Trip down memory lane: Hunt for the Golden Demon

40k, Middle-Earth SBG, Warhammer: The Old World

You might have noticed a decent-sized gap in my posts, with the last post well over a month ago! I’ve been pretty busy with work these last few months with a big project finishing, but primarily my spare time has been taken up with cycling. I’ve signed up for a charity ride in October, which will see me ride 200+kms over a couple of days so I need to get in shape! The ride is to raise money for cancer research, here is the fundraising link if you’re interested in contributing. I used the opportunity of having nothing on the painting table to spend some time refitting the painting setup which put my painting desk out of commission for a few weeks as I 3D printed the new setup – more on that later. Regardless with a window with no new painting to show off, I figured this would be a good time to do a post I’ve been thinking about making for a while: a retrospective on my attempts at display painting and more specifically attempts at the Golden Demon competition.

Hard to believe since I’m so into army painting these days, but for a few years around 2007-11 I was mainly into display painting, and had quite a few cracks at Golden Demon. I’ve never photographed these before which is a bit of a shame as a few aspects of them have aged poorly over the intervening years, but from that we can extract a bit of advice so not all is lost!

The Early Years 2007-2008

I had my first crack at Golden Demon in 2007, and got my first and only result (barring some finalist pins) with a bronze! This was an interesting category they called “Master” where we had to paint the special golden demon model for the year unconverted. You can see the Gold and Silver entries over at the Golden Demon Compendium.

Here he is next to the trophy looking rather chuffed with himself!

Of note (and you’ll see this again on the next model, much worse) is the water. I used PVA for it (I had nothing better at the time!) and while it looked fine at the time it has gone a bit cloudy since then.

Next up is my 2008 entry: Merry from the Lord of the Rings

This model is minuscule so I was pretty happy of the detail I managed to get into it at the time. Funny story about this model, the way Golden Demon used to work in Australia was that you would have a round in individual stores, then the models that did well in that were sent to Sydney for the “proper” Golden Demon event. This model was sent to Sydney and we sat around the Perth Games Workshop store waiting to hear results. The phone call came in and I had won … the Youngbloods (under 14s) category! As a 20 year-old that was a bit of an issue, and we duly called the Sydney store to let them know my model had ended up in the wrong category. They ended up re-judging the Lord of the Rings single miniature category and I ended up with a finalist pin for my troubles.

From an ageing perspective, a couple of lessons from this model: 1) as above I used PVA for the river and that has gone completely cloudy over the years – don’t use PVA for your water effects! 2) The moss I used on the base was nice and green when I put it there and as you can see it’s gone a lovely golden colour now. I believe you can seal moss with some products nowadays to prevent that from happening but I had no idea about that at the time.

The Staff Years 2009-2011

I joined the staff at my local store after that and so needed to enter the Staff category rather than the regular categories. This made trophy availability a bit tricky as the staff category was just a single category judged on top 3 across all the staff in the country and there were some very good painters in the staff at the time. I don’t quite remember which order I painted these miniatures in, but I think this is right:

Eowyn is one of my favourite models I’ve ever painted, she’s gone a bit glossy over the years unfortunately, but given the size of the model I was very proud of the detail I captured there. It was also one of my first attempts at Non-Metallic-Metal which was all the rage at the time.

Lokhir Fellheart is a very cool Dark Elf model from the old Warhammer range. I remember having lots of fun painting this model, trying out a more limited palette. The sculpted waves were fun to do as well. Also some NMM on this model.

This work nob with banner marked a return to a more “realistic” style with metallic paints and some nice grime. I was definitely inspired by some of the French painters a the time which had some really great treatments of metallic areas.

Wrapping up

I hope you’ve enjoyed my trip down memory lane, it’s been fun looking at and thinking about the context of those models. I was lucky to even get a trophy, looking at the standard in painting competitions these days the bar is so high I’m not sure I’d be able to compete.

As I mentioned at the start, one of the impediments to me doing any painting has been my painting desk has been out of commission as I printed new infrastructure. I backed the PaintPal Studio XP kickstarter which is a modular set of paint racks, and got the files a few weeks back.

