel. 1) On sale. 2) Because Terminators. And most importantly, 3) They came in little miniatures carrying cases with foam inside. So naturally, I used the cases for a few years, the figures all got shunted into bits boxes, and that was that. I gave the cases away a year or two ago, (I think?) to Tarmor. At some point I found one of them and quickly painted it up, because let’s face it – how hard could it be? Had no idea where the rest of them were, though.

So sometime last year while cleaning up some bits boxes – around the same time as I found and repainted that Judge Dredd RTB01 Space Marine – I found the “Nightmares”. Since I first found out that they’re called that literally 2 minutes before starting this post, I’m just going to call them Terminators from here on in. Anyway, I found the Terminators, and bundled them into a zip-lock bag alongside the tiny number of (licenced) Aliens miniatures I have from the same era. And then put them away in one of my Unpainted Miniatures Storage Cases. And promptly forgot about them until a few days ago, while attempting to tidy up the room where I keep all that crap, I bumbled onto them, sharing space with a bunch of Mantic models.



This being my Summer break from work, and as I’m now getting in some good paint time, I brought them out, lost them, found them again and then painted them from Spray to Varnish to Flock in less than 3 days – most of which was drying time. So now I have a unit of 12… well. I can use them as Terminators in the Terminator Genisys game I picked up on sale during Black Friday. I understand it’s supposed to be quite a good game, but hampered by being massively overpriced for what you get in the box, and an expensive licence that seriously underperformed in the wider market, with the height of it’s popularity being, you know… 25-odd years ago. Still, when it was on sale for £20 I decided to grab it. Also, free rules if anyone wants to try it out.

Failing that I could use them as Necrons in 40k… I just picked up their Start Collecting set, and will probably grab a second one before too long. Or… as Cultists for my Iron Warriors? Hmm….

They may be simple. But there among the Iron Warriors it looks fantastic.

Oooh, making them cultists is a great idea!

Cultists seem like a good fit. Like maybe the Dark Mechanicum guys have been picking up random folks and turning them into automata and these are the rejects?

Yeah - Nice paintjobs, and using them as cultists seems a perfect fit to get them some table time

Thanks Gents. Despite the different bases, I think they'll work well together. My "proper" IW cultists will probably be on the plastic GW tech bases, but I think I'll manage despite the discrepancy.

Nice work on these not-Terminators. They must have been a breeze to paint after all the vikings and dwarves.

Yeah, they were - to coin a phrase - piss easy. I've gotten a bunch of the Terminator T-800s out of the boxed sets I picked up recently, with a mind to knocking out a bunch of them just as quickly. I'll leave some to the side for later conversion into the other weapon options. I just have no idea what's worth giving them, or good, or reasonable, so I'll probably just do a couple each of a few of those options while the rest of them will be stock.

Speaking of Vikings, however....

Here's the next post of my small Viking project. A couple of weeks ago, when I got up on the morning of Christmas Eve 2016, I decided to paint up some Vikings, and see if I could get them done by Boxing Day. I very deliberately selected four figures. Two of them were the berserker pair that, while now part of the Foundry catalogue are ex-Citadel models from the truly Oldhammer days. Before everything was All-Warhammer, All The Time, Citadel has small ranges of Normans, Vikings and Feudals under the Fighters/F4 category. When Bryan Ansell resurrected Wargames Foundry as a Historicals company while purging the historical ranges from Citadel, he moved a large number of moulds across that he deemed appropriate. The two berserkers here were amongst the models who made the trip, and as such, are still available today.


Erik and Thorir the Ex-Citadel Foundry Vikings.

I actually owned both models back in the day. Erik, the model with the 2-handed daneaxe was broken at some stage, losing the axe and chunks of both arms – while Thorir, gazing at the sky, was simply lost to time. I notice that there are a couple of other old models that I always liked still available in the Foundry ex- range, so I’ll have to do another Foundry order before too long to pick them up. I should point out though that all of these models, like my other painted vikings in the above-linked posts came courtesy of the Cannon man from work. These two were painted very quickly, and done on time. While painting them, though, I noticed the shield boss on Thorir’s shield. This was unfortunate, as I’d selected all four figures based on getting them done quickly, so the two old-school models that were mostly flesh and pants, and the other two that had a good amount of armour and chain on them – and no shields amongst them! So…. erm.



It took until the first days of 2017 before I got around to painting the shield. I decided on using muted tones for it, to go well with the muted and earthy tones I’d used for both berserkers’ clothing and gear. While I didn’t get the shield pattern perfect, I’m happy with how it came out nonetheless. At the same time I also fished out the model who is the Warlord for the moment – Eureka Miniatures’ Beowulf the Geat – and added some small freehand ravens to his shield, which makes a vast difference to the model in my opinion. I can’t fathom why Nik’s Beowulf range doesn’t have “Viking” keyworded anywhere in it. I’ll have to ring him and point it out since it can’t be helping his online sales. I know that technically, Beowulf predates Vikings by several hundred years, but when you’re selling miniatures…



The next pair of Vikings are essentially “just some guys”. I’m not sure of their manufacturers, though I think it’s pretty safe that they’re from different ranges given the difference in sculpt style. If/when I find out where they’re from, I’ll update. In the meantime I have nothing particularly interesting to write about them. I used a little more in the way of the colour palette on these guys, but still kept them quite muted.



Finally, a group shot of all my completed Vikings to date. There are quite a few more where they came from! I just need to make myself get them done...

Yes! The ravens on the warlord's shield are VERY nicely done, now he properly looks like the bossman

An awesome bunch of hairy Northmen there, Azazel. Love the freehand on their shields.

Thorir has the body language of someone very, very annoyed with his current situation and would much rather have a cuppa instead of doing whatever Eric is thinking of doing.

Really impressed by the pale skin tone Az! looking good, it's coming along well and looks like a pretty decent project!

I've fallen behind again! Awesome vikings, or(c/k), dwarves(!), terminator dudes, and more viking! Fantastic work as per usual, and so prolific!

Another nice set of vikings. They came out remarkably well, especially given how quickly you finished them.

Liking the not Terminators, any more hidden treasures?

I planned to update a couple of days ago, but the events of Friday here in Melbourne put me off hobby-related stuff and it just seemed a little .. I dunno, inappropriate(?) for me to blog about toy soldiers at the time.

Thanks for the words on the Vikings. I've kinda lost the excitement on painting them for the time being, so I think that getting more of them done will be shoved aside in favour of something more exciting as my mayfly-like attention span wanders all around the shop. I need to paint some of my Forge World crap...

@Jehan-reznor - an almost infinite number. I just need to find and paint them all...




Anyway, like a lot of others here, I backed the Conan Kickstarter a couple of years ago, and also like many of us, I had my first wave of stuff arrive recently. Now I only got around to taking the stuff out of the shipping boxes last week, and frankly, I haven’t had the time to look further into the actual boxed game or the equally huge “Kickstarter Extras” box. Boxes. I got two King Pledges…



What I did do while I was cleaning up in the War Room last week and making space to put the Conan stuff onto one of the shelves was notice how nice the models in some of the add-on boxes looked. Specifically, the “Adventure Pack”. The models looked really fine, baby. That is to say that they looked very finely detailed. Much moreso than anything I’d expect to get from a boardgame, and moreso from a kickstarter boardgame where the usual reaction to the models is “yeah, these are pretty decent” or a sadly unsurprising disappointment. After seeing Subedai get busy with some of his Conan models, I thought “why not?” and opened up the adventure pack to paint the contents as they looked like they’d paint up nice and quickly.



