Dwarfs – Page 2 – Lair of the Lagomorph

Thunderers Part 1

I got a few good painting sessions in this week and got to add this 10-strong unit of Thunderers to my Dwarfs for our Border Princes campaign.

These, just like the majority of the Miners I painted a few weeks back, are from the Warhammer 7th edition starter set: Battle for Skull Pass. This means they’re one-piece plastics and therefore are quite limited in their casting as a result. I think they look fine for army models however and as an added bonus they’re very easy to paint due to the complete lack of overhangs brought on by those casting limitations.

They were painted in the exact same manner as the Miners I mentioned above so feel free to go see that post for a detailed guide. In short, the beards and leather are done with contrast paints (two coats of Snakebite Leather for the leather, and a single coat of Gore-Grunta fur, Wildwood, Black Templar, Apothecary White, or Skeleton Horde for the beards). The metallics are Scale75 paints (silver: S75 Black Metal, Bronze/Brass: S75 Necro Gold), washed with GW Agrax Earthshade and highlighted with their respective basecoat colour. The green is the most involved process with a base coat of Vallejo Heavy Black Green followed by successive highlights of the same base colour with more and more S75 Sherwood Green mixed in all the way up to the line highlights done in pure Sherwood green. For the sleeves I stopped a few steps into this highlight process to differentiate them from the green on the armour (maybe 60% Heavy Black Green to 40% Sherwood Green).

Nice and simple and very quick to paint, I finished these in two sessions which is a nice pace. I have another unit of 10 to paint for the army, and I’m currently planning on how (or if!) to differentiate them from these ones painting wise.

Still plenty more to paint for this campaign so expect more Warhammer models to come this way soon!

Off to work we go!

Warhammer: The Old World

Planning is proceeding for the Border Princes campaign, armies have been selected and painting underway! I’ll be fielding Dwarfs and Vampire Counts, with the remainder of the forces in the campaign being Lizardmen, Beastmen, Orcs and Goblins, and Wood Elves. Additionally we’ve decided to have a small Bretonnian force defend the central town to make it a bit more challenging to take that important location. I’ll be painting that up took so expect some photos as I start getting getting around to that.

First up though is more progress on the Dwarfs. This unit of miners is probably the largest unit that I’ll be including in the army, so it was nice to get it done. The models are a mix of the old metal miners for the command and of the Battle for Skull Pass plastic models. They’re actually quite different looking but I think with the matching paintwork they work together well enough.

Painting-wise these were pretty straightforward. I used contrast paints a fair bit, with the beards being just a single coat of contrast: Gore-Grunta Fur for the red beards, Black Templar for the black beards, Skeleton Horde for the blonde beards, Cygor Brown for the brown beards and Apothecary White for the white beards.

The leather was done with Snakebite Leather with a coat of Burnt Umber Ink over the top to darken it. The candles are a single coat of Aggaros Dune, with the flames done with a coat of Nazdreg Yellow with some highlights of Nazdreg Yellow mixed with white.

The metallics are all Scale75, with the silver sections done with Black Metal and the bronze sections with Necro Gold. In both cases I base coated with the metallic paints, gave them a wash of Agrax Earthshade and highlighted back up with the paints.

The green on the armour is Vallejo Heavy Black Green followed by successive highlights mixing in Scale 75 Sherwood Green.

Overall I’m pretty happy with the look of these considering they were painted relatively fast. Hopefully I can get these Dwarves done up relatively quickly and move on to the other armies for the campaign!

Dwarven Cannon

Warhammer: The Old World

With my newly refound ability to paint, I’ve been looking for things to paint (which I’m not short of) and where better to direct that energy than at a new project rather than work towards finishing one of the many existing ones I have!

I got a book in the mail last week I’ve been looking for for a while, and said book triggered a flurry of conversation between my regular gaming partner and I about campaigns in the Warhammer world. The book in question is The General’s Compendium, a book published during the 6th edition of the game which contains a lot of ideas for what we now call narrative games, including a whole three ways to run wargaming campaigns. I read the book cover to cover over the last few days, and I really want to run a campaign now!

One of the map-based campaign systems in the book has the factions involved in the campaign have “banners” on the map, each representing an army. Rather than tracking army composition, the players just pick a game size they want for the campaign and each time enemy banners meet on the map, a game of Warhammer is played at the size specified at the start. The players are free to alter their army lists between games, that being rationalised away by reinforcements and units being shuffled between banners.

The details are still fuzzy, but the leading idea for our campaign is to each have a number of factions under our control. As we are just two and that will be a lot of games and a lot of painting, we decided to keep the point size for the banners to 1000 points. The opportunity to paint multiple small armies is one that I very much welcome, and here’s the start of that:

This cannon and its crew are models from the Battle For Skull Pass starter set which was released for the 7th edition of the game. I’ve had these dwarves for quite a long time now, and in fact dwarves were my first ever Warhammer models way back when (over 20 years ago)! It’s one of my biggest Warhammer regrets to not actually have a painted dwarf army considering how long I’ve owned some of these models. Time to fix that!

I decided to go with the Karak Hirn colour scheme (i.e. green), as that was the studio army that was done up in the army book back then, and I have fond memories of looking at those pages back in the day. It’s also the scheme that I used for that first box of Dwarf Warriors I got at the time.

Most of the painting was done using contrast paints as a base coat, with the exception of the green tunics which these models acted as a testing grounds for. I wanted to make sure I matched the green of the studio paint job back then, and luckily for me the army book had a nice guide on how to paint it … with 20 year old paints. Luckily I was able to match the paints with some in my collection, and it’s quite simply Vallejo Heavy Black Green as a base coat followed by successive highlights of that same colour with more and more Scale75 Sherwood Green. I’ll do up a proper painting guide when I paint up the first block unit and have finalised how all of this is going to look.

Anyhow that’s it for this update, these models were very quick to paint, upside of their relative lack of detail due to being ~15 year old single piece plastic models. I have plenty more from that starter set to get through, so expect some more stiffly posed dwarves to grace these pages soon!