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This has been a slow week for painting. I'm getting burned out on samurai, and I can't seem to make any progress on the last two of the hatamoto I've been showing. I finished the painting on three more classic Chaos minis, but I'm having trouble with the shields:


There's not much to this guy. He's fully armored, carrying a spear/halberd thing. I'm keeping these guys Old School, which means using the plastic shields they originally came with. I don't really enjoy freehand, but I wanted to give them classic Citadel shield designs, so I located a PDF of the Arcane Armorials transfers and printed them on transfer paper. This one slid over well enough, but the decal sheet is clear rather than white, resulting in a translucent red. Also, I either didn't seal it well enough after printing, or else I cut too close to the ink, but the colors kind of dissolved.



This guy's weapons all have a bird's-head motif, so I assumed his weird double mohawk is actually a feathered crest. I modeled the colors after Deathbird, an old Marvel supervillain. Once again, the shield transfer sort of fell apart.



Another simple Chaos Thug. He has a horn. He also had a mold line running over his right eye that I didn't notice until I was highlighting his skin. Rather than scraping it off and starting over, I turned it into a scar. His sheild transfer went on well enough, but the white basecoat shows through. I should have done a red basecoat instead.

I wanted to call these guys done this week, but the shields just aren't working. I may have to freehand them after all. Bummer.

 JoshInJapan wrote:
I have a bunch of Chaos dudes, none of them newer than The Lost and The Damned, and I love every one of them. I actually packed them up with the intention of selling them off the last time I tried to rationalize my collection, but I just couldn't bring myself to do it.

Lol! I'd kinda hoped to get them off of you too....

Valete,

JohnS

Eyes on the owlbear look ok to me. Very alert, probably stares at you from the desk Samurai is cool too!

That's a great/crazy looking Owlbear, and the Samurai gang continue to impress.

I think the latest samurai is my favorite!
Owlbear's eyes look good to me.

Last Monday was my son's sixth birthday, so I didn't get much done while we were playing, and around midweek I just sort of lost steam. Over the weekend I forced myself to finish this guy:


He's another Steel Fist samurai. of course. I'm trying to keep these guys unique, and it has been getting harder to find interesting historical armors to base them on. I found this pattern by searching for "unusual armor" (or rather 変わった
鎧) on my phone, and came across this fantastic armor with yellow lacing and gold and purple accents. GIS on my computer doesn't show it though. He got dropped when he was half finished, mangling his original weapon, so I replaced it with a Dixon spear. The black lines on his back banner aren't uniform, but you can only tell up close so I'm calling that good enough for now. Here's everyone I've finished so far:


Only one more (plus movement tray), and I can put this unit behind me.

Would you mind sharing some of the inspiration photos you used?

I'll try to find some of them, but my phone (which uses Safari) and my computer (with Google) give different results.

He looks great - I'd have never picked that the weapon was a replacement, either so a very smooth conversion/repair job.

if you have email on your phone you should be able to copypasta the URL and email it to yourself?


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Huh, Just saw the chaos guys. They look pretty good, and I think the shield transfers would be recoverable if you just paint 'round the edges of them with the right colours. Well, the red ones, anyway. The blue looks like it might be too far gone.

I've done a few cursory image searches, but haven't found any of the images which inspired me. I did, however, find several other inspiring images. I'm going to take a break from samurai for a bit, but when I get back to them I can jump right in with some neat lacing patterns.

I went back and painted over one of the transfers, and it looks a lot better. I applied different transfers to the other two, but only one of them worked. I'll put up photos when the minis are complete, but for now it seems that, since the transfers require some freehand touch ups, it would be quicker to just freehand the shields.

I'm done! I've finally finished the hatamoto!


I was pretty sick of painting samurai by the time I got to this guy, so instead of researching samurai armor accented with bear skin (as this guy is), I just went with alternating green and white for the lacing. The fur is army painter fur brown, highlighted just a bit with fur brown/ivory, then hit with a wash of Strong Tone. This guy was apparently really into bears-- he has fur tabi, a fur-covered scabbard, fur lining on his kusazuri and menpo, and on his kabuto. For his banner, I imitated (as best I could) an ink painting I found online, and put a poem/song about a bear on the other side:
A bear / in order to see(view) the scenery / climbed a mountain.

Here's the completed Troop:




I left enough room on their movement tray for one more rank plus 5mm if I decide to field them as a full regiment instead. These are nice models, and fun to paint, but I'm going to take a break from samurai for a couple of weeks.