So that’s what we have here. Barrels. I haven’t started on the other stuff yet, but the barrels are pretty nice for what they are. I usually paint my barrels up in the standard, admittedly boring way that most of us do. Dark brown wood, metal hoops. Job done. Nothing wrong with that, but with posts by Dagger and Brush on building trees with realistic bark colours resonating in the back of my head, I decided to paint these ones so that they looked a little more …realistic? worn? aged? So they would look like they’ve been left outside in the elements for their time. Faded, stained wood and rusted metal.



Primed white, base coated with Vallejo Skeleton Bone coloured primer and then drybrushed with Reaper HD Arctic Grey. Hoops painted with Vallejo Plate Mail Metal coloured primer and then painted over with very-thinned Vallejo Model Air Light Rust and Orange Rust. The whole thing then washed with 50-50 Army Painter Soft tone wash and windex, and then with Citadel Nuln Oil Gloss. Gloss Polyurethane varnish, followed by Testor’s Dullcote. I’ve got that down here fo rmy future reference in case I end up with more of these barrels or want to recreate the exact look. It’s annoying when you paint everything that you have of some kind of scenery, and then find more somewhere, and then can’t remember exactly how you did them. I found some more of those Confrontation walls recently, and so now instead of having painted them more or less instantly, they’re just sitting there. In fact, I’ve lost them again somewhere. Bah.


Norsemen and their Norse Dwarf cousins discuss the best way to provide scale shots for barrels.

After checking the Kickstarter details, I see that each core pledge box comes with an extra 5 chests. Add those to the 5 in the accessories box and I’ll have 15 chests to paint up. They’re pretty finely detailed, but the thing stopping me from blasting through them now is working out how to paint them. Wood? Iron? Bronze? It’s bloody exhausting!

Ooh, I like that light-coloured wood, it's a nice change from the default "wood" colour

Great stuff! For the chests variety might be good for things like the colour objectives in Zombicide.

Excellent viking horde Az. Very skillful freehand shields.

Thanks. And I do like that idea, Llamahead. I might have to do that in some form. I've got lots of metallic paints, so perhaps different coloured metals. I'll have to check my Zombicide stuff and note down the colours they use.

My condolences to you and your fellow countrymen for the horrible tragedy.

As to your post, as always a pleasure to see your models and read your posts. Live those barrels, I often have a hard time painting natural materials but these look great, very realistic for such a simple recipe.

Thank you. I live in Melbourne, and used to frequent those exact same streets in those very same blocks every day when I was in town for Uni and work, so it's very close to home. I spent most of Friday watching the news unfold and being very, very angry. gak, my wife was in town today and stopped to pick up some paint for me from a hobby store location that the murdering witch drove right past.

Anyway, some more models.

We’ve got two dwarves today. One old enough to quality as right proper Oldhammer, and the other quite recent.



The first of the two, sometimes called “Dwarf Ninja” and other times “Dwarf Rogue” comes from the Dwarf Adventurers line found in the 1988 Citadel Catalogue, meaning he was released around 1887 or thereabouts. Looking through the 1987 Citadel Journal, the Dwarves in there, also by the Perry Twins are of a slightly different style to this one. I got this figure back in the day, started painting him, stopped, then restarted, did what I thought was a great job, screwed it up with a black wash, restarted and finally finished him recently. He’s got a vaguely middle eastern feel, with the scarf around his head, and so I painted his skin in a slightly different-to-usual tone compared to how I usually paint my dwarves. He also has a nice line in thieves’ tools on his belt.



His partner in crime is another of Stonehaven’s dwarves from their 2012 Kickstarter. I’ve shared a few of these figures before now, and if I ever finish painting the lot of them I’ll do a group shot. This dwarf rogue was started a couple of years ago to represent an NPC in our very, very occasional Pathfinder campaign. She fit the bill perfectly, and so a couple of weeks ago I saw the half-painted figure sitting on my desk and finally made myself finish her off. No thieves tools in play here, just a pair of dual-wielded daggers for some stabby good times.

I think they make quite the pair.

Aside from the obvious use in role-playing games and as a character meeple in various board games, I’ve started to think about combining a bunch of the more out-there Dwarf Adventurer types into a unit for Kings of War. Possibly using the berserker stat line to represent them being a bit more reckless but a hell of a lot more dangerous than your regular dwarf. We’ll see…

A band of adventuring Dwarfs would look great. All ragtag but unpredictable as hell due to their experiences and capabilities. Beserkers would probably fit pretty well.

A nice set of dwarves, as usual. They must have been fun to paint, especially given how different (i.e., not-bearded) they are from standard dwarves. Also, nice work on the barrels. The sun-bleached look is inspired.

Nice ninja assassin dwarfs.

EDC

Lovely dwarves! They make me want to paint up the various dwarf rogues and assassins I have (ASoBH KS and some ancient Citadel ones I think).

Do you have any tips for painting black cloth? That's some of the nicest work I've seen on that front.

Thanks all!

Ian - I (think) I started with a mix of very dark grey and black. I then just did the usual sort of shading with pure black and highlighting with the unmixed dark grey and then the next grey up for a couple of layers. Mostly just keeping the paints really thin and avoiding the whole "highlight to white on the edges" mentality - keeping even the lightest edge highlights to to a darker mid-grey, which still pops nicely enough because the rest is so dark. I did darken the whole lot down at one point with a really thinned paint wash of black.

I had tried the same with AP Dark (black) Wash at one point but it wrecked the male dwarf, so I had to start again from scratch. Also for these guys I avoided toning the black or grey with blue, etc.

Oooh fancy barrels and those dwarves are sweet.

Thanks Azrael, that makes sense. It's similar to what I'm doing already, which I interpret to mainly mean that I should just keep practising. But I will try following your steps and recommendations precisely, and see if that helps!

River Horse Teminator Genisys Plastic Endoskeletons and Endoskeleton Crawlers
Recently I found and painted up a bunch of “Nightmares” from the long-OOP game Legions of Steel that I’d had stored in various boxes of random figures since the 1990’s. Clearly these models were inspired by James Cameron’s Terminator films, and given that I recently purchased some Terminator Genisys starter sets from Warlord Games when they were on deep Black Friday discount (because rofl@£70.00), I figured I should paint up some of the actual figures. The Resistance figures don’t excite me all that much, so I’ll likely not start on those until all of the Machines are done.



I set some of the Endos aside to work out weapon swaps a bit later, and just decided to knock out a set worth as stock figures. If need be, I can run Imperial Guardsmen, etc as Resistance if I want to learn and play the game in the meantime, but let’s be realistic, that’s not happening anytime soon.



I painted these using the same methods as the Nightmares so they share the same palette and will fit in nicely alongside one another. As originally considered, the Nightmares can act as T-600s/Prototype Endos in the Terminator game, and the T-800 Endoskeletons can join the Nightmares as Iron Warriors cultists as needed – more abominations courtesy of the Dark Mechanicum. I also added a few skulls to some of their bases because Terminator.



I also knocked out 5 “crawlers” using the same methods. Not sure what they’ll be used for outside of the Terminator Genisys game, but hey, they were easy to paint and they add another 5 models to my completed numbers for the YTD.


Legions of Steel Nightmares provide T-600/Prototype support to their T-800 Endoskeleton brethren.


