Warhammer: The Old World – Lair of the Lagomorph

Blogomorph no.4

In which we discover what holidays really are for, I attempt to take over the galaxy, and we observe some dwarven progress.

Holiday Snaps

My hobby time this week has been severely impacted by some very nice family holidays up in Broome, all the way at the north of Western Australia (~1700kms as the crow flies from Perth, 2200 if driving). Broome is a really nice small town which is a somewhat renowned tourist spot, if you go in the right season (May to October).

Beyond providing a great excuse for my lack of progress this week, the reason I bring this up is because, Broome has this amazing red dirt all through it, much darker than the red dirt we get around Perth. If you’re a follower of the blog you know I love a red dirt base (see amongst others: Chaos Guy from last week, my Orcs and Goblins army), and Broome offers some great inspiration for those really saturated red dirt bases.

I personally really like the look of those dark rocks peeking out of the red dirt, and that is what I’m going for with the bases on that chaos model I showed in the last post. Hopefully you can find some basing ideas out of these photos so I can tell myself the weird looks I got from other tourists as I took photos of dirt were worth it.

As a bonus here is some inspiration for those of you that enjoy broken rock bases!

Imperial Ambitions

Barely back from holidays we made use of a long weekend here to play the longest game of them all: Twilight Imperium 4 (I know, there’s plenty of longer games — see this crazed attempt!, but this is as long as I’m willing to go!).

*And this is just the component for 5 players! We usually play with 6, and the game goes up to 8 players!*

For those of you not in the know, Twilight Imperium 4 is a game of galactic conquest/politics/trade where all the players attempt to become the ones that rule the galaxy. They do this by amassing victory points which can be obtained in a variety of ways, mostly dictated by cards that get revealed as the game goes on. This generally means you can’t really know ahead of time how you’ll need to contort your game plan to fit the objectives. Add to that the limitation that you can generally only score one one of these objectives per turn (you can also score secret objectives but I won’t go into too much detail), and you end up being dragged pillar to post from turn to turn, being forced to shatter alliances or forge new bonds with old enemies as you try to accomplish objectives. This makes the game very political and you need to spend a lot of time discussing options with other players, smoothing over perceived slights, allying against a more powerful opponent, or simply trading commodities to make a bit of money. The game is extremely fun and tense, as you constantly need to be keeping an eye on what is going on around you while formulating your own plan.

*Close to the end of the game, the board is packed!*

As a result of all this, the game is long, we generally finish in 10ish hours so a solid day’s gaming. This was a five-player affair, and it took us close to 13 hours (including a dinner break). Why the extra time? Well in this game we ended up with two players (pink and blue) in a position to win in the next turn, so the rest of us (yellow, red, black) formulated a complex plan to try to stop them. This effectively meant throwing all our forces against these two players to try and drag the game into an extra turn which would see us get into a position to win ourselves.

We succeeded in dragging the galaxy into bloody war (extending the game into roughly two more hours of game time in the process!), and effectively crushed the fleets of both players, but in the end it was too little too late, both players cleverly hanging on to or aiming for objectives they could score even when the table turned against them. The game has an initiative system each turn which dictates the order turns are played and points are scored. The pink player (my lovely wife) managed to both hold on to a safe objective and pick an early turn order so she was able to score out before the blue player could score his. The game is brutal this way, first to score wins.

For three of the five of us it was the first time playing the first expansion of the game, Prophecy of Kings. This adds some more mechanics to the game which I really enjoyed, including amongst other things rewarding exploration and also adding some faction goals that let you unlock some powerful abilities.

On the Painting Table

As you might expect from all this activity, I didn’t get much painting done this week. I did manage to get my batch of Longbeards to the wash stage so I should be able to get them finished soon.

Blogomorph No.3

Blogomorph, Warhammer: The Old World

In which we get crafty, get some paint on a chaos model, and do some dwarven engineering.

Figures for the Whole Family

Last weekend saw me do some unusual miniature “painting” with my son. The miniatures were paper and the paints… colouring pencils!

I came across these paper minis a little while back, but only just clicked that they would be great fun to print out and put together with my son. We had a great time colouring, cutting, and glueing them together and ended up with a nice collection of figures and an extremely messy table.

