July 2023 – Lair of the Lagomorph

Back much sooner this time, with just the one model, but a big one at that!

*Sorry for the “Inception” style floor rising up into the sky on this shot! This is a very tall model and I* *didn’t have any terrain tall enough to act as a backdrop!*

This is one of the biggest monsters Games Workshop produced for the old Warhammer world back in the day, a Terrorgheist! Effectively a really, really, big undead bat that has unnatural terror causing powers (I’d be terrorised quite naturally if I saw one of these!). I’ve always loved this model and at the same time been extremely daunted by the idea of painting it, hence this model staying as bare plastic for the last 10 or so years…

After painting my unit of slayers, I wanted to paint something a bit more loosely and settled on this big bag of bones. With that in mind, the painting ended up being very straightforward: Wildwood contrast on all the leathery skin bits, Skeleton Horde contrast on all the bone bits, and Flesh Tearers Red contrast on the exposed fleshy bits and the mouth. The model then got an all over dousing of a wash made from Brown and Grey oil paints. I left it to sit around for most of a day and then picked out all the bone areas in Vallejo Model Colour German Came Beige WWII and highlighted them with a mix of the aforementioned beige and Vallejo Model Colour Bonewhite. The ears and nose were picked out in GW Bugman’s Glow, washed with GW Druchii Violet, and highlighted with a mix of GW Bugman’s Glow and Vallejo Model Colour Dead Flesh. Quite simple and quick overall!

You may have noticed some red goopy bits all over the mouth of the beast in the photos so far! This was my first attempt at trying out the stringy gore effect I’ve seen quite a bit in other painter’s photos. It’s quite simple to achieve really, get some UHU tube glue (the transparent gel-like version you squeeze out of a tube) and mix in some red (I found GW Flesh Tearers Contrast worked best for me, I also tried GW’s Blood for the Blood Good, but that seemed to react with the glue and dry too fast to be useful). Use a wooden skewer or toothpick to then pick up your red sticky blob and start tacking it on a part of the model and stretch to another. Repeat until sufficient horror has been achieved!

The mouth wasn’t the only area getting this treatment, the model has these exposed innards that seemed like another appropriate spot to use this!

I’m interested to see how resilient this ends up being on what is a gaming model, it could be this is only a useful technique for display models that can expect a lot less handling. I’ll report my findings at some stage in the future! Regardless, it’s quite easy to do and looks great I think.

This model comes with a humongous base (which as you can see is nicely warped), and while the model comes with these rocks that do a neat job of starting to fill it, I knew I was going to need something else on there to break it up some more.

As a start I put in this mini scene of a zombie starting to pop out of the ground, although clearly this rat thinks that breakfast was just delivered! For the rest of the space, I broke out my big tufts. These are mostly leftovers from sets of tufts that are too big to fit on regular bases and have been piling up in my tufts box for a while now. Nice to have something to use them on.

The more Warhammer savvy of you might have recognised that I’ve talked about using 6th edition Warhammer for this campaign and that this model didn’t arrive till 8th edition (if memory serves!). My Vampire Counts for the campaign are themed around the Necrarch bloodline, and the Necrarch specific army list at the back of the 6th edition army book allows them to take unridden zombie dragons as a rare choice (normally these require a vampire to ride them) to represent their mastery of necromancy. This seems like a great way to run this model without having to make up rules so that’s what I’m doing!

That’s it for this update, I had a lot of fun painting this model and I get to pivot onto another faction after this. Something I haven’t posted anything about yet!

It’s been a bit of a while between updates, painting this unit was slow for a couple of reasons: as I mentioned last time around I’m back in the office mostly which has cut down on my painting time, but more importantly I took my time on these!

This is one of my “holy grail” units, Troll slayers! Dwarves were my introduction to Warhammer, and I spent a lot of time over the years looking at the models in the pages of my army book (all I could do, 14 year old me definitely could not afford full units of metal models!). I got my hands on a lot of metal dwarf models a couple of months ago off a friend that was wanting to sell them off, and I’ve been greatly looking forward to painting them.

Troll Slayers can have multiple “Champion” type models and I decided to include two in the unit. The leftmost model in the photo above is the one that came with the models I just bought, and the rightmost is a model I’ve had since those early days, finally getting painted. Both very cool sculpts.

I had a bit of fun with the banner, the runes on the left scrolls spell out I KO TROL. The book has a horn symbol on it as a call back to this army’s origin: Karak Hirn – The Horn Hold.

I also had a lot of fun painting the troll head mounted on the banner. The blue makes for a nice contrast with all that orange!

These Troll Slayers mark a bit of a milestone for my Dwarfs, they take the army up to 1000pts which is the size we settled on for this campaign. So here’s a photo of everything I’ve painted so far for them! I’ll likely paint up some more models (I own plenty more now!) for the army, but it’s ready to go as it is and I’ll focus on the other factions for now.