T-800 Endoskeletons and Legions of Steel Nightmares as Iron Warrior’s Chaos Cultists.

I love the terminator models! You really made them look menacing, which is the effect they should have. My concern about using them as cultists is that they look a bit too tough to be cultists. But honestly, with a bit of imagination it works, and definitely fits the Iron Warriors theme.

Terminators are looking good.

I like that you kept the paint jobs on them simple. Black and silver is a classic combination which looks great even with the classic black undercoat / silver dryrbush / black wash. I'm sure you added a few more layers to that process but it's still so gratifying to be able to quickly get through a squad of minis that way. It was a lovely touch to then add a bit of colour to the bases, rather than going for a kind of high-tech rubble/scrap base and adding spots of colour to the mini itself. The combination really enhanced the monstrous inhumanity of the machines, and evoked that T2 shot of the Terminator crushing a human skull beneath its metal foot: we get a sense of the implacable Terminators stomping forward, with no natural or human qualities to them at all, grinding the natural world underfoot as they go. Lovely.

Nice work on the Terminators. Are you tired of painting silver yet?

Also: Thanks for sharing the Legions of Steel stuff. Thanks to you, I have finally identified the four poorly-painted not-Space marines that have been sitting in my mixed-SF box for untold years. I wonder what happened to the skelebots...

Silver's so low-stress to paint that I'll take a ton to make me sick of it. Having said that, I've finally forced myself to start on some of my AdMech, so it's always a possibility. No probs on the LoS stuff, either. I was really scratching my head on trying to remember what they were called. I think doing anything other than keeping the Terminator paint jobs simple would have been redundant. Especially at that size - trying OSL or highlights on the eyes, or painting in the teeth would be doable but unnecessarily fiddly, and just fails the miniature painting triage test for me - especially for plastic R&F that are of little individual import. I wanted to keep the bases consistent with the majority of my other minis, and going for ash grey/no grass/etc on such a small cohort of figures would have removed their ability to unify with the majority of other models.

I see what you mean about too tough for cultists, but the 40k scale is pretty condensed. If those hulking armoured marines amongst them in the final shot are T4, then I think it works for the Endos to be T3.

A couple of weeks ago, I started on the Giant Wolves add-on boxed set from the Conan Kickstarter that I painted those barrels for recently.



Anyway, I'd selected these to take a look at alongside the Accessory Pack, and on opening them up was really quite impressed with the models inside. Unfortunately, I didn't take any photos of them before priming or adding paint, (The render above is as good as I have, I'm afraid) but they were really a nice surprise and on par with the fine details of the stuff in the Accessory Pack. Since furry friends are usually on the easier side of the painting spectrum, and inspired by Subedai's recent success in getting Conan's stuff painted, specifically his Hyenas, I got busy with them pretty much immediately.



I initially primed them with Tamiya Grey Surface Primer and no real plan, then came inside to google some wolf images. On doing so, I decided that they would look good with a lot of white involved, and so re-primed them from each side with Tamiya White Surface Primer while leaving them a little darker with the grey down the back.



Once I got them inside I sorted the bases firstly by supergluing some small shards of slate down, and once that was done, I used the sample of "Area 51" scenery glue kindly sent my way from Kibo to affix the sand. I almost always prefer to use PVA because of the higher surface tension of PVA, but given that these models are pre-fixed to their bases, something with low surface tension and flow was much more useful, and the Area 51 was perfect for the job.



Next, I added some Old Citadel Bronzed Flesh (round HMG pots, baby) thinned down to add some buff tones to the fur. Following that it was a combination of a half-dozen photographs of wolves from Google Image Search and painting - utilising a mix of drybrushing and fine detail brushing in various combinations of Vallejo Model Colour Basalt Grey .869, Sky Grey .989, Reaper HD Arctic Grey, and Vallejo's airbrush Black and Schwarzgrau primers, carefully brushed on.



The yellow of their eyes was painted with (discontinued) Citadel Foundation Iyanden Darksun, dotted with a pupil of black. A very-thinned down mix of brown and black was dabbed onto their paws to darken/dirt them a little in contrast to the majority of their pelts. As mentioned, I used various photo references as guides to painting their pelt and facial markings, taking note of the variations of colour and pattern that can be found inside even a single wolfpack with the intent to create models that (can) work as individuals while retaining a unified and natural feel for the entire pack.



A few adventurers face off with the wolves to provide a scale reference. Models like these can of course be used in pretty much any fantasy-esque game, from Pathfinder to Warhammer to 40k to Kings of War. And so they shall be.

Nice work on the wolves. I'm particularly impressed that you bothered to make them all at least a little different--I'm not sure that I would have had the patience for that.

After seeing your stuff, I'm beginning to regret not backing the Conan KS. Is everything this good?

Man those wolves look great with your paint! nicely differentiated and as a pack suit the games you play!

 JoshInJapan wrote:
Nice work on the wolves. I'm particularly impressed that you bothered to make them all at least a little different--I'm not sure that I would have had the patience for that.
After seeing your stuff, I'm beginning to regret not backing the Conan KS. Is everything this good?

I honestly haven't opened it up yet, aside from the 3 add-on boxes of the Wolves, accessories and the Tiger. It seems like it's going to be, though and gave me no hesitation on backing their new, Ancient Greek Mythology game.

Thanks Damo! They should be nice and versatile across a lot of games.

Nice work on the wolves, or the different fur patterns look great.

EDC

Thanks mate.

Those wolves look awesome and I even like the terminators after the way you painted them.

They look better than the official painted ones in my opinion.

Lovely work on the wolves. I like the variations of colour on the fur

Nice wolves and terminators Killing it numbers wise this year.

The wolf paintjob is really effective, I love 'em, and I too am starting to regret not getting in on the Conan KS

Thanks guys. I don't think I'll be able to come close to January's output again this year, but it was a nice kickstart to get started. I wasn't super interested in the Conan KS until it had clearly hit the "super deal" levels of value, right at the end. I also saw that it clearly had no chance of delivering on time, so it was actually a lower-stress thing to back. The figures have been surprisingly nice. I wish the "Tiger" was more anatomically correct, though - especially after the wolves. You can see the WIP in the photo below.

But yeah, I started on some Tech Thralls last weekend.



Not too much more to finish them, but I'm kind of stuck. I'm very much a "Red" Mechanicus guy, but I'm trying to decide whether to go with a metallic dark red on armour pieces, or the more typical red that we see here in the WIP shot. The choice will pretty much then be uniform right across all of my Cult Mechanicus, Skitarii and Mechanicum stuff from that point on. Any thoughts?

Not seen many folk with the Tech-thralls. They don't seem to be lacking for firepower there. I love how people vouch for the IoM but seem to ignore the fact that they're equally as douchey as the rest of the races lol.

Nice work. Do you have much in the way of Mechanicum/Mechanicus stuff?

Thanks. Any feedback on regular red vs metallic? As for my

AdMech, I've got a whole bunch of Forgeworld stuff from the past few years - including more Tech-Thralls (these guys are the paint guinea pigs) a Triaros and a Krios and a bunch of various Automata. None of the really big stuff yet. 2 or 3 Start Collecting boxes, a few boxes of Kastelans/Kataphrons/Skitarii from before SC was a thing, and I've ordered 2 of the recent battleforces awhile ago - if they actually ship. And a few bits and pieces from the RT-era.

All it needs is to be assembled and then painted.

