Back again with more forest spirits, this time Tree Kin, smaller than Treemen, but bigger than Dryads!
I’ve had half of these models for quite a long time now, as part of the wood elf army I put together around 2007. The other half I recently inherited from a friend who generously gave me his. Both sets needed some care after years of neglect, but nothing a trip in the stripping bath and some fresh glue couldn’t fix! My models were built as is, but he’d done some cool conversions on his to spice them up a bit (there only being 3 variants, it’s nice to have some extra variety in a unit of 6!).
I painted these in the same manner as my Dryads and Treemen, hitting them with the airbrush in random patches of greens, browns, and blues, then highlighting them as guided by this eclectic mix. See those posts for more detail on this.
These models are covered in little critters (called spites!), which were quite fun to pick out in various colours. I decided to stick to a blueish/greenish range for these to make them relate to each other while still having some variation.
As I’ll be moving on to the elvish side of the army now, I thought it would be fun to have a family portrait of all the forest spirits I’ve painted so far.
I won’t be able to run all 4 treemen till I paint a lot more models for the army, but I’m planning to run one in the first thousand points. I suppose I can rotate them between games for now! As I said above I’ll start painting elves next, and have some archers ready to start painting now. Presumably those will for the focus of the next post unless I get distracted which is always a possibility!
The Old World release has had me going around in circles reading, getting excited about an army, army list writing, model building, model painting, rinse and repeat for another army. So I’ve started a lot of things but not finished much! One thing that I have realised doing this is that I really enjoyed painting those Treemen last post and wanted to paint some more foresty units!
So I broke out some dryads from the foam cage of an army case, rebased them on the new base size and got to painting them! Much like the treemen, this was rather free-form painting, starting with an airbrushed basecoat of a patchy mix of browns, greens, and blues and going from there.
This has turned out to be a rather fun way to paint, and gives rather nice results for these rather organic models. I think this would work quite well for something like Tyrannids in Warhammer 40,000.
I think the shots from the rear show the patchy nature of the paint work well, being flatter and less obscured with detail.
One thing I do need to figure out is how I’m going to paint the elvish section of the army. This works well for all the forest spirits, but I’ll need to try out something for the non-tree people!
Regardless of how I decide to do the elves, I’m pretty committed at this stage to paint up a small force of Wood Elves for the Old World. In fact I’m leaning towards choosing them as my army for our Border Princes campaign. I’m finding the new rules don’t suit how I’d like to run my Dwarves at 1000 points (But look excellent for running them in bigger games!) so that may cause me to pivot to a different army.
On a different note, I painted this mischievous Christmas goblin for a friend a couple of weeks ago and finally managed to meet up to hand it over so I figured it was time to post up some pictures!
A rather fun model to paint!
I’m most of the way through some more Wood Elf models (still Forest Spirits!) so expect a post on them soon!
One of the things that has me excited about the new Warhammer ruleset is that the armies are self-contained in the main army books, so I can start planning out all sorts of armies without having to wait for them to be re-released for the game. Given that I have a decent collection of models that will be useable in it, I’ve decided I’ll have the most fun if I work on models for the Old World in general rather than painting one army after another. This means picking up what I feel like painting most and getting it done! Last week we had Tomb Kings, this week Wood Elves!
After the base sizes for the new game were announced for models, I had a hunt through my collection for models staying on the same base size that I could paint while I wait for my Tomb Kings starter set. I came across these treemen which have been sitting undercoated in a case for close ten years, and I decided they deserved some paint after their long entombment! These actually belonged to my wife when she had a period of interest in tabletop gaming (as a result of which we met!), and I’ve inherited them since.
We have 3 variants here, 2 treemen, a treeman ancient, and the named character Durthu. I’ve taken photos of each side of each, and put them into a slideshow for each model so you should be able to scroll sideways though them.
Treemen
Treeman Ancient
Durthu
From a painting perspective, these models were painted in a rather freeform manner (apart from Durthu which had much more of a plan, detailed below). I first took to them with the airbrush and put on random patches of greens, browns, blues, greys. I then started highlighting the models, roughly following the patchy undercoat. This required a lot of mixing, as the patches of airbrushed paint blended into each other. So no paint recipes here, each area was done on its own and the ratios based on whatever made sense there. I think this gave a really naturalistic look to these models as trees are far from uniform in nature, being covered in all kinds of mosses, lichen, mud, etc.
This was an extremely fun way to paint and I’ll definitely replicate that on the rest of the forest spirit models in the army.
Durthu as I mentioned above had a much more deliberate plan in his painting, driven by my experiences walking in the local bush land here in Perth. It’s rather common to come across burnt bush around here, either from bushfires, or burn offs done to reduce the impact of future bushfires. The forests end up black after these events, but nature here is built to live through these events, and when rain comes life springs anew from the ashes, revealing what I think its a pretty amazing sight: bright green new growth surrounded by pitch black burnt forest. Here are some photos I’ve taken of what I’ve seen here.
Having grown up near temperate European forests, I find this quite an amazing sight and have always wanted to paint a model that tries to replicate the effect. That’s what I tried to go for on Durthu, his main trunk is blackened by fire, but bright new leaves are coming up.
Dwarfs were the first Warhammer models I bought, but Wood Elves were my first “proper” (i.e. built to a decent size) army for Warhammer. I have a lot of models for that army, although most are in a dire state so I’m excited to repair and repaint them and get them back on the table with the new ruleset.
I’m using these new rules to indulge my love of painting whatever I feel like at any given time so I’m not sure what I’ll be painting next! Potentially some more terrain for the Border Princes campaign, we’ll see when I sit down at the painting table next!
Lair of the Lagomorph 