It was quite a lot of printing, but it’s made for quite a neat setup. I’ve already started painting again and hope to have something to show soon-ish, I’ve embarked on something a little bigger than my usual posts so it might still be a while away.

Carthaginian Cavalry

Hail Caesar, Midgard Heroic Battles

Back in this post with further work on my epic scale Punic Wars project, with some cavalry this time!

Warlord Games lists these a Libi-Phoenician Medium Cavalry on the box, I’ll be using them as heavy cavalry in the game as the Midgard ruleset keeps things simple as light or heavy cavalry for mounted units and I’m generally following the units as provided in the example punic wars army lists provided by the author of Midgard.

The Warlord Games sprues come with 10 of these models, but I’ve saved one to bulk out a character base for when I get to those. I’ll be using it to mark a character as more important by having two models on the base rather than the one.

Painting-wise there’s not too much to report, I’m sticking with the formula that’s worked well for me at this scale: undercoat the models black, then base coat them all over with Vallejo Nato Brown. This tackles all the leather and other nondescript brown items on the models and lets me focus on the more colourful details. The horses are done with contrast paints (Gore-grunta Fur, Wyldwood Brown, Black Templar), and I picked out the cloth areas in alternate bone/blue/purple colours. The skin is AK Tan Earth, and the metals my favourites Scale 75 Black Metal and Necro Gold. The models get an all over wash of Army Painter Strong Tone, and then I pick out at few areas of interest (mostly the cloth areas) in their base colours as a highlight. The only real highlight on the models is the spear shafts which I pick out in Vallejo English Uniform to make them pop out.

I lost the transfer sheet for the set, so I went for hand painted symbols, sticking with the Sign of Tanit as it’s relatively straightforward to paint at this scale.

Speaking of scale, last post Jeff over at https://kuribospainting.com asked for some scale shots to show the size of these models relative to “usual” models. So here they are next to Warhammer Empire models which I hope offer a relatively familiar standard, Hope this helps! The Warlord models are an odd scale from what I understand, something like 13.5mm, so just under half the size of a 28mm model.

Next up in this Carthaginian Division box set is the characters and many, many Gauls!

Iberian Scutarii

Hail Caesar, Midgard Heroic Battles

The good thing about projects is that they sit around and wait for you to get back to them when you wander off different paths. The last post on my Punic Wars epic scale project was back in September last year (so close to 10 months ago!), and it’s now time to resume painting tiny models!

Off the painting table this time around we have some further reinforcements for the Carthaginian side: Iberian Scutarii. These Spanish mercenaries should add some nice muscle to the enemies of Rome!

The longest part of painting these models were the shields as you might expect. They really form the most eye catching section of the models so I spent a bit more time on them than on other parts of the models which are mostly a simple base coat followed by a wash. For the patterns on the shields I generally copied the patterns from the studio paint job on the box.

As all the models I’ve painted for this project so far I really like how they look as a block, I think the scale is a nice balance between paintability and nice look as a mass on the table. There’s a lot more to go where they came from, I’m barely halfway through the first box of models, with fours stands of Gallic infantry, one stand of heavy cavalry and the characters left in the Carthaginian Division set. Then I have the Roman Division and the Allied Division sets to tackle as well as Elephants!

Canoness Veridyan

40k

If you’re at all associated with the Warhammer side of our miniature hobby, you probably came across the sad news that John Blanche passed away earlier in the month. Needless to say he had an incredible impact on our hobby, his artwork inspiring many of us and laying the course for much of what Warhammer and its dark future counterpart became. It’s easy to see his impact by the number of excellent posts on the topic around the internet (I’m partial to Azazel’s post on the subject, which focuses on the impact of John’s miniature painting articles). For myself, one of my first proper experience of the hobby was reading through the 3rd edition Warhammer 40,000 rulebook, and soon after getting Mordheim and playing that for quite a few years. If you’re familiar with both those books, you’ll understand that John’s art provided a lot of the context as I got to grips with these worlds, and therefore has stayed with me throughout the years as I paint models and play games. On the news of his death I spent a bit of time looking back at those books, taking in at the art that inspired me all those years ago, and deciding that I should channel this energy into some model painting! Luckily for me I picked up the Canoness Veridyan model when that was released quite a while ago (I saw 2016 somewhere), and that being a direct interpretation of one off John’s most famous paintings that seemed like a good way to go.