I think either way works fine (not helpful feedback, I know). Could do both? Have the metallic reds on your more important units and have the matte red on your line infantry?

This is just me, but the red you used pops a bit too much with the darker metals. A darker red may be better, but that's my opinion.

That red could take a hit of Nuln and be just dandy for a Mechanicus red.

Yeah, I want a dark-ish red, though I don't mind it a bit brighter in the top highlights. Not into orange, but probably what you see there as the top-level highlight. The ones in the pic are as far as I got before stopping to scratch my head and consider metallic, so they haven't been shaded yet and are just the base colour covering the washed/drybrushed silver paint underneath.

The shade of metallic I'm considering is pretty much similar to the Forge World look for Thousand Sons.


If I go the Metallic red rather than traditional, the R&F would have the TS style red above, while more important stuff would have more of a glossy/candy finish. If I can pull it off.

This past week I finally finished off another three Iron Warriors. Both rebasing them on the new Sector Imperialis 32mm bases from their old 25mm ones and actually completing their paint - started well over a decade ago. Yes, I paint slow, but they've also spent a goodly time put away in boxes before I decided to revive the project last year.



Two of these models feature arm replacements. The "champion" has a Necromunda Pit Slave chainsaw arm, along with a 90's-era metal Iron Warriors Shoulderpad. The central warrior has a Melta Gun arm that's taken from a manufacturer of not-40k miniatures, again from the 1990s. It came from one of their Not-Orks, later renamed "Org" and changed to a not-at-all-Ork-based organised crime kind of faction after GW sent them one of their nasty lawyer letters. Because GW owns the concept of Orcs in space. Apparently. They had a game which from memory actually had decent rules. If I ever remember their name, I'll edit it in. Anyway, the Melta Gun arm looked great, and it found its way onto one of my Iron Warriors, a squad with a large number of obvious cybernetic implants and limb replacements. Once again, I've added "IV" decals to the models, to represent their still-present pride in being members of the IV Legion.



Again, aside from mechanical parts from Necromunda models and the Org arm, the models are built with a mixture of parts from modern loyalist marines, modern chaos marines, metal 2nd & 3rd edition-era chaos shoulder pads, Iron Warriors metal parts and Iron Hands metal parts. The central model's head and torso come from the '90s metal chaos marine biker conversion parts.



The third Iron Warrior comes with a not-so-subtle message for any who he may encounter. The chainsword's hazard stripes look terrible when blown up to this size, but at their actual size they look completely fine.



I've got another five of this squad on my paint desk at present to complete, along with another four including a Warsmith in the cabinet waiting to be moved out. Following that I have an old Forge World Castraferrum Dreadnought and Vindicator to find and fix up - both purchased many years ago before the FW kit was replaced with the Citadel kit. Then I can move onto newer purchases, newer models and newer plans for my Iron Warriors.

Iron Within! Iron Without!

Excellent stuff! Love the Melta cybernetic.

Another winner- Love 'em. That "Iron within" is stunning

Great stuff, Azazel. You and Jamesy can knock out some quality Iron Legion stuff! I'd love to see your take on Perturabo someday

Thanks guys. Pertuarbo is "on the list", though not near the top of it at this stage. Truth be told, I don't love the model as much as I'd hoped before it was released.

Nice work on the Iron Warriors. I'm still amazed that you aren't tired of painting silver/steel.

Thanks Josh. You're right - there's an awful lot of metallics on my plate right now between the Minotaurs, Iron Warriors, AdMech... and my small Alpha Legion force will also be metallic, and likely both red and blue Thousand Sons. Forge World has to take some of the blame, but those coloured metals just look great to my eye.

Yeah, that shoulder pad knocks it out of the park. The proverbial icing on the iron cake.

Well, keep it up. Between you and timetowaste85's Enforcer pblog, I'm actually getting more interested in colored metallics.

Started this morning wanting to paint (and finish) at least 1 more of the Iron Warriors assault squad. Finished washing their bases, but spent most of my painting time working on 5 Orcs. To get them out of the way so I can work on the IW. Of course.

Some nice looking Iron mate, and the Thousand sons. Looking forward to seeing more.

The more I see the more I want to finish enough Imperial Fists to fly over and game with you :-)

One day, Damo, one day...

I'll need to finish a fair few more Men of Iron first, though.



Remember Sedition Wars and it’s incredibly-successful Kickstarter? Of course you don’t. That’s because you either never heard of it, or the complete abortion of a game and fulfilment means you’ve blocked it from your memory like a terrible life experience, which it very much was. I was one of the ones taken in by a love and respect of Mike McVey going back decades to my youth and being foolish enough to believe the h̶y̶p̶e̶ lies of the campaign put on by Studio McVey and CMON to the tune of quite a few hundred dollars for my multiple pledges. Anyway, this post isn’t to bitch about the pile of money I flushed down the toilet in a mess of warped boards, terrible unplaytested rules and restic models.



It’s about the one bright spot of the entire project (aside from the textured bases, I guess). The Terrain Set. More specifically, for this post, the barricades. I’ve been buying a bit of stuff for FFG’s various Star Wars games in the past 6 months or so, and part of that has naturally involved looking at pictures of stuff.



Not my work, but the work that inspired these getting painted after all this time. While looking at Star Wars stuff, I came across some pics on Agis Neugebauer’s blog. Now, he’s a poster here on Dakka, and I’m somewhat familiar with his work posted on these forums, but I hadn’t seen his Star Wars Imperial Assault stuff before. Lots of great stuff there, including an Oskara conversion that I will totally be ripping off, but Agis’ also has a bunch of the Sedition Wars stuff painted up, and looking pretty bloody sweet. This triggered the “Hey, I’ve got those somewhere!” reaction, and off I went to find the crates, and while doing so, also grabbed out the barricades.



The barricades got finished first. Sprayed a custom green based on Vallejo’s 890 Reflective Green, then oversprayed with Plastic Soldier Company’s German Field Grey (Don’t buy their spray cans – they leak!). I then added the Lambdas, taken from a Warlord Games decal sheet (I would have preferred some white outline tank numbers from the WLG German Turret sheet, but I didn’t have any, and Lambdas are totally a thing in modern military markings and so in my mind help these pieces fit anything from near-future to 40k. I then drybrushed the barricades with Army Painter’s Army Green, and then Vallejo Bonewhite on the extremes. Some foam-weathering with Vallejo Metal Black, Vallejo Plate Mail Metal coloured primer and Vallejo Scorched Brown. Followed up with a spray of Plastic Soldier Company’s Dirt Brown Weathering Spray (they leak, FFS!), wiped down with a damp cloth, and finally a quick go-over with some of the foam-weathering, and they were ready for a heavy spray of gloss polyurethane varnish for protection, and then the good old Testor’s Dullcote to make them look good.



I also wanted to avoid any overtly-distinguishing iconography that would tie them too closely to any particular universe. So this meant no Imperial Aquilas or Imperial Cogs, and the dirty weathered look fits pretty well with just about anything, except maybe an especially-shiny game of Infinity. I can’t see pre-fab barriers getting carefully cleaned before being loaded into a transport between deployments, after all.