The models are by Zhu Industries over on itch.io for those of you that are interested. I think they look really cool (I really like the art style) and they’re made really well. It’s relatively easy to follow the instructions and all the fold markers are bang on so that you end up with double sided models that are properly aligned.

My son is 6 and has had a few shots at painting “regular” models, but he’s been more engaged in colouring these; I suppose it’s a much more familiar medium for him. It’s not like this is just for kids either, these are very viable alternatives for playing skirmish games if you want to avoid the expense, or don’t have the space for regular models, or just like the look of them. I have to admit even after my son decided he wanted a break a few hours in I still kept on colouring and cutting away…

Black Armour

Last post you saw me betray my Dwarven Battle March army by getting distracted by some very cool new chaos models. I managed to get said distraction painted over the weekend after a bit of colour scheme pondering. I ended up on what I think is quite a menacing look in straight black armour, leaving the trim also black to avoid the more usual chaos all shiny trim look.

The colour scheme pondering I mentioned above was done in the way I usually start (but not always end): looking through books. I quite like flicking through art and design books for inspiration for colour schemes, and while that is not always a successful process, in this case the books delivered.

I started with this very cool Japanese book that is just a massive collection of colour schemes and found a set of colours that piqued my interest. The top one is what caught my eye first, but the second one seemed much more useable as it was a more complete set of colours.

I then turned to art books, and decided to start with a very nice book of Paul Bonner’s art. You might know him from early Warhammer 40k art, or the plentiful gaming art he’s done in the years since. In this case, his cover art for a book in the Swedish RPG Drakar och Demoner‘s Trudvang range caught my eye. I quickly realised that it’s pretty much the bottom colour scheme I’d found in the other book! The stars had aligned and I was locked in.

This artwork is just very cool, I found the stark blue/black armour against the red/orange background really striking, and looking a bit deeper the range of browns and other secondary colours really complement the overall feel. It’s not just the colours that grabbed me, the fact the riders’ armour is all one colour, with only reflections highlighting all the details makes them look extremely imposing and threatening which is perfect for the model I was painting. Plus it meant painting black with Vallejo Dark Sea Blue highlights which is my absolute favourite way to paint black (as an example my Darth Vader).

This is not a particularly quick colour scheme to paint as there is a lot of edge highlighting to do which I do find a bit tedious when doing it en masse, but quite satisfying when tackling one model at a time. The model took around 2 hours from start to finish which means I can do one of these in a nice painting session. I think I might do more model by model or small batch painting in the future. It’s definitely slower than batch painting 10 or more models at a time but a lot less of a grind.

On the Painting Building Printing Table

Good news for Dwarf fans, after my brief dally with the forces of evil I’ve jumped back into my Dwarfs. After the Hammerers it’s time to make a dent into the units of Longbeards. I’ve decided to go for smaller batches after my experience with the Chaos Warrior and have picked out 4 as a nice small batch size.

Just like the Hammerers were, these models are sculpted ready to be holding shields so I tapped into my new shield supply and decided to go for these smaller shields. Unlike shields I used last post, these originally came with icons on the sprue which were meant to be glued onto them. As a result, they have some handy locating holes on them, which given I don’t have said icons I needed to cover up.

I decided this might be a job for 3D printing, although I expected it to be a bit of a challenge given the size I’d have to print these at (the shields are 9mm diameter), and the fact I only have a filament printer which isn’t renowned for fine details.

The vector drawing
Extruded into a 3D model
Ready to print!

The design process was quite straightforward in that I knew I needed to play to the strength of a filament printer, which is to print lines. To that end I decided to go for a simple embossed horn shape. I first drew it up in a vector program (Affinity Designer) then exported to SVG and imported into a 3D tool (Tinkercad) and extruded into a 3D shape. I then exported that as an STL and imported it into the slicer software for my 3D printer (BambuStudio).

It took me a few iterations to get something that would print ok. The models are so tiny I got a fair few that just came unstuck during printing so I had to add a raft to the print and even then the whole raft lifted off! Some more refinement required but at least I have some useable prints now.