Completely unrelated, I finished off those Chaos Thugs:


This first Thug was essentially finished, but the translucency of the transfer on his shield bothered me. I ended up going back over it, and I think it looks much better now. I may or may not add some writing on the scroll.


I couldn't salvage the original transfer on this guy's shield, so I just painted over it and applied a new one. I probably should have replaced the shield entirely, as it ended up kind of lumpy, but it's hard to tell at arm's length. This model doesn't look particularly Slaaneshi, but that's what I had in the right shape and color. Maybe he's wearing a thong under his armor? I dunno, and don't really want to think much more about it...


I tried to do the same with this shield, but it just didn't work. The spike is too thick at the bottom to easily slide a transfer over and I ended up just freehanding the Star of Chaos. You won't be able to see his shield when he's ranked up, though, so we can all pretend this didn't happen.

I had enough fun revisiting this army that I pulled out a few more that I painted years ago, to see about touching up, but my twenty-years-ago skills hurt my eyes to look at, so I have three soaking in alcohol, awaiting stripping and a new paint job. Watch this space!

Very nice stuff. Always nice to get a unit done

That Hatamoto looks fantastic - the banner adds so much to him. The watercolour-like bear is a very nice touch, as is the poem on the back. Not that I can read it, but hey...

I am, indeed glad to have the unit finished. The poem on the banner is pretty famous-- everyone reading this has probably heard or sung a variation of it.

 JoshInJapan wrote:
I am, indeed glad to have the unit finished. The poem on the banner is pretty famous-- everyone reading this has probably heard or sung a variation of it.

The itsy bitsy spider?

Valete,

JohnS

It's about a bear, you goof, not a spider.

What a great unit of samurai! i like the freehand bear.

Thanks. It looks much worse up close.



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About halfway through the unit of hatamoto I posted the other day, I started pulling out random minis to ward of the boredom. I already posted the Chaos guys. Here are a couple more:



According to the tab, this guy is the Moon Duke, part of this set of Heroic FIghters of the Known World. I have almost every mini in this set, in various stages of disrepair. My son likes to look through my many, many Boxes of Shame, and when he saw all my old human fighters, he just had to take them all out and put them in my display case, to use as his Knight Team (as he calls them). The thirty-year old paint jobs offend my eyes, and I plan to get them all up to snuff, one at a time.



And here are three more bases of snotorclings. The snotlings have been ready to base ever since I finished the first set, but I didn't get around to painting more orclings until last week. Now I can field two troops or one regiment of the little pests.



Finally, here are some scouts I painted with my son. He is only six, so brush control remains an unknown to him, but he enjoys slapping paint on minis, and it's easy enough to go back and patch up the messy bits as we go. I have a lot of unpainted space marines, both metal and plastic, so I have no problem sacrificing them to improve his hand-eye coordination and fine motor control, as well as giving us more tie together that doesn't involve me getting punched by the Littlest Kamen Rider.

Finally: I can't believe no one has gotten the bear joke I posted over the weekend.

I was a little sad that no one commented on The Moon Duke until I noticed that my new post got turned into an edit, and thus didn't show up as an update. Oh, well...

This week, I have some Ogres to show off:


Of these three, the bald guy with the topknot is my least favorite. His head looks derpy, and with only two one-handed swords in the pack, he ends up looking like the ugly cousin of Grokagamok (who can be seen [urlhttp://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/613450.page#7217930]here[/url].) I still really like Mantic's ogres, and they are pretty easy, if somewhat repetitive, to paint. That said, I don't really need or want a full army of them, and will most likely use them as Oni allies for the samurai. I tried to tie them in thematically by giving them tiger skin loin clothes, with mixed results.

I like to have a couple of projects going on at once so that I have something to do while washes/glazes are drying. This time, I finished off three more Chaos Thugs:



I got this guy in a blister pack around 1986-87, and at the time I was really into him. "Check out this awesome gladiator," teenaged me thought, "I bet he got started as a pit fighteror something!" Looking at him with my 40-something eyes, he seems a lot more pervy and overtly Slaaneshi. Check out the thong, the piercings, the self-inflicted scarification. Also, his feet don't meet up with his base very well. I tried to hide it with static grass. Did it work?



This guy is based on the same body as the blue-and-white guy in this post. His pose is a little more natural, I think. He looks really stunted in the photo, but he's not much better seen straight on. I'm guesing he's supposed to be a dwarf, like that guy in that Men Without Hats video? I have a least one more Thug who fits this court jester theme-- I'll have to redo him soon.