I initially decided maybe I should try to paint this to display standard, as it’s been many years since I tried my hand at that, but ended up going with the flow and that resulted in a model that’s more like character standard (i.e. slightly better than army painting!). I think I’m just too impatient to paint display models these days, or at least not used to it anymore!

I left the model as is, adding a few elements on the base to recall the original painting (i.e. adding a stack of bones, and a white rat scurrying away).

If you’re unfamiliar with the painting, here’s a photo of a nice print of it I have hanging near my games table.

I really enjoyed painting the model, it was nice to take a bit more time than usual on a single figure. I find painting reds and blacks quite satisfying, and I have to say I had a bit of an urge to do some more Sisters of Battle/Adepta Sororitas models after this one, so who knows maybe that’ll start something!

Gaslands Cars

Gaslands

I’ve gotten into watching the WRC (World Rally Championship) this year, I’ve always been interested in watching rally (and playing rally games!), but the watching part was always tough as there was no easy way to do so. With streaming that’s changed now and it’s possible to watch full rallies now which is great fun (I’m actually catching up on Rally Japan as I type this!). As a result I’ve had a bit of an urge to do something car related hobby-wise, and since I finished my 100 miniatures for the GW challenge I’ve been freed up to do so!

Now WRC cards most definitely do not have guns and armour plating mounted onto them (probably would slow you down too much!), but cars for Gaslands definitely do! For those not in the know, Gaslands is a post-apocalyptic car battles/racing game which encourages you to kitbash Matchbox/Hotwheels/whatever toy cars you want and turn them into road warriors. It’s been around for a while now (I think the first edition was from 2018), and I’ve enjoyed coming across people’s models over the years but never tried myself.

I found some Matchbox cars at my local supermarket, on sale for less than $3 (Australian!), and thought they looked like fun ones to kitbash. One (above) was a raised Jeep, another (below) was an old Mercedes open top car, and the last one (two-down) a 4×4 VW beetle.

Painting-wise, I kept these very simple. I actually found most of the fun in these models was actually the kitbashing part (more on that later). The process was over a black undercoat, first I airbrushed a rusty brown all over, then gave the cars the old hair spray treatment to help chipping the next stage (if you’re not across how that works I went into a bit of detail in this post). For the body I airbrushed a solid colour over each and then attacked it with a wet brush to get that chipping look. I used the hairspray to my advantage to clean off anywhere I over sprayed with the body colour. I then picked out some details like the tyres and guns. I followed this all up with an all over coat of gloss varnish to fix the hair spray layer in place and get ready for the wash stage. This was an all over brown enamel wash, wiped off the raised areas with a sponge. I then hit the car with a mix of dry pigments, with rust colours on the rusted areas and dust. I finally locked all this loose material in with a couple of coats of matte varnish. The only real detailed step for these was picking out the headlights, which were base coated in a light grey, on which I added a couple of spots of highlights to mimic the glass look.

As I mentioned above, I really enjoyed the kitbashing aspect of these models. I painted these models in one evening, but took one evening each to build them. I don’t have great photos of the build stage, but I hope you can get a good idea of what they looked like before paint went on with these:

I started by disassembling the cars and popping the bodies into a jar full of acetone to get the original paint off. After a good sit in there and a good scrubbing they were ready to go. I grabbed a box of 40k bits that I had and started kitbashing, mixing in some WW2 kits, and for the Mercedes some 3d printed wheels I made using my filament printer. I had a lot of fun building the tracks for the VW, they’re spare from a Warlord games Opel Blitz kit that I built using the wheels.

