2022 – Page 2 – Lair of the Lagomorph

Sikhs!

Back in North African Theatre for this update, with an addition to my 8th Army forces; this section of Sikh infantrymen.

Ever since I cracked open the 8th Army set from Warlord Games I’ve been eyeing off the different head options that are included, and I decided that while this platoon is supposed to be from a British regiment clearly in the heat of battle this section from an Indian regiment must have been joined them! I really like these models, Warlord did a great job here. More than just the models, I’m keen to showcase the variety of troops that fought in the desert, and while I won’t be building a section for each head option in the set (there are a lot if you consider the options also included in the Commonwealth Infantry set!), I wanted to not just stick to Brodie helmets.

These models also mark the end of the first platoon with regards to infantry, leaving me with 3 sections of infantry done and a royal engineers section. Progress is slow, but it is progress! I have a fair amount of infantry left to paint for the 8th army side of this project as I have my second platoon’s worth to paint (nominally as Australian, we’ll see who else sneaks in there!), and also the entirety of the other side (DAK) as well!

From a painting point of view, these are doe exactly the same as my other 8th Army troops except the skin of course. For the skin I used Vallejo Flat Brown, followed by a light wash of Agrax Earthshade, a highlight of Vallejo Flat Brown (effectively leaving the Agrax Earthshade in the very recesses), followed by a highlight of Vallejo Flat Brown mixed with Vallejo Heavy Skintone, and a final highlight of the previous mixture plus a dash of Vallejo Iraqi Sand.

The mixes I listed above were done to match colour swatches I’d made from sampling the colours present in a photo I found online. It’s the first time I try to do something like that and I think the results worked rather well, so I’ll definitely try that again in the future.

The background I used in the photo is a printed out photo I took when visiting the Flinders Ranges in the middle of Australia. Not quite North Africa, but it is a desert so close enough for my purposes! I spent a couple of weeks out there back in 2014 in the middle of winter and it was freezing cold and so dry that my lips were cracking no matter how much balm I put on! The scenery was fantastic however and the night skies unbelievable for someone that grew up in light polluted Europe.

Finally, here’s something I stumbled across in a second hand store yesterday! A really nice book from the late 70s on the Desert Rats. Plenty of great photographs that I’ll be pouring over for ideas!

2000pts of Skaven

AoS

Well I don’t often (maybe ever?) post twice in a day, but I ended up with a few hours of spare time I wasn’t expecting so decided to tackle the last model I needed to paint for this army (for now!).

This is the Warlock Engineer from the Island of Blood starter set. A cool little model (love the blunderbuss with a scope on it!) that was really quite fast to paint. I’d planned on just doing the basecoats tonight, but got carried away.

Once again not much to report on the painting front, he was painted much like my other Skaven, although with a little more care than the rank and file!

Once I’d finished him, I couldn’t resist setting up the whole army together for a photo!

So there you have it, the 2000pts of Skaven I’ve been working on for quite a while now, arrayed in front of my unfinished fortress, with the Dreadfleet mat hanging behind it for a very mystical looking sky! This feels like a nice achievement, as while I’ll definitely paint more Skaven models in the future, my goal at the start of this was to get to the 2000pt mark. It’s also taken me a while to get here, as my first post on the army was back in October last year, so almost a year ago.

I’m not too sure what I’ll be painting next, I have a couple of other projects on the go but I wouldn’t be surprised if I end up using this as an excuse to kick off a new one!

Clawlord

AoS

Back this week with another Skaven model, this time a Clawlord! This model was a limited Skaven warlord that came out around the time of the Island of Blood set, paired in a duel with a High Elf Noble. Both the elf and this Skaven are really nice sculpts and as I bought both at the time I’ll have to paint his elvish counterpart at some stage.

Not much to write about from a painting point of view, he’s painted much like the rest of the army although I did spend a bit more time on him than I would a regular trooper. His main new feature is the fact that I painted the pupil on him rather than just the red iris I did on all the other models in the army.

The tail is quite a prominent feature of this model so I made sure to spend a fair amount of time on it, adding a bit of colour variation, and picking out all the lovely (🤢) details. Overall though a really fun model to paint!

I’m currently in the process of rewriting the army list as a result of the new Skaven rules being released a month or so ago, but so far there is a good chance he’ll be the second to last model I need to get done for 2000pts which is rather exciting. I do love finishing projects! This also means that next post on the army is likely to features shots of the entire army together which should be fun to do.

Return of the Clones!