After my shield counting blunder last post, a few of you may be amazed I’ve done it again and only have 3 shields for four models! Luckily for me one of the four is the champion model who doesn’t carry a shield. Crisis averted.

PLA filament plays pretty well with the plastic glue we use on our models so I was able to use that to glue my new icons down. As an added bonus as it melts the icon a bit it, it smoothes out any rough edges left from the printing or raft removal process, much like you can use plastic glue to smooth out models after sanding or scraping mould lines. The end result is not perfect by any stretch, but I think it should look good after painting. I guess we’ll find out!

Blogomorph no.2

Blogomorph, Roleplaying Games, Warhammer: The Old World

In which we explore Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, get a shield delivery, and betray some Dwarfs.

With Heroes Like These, Does the Empire Even Need Enemies

My regular gaming group and I have recently picked up our long running Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (WHFRP) campaign after a bit of a hiatus (we like trying new games and coming back to old favourites), and we’ve resumed our long journey through the classic Enemy Within campaign for the game. The campaign was first published between 1986 and 1989 and has been a staple of the game’s lineup since then, being reprinted for multiple editions of the game. The version we’re playing is the version published for the 4th edition of the game which is touted as the Director’s Cut of the adventure. The campaign is long, taking up 5 books (each with a companion book with extra materials for those extra keen) and it has taken us quite a while to get to book 3: Power Behind the Throne. This means we’re approaching the halfway point which is both exciting and daunting; there’s a lot more to go.

The game and the campaign are both tremendous fun, there’s a lot of that early Warhammer comedy in the books which mixed with the game’s lethality makes for a really good balance of tension and comic relief. The stakes are high, and the “heroes” (i.e. the player’s characters) somehow keep achieving great things while looking like they’re one step away from disaster the entire time. I won’t mention any details for fear of spoiling the campaign for others (and please if you’ve played it, stay away from spoilers in the comments, a few of the players do read the blog!).

I’m a big fan of what Cubicle 7 have done with this 4th edition of the game. It has some really neat mechanics such as the Advantage rule, which effectively rewards doing well in fights and gives cumulative bonuses to dice rolls as long as you keep doing well. This might sound a bit unbalanced on paper and it absolutely is, but this is a good thing. It has this great habit of making fights finish fast once a side has the upper hand which is an excellent feature. No toe to toe slog until someone runs out of hit points à la D&D here, just quick brutal battles that keep the story moving.

I can’t compare it too much to the older editions (1st and 2nd) of the game as the only other edition I’ve played was the Fantasy Flight 3rd edition, which was a complete departure from the early system. Instead of the percentile system that 4th went back to, 3rd showered you in cards and components and had you play a sort of board game to keep track of your character. I came across a video of Quinns Quest that describes it as a tabletop World of Warcraft which I suppose is pretty close. It sort of made sense at the time as I picked up new releases and slowly grew the game, but I have to say now looking at that box full of cards and tokens I have no idea where I would even start to try to pick it up again, it is absolutely overwhelming.

*Not pictured are: some more cards, more different kinds of cards, and twenty-ish softcover books.*

The good news is that sea of tokens has since been put to good use in other games; you’ve seen them on the blog used as markers for games of Silver Bayonet and Midgard.

I’ve recently managed to find a sensibly priced copy of the 1st edition of WHFRP, so I look forward to sitting down with that and reading through to see how it all started.

Shields! Shields! Shields!

As I mentioned last post I was waiting for some shields to arrive so I could finish my Dwarf Hammerer unit. These arrived about a day after I put up said post, so I can only conclude that if I want online orders to arrive sooner all I need to do is post more often.

These shields are a nice mix of the models that were around when I started the game which is early 2000s, and they’re just right for these Hammerer models. The delivery unblocked me and I quickly resumed painting the unit.

I did find myself with a dilemma though, how best to hold all these loose shields while painting them? The answer: super glue them to some sprue! This actually worked pretty well as a holder, and I managed to paint both sides of the shields easily enough this way. The shields have a small recessed circle at the back which matches up with prongs on the models. These recesses are where I tacked the shields to the sprue, so any offending gaps in the paint were nicely covered by the glue join once on the model.