I picked up a 1/72 kit of US Vietnam troops to make some crews for these cars. You can see the one I glued into the Mercedes a little bit in these photos. I have some plans for some of the other cars I’ve picked up to have some more visible crews, so more on those later! I have to say after handling 1/72 models up close I’m even more impressed by John’s work over at Just Needs Varnish, who paints models in this scale on the regular. They’re really quite small, much closer to painting 15mm models than 28mm I have to say.

Anyway that was a very fun project, as I said above I’ll likely make more, and beyond that put together some terrain for the game!

Steel Legion Guardsmen

40k, AoS, Blood Bowl, Warhammer: The Old World

As you know I’ve been painting away to meet the 1 Million Miniatures challenge, where I pledged to paint 100 miniatures at my local GW store. Last post saw me get to 91 miniatures, and with a little over a week left I decided to paint up this squad of Steel Legion Imperial Guard troops, which would take me up to 101 miniatures.

I only have 10 of these old metal models, but I decided to paint them as if I was painting an army of them, which suited the speed painting I needed to do for the challenge anyway. With the new Armageddon Warhammer 40,000 set coming out, one has to hope they’re re-releasing Steel Legion miniatures one day, which means I might be able to add to these!

Painting-wise, these were extremely simple and quick. To get a head start on the trench coats, I undercoated the models with Vallejo German Dark Yellow/Dunkelgelb airbrush primer. I then picked out what is visible of their skin in Pro Acryl Shadow Flesh, followed by covering all the leather areas (Masks, straps, books, ammo pouches… there’s a lot of leather on these models) in Wildwood contrast paint. The bedrolls are Vallejo German Fieldgrey WWII, the helmets Vallejo German Camo Dark Green. The gun casings in Vallejo German Grey, and finally the metal areas in Scale75 Black Metal.

I then went for my usual all over wash, but instead of my go to Agrax Earthshade I decided to try something a little bit lighter as Earthshade can be a little dark over colours like the trench coats. Instead I decided to experiment and went for Army Painter Soft Tone. It worked really nicely, giving a nice gradient over a lot of the models. It led me to think that I might get away with minimal highlights on the models – great for army painting. For highlights I simply picked out the raised areas of the helmets, trenchcoats, and metallic areas in their respective basecoat paints (upside of using airbrush primer, you can paint it on when you need to), did a few line highlights on the guns with the German grey mixed with some AK Ivoryand that was it. The final touch was painting the glass on the goggles in Citadel Contrast Blood Angels Red – couldn’t help going for that Fallout New Vegas NCR Ranger look, too iconic!

The basing was simple as well, a thorough covering of AK Sandy Desert texture paint, followed by some MIG Brick Dust pigments. The base rim is Two Thin Coats Druid Flesh.

So with these done, this takes my tally to 101 models, completing the challenge! So what do these 101 models look together you ask? Well I couldn’t resist finding out so I laid them out for a family portrait.

The answer is… eclectic! That’s quite a few model ranges represented there, but I’m proud to say only the Amazons were purchased during this challenge, all the other models I already had and were sitting unpainted in boxes, some for many many years. This then was a great excuse to get some paint on these older models and put a dent in the backlog!

Having the challenge finished is a bit of a weight of my shoulders, I enjoyed painting all these models, but the focus on speed definitely influenced the models I picked to paint, and I look forward to being able to pick and choose what I paint more freely!

Blood Bowl Orc Team

Blood Bowl

With the deadline for the 1 Million Miniatures challenge approaching (May 9th!) and having been distracted from painting for a bit due to participating in a Vampire the Eternal Struggle tournament, it was time to get back on track and make a dent in the last 21 models needed for me to hit 100.

I’ve painted one Blood Bowl team already during this challenge (the Amazons) as my gaming group is keen to get into Blood Bowl. Another friend was keen to join in but not necessarily interested in the hobby aspect of the game and as I had this Orc team lying around from an old starter set I decided to paint it up for him to borrow.

I’ve been painting quite a few Warhammer and Warhammer 40k orcs/orks recently and decided to changing things up and go for a blue scheme rather than the reds and blacks I’ve been going with. I quite like the look of these, might have to paint some more blue armoured Orks in the future.