I have 12 barricades in total and I think they came up very nicely, but I’m also quite aware that looking at the individual weathering patterns on each of them isn’t exactly enthralling blog content, so here are some more posed shots with a few of my Imperial Guardsmen from the Terror Australis Regiment providing scale. Also, a sneak preview of my next mat review…

Good job! I got a set of the SW game from the KS but none of the terrain, looks like I missed out on the only good bit! Though I have used the bases for my Deadzone models

Still love the iron warriors. Those barricades (and guardsmen!) Look great. Keep it coming

I kind of like the idea of the metallic red, maybe 2 parts silver to 1 part red of choice followed by a red wash? That is what I did with my Alpha Legion (but not with red obviously).

Great to see more Iron Warriors and the barricades came out looking sweet.

Thraxas.

Nice work on the SW terrain. I finished off all my SW stuff apart from the terrain set last year. I'll have to dig the box out and see what I can do with it.

If Nerdfest ever comes over for a game let me know and I will try to arrive suspiciously around the same time and beg for a game too. Aussie Dakka Dakka all the way.

love those meat shields..........I mean tech thralls Az. Meant to pick some up at WHW but totally forgot. My wallet failed to remind me ><

One day we'll finally have that game. Or games. Maybe after 8th hits if 40k becomes less of a messy nightmare?

I keep getting distracted from those Thralls. I'm going to have to do some test models to find a way I'm happy with for the metallic red. But first, I need to clear a bunch of crap off my painting desk. To wit:

A bit over a year ago I busted open my Mars Attacks Accessory sets, and got to (slowly) working on the contents (occasionally). So far, I’ve finished the incredibly unimpressive result of 8 box stacks, from the four sets I had. Recently, I’ve finished a few other bits and pieces. Namely, the STOP signs, and the benches.



You can’t really tell here, but there’s a subtle metallic as part of the red and I tried out Warcolours Metallic White on the white sections. I did this to emulate the reflective qualities of real STOP signs, at least those located in Melbourne, where I live. I initially tried the metallic white over silver but it worked poorly, so I repainted the details in white, and then went over with the Metallic White. Even in-hand, the metallic effect needs to be pointed out with an “oh yeah, now I see it” result. A kinda generic grungy grey for the bases.



The benches. To me they seemed much more like public bus (or tram) stop-style benches than anything else. In keeping with this, I painted them in a horribly-plasticy bright orange, of the sort that would have been seen back in the 1980’s. Of course, back in the 80’s here the bus stop benches were made of concrete and wood, and painted a dark green. I dunno, I could have gone with a sleeker, more modern silver which would have been easier, but I felt that a harsh, bright colour (then dirtied a little) is a little more evocative of actual urban city streets. And the horrid orange just “feels” right for a bus stop. I used Warcolour’s Orange “One Coat”, though naturally, it took multiple coats to actually cover over the base silver spray. So much for “One” Coat…



Scale shot with thanks to a Minotaurs Space Marine and a T-800 Endoskeleton. I think these will be perfect for any modern/post apoc and even urban sci-fi battlefield that’s not too far removed from “Earth-like” environments. One day I might even paint up my Secret Weapon tiles from their Kickstarter. Seems like a Summer project…



Oh, and as an addendum. I found these yesterday. Ignore the game of Runebound in progress and note the ten(!) additional accessory packs that were inside a tub of Mars Attacks scenery when I was looking for an unassembled incomplete Imperial Bastion. That’s a hell of a lot of mould-line scraping before I can get to the easy-ish part of painting up all that scatter terrain…

The scatter terrain remains one of my favorite parts of Mars Attacks. You did a bang up job on them.

Thanks Josh!

This time I have a very “Oldhammer” Warhammer Orc Warrior, known as “Slyss” from the 2nd-3rd Edition era, sculpted by Kev Adams. I bought this guy and started to paint him long, long ago and only recently found him in a Chessex case and made myself complete him.



As can be seen, he’s one of those models with the huge, spiky shield boss. A big part of getting this guy finished was simply deciding what to do with it. The easier option would have been to make it a big, nasty spike. The other obvious option, though a little more involved was to follow Oldhammer tradition and turn it into a 3-D shield, and use the boss as the basis for a nose. Obviously, I went with the latter. I built up very slight brow ridges, bridge of the nose, cheekbones, lower lip, teeth and nostrils with liquid greenstuff. Mostly so the shield wouldn’t look like a completely flat piece with a big spike sticking out of it. The bridge of the nose and nostrils then, were the most important aspects.



The earliest reference I can find of this guy is in the 1987 Citadel Journal, which pretty safely dates the model to 1986-87. He’s an evil-looking bastard, alright – and a good example of the whole “older models have character” thing that people like to bandy around – and overuse at times. With such squinty eyes and a weird-as-hell mouth – he fits in here. He’d work okay these days as some sort of Chaos Mutant, painted in more human skin tones.



Rear view shows the slightly crude, but still detailed sculpting of Kev Adams’ early Warhammer Orcs. Along with the crocodillian mouth and face that is oddly reminiscent of some renditions of trollface. Also, my awesome handpainted woodgrain shieldback.



This pic is the money shot – my show-off pic for the freehanded Ogre-Face shield design. No radiating black sun lines or chequerboard on this one. Just the nasty face, scowling at the world in front.

I always check the pictures first before reading and my initial impression was that the shield was part of the model. Have an exalt, your extra work on the shield gives it a nice bit of extra Old Hammer feel to it.

Your solution for the shield spike is brilliant. I used to just shave them down to make a flat surface. If/when I get back to my Oldhammer stuff, I'll have to give this a try.

Love that shield Az! Indeed full of that undefinable "character".

That's a lovely looking Ork (well, as lovely paint job, not sure how lovely Orks actually are..)

Love that shield!

EDC

Superb work on the shield!

Lovely mini all round. I think what sets it apart from some of the lesser Oldhammer sculpts, much as I love even them, is the posing. He's clearly fighting, rather than just standing around oddly.

I didn't even know you could use liquid greenstuff for sculpting as well as gap-filling. This is impressive work though. And the painted-on woodgrain is a great touch to deal with the often blank backs of the early shields.

Thanks guys. I guess sometimes it's quite beneficial to have a big ol' nose!

I've pulled out some almost-as-old Orcs to work on bit by bit, but it'll be awhile no doubt before they're done. You'll be glad to know that only 3 of the 5 are standing around oddly (though 2 are Bolt Thrower crew, so I guess we can fogive those guys) but 2 of them could be said to be "in the fight".

I have recently finished some 4th ed-era orcs though, so they should be ready to show very soon once the varnish, photos, etc are all done. And a Heartbreaker Big'Un (or Black Orc?) just a few minutes ago.

The liquid greenstuff "sculpting" was pretty much just slowly layering it on, and pushing it around to the right places, then letting it dry and doing another layer. A slow and tedious process, but trying to get actual putty or GS on that shield would have been even more painful.

Recently I completed and showed off the barricades from the Sedition Wars Kickstarter’s Terrain Set. Today I have some more scatter terrain to share – specifically the crates.