So here’s the painted unit! The more eagled eyed amongst you will realise that I have nine models pictured here but only had eight shields on the piece of sprue above. If that’s you, well done you spotted that much faster than I did, as I only realised this when I was glueing the shields to the models and suddenly found myself one short…

In the end I decided the champion could have a fancy new shield instead, so I gave him one of the modern shields with the moulded decorations which I could easily just paint with the gold colour.

*The rune on the shields is the dwarves letter H, for hammerers, or Karak Hirn. It also looks like the number one which is appropriate as hammerers are definitely my number one dwarven unit.*

A discovery I made while painting these models is that paperclips make excellent lid holders for recalcitrant Citadel lids (i.e. ones that keep closing on you). I’ve seen people use those plastic cylinders you get on new brushes to prop pots open, but I always lose mine so it’s not very helpful. What I do always have on hand is paper clips, which I regularly use to unblock dropper bottles (you can see the paint on this one in the photo) and super glue tubes, and as a source of stiff wire for holding components when painting and pinning models.

On the Painting Building Table

Presumably this means I can now move on to the rest of my Dwarf units. Well there is a spanner in the works; my lovely wife bought me some models for Father’s day (last Sunday in Australia), and now I have fresh new kits staring at me from across the room and that is a hard lure to resist…

*You better believe some of the dwarfs at the back are writing about this outrage in their book of grudges.*

So yes I’m building some very cool new chaos models instead of painting my Dwarfs. The revolving door of shifting interests keeps on turning!

Blogomorph no.1

Blogomorph, Star Wars Legion, Warhammer: The Old World

In which we discover what a blogomorph is, discuss Star Wars Zero Company, and the latest in Warhammer small scale battles: Battle March!

Blogo-what?

You may be wondering what this blogomorph business is about, and quite rightly too! It’s a) my none-too clever portemanteau of blog and lagomorph, and b) my attempt at changing things up a little bit around here. I’ve been wanting to have a space to discuss gaming/modelling topics in a manner lighter than writing full posts about them for a little while now, and tacking these pieces to my normal posts about painting a unit etc hasn’t felt quite right. A good example of this was my attempt a little while back to put in some book reviews at the end of posts (the short lived From the Shelves series). While I enjoyed doing that it felt a bit weird having these posts with two quite distinct themes.

The other side of things I wanted to address was the limitation I’d placed on myself to only post finished things to the blog. While this has driven a lot of progress through my backlog of models, it’s rate limited posts to how fast I can paint. In busy periods this has meant posts dropping to once a month or couple of months in some cases.

Finally, while I quite enjoy writing and would like to do more of it, my post per finished unit format was a bit limiting in itself. There’s only so much you can write about the third unit of goblins you’ve painted in a row.

All of the above has lead me to want to try having two types of posts on the blog: 1. These blogomorph posts, which will be more regular shoot from the hip looks into things that interest me, WIP shots, and such; and 2. In-depth posts where I go deeper into one topic, such as reviewing a full army I’ve just finished, battle reports, full on discussions about games etc. These in-depth/deep dive (undecided on the name as yet), will happen when they happen (i.e. when I have something to talk about!).

The blog is turning 6 tomorrow, which is wild to think about as I did not imagine I would go on for this long. I’ve been enjoying it greatly however and this feels like a good way to welcome 6 more years! I hope you enjoy this experiment, time will tell if it sticks!

Star Wars Zero Company

Zero Company is a new strategy video game that is basically XCOM but Star Wars, and I’ve been enjoying it greatly. I get along well with this genre of turn-based tactical game (it’s effectively the video game version of tabletop skirmish games so perhaps not that surprising). That being said I’ve not played much of the XCOM games themselves which is probably an omission on my part. My favourite entries in this style so far have been the Shadowrun games that were released 10 or so years ago (I recommend them if you like this genre and/or Shadowrun as a setting).