Painting process-wise, there’s not too much to write about, this is the good old base coat, Agrax Earthshade all over, highlights type of painting. The skin recipe is the same as my Warhammer orcs.

I enjoyed painting the markings on these, it’s a fun part of painting any orcs/orks, and you can get away with being a bit messy, you can be sure orcs wouldn’t be particularly neat.

These models take me to 91 total for the challenge, just need to find 9 more to do inside the next two weeks and I’ll be all done. Back to the painting table!

Ork Meganobz

40k

Continuing on the 100 miniature target for the 1 Million Miniatures challenge, here’s the next set of miniatures into the speed painting grinder: 9 Ork Meganobz!

I’ve already painted three of these quite a while ago, although in the bright yellows of the Bad Moon clan. This time I went for Goff colours, as I’ve been wanting to paint other clans for my orks.

The paint scheme is relatively simple for these, starting with a silver undercoat, followed by randomly picking out panels in Vallejo Heavy Red, black (Vallejo Model Black), light grey (Vallejo Heavy Bluegrey), and bronze tones (Scale75 Necro Gold and Vallejo Tinny Tin). For a few areas I also added markings like the checkered patterns so characteristics to Orks, as well as other simple shapes.

This accounts for most of the models, but they also have a few more organic areas, such as the flesh and clothes. The flesh was base coated in dark green (Vallejo Heavy Blackgreen) and the pants in brown (Vallejo Chocolate Brown). I then picked out all the wiring in a variety of colours, and did an all over wash of Citadel Agrax Earthshade.

For highlights, started by picking out raised areas on all metal panels (painted or not) with a bright silver (Citadel Runefang Steel). I then went over the red panels with some patchy Vallejo Heavy Red, and picked out the checkers and other white areas with a mix of the base coat (Vallejo Heavy Bluegrey) and an off-white (AK Ivory). I then liberally applied thinned down rusty brown (Vallejo Parasite Brown) all over the non-bronze metallic areas, and a copper oxide colour (Citadel Nihilakh Oxide) over all the bronze panels. For the skin highlights I did two highlights over the base coat, by first doing a 50/50 mix of the base colour (Vallejo Heavy Blackgreen) and Vallejo Goblin Green, then a final highlight of the pure Goblin Green.

Overall I’m happy with the outcome, and thoroughly enjoyed the process. Painting rusty models is always a lot of fun and lends itself well to faster painting as the whole process can be pretty loose. These models take my tally up to 79, so getting pretty close to the 100 mark which is good with a bit under a month left for the challenge.

Ghoulish Speed Painting

40k, Warhammer: The Old World

I’ve been busy trying to get through the remaining miniatures needed for the 100 target I have in the 1 Million Miniatures challenge. I left the last post at 36, and with just over a month left I needed a bit of a speed boost. Luckily for me I found 29 of the most speed paintable miniatures: Ghouls!

So why are they so speed paintable? Well they’re mostly organic materials, which lend themselves really well to airbrushing and washing, which are two elements that help you get far fast. On top of that, they’re mostly one organic material: skin!

To get these done fast, I leveraged my airbrush to get a terracotta colour base coat, followed by a dead flesh zenithal (from above) spray. I then picked out bones, fur, leather, stone, using contrast paints, and painted over the metal areas.

Airbrushed and contrasted!

I then airbrushed some acrylic floor polish all over them (an old military modelling trick – basically a cheap way to get gloss varnish). Once that was dry (helped along with a hair dryer), I did an all over oil wash with a mix of terracotta, magenta, brown, and a blueish grey to get a brownish purple with some red accents. Again I helped it along with a hair dryer before wiping the oil off the raised areas with some makeup sponges. I then applied some texture paste and grass clumps to the bases and left everything to dry/cure overnight.

Washed and Based!

The next morning I did a brown acrylic wash over the bases, painted the base rims, airbrushed on some matt varnish and painted on some blood effects on their mouths and hands. Overall painting time was approximately 4h split over the two sessions ~2.5 hours before the overnight drying session, and an hour or so for the final touches. So nice and quick for 29 models!