Star Wars Legion

It’s been a few weeks since I posted anything as I’ve been on a brief hiatus caused by me getting into some card gaming with some friends, but the painting itch has been strong and I was excited to get back to finishing models!

This week I painted up these clone troopers for Star Wars Legion, to add to my 501st Legion Clones. As you may have noticed, these have yellow* markings rather than blue, to mark them as part of the 7th Sky Corps, Obi Wan Kenobi’s troops. I wanted to do this because I plan on fielding Kenobi in addition to Anakin Skywalker in the army, and I fancied them having a squad each from their respective commands.

* Interestingly, the wiki article says the markings should be orange, but they always looked yellow in the tv show to me, probably a trick of the lighting!

These were painted in exactly the same way as the first batch of clones, and I kept the marking positions the same on both, just changing the colour.

These were nice and quick to paint, a good project to get back in the painting flow!

Warpfire Thrower

AoS

A quick one this time round, I painted another model for my Skaven army, a Warpfire Thrower, a cool (or not as it turns out!) little weapons team.

I really like painting weapons teams, whether fantasy or historical, as they always represent a little vignette. This makes for interaction between models that is often absent in armies of individually based models. Here we have a hapless rat that was clearly wandered too close to the last jet of warp fire!

There is a fair amount of detail on this model considering it was a starter set model from back in the day and must have been 2-3 pieces at most. The fire on the rat was fun to paint, if a bit challenging as I’m used to having a bit more space to try and get some fiery gradients happening! The smoke billowing out of the reservoir looks a little rough in the photos but seems to work well enough on the tabletop, so I’m happy with it overall.

This gets me one step closer to finishing the original 2000pt list I’d put together, only two characters left now, although with the new army book having been released a few weeks back it’s likely it would have to change if I ever decided to play it in a game.

Phase 1 Clones

Star Wars Legion

After a few weeks of little to no painting due to the excellent reason of getting a wedding ready, I sat down at the painting table over the last few nights and decided to tackle some more Star Wars Legion models, this time some clone troopers to go with The Chosen One!

After the large amounts of storm troopers I painted for my Galactic Republic army, the last thing I wanted to do was paint more plain white armoured troopers, so I decided to paint some markings on them as well as battle damage, loosely based on how they appear in the movies/shows. The blue marks them out as part of the 501st, the legion commanded by Anakin.

These models are made from the soft plastic found in Star Wars Legion starter sets and as per my previous encounters with the material, I did not enjoy the building or painting process very much. It’s sad because the newer hard plastics produced for the game are some of the best examples of plastic kits, I wish they’d started with that from the get go!

The battle damage did a lot of work to cover up some of the imperfections in the casting, and generally the poor quality of the casts guided my painting towards the faster end of the scale. Overall though I’m happy with how they look for the effort put in, and they were a great way to get back into the groove of painting!

If you follow the blog some, you may have noticed I’ve been experimenting with backgrounds to my model photos for a little while, and this is the latest experiment. I printed out a photo I took in Japan back in 2015 of these wooded hills in the mist, and I think they’re suitably abstract to work well as backdrops.

Keeper of Secrets

Warhammer: The Old World

After saying hobby time might be short over the next few weeks in the last post, I found a couple of hours today and finished up a model I’ve been working on on and off for a few weeks now. This is an older Warhammer model, and a solid chunk of pewter!

I’ve pulled this model out of the unpainted pile as a result of my recent dive back into older Warhammer books. It was a relatively quick paint job, I used the airbrush to get a quick zenithal sketch for the skin, with a reddish purple from underneath and a pale pink from above. After basecoating the rest of the model I did an all over purple oil wash, followed by some quick highlights on the skin, the red cloth, the black horns/nails and the metal.

I decided to try something I haven’t done in a while for the basing, and do some snow! I went for a spring thaw look, with the snow turning to slush. I think it looks about right, it was a simple mix of bicarb soda, snow flock and matte medium applied with an old brush.

Overall I’m pretty happy with how it turned out, and I have quite a few more old Warhammer models needing a coat of paint for when more nostalgia for that era kicks in!

The Deathmaster and the Word Bearer

AoS, Horus Heresy

I’ve had a bit of a rocky few weeks hobby wise, as I’m getting married in a couple of weekends and wedding prep trumps painting models! I’ve still managed to fit in a few painting sessions however and here’s the output of that!

First up we have this Skaven Deathmaster, a really cool model from the Old World times that made it through to the current era (loosing his special character status in the process!). I wanted to tie him in with the rest of the army while keeping that cloak as black as possible, hence the teal highlights on the black.