Once again, these were inspired by the ones from Agis Neugebauer’s blog. I liked the weathering that he put into the crates, and also liked the contrast created via the red straps. He did use transfers to define them with Imperial cogs, and once again I decided to skip any markings that would tie them to any one universe, so they can be used in anything from “movie-style” Bolt Action WWII (when we don’t go to great pains to ensure historical accuracy of the design of all the crates left around that are being used as cover, through moderns, Star Wars (we can see how well they work above), near-future, post-apocalyptic right through to the 41st Millennium, where mundane things still often look strangely familiar…



The proud warriors of the Minotaurs Chapter provide scale reference alongside members of the Terror Australis Regiment of the A̶s̶t̶r̶a̶ ̶M̶i̶l̶i̶t̶a̶r̶u̶m̶ Imperial Guard. As can be seen, I gave them a light weathering, though not to the level of detail or care that Agis did on his. As far as scatter terrain goes, they’re really just more of the same sort of stuff I usually churn out at the level I’m happy to go with, generally. Not superbly exciting by any means, but additional, solid looking stuff that looks better than simply a spray and wash, a bit of extra weathering, though not nearly to the effort put in by people like D&B in his diorama-level pieces. Oh, I also found and finished one more of those U.S. DUST Tactics Supply Drop Crates, so it gets a guest appearance in this photo.

And finally, some “in action” type shots alongside some of the other appropriate scatter terrain I’ve finished in roughly the last year (so no stop signs here!) DUST Tactics Supply Drop Boxes, DUST Tactics Dragon’s Teeth and Confrontation Walls, and the very recent Sedition Wars Terrain Set Barricades. There’s not a lot of height variation, nor any foliage, but just these bits of scatter make a passable battle site for a small combat patrol sized skirmish.

Loving the scenery you've done here Azazel . Also nice job on the Oldhammer orcs .

Was hoping you'd paint up one of the STOP signs as SOP ala Simpsons movie lol.

Nice classic Cadians.

Those are some nice boxes, which is something I never thought that I would say about boxes.

I concur, those are some quite nice crates.

Thanks guys - that's not the end of the scatter terrain I have to show in the next few updates, but I prefer to mix it up with other stuff I've finished recently. To keep it somewhat interesting and whatnot....

I have been going back and forth between Dwarves and Orcs a bit over the past couple of months. Well, rather than break that pattern, I’m going to continue with it while I get a bunch of models on my desk completed. Hopefully without adding too many more to the queue.



I recently decided to dig out all of my metal Slayers with the intent on working my way through them. In that batch are a pile more of the mid-90’s range, as well as a bunch from the Marauder range.



I was never a big fan of the Marauder Slayers. They were just a bit random for my taste, and a bit cartoony to boot. While the Slayer look wasn’t as fully defined at that stage, the archetype that will always work for me is “Wild Nyjhul”. The Marauder Slayers were overall a bit far from that.



I don’t think the painted examples helped too much either (grey beards and orange hair just looked – and still looks – odd). Finally, I just didn’t like the Morrison’s Dwarf sculpts as much as I did the Perry’s. Some of their other Dwarves are very fine, but their Slayers just aren’t as good. Citadel’s Dwarves have always had wonky proportions, but the Marauder Slayers were overall a step a little too far towards them just being heads with arms and legs attached.





Now that I’ve spent the last 5 minutes slagging them off. The act of painting them has warmed me to these models a bit. I also like the fact that they’re not all armed with the typical axes. After all, Dishonoured Dwarves would have come from a variety of walks of Dwarven life, and so I see the other weapons mixed in – particularly the swords – as a reflection of that. Particularly for the (let’s face it) less impressive models like the Marauder models that can be viewed as representing Dwarves who have more recently taken the Slayer’s Oath.





I’ve included a bonus shot of the naked slayer, to show off his dragon tattoo. I think I may have to go back over it with the blue to redefine it though. The thin layer of flesh to embed the tattoo “into his skin” seems to have worked a little too well…





For the wounded slayer, I considered adding fresh blood to his wrappings after varnishing the models. I decided against it, instead going for more of a dried blood stain on them than a monents-fresh set of wounds. Think David Wenham in 300.



I decided on a group shot of all my currently-finished Slayers, to see how they looked together. Also including the rebased-on-32mm Stonehaven Dwarf Berserker, who I think looks much better on the larger base.







Then while putting them all back onto the shelf with the new three, I noticed that I actually had enough for a complete KoW regiment, plus the two heroes on their 32mm bases. So, having accidentally achieved Numberwang, I took them down again and mounted them on a unit base and took a couple more photographs. They’re guaranteed to be juggled around as I complete more of the metals. The later Giant Slayers will be condensed into their own regiment along with standards and musicians, while the smaller models – Troll Slayers as well as the Marauder and older Citadel models will end up on their own regiment base. But for now, they’re ready to kick some arse as a single unit!

They look really impressive. The sculpts may be a little odd. But they certainly look the part of the unhinged, demented and honourless of their race.

Marauder sculpts definitely had their own character, didn't they I think your paintjob has brought out the best in them.

Nicely done. It must feel great to suddenly have a unit done and ready to field. Do you have enough dwarves painted for KoW?

Thanks Gents. Working on another trio of the Marauder Slayers in the queue right now (amongst other things), and it'll be good once they're all done.

It was a nice surprise to have enough for a unit. I've now got 3 regiments - the slayers and the two BFSP ones, 3 BFSP cannon (still lacking crew), 2 Slayer heroes, 1 other hero just finished - to be shown shortly, and probably enough to field another regiment of rag-tag dwarven adventurers/explorers. Or close to it. Definitely a troop at least.

So I guess that's enough for a small force for small games. More of an ally-sized force for the moment, I think.

Keeping up the tradition of Orcs vs Dwarves, today we have some more of the mean, green boyz. Specifically a trio of Big’Uns from the early 90’s – 1992-93 to be more exact, or the early days of WHFB 4th edition.



As befits orcs of this size, I’ve rebased them both on 32mm bases. They’re both just too big for 25mm bases – round or square. With a pair of duplicate sculpts here, I had the options of painting them the same, mass-assembly style, converting one for proper uniqueness, or giving them different shields and simply painting them a bit differently. I went with the third option, both because it’s an acceptable compromise and because these days I’m really loath to chop up old figures that aren’t already broken for conversion purposes. I mean, I cut a slotta out of all of these flat-topped 32mm bases rather than snip the slotta off the model!



The ogre-sun-face shield is (I think) from the goblins in the 4th Edition WHFB starter box, while the grinning goblin-faced shields are positively ancient – from the PBS3 Warhammer Fantasy Regiments plastic boxed set circa the late 1980’s. Damn, I wish I could buy a few of those boxes today.

Nice work on the orcs. I'm not particularly fond of orcs from that era, but you made them look nice.

I totally understand where you are coming from re: not chopping up older models. I had a bear of a time basing my Melniboneans for just that reason.

All the blood in my head just rushed to my nostalgia.

Lovely orcs there az, especially love the skin tones.

About the bases... I recently managed to snag 60 Blood Bowl slotted 32mm bases and now I won't have to snip any Oldhammer tabs or carve into the bases. Very convenient.

Thank you guys. I still have a real fondness for Kev Adams' orcs, despite their cartoony look. My Orcs were the only full-sized army that I didn't sell off during my great WHFB purges of the past. And now I'm going to (very slowly) paint them.

Joyboozer - you're directly responsible for the figure I dug out last night, and am putting on the fast track. Plan is to get him painted and finished today, so hopefully I'll actually get him painted by the end of the weekend.

Thanks Mymaeran. Those Blood Bowl bases sound ideal. Which figures do they come with? I thought the BB stuff was non-slotta plastic??

No the Blood Bowl figures are actually slotta figures, weirdly enough. They all come with 32mm slotta bases AFAIK.

I guess that makes sense in making sure that they're glue-free for clip, push and play for the boardgamer market.