I quite like this kind of painting, it’s quite cathartic to just glob oil paint all over your models knowing you can clean them up after. There’s not too many models you can do this to however. I did do something similar in the past with acrylic washes for the Goblin Town models, but I think I like the oil route better, it’s more controllable and the extended drying time is actually really helpful when doing so many models.

I also tried out my new Dark Eldar scheme on some Wyches:

They’re probably a little rough for my liking, so I might take my time a bit more on the next batch, but they still look nice at table level.

Anyway that adds a nice 34 extra miniatures to my tally, taking me up to 70 total which is a much more comfortable place to be with little over a month to go in the challenge. Let’s see what catches my fancy next!

1 Million Miniatures

40k, Warhammer: The Old World

Back in December last year, Games Workshop announced their 1 Million miniatures challenge, which has people pledging in their local Warhammer stores to paint 25, 50, or 100 miniatures between January and early May. I figured that would be a fun thing to do so I duly pledged I’d do 100 miniatures thinking that would be a piece of cake (foolish!). I had this great idea that this would serve as a good excuse to paint my Tomb Kings starter set which has 90+ miniatures in it, and skeletons being relatively easy to paint that would be that.

Trouble was, building 90+ skeletons in one shot is actually quite boring, and I quickly found my enthusiasm dwindled to pretty much nothing. Which left me in early-march with just the last two post’s worth of miniatures done for the challenge: the Flagellants and the Amazon Blood Bowl Team, totalling 20 miniatures. Suddenly to make the 100 by May 9th I needed to paint something like 1.3 models a day.

So I switched tack to the methodology that gets me painting the most: abandon all plans and paint whatever I feel like at the time. Hence this post which shows of the eclectic result of the whatever I feel like strategy, but in so doing adds another 16 models to the tally. I’ll show them off in painting order.

First up we have these wacky Goblin Squid Herders and their charges, three mean-looking Squigs!

These models are very fun, and were great to paint. I really enjoyed doing the patterns on the Squig bellies, and felt they were necessary to break up what would otherwise have just been angry red balls with legs!

Next up we have this unit of Empire Knights converted and painted to be of the order of Knights Panther.

I made the cloaks and other fur applications from greenstuff which was good practice (but also really slow, bad idea when trying to paint 100 miniatures, whatever I feel like isn’t always efficient). The paint job on these was quick, although I spent a bit of time on the furs as the signature element of these models. This mostly involved creating the gradient from yellowy-brown to cream on the furs before painting on the spots using dark brown contrast paint.

Finally we’re staying with animal patterns but in a much more synthetic setting with the last entry in this post: some Dark Eldar warriors with a wild (pun intended) colour scheme. I’ll go more in depth on the influences for this scheme in another post hopefully, but long story short I saw some very cool, extremely 80s, Eldar colour schemes in the 1st edition Warhammer 40,000 rulebook and went from there. Some of the tiger stripes are a bit wonky, but I got better as I went along and learned what worked and what didn’t. The scheme is surprisingly fast to paint, mainly because most of the armour is black and I find I can do that black with blue-ish edge highlight look pretty quickly (don’t look too close at those highlights thanks).

I hope you’ve enjoyed this look into the mix of models that made the cut for things I felt like painting in the last few weeks! This is a bit of a microcosm for how I approach this hobby and why if you’ve followed this blog for a bit you’ll have noticed me jumping from project to project all the time. I value the fun I get out of this hobby more than anything else and that means I’m always trying to paint what inspires me. I like to think of it as striking while the iron is hot on an idea.

That might mean I get excited on a project for a few months then stop when I get excited about something else. This might seem unproductive, but at the end of the day I find even if I park a project for a bit, inspiration will come back at some stage and that is the time to resume it. If I push through when I’m not inspired anymore I’ll a) not enjoy myself and b) get a worse result, both of which are things I like to avoid. Anyway that’s enough yammering, I have 64 more models to paint!