The second model is one of GW’s representations of the Space Marine Primarchs during the Horus Heresy period. This is Lorgar, the Primarchs of the Word Bearer Legion, probably the most treacherous character in the stories. Cool model, he’s fairly big (probably more like a 54mm model), but not as big as some of the other Primarchs. I’m happy enough with the paint job overall, but really chuffed with how those flaming skulls came out!

He was painted to celebrate the release of the new edition of the Horus Heresy game. My local hobby store Beyond Odyssey (Go see them if you’re in the Perth region!) organised for a few local painters to paint up Primarchs for the launch.

Anyway that’s it for this update, not too sure how much I’ll be able to do over the next few weeks, so may be a while between posts, but then again the if odd dull moment does crop up I might get something else painted!

Black Templars

40k

I’ve had a burst of nostalgia these last few weeks, and have been pulling out old rulebooks and old armies to look at and remember my earlier days in this hobby. One of those armies was my Black Templar space marines, that I played in 5th edition Warhammer 40,000 (somewhere around 2008-2010 I would guess). That army saw a lot of play time, and not a lot of painting time, so generally sits at the mostly base coated stage. Considering how much I enjoyed playing this army I decided they deserved some attention at the painting table and pulled out a few to throw some paint on.

I kept things simple, mostly concentrating on doing a lot of line highlights! With the rest of the colours being relatively flat. When you think about it, these all around line highlights don’t make much sense but they are a definite part of that era’s studio painting (still are to some extent!). They are however quite tedious, and while objectively these models were pretty quick to paint, I still had to motivate myself to get back to them.

Anyway, I’m happy with how these look for the effort I put in, and I did enjoy the trip down memory lane they took me on. I do want to get the lot of them done at some stage, but have enough ongoing projects to keep me busy in the short term without adding to them! So for now these 5 act as a nice “palette cleanser”!

With that in mind, I better jot down my recipes so I can match them in the future!

Brand abbreviations – VMC: Vallejo Model Color, VGC: Vallejo Game Color, VP: Vallejo Pigments, GW: Games Workshop Citadel, S75: Scale 75, AK: AK Interactive, MP: Ammo Mig Pigments,

Line Highlights: VMC Dark Sea Blue, VMC Dark Sea Blue + VGC Steel Grey, VGC Steel Grey
Shoulder Pads: VMC Iraqi Sand, VMC Iraqi Sand + VGC Bonewhite, VGC Bonewhite
Scrolls/Seals/etc: VMC English Uniform, VMC English Uniform + VMC Stone Grey, VMC Stone Grey
Red: VGC Heavy Red, GW Nuln Oil, VGC Heavy red
Metal: VGC Chainmail, GW Nuln Oil, S75 Black Metal
Eyes: VGC Heavy Red, VMC Orange Red
Brass: S75 Necro Gold
Basing: AK Terrains Sandy Desert (texture), VP Dark Yellow Ochre, MP Gulf War Sand, MP Light Rust

Verminlord

AoS

Back with more Skaven, this time the big cheese himself: the Verminlord!

Specifically I built the kit as the named variant Screech Verminking, and he is by far the tallest model in the army at 6.5in/ 17cm. Ever since this kit came out right at the end of the old world Warhammer I’ve wanted one, so it’s nice to finally have an excuse to buy and paint it.

It’s a fantastic model, but I found it quite daunting to paint, because of its size and the amount of detail all over it. I’ve been practicing techniques I knew I would have to use on this model on other models in the army, refining my big model skin on first the Stormfiends then the Hell Pit Abomination.

The skin was painted in multiple stages, alternating airbrushing and brush work to get a nice mix of smooth gradients and nice texture all over the model. The early airbrush work set the overall tones (darker reds below, light skin above), followed by layering and highlighting by brush in three stages, painting in detail where the model was a bit flat (painting the rings on the tails took some willpower!). Finally I used the airbrush again to add some more tones in, with some dark reds and purples to enhance the shadows. A final brushed on highlight took care of any areas where I overdid that last airbrush pass.

Overall I’m very happy with it, I painted it roughly over a week and a half, in a few paint sessions scattered over the period. It makes a nice centre-piece for the army.

With that, I only have a few heroes and a small weapons team left to complete my 2000pt list. Will I have the willpower to stick with this and see it through, or get dragged back to the North African desert or some other project entirely? I have no idea and will find out over the next few days!