Anyway back to Zero Company. I’ve been enjoying the story so far and the gameplay has been great fun. The battles are tough if you’re not paying attention but not crazy hard which is a nice mix to keep you not too frustrated and interested. A weird (for this genre of game) upside has been the level of the graphics and the character customisation options. The game looks good and you can change a lot of stuff about the characters which has on a few occasions lead me down a rabbit hole of tweaking characters rather than actually playing the game…

For me, a usual side effect of getting into something Star Wars-related is the rising need to paint some Star Wars Legion models. As you start the game, you get to create the leader of Zero Company (called Hawks but that’s pretty much the only fixed thing), and I ended up with a look I quite liked so decided it would be fun to paint a model in that scheme.

The new Rebel Commandos set for Legion has models that are bang on for reproducing my version of Hawks (Fatigues, Twi’lek heads, sniper blaster), so I just assembled this out of the box, no conversion needed.

A quick one-sitting paintjob later and I had successfully expunged my need to paint some Star Wars models (although for how long, we will see…). If you’ve followed the blog for a while you might recognise the basing as matching that of my Imperial army. One of my many project ideas is to make a rebel force that matches those imperials for cool Endor-themed games. That project is now one model strong!

*If you can read my horrendous hand writing you can have all my secrets!*

I’ve started taking note of my recipes in a notebook as that lets me keep proper paint swatches alongside the paint names, which makes keeping track of mixes and finding matches for paints going out of production much easier. That’s the theory at least, let’s see how it works out in practice.

On the Painting Table

Besides the Hawks model above, I’ve been busy painting some Dwarfs for Warhammer. Recently Games Workshop released an updated edition of the Warhammer Old World rules as well as a book called Battle March which has rules for playing small games of Warhammer (500-700 points). It has modified army selection rules to make games of that size interesting as well as a cool set of narrative scenarios which is right up my alley. Battle March armies are very roughly 3-4 small units and a character which makes for a nice self-contained painting project.

This seemed like a great excuse to paint up some small armies so I trawled through my collection of unpainted models and decided it was time to get paint on some of my old Dwarfs. I’m lucky enough to have quite a few of the middlehammer-era (think 2000s) Dwarfs and it’s a shame they’re still just bare metal, so this seemed like a great excuse to rectify that without being overwhelmed by needing to paint a full army.

*The upside of these WIP shots is I kind of need to keep my desk clean or the shame will end me, which is great for productivity!*

I’ve pretty much finished the Hammerer unit, but have hit a hurdle: I don’t have era-appropriate shields in my bitz box (the horror!). I’ve since found some on ebay so that problem will be solved once they arrive but it’s been a bit of a hit to motivation (which is ridiculous, as you can see I have two units of longbeards and a character I could paint while I wait).

I’ve had some good luck 3D printing bases for my Midgard models so I thought I’d try to make some for these models. I have buckets of 20mm square bases in my stash, but severely lack the 25mm the current rules ask of these models. They came out pretty good and I’m relatively confident the layer lines will be hard to see once the base rim is painted.

I’m hoping these Dwarfs will make for a nice first “Deep Dive” post when I have the whole army painted up.

Wrapping Up

Thanks for joining me in this blogsperiment, I hope you enjoy the format, it’s been fun to write and I think it hits what I’m after for these which is a nice bonus.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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!

Flagellants Part 2 // Mörk Borg

Roleplaying Games, Warhammer: The Old World

As I mentioned last post, I hadn’t done too much painting over the Christmas break, but I decided this week to break that negative streak and get back into it! The best way to do that was to pick an easy project and that meant finishing this next batch of Flagellants.

These will fight alongside the last batch, most likely in games of Midgard – hence the two sets of 8 models which make up a base each.

There’s not too much to discuss painting-wise, these are your bog standard doom saying, apocalypse preaching, world is ending types, in their usual accoutrements: brown and black rags! I tried to break up the mass of rags with some different shades of brown (I think I have 3 all up), as well as the aforementioned black sections. The fire was fun to paint, with some wet blended yellows and oranges over an off-white base coat.

If you remember my last post, I discussed creating a space in my posts to talk through books from my gaming bookshelf, partly to remind myself of old favourites, but mostly to motivate me to crack open those that have sat unread for many years. I’m a little bit undecided if these should be standalone posts or be part of “regular” posts (as I’ve done here; open to opinions if you have any!). Anyway, here’s my first shot at a segment I decided to call From the Shelves.