I have stopped painting eyes on most of my minis, because they are too small to see at arms length, but I made an exception for this guy-- that mutation is the focal point of the model. I stuck with the eye theme with the old school transfer, as well. I managed to get it to settle over the shield boss well enough, but it still needed painting over to get it to look right.

Here's a group shot:


Next up: an ogre hero and some very very old Citadel fighters.

Good looking stuff.

I especially like the ogres. I'm still working on my GW ones.

I think it's cool that you paint with your son even though he's so young.

He has the attention span of a six-year old, so I end up doing most of the work. Mostly he likes to line up however many figures he can reach and have "battles." Once he's a little older I plan to introduce more complicated rules than hi-lo.

I have a few very old Citadel ogres, but nothing from the current range. How do you like them?

Scouts looking good for six. So's the other stuff. Great ogres, I especially like your mantic ogres color scheme.

Thanks. The scouts (and everything he paints) end up being a team effort-- we're still working on brush control.

I'm a big fan of Mantic's ogres, but not that orange-brown they use for their skin. It reminds me of the GW studio Beastmen around 6th/7th edition WHFB.

You've gotten heaps done here since I last looked in - I remember that set of fighters! I may even have one or two, though nothing actually painted, and certainly nothing worthy of display like the Moon K̶n̶i̶g̶h̶t̶ Duke of yours. The SnOrcling horde is coming along nicely. The hardest parts of those mobs is painting the little blighters and your Son's Marines are fantastic for one so young.

I like what you've done with the Ogres and I actually thought "Oni" when I saw the flesh tone you'd used, only to have it confirmed further down the page - so I guess you can call the scheme effective as well. The old-school thugs look great as well. How many have you renovated now?

I find the orclings pretty easy to paint, if only because there isn't much too them. Goblin green, wash. Pick out the or cloth, wash. Glue to base. Digging through my boxes of unpainted stuff, I found another unopened pack of snotlings, so someday I'll crank out another six bases of the little guys.

I have five updated thugs so far, with another thirty or so waiting for modernization. I'm working on some fighters and a hero fort the ogres right now. After that, I may work on something bigger.

Having finished off a Horde of ogres last week (6 models is a horde?), I decided they needed a captain. Here he is:



I absolutely love these old Jes Goodwin ogres. Everyone is an individual with so much personality. I supposed that's why I never got around to building an army of them-- they all seemed like they could have been the general. I have probably four more from this line, with a few that went missing when I moved overseas. One of these days I suppose I will have to really sort out all my painted and unpainted lead. They will be my legacy to my son, after all. Here's all the ogres I have currently painted:

including an inadvertent selfie.

Also, a couple more fighters:


This guy is named Wulf, at least according to his slotta tab. He does have a wolf head on his breastplate, but it's all but invisible thanks to the wings on his helmet. The wings had some ugly mold lines/casting errors on the front that made them more difficult to paint than they should have been, but they look good enough at arm's length that I won't lose any sleep over it. His shield is one of the few designs that work for non-Chaotic humans from the Arcane Armorials set I acquired a few weeks ago. This one required a lot of touching up after application, just like all the others I've tried. I'm beginning to think that keeping it old school is more hassle than it's worth.



And this is Vlad. Just like Wulf, he's an old Jes Goodwin sculpt. You can tell because the eyes were so easy to paint. Vlad is kind of a boring miniature-- full plate with horns as his only decoration. I guess the shield is supposed to make him more interesting visually, but once again the transfer is something of a letdown. As much as I hate freehand, that may be the way to go in the future.

I don't normally post WIP photos, but I'm stuck on this guy:


He's a paladin from the same era as Vlad and Wulf. He's almost finished, but I can't seem to think of a good way to do the plume on his helmet. Ideas?

New stuff is looking good, and I'd love to see an "army shot" of the Ogres. For the paladin, you could go with yellow for the plume, or purple again - possibly a lighter purple? If you wanted to go crazy you could do the "layers" of feathers in alternating colours. Black and White, or Dark Purple and White would work with his existing outfit.

That is the army shot of the ogres. They have been on the back burner for a long, long time.

I like the idea of alternating colors for the plume. I'll give that a try and see how it looks.

Nice work!

Yep, nice oldschool stuff. Between you and Azazel I'm getting nostalgic for things I wasn't even in the hobby for