In my formative Warhammer years, there was a bloke called Dave. Dave was in his (I think) late 20’s when I was a late teen, but we were both in the same Warhammer circles, and he was definitely a good bloke. He commission painted for some people and had a huge collection of models. He used to put together some amazing looking conversions and kitbashes back in the days before plastic kits became the norm. I’ve got a few of his conversions in my own collection, as well as some that I used as the base for further conversions of my own.


No helm = Dave’s conversion. Horned Helm = Dave’s conversion massively re-converted by me.

I lost contact with Dave over the years, as these things happen. But I recently found a Khorne Chaos Dreadnought conversion that he gave me to paint back in the day. Well, it used to be called a Chaos Dreadnought, but now we’d call it either a Chaos Helbrute or a Ferrum Infernus Chaos Dreadnought.

As I thought it looked bloody amazing, especially in relation to the godawful 2nd Edition Chaos Dread, my payment was to be another Dread of the same type. I found the model again this weekend, and sat down to finish off the final bits of detail that were left to do. Given the amount of time that’s passed, I’m not expecting anything in terms of payment, but I’ll be happy enough just to get it into Dave’s hands.



So here it is. Well, most of it. He never gave me the weapon arm. I think he was working on something unique before passing it onto me. Also missing the Hellfire Missile rack, which was converted from a non-Citadel model. I’m sure I’ll find it, then finish and post it out.



I’ve got an old phone number that belonged to Dave years ago. I called it yesterday evening and again this morning, but only got an answering machine. I’ll call again later today and hope to get through. After that, I know of some clubs he used t frequent on the other side of town so I’ll see if I can track him down that way.



The base is an MDF drink coaster. A little big in my opinion, but it’s Dave’s model and if that’s what he built and he’s happy with it, more power to him. The model is based around a stock-standard metal Castra Ferrum Dreadnought – AKA 40k 2nd Edition/Angry Washing Machine. Feet are Epic 40k Drop pod bases of some description.



The head is from the 2nd Edition-era Juggernaught of Khorne grafted onto the front of the Dreadnought Sarcophagus. The spikes come from the Chaos Dwarf Boar Centaur Warmachines – Tenderiser or Whirlwind. The Close Combat arm is made from a standard Dread CC arm with a plastic Adeptus Titanicus Warlord Titan chainfist replacing the power fist’s “hand” and a converted melta barrel replacing the storm bolter barrels.



The skull-codpiece is an old metal chaos shoulder pad, the Imperial Guardman’s corpse is an Aliens Colonial Marine casualty from some long lost range, and the lasgun is from the Necromunda Accessories sprue. Dave can add flock, static grass or tufts or any other foliage, to taste once he gets the model in hand. The three parts of the model are only sitting together in the above photos, rather than glued – with the torso loose and the arm blu-taced to the body. Once he gets it, Dave will be able to pose it however he likes, or even attempt to magnetise the arm and sockets.



It’s a pretty cool design in a lot of ways, and moreso considering that it’s entirely made of metal components. It weighs an absolute ton! One day I might try to build one of my own – inspired by this one, but using plastic components…

Oh man, now I'm intrigued by this Dave person. Hope he still plays and this results in this dusted-off old Dreadnought seeing some action after all these years!

Dave's not your own alter ego is he? to justify the models you have :-) even if he is, I love those first two conversions and paint jobs, they scream early 40k and have such a wonderful creepy vibe even though they're brightly painted, probably more creepy than the current realism that is preferred today.

That dread has a nice oldhammer vibe to it, especially when paired with the clean, bright red. Keep on hitting us with those nostalgia bombs!

That's a great looking model. It's amazing how close to the iron clad chain fist that conversion is. Someone was tapping into the future with that conversion.

@Mymearan - Well, I've tried the old number a couple more times (including right now) but keep just getting the Telstra answering service. I also tried a number I found for NWA wargames club that I know he used to occasionally attend. Yeah, Straight Outta Nunawading!

@Brook - The original plan for the dread was for a Wayne England-inspired scheme inspired by his Legion Gryphonicus artwork or the Marines on the cover of WD110, only in red.
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-0HW7cy37k1c/VktfIb8DNAI/AAAAAAAAJl0/jmwUehtntRA/s1600/white-dwarf-110.jpg
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/b5/b0/23/b5b023a2e1f03db81c96a8c2b1034dd3.jpg
It was a hell of a task, and when I found the model (the first time, shortly after moving in here) I went for a much more achievable clean red, with the Khornate rune on top. Result was I was able to get most of it finished, and then when I found it the other day it was a matter of a few small details. I've got some really old stuff upcoming shortly. As in drying from the spray varnish outside, so hopefully bloggable inside a week. Thanks to a productive January off work, I've got a bit of a showcase backlog.

@Nerdy - heh, nope. Dave was a "proper" adult with a job and everything while I was still in my late teens. I did buy a lot of my oldhammer stuff off him though, as he would regularly buy blisters just to get a certain figure or even a certain bit, leaving him with lots and lots of spares.

@Archer - good spot there mate. It's very much the same model, only without being the same model!




This guy was started about 3-4 years ago, when we started a very-occasional Pathfinder campaign run by our friend Orez. My character is (was?) a Dwarf Cleric, and so I trawled through my Dwarf minis storage box to find something appropriate. This guy was what I came up with. Hammer. Staff. Gems. Surly Expression. Yep, he fit the bill well enough. I could have blinged out his rather bright cloak a little more, but given how beaten up and ragged it is, I decided not to in the end.



Since we play …infrequently, the figures from the Pathfinder project kinda got sidelined and semi-forgotten. As a result, this guy was sitting on my painting desk for a couple of years before I noticed him recently and decided to just get him finished. Even if he doesn’t do a lot of Pathfinding, he certainly has a place in the Dwarven Army that I’m slowly building for KoW and even AoS if/when I get around to playing it as well.

Fits the bill nicely

Thank you mate!

The next Orc off the rank is this guy. A Kev Adams sculpt from shortly after he left GW, and originally from Heartbreaker in the 1990’s (when I purchased it), this figure is still available today from RPE/Ral Partha Europe as “2004 Orc w/scimitar” for a very reasonable 2 quid.



I’ve painted him with quite dark skin, though he’s nowhere near the size of a Black Orc. It’s a fairly simple paint job that gives him a little bit of individuality compared to the Citadel models I’ve been painting lately while being similar enough for him to fit in wherever I need to drop him down.



It’s a simple figure, all in all – but I think it’s a cracking sculpt that doesn’t need to reply on the character of old-school models, nostalgia or the act of painting it to endear it. Those things all add to this model, but I think it stands confidently on its own even without those additional elements.

That's a nice orc. I was a little confused at first, though, because his helmet and equipment looks more Gobliny. I assume he's orc-sized?

Some good stuff here buddy . Love the Chaos Lords in particular!

 JoshInJapan wrote:
That's a nice orc. I was a little confused at first, though, because his helmet and equipment looks more Gobliny. I assume he's orc-sized?

A bunch of Kev's Heartbreaker orcs straddle that line - the facial details here are also kind of in-between the two types of GW archetype. He's the same size as the 3rd edition orcs, but the sizes of both O&G have fluctuated so much through the years. He was (and still is) sold as an Orc, though. So that's good enough for me. Heartbreaker's Goblins from the same era are very GW-style gobliny, though.



@AoV - thanks mate - some more 40k coming up again real soon!

These are some quite pretty orcs, all told. I really like the red treatment you've given this latest one's scale skirt and the bold blue of its pack.