For the inaugural From the Shelves segment, I decided to pick out a book that has some nice thematic parallels to the flagellants above: Mörk Borg. Mörk Borg is a rules-light roleplaying game that sort of blurs the line between art project and game, with some pretty wild graphic design that looks like nothing else I’ve ever read.

I’ve had my eye on this book for quite a while (it was originally released in 2020), but I only picked it up in December last year, as my gaming group started talking about running short games instead of long campaigns as our default way to play RPGs. The book is pretty short (80 something pages, most of which are pretty light on text) and the rules are very simple (~8 pages of the book are the actual rules of the game). There’s a few pages on the setting (the world is about to end, and things are generally pretty grim; maybe the flagellants are right!), then character creation rules which are mostly dice driven (i.e. result in pretty random characters), this is followed by the main game rules, some optional classes, a bestiary, and an introductory adventure. All in all a pretty complete game given the small format.

The game itself is a simplified fantasy adventure system, in the OSR genre (i.e. tries to capture some of the nature of early RPGs), but has its own voice rather than being a classic Dungeons and Dragons reproduction. While the universe at first glance is extremely grim, there is a tongue in cheek feel to the whole book which reminds me of early Warhammer fantasy/40k publications. This in some ways is so over the top it’s impossible to take it too seriously and I’m sure this ridiculousness will lead to some great moments at the gaming table.

*One of the more unusual weapons tables I’ve seen!*

The crazy graphic design is pretty interesting, on the one hand it does a great job of communicating the feel of the game, but possibly more importantly it does a good job of making different sections easy to find. I read an article on this book that discussed that as each page looks different, you end up using the art/text as a landmark when flicking through the book, and I very much agree with that. The book also has the index on the rear inside cover which is a genius move that makes it very easy to consult at a moment’s notice.

*Looking for rules on hit points? Just find the page with the big heart!*

Overall the book is a fun read and I really look forward to running games of it. It has a great amount of support out there from 3rd party publishers due to its permissive license model, so it’s hard to run out of pre-prepared content. It even has a in-universe 3rd-party miniature skirmish game called Forbidden Psalm which I’ll have to check out some day!

Hopefully you’ve enjoyed this quick look into this book, I’ve definitely enjoyed reading it and now I’m going to go try to convince my friends to play the game.

Middenland Swordsmen

Midgard Heroic Battles, Warhammer: The Old World

I haven’t painted much over the last few weeks as it’s been a bit of a busy time, with some travelling (more on that later!) but I managed to chip away some more at some Empire models.

After learning to sculpt beards for last post’s Valten, I tried my hand at it again on these swordsmen. I wanted to represent some state troops from Middenland, one of the northern provinces of the Empire which is presumably filled with gruff bearded men. The Storm of Chaos campaign is mostly set around Middenheim which is the capital of Middenland. These models will then be fighting on their home ground.

The uniform of Middenland is just blue, but the book I have on Empire uniforms suggests multicoloured feathers, and I extended that to the shields. They might be a bit more colourful than the average representation of Middlenlanders but they work for me.

These models are “rescues”, in a previous life they belonged to a friend that had built them as halberdiers, but all of the halberds had broken over the years. I inherited them a little while back and have since then stripped them of paint and rebuilt them as swordsmen from spare arms I had.

I find that I can get most if not all the paint off when stripping plastics, but there is always some residue which adds a bit of texture to the models. As a result I wouldn’t use these as display models but they’re ok for armies!

You can see what I mean in the unpainted photo above, the light grey plastic is the new parts I glued on, while the dark grey/black areas are the stripped models. You can also see my attempts at sculpting!

I mentioned travel above, I ducked over to Sydney for a few days to see a concert at the Opera house (a metal band would you believe!). I took the opportunity to visit some museums and the art gallery there and wanted to share this humungous painting of some Napoleonic cavalry by Édouard Detaille.

The painting is something like 4.5x5m and dominates the room. You can get a better view of the painting itself on the gallery’s website (https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/works/4560/), but hopefully my photo gives you a sense of scale! The whole gallery was very inspirational, plenty of ideas to pinch for hobby projects!