2025 – Page 3 – Lair of the Lagomorph

I’ve been busy building and painting a big unit for my Orcs and Goblins Old World army and needed a change of pace (read: a smaller project!). I had a look around my hobby room and my eyes stopped on my Dreadfleet box. I’ve used the game as a palette cleanser in the past (Back in April 2022!), and it delivered once again. At the pace I’m painting it I should expect to be able to play a game in 2040 or thereabouts.

Rather than paint more ships, this time I decided to tackle the terrain pieces in the box. These are nicely varied and hold a ton of detail given the scale they’re representing. They also had the advantage of being mostly rocks and therefore were nice and quick to paint, which fit my purposes perfectly.

Painting them was quite relaxing, and apart from painting the water, they were really straightforward. The water was an issue for two reasons: 1) unlike the ships which have separate bases, this terrain has the water attached and mixed into all that detail I was talking about before, and 2) I never wrote down how I painted the water the first time around!

Considering “the first time around” was close to two years ago I was preparing myself for some hard trial and error. However I got extremely lucky there, and as I was painting remembered how I’d done it, as well as picking the right paint to use on the first try. I am preparing for the next long break between painting this set this time, and writing things down! So here goes:

Rocks:
1. VGA Dark Fleshtone [Airbrush] – All over
2. VGA Beasty Brown [Airbrush] – In generous patches
3. VGA Cold Grey [Airbrush] – Smaller patches, picked out some rocks entirely
4. VMC Stone Grey [Drybrush] – All over
5. MIG Panel Line Wash Deep Brown [Wash] – All over
6. AK Slimy Grime Dark [Stipple] – On the base of the rocks to add green algae
Wood:
1. VMC English Uniform [Basecoat]
2. VMC Stone Grey [Drybrush] – All over
3. MIG Panel Line Wash Deep Brown [Wash] – All over
4. AK Slimy Grime Dark [Stipple] – On the base to add green algae
Sails:
- VGC Black [Basecoat]
- VMC Dark Sea Blue [Highlight]
Bones:
- VGC Bonewhite [Basecoat]
- MIG Panel Line Wash Deep Brown [Wash] – All over
- VGC Bonewhite [Highlight]
- AK Slimy Grime Dark [Stipple] – On the base to add green algae
Castle Walls:
1. VGC Black [Basecoat]
2. 50/50 AP Kraken Skin / VMC Dark Sea Blue [Line Highlight]
Castle Roof:
- VMC Dark Sea Blue [Basecoat]
- 70/30 AP Kraken Skin / VMC Dark Sea Blue [Line Highlight]
Lava:
- PA Titanium White [Underpaint – Brush] – Painted the lava areas in pure white
- VMA White [Underpaint – Airbrush] – Painted next to the lava areas to create a glow
- VGA Moon Yellow [Airbrush] – Center of the lava areas
- VGA Orange Fire [Airbrush] – Outer areas
- VGA Gory Red [Highlight] – Picked out the raised areas to make “cold” lava crust
- VMC Black [Highlight] – Picked out raised areas within the red
Water:
1. Light Grey [Basecoat] – This was a mix to match the undercoat I used on the rest of the models in the set, a just off-white straying into grey.
2. GW Contrast Akhelian Green [Contrast]
3. VMC Light Sea Grey [Highlight]
4. GW Contrast Akhelian Green [Contrast] – Slightly watered down
5. VMC Light Sea Grey with a dash of GW Contrast Akhelian Green [Highlight]

Manufacturer codes: VGA – Vallejo Game Air, VMA – Vallejo Model Air, VMC – Vallejo Model Color, VGC – Vallejo Game Color, PA – ProAcryl, GW – Citadel/Games Workshop, AP – Army Painter, MIG – Ammo Mig, AK – AK Interactive

Here’s some detail shots of the terrain pieces. They’re all named in the rulebook so I’ve reproduced those in the captions.

Castle Island
Castle Island

Corpseface Cliff
Corpseface Cliff

Shipwrecks

Volcano Island
Volcano Island

Leviathan Island and Skull Island
Leviathan Island

Finally here’s a shot of the terrain with the ships I painted earlier. Really gives you an idea of the fantastical scale the game’s ships are!

It was nice to have a small project to tackle, gave me a sense of having accomplished something after a few months of working away at a bigger project without results I can show! What is true is that the pandemic days are truly over, I have to get used to hobby productivity levels that are much reduced when compared to the enforced downtime we had in the early 2020s. One thing I promised myself when I started this blog is that painting is meant to be my fun time, and should never feel like a chore. That means posting to the blog is secondary to that, and even if I feel it’s been too long between posts (which I’ve felt all of last year and this year), life and fun comes first, and I’m not going to make myself paint just to post something.

I’ve been in contact for a few months with John over at Just Needs Varnish!, over which time we decided to tackle some of our respective Japanese backlog. He had some turn of the 19th century Japanese forces in need of painting, and I’d been sitting on a collection of unpainted Sengoku era miniatures for a couple of years.

I decided to kick off my Sengoku collection with some spear Ashigaru. The models are from Perry Miniatures and come in boxes of 6 metal miniatures so what you see in the photo above is two boxes of spearmen and a lieutenant from the ashigaru command box also by Perry.

The resulting odd block of 13 models works well for my current target rules system for playing this era: a repurposing of the MESBG ruleset. It’s one of my favourite skirmish systems and I think lends itself very well to historical gaming. The game system is very flexible and makes it easy to represent mixed units as the models are individually placed and moved. In MESBG you pick armies by assembling warbands lead by character models, with 12 models lead by a minor “hero” being pretty standard for the game. This means this group of 13 above makes for a nice warband.

If you’re familiar with the period you might have recognised the mon (emblem) of Clan Hōjō, with it’s three triangles (representing fish scales if I understand rightly!). I decided to go with this clan as I visited some the region they ruled over during my first visit to Japan back in 2015 and really liked it, it’s one of my fondest memories from that trip. In fact the foggy forest photo I’ve been using as a backdrop to my miniature photos for quite a while now was taken there! So the backdrop is very appropriate for these models.

Painting-wise these were relatively simple, with the black and blue scheme heavily reliant on Vallejo’s Dark Sea Blue. I used it both for the cloth areas and the highlights on the black, just mixing in different levels of pale greys in for highlights to differentiate them. For the skin I followed the recipes in my previous Samurai post.

I was planning on tackling some buildings I 3D printed early in the month but simply ran out of time, so they will appear on the blog at a later date when I get around to them!

John got some great results out of our themed painting month, painting some very nice cavalry and some matching infantry that you can see pictured above. Overall this was a fun exercise, and got me to paint some models which I had no immediate plans to tackle which is always a nice plus! So thanks John for the motivation, and I recommend you all go check out the models John painted (and generally follow his blog, lots of great stuff on there).