Thanks mate. I've got a bit of a habit of painting scale mail in coppery tones. A figure like this goblin could well look quite boring with too much silver/iron since that's what most of the model's clothing is made of.

What? A Castraferrum Dreadnought? Are those even still a thing? It’s ok. I have a Contemptor lined up for later. Anyway, enough sarcasm.

The Minotaurs Space Marine project that I’ve been working on (albeit slowly) has featured a lot of models that aren’t considered particularly exciting these days. Late-RT/2nd Edition Metals, Assault on Black Reach marines, 2e starter box marines and so many refurbished marines. On that very same theme, my first Minotaurs Dreadnought is simply an AoBR (5th Edition starter, 2008) plastic dreadnought.



As with most of these things, I started it ages ago (less than a year ago this time!) and only completed it recently. Almost by accident, really. One positive (I guess) of my “butterfly” painting style is that there’s pretty much always something reasonably cool that just needs a little bit more to push it to completion. My randomly picking up this dread off the desk on a Saturday afternoon and making myself actually complete it being a prime example…

The model is pretty much stock AoBR. The only additions being the smoke launcher on top and a few bits of Forge World’s Minotaurs Brass Etch – the Icon on the front of the sarcophagus and the Lambda with wreathed Phi on the left shoulder. A single Minotaurs transfer on the right shoulder and a Lambda (from Warlord Games’ Spartan set) on the right greave.



Luckily, the arms are tight enough that they don’t require any glue or anything at all to leave them both poseable and potentially swappable. The painting method was achieved with the same method as the regular Minotaurs – the model was sprayed silver, then zenithally highlight-sprayed a brighter shade of silver and then the bright brass was achieved with washes and a very careful highlight drybrush and some edging. Various elements of the dreadnought’s “skeleton” were subtly shaded with a blue tone, while others were done with brown, or only with black. Red was the only accent colour used, aside from green on the lenses and bone scrolls.



While I considered using some additional colour, or adding something to the left shoulder-front, I didn’t want to get too carried away as I feel that the Minotaurs should feel quite Spartan. (Pun intended, obviously!) The whole thing was finished with a satin varnish rather than the usual matte since I wanted to retain some of the soft shine that the model had when the paint was done. I’ll need to matte in the drilled-out holes of the multi-melta barrels, though.



Coming up with appropriate text for the small scrolls was annoying. A simple reference to Minos which has just got to be the name of a world they recruit from, or at least a key vessel in their warfleet. Aeres of course is the name of the warrior entombed in this Dreadnought. Chosen because it sounds good, fits nicely in the small frame of the scroll, because I could paint it decently enough, and probably because I was listening to a podcast talking about Austin Aries the other day when I was working on the dread.



Finally, a shot of Aeres alongside a few of his battle-brothers. May their enemies quake in fear!

The dread is looking awesome buddy. Lovely stuff!

I know what I like - And I like that. A lot

Dreadnought looks great. I love dreadnoughts. Something about that blocky form that appeals to me.

If you were interested I have the chainfist and hurricane bolsters from the iron clad kit that would probably fit just as well to that dread body.

ooooooooo. That sounds tempting. I don't believe I have those parts at all.

Nice work on the Dread. The brass effect is fantastic. I may need to find an excuse to copy it.

Although the AoBR stuff may not be the New Hotness, I'm still quite fond of them. I used them for the core of my (very small) Howling Griffons force, and they hold up just fine, IMO.

If you like I can shoot you a couple of pictures of the parts (they are glued into the arms).

Thanks guys for the kind words. The Next dread will be the Iron Warriors FW one that's been waiting a long, long time for resurrection. (And I've lost the FW Plasma Cannon that came with it!)

Archer - if you're using the arms on an existing model I don't want you to lose them? I'm a touch confused to tell the truth.

No, no, they are spare. I assembled my Ironclad with the seismic hammer and power fist (and I don't do the swapping thing).

So hopefully being more clear, I have a dreadnought hurricane Bolter arm and dreadnought chainfist arm all assembled but will never see paint or gaming while in my bits box.

That sounds great, Archer - very kind of you.

AoBR is something I'm hugely fond off actually. I collected orks at the time and 5th Ed was my favourite edition of 40k. My dreadnaught and the terminators from it did end up looted however.

The dread looks very nice Azazelx, the little extras make a big difference.

I am always happy to see some minotaurs from you Az, maybe as happy as when I see your Iron Warriors! it always gives me that push to get more organised with my own small Minotaurs contingent :-) so I ask of you, what and where did you use for extra 'spartany' type extras? heads, decorations, loin cloths etc?

Thanks guys, I'm very happy with how it came out. I considered weathering it, but then I decided to leave it be. I figure that the Minotaurs have got a finish of brass plating on their armour rather than metallic paint, given the hint of verdigris on the official artwork from FW. I've only got 2 more models in the works (right now) for the Minos - A Librarian that's about 2/3 done, and a Captain who is still in the build phase. I've got plenty more to build afterwards, just not sure where to go next following 2 Tactical Squads, a Dread, Libby and Cap. Perhaps Tartaros Terminators with a twist?


Damo, The "Spartan" style heads are from Anvil Industry (on the heavy bolter guy - who came from you originally!) and Puppetswar (on the Vet Sergeant). Shoulderpads are FW, and the Pteruges are again from Anvil.

Speaking of Iron Warriors....



Yesterday I finished adding the transfers to a batch of figures. The figures in this case were the last of my “Legacy” Iron Warriors – those being the set I converted over 10 years ago because I thought the IW looked good, and because I thought that basically weathered silver armour would be a fast army to paint. Little did I know…



Every one of the initial set of models was converted – using the parts available at the time. This meant bits from the plastic MK7 Space Marines kit circa 3rd edition, stuff from the (still current) Chaos Space Marines kit and the (even more sadly still current) Khorne Berserkers kit. I added in additional bits from the Metal shoulderpads that were available around 2nd-3rd edition and metal parts from what are now the Iron Warriors and Iron Hands Squad boxed sets, both of which are still sort-of available now as upgrade packs. But without the shoulder pads for the IW.



The circular saw arm comes from the same (Not-Orks) “Org” from that game I still can’t recall the name of, while the right shoulder is a metal one. His head is an Iron Warriors head with lots of cybernetic implants. The rest of him comes from the plastic kits of the day. As with many of the other models, I kept a link to the Legion with the IV added to his left shoulderpad.



His partner also features a mixture of parts. Torso and Head are from the metal Iron Warriors parts, though with the horns removed. I’m not huge on the whole “Iron Warriors as Space Vikings” thing.



Both arms and weapons are from the Khorne Berserker sprue, though the bolt pistol was added to the right hand and the angle was chained on the chainsword hand for a more open pose.



Once again, we’ve got one metal shoulderpad (got to be economical!) which is the Chaos star one. I could paint that central point in as a gem, though I’m not entirely sure if I should do so or just leave it. Red? Brass? Or just leave it as a large (iron) stud?



The left leg is from the Iron Hands kit, and the right is from an Assault Marine. I cut the IH leg pair in half so as to get two unique bionic leg sets from the one piece. I said economy, didn’t I? Finally, it’s backed up by a 2nd Edition-era plastic SM Backpack.

That’s it for now. I'll have the next pair up in a couple of days!

Always a pleasure to see your Iron Warriors buddy . Great stuff!

The Hazard stripes are so perfectly done. They really make the models pop. You must have a very steady hand.