warhammer – 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!

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.

Canoness Veridyan

40k

If you’re at all associated with the Warhammer side of our miniature hobby, you probably came across the sad news that John Blanche passed away earlier in the month. Needless to say he had an incredible impact on our hobby, his artwork inspiring many of us and laying the course for much of what Warhammer and its dark future counterpart became. It’s easy to see his impact by the number of excellent posts on the topic around the internet (I’m partial to Azazel’s post on the subject, which focuses on the impact of John’s miniature painting articles). For myself, one of my first proper experience of the hobby was reading through the 3rd edition Warhammer 40,000 rulebook, and soon after getting Mordheim and playing that for quite a few years. If you’re familiar with both those books, you’ll understand that John’s art provided a lot of the context as I got to grips with these worlds, and therefore has stayed with me throughout the years as I paint models and play games. On the news of his death I spent a bit of time looking back at those books, taking in at the art that inspired me all those years ago, and deciding that I should channel this energy into some model painting! Luckily for me I picked up the Canoness Veridyan model when that was released quite a while ago (I saw 2016 somewhere), and that being a direct interpretation of one off John’s most famous paintings that seemed like a good way to go.

I initially decided maybe I should try to paint this to display standard, as it’s been many years since I tried my hand at that, but ended up going with the flow and that resulted in a model that’s more like character standard (i.e. slightly better than army painting!). I think I’m just too impatient to paint display models these days, or at least not used to it anymore!

I left the model as is, adding a few elements on the base to recall the original painting (i.e. adding a stack of bones, and a white rat scurrying away).

If you’re unfamiliar with the painting, here’s a photo of a nice print of it I have hanging near my games table.

I really enjoyed painting the model, it was nice to take a bit more time than usual on a single figure. I find painting reds and blacks quite satisfying, and I have to say I had a bit of an urge to do some more Sisters of Battle/Adepta Sororitas models after this one, so who knows maybe that’ll start something!

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!

Ork Meganobz

40k

Continuing on the 100 miniature target for the 1 Million Miniatures challenge, here’s the next set of miniatures into the speed painting grinder: 9 Ork Meganobz!

I’ve already painted three of these quite a while ago, although in the bright yellows of the Bad Moon clan. This time I went for Goff colours, as I’ve been wanting to paint other clans for my orks.

The paint scheme is relatively simple for these, starting with a silver undercoat, followed by randomly picking out panels in Vallejo Heavy Red, black (Vallejo Model Black), light grey (Vallejo Heavy Bluegrey), and bronze tones (Scale75 Necro Gold and Vallejo Tinny Tin). For a few areas I also added markings like the checkered patterns so characteristics to Orks, as well as other simple shapes.

This accounts for most of the models, but they also have a few more organic areas, such as the flesh and clothes. The flesh was base coated in dark green (Vallejo Heavy Blackgreen) and the pants in brown (Vallejo Chocolate Brown). I then picked out all the wiring in a variety of colours, and did an all over wash of Citadel Agrax Earthshade.

For highlights, started by picking out raised areas on all metal panels (painted or not) with a bright silver (Citadel Runefang Steel). I then went over the red panels with some patchy Vallejo Heavy Red, and picked out the checkers and other white areas with a mix of the base coat (Vallejo Heavy Bluegrey) and an off-white (AK Ivory). I then liberally applied thinned down rusty brown (Vallejo Parasite Brown) all over the non-bronze metallic areas, and a copper oxide colour (Citadel Nihilakh Oxide) over all the bronze panels. For the skin highlights I did two highlights over the base coat, by first doing a 50/50 mix of the base colour (Vallejo Heavy Blackgreen) and Vallejo Goblin Green, then a final highlight of the pure Goblin Green.

Overall I’m happy with the outcome, and thoroughly enjoyed the process. Painting rusty models is always a lot of fun and lends itself well to faster painting as the whole process can be pretty loose. These models take my tally up to 79, so getting pretty close to the 100 mark which is good with a bit under a month left for the challenge.

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!

Blood Bowl Amazons // Fate Core

Blood Bowl, Roleplaying Games

I’ve taken a slight detour through the screaming crowds of Blood Bowl fans over the last couple of weeks, as my gaming group decided to get ready for some games of Blood Bowl after the release of the latest edition of the rules. I’ve always enjoyed Blood Bowl, so I did not take much convincing and found myself assembling a freshly unsealed box of Amazons soon after.

I’d sort of kept an eye on Blood Bowl models over the last few years, and was always pretty impressed with the sculpts. Now I’ve put a modern team together and painted it I can say they stand up to that initial impression. They’re great models, with a nice amount of detail (but not so much they’re tedious to paint, which is a great balance).

I went for a gold and purple colour scheme for no other reason than I found it pleasing to the eye. The yellow and red feathers were inspired by the artwork for the Magic: The Gathering set Ixalan which has these really cool yellow/red/purple feathered dinosaurs all through it.

The numbers are from the transfer sheet that came with the set. They also had transfers for the base rims to indicate the player positions (e.g. blitzer etc.) which I’m sure is practical but I didn’t really like the look of that so I avoided them.

I look forward to playing some games with them, it’s been ages since I’ve played tabletop Blood Bowl (I’ve played a bit of the video games in the intervening years). Amazons were very fun to play back in the day and I hope that still holds.

I wanted to show a photo of my setup for batch painting after a discussion with Jeff over at https://kuribospainting.com on holders for miniatures in the last post‘s comments.

As you can see I tack on the models to some bits of branch I’ve cut up into ~4cm cylinders. I find these quite comfortable to hold and they have a nice bit of weight to them (they’re eucalyptus, so quite dense) which means the models don’t topple over. I prime the models like this and don’t take them off till I go paint the base rims. Having one per model is quite practical. You can also see some of the markers and the balls which I didn’t paint yet, I’ll get to them at a later date!

For the second instalment of From the shelves I have Fate Core from 2013.

Fate is a really interesting system that has clearly influenced a lot of later roleplaying games. I’ve played a decent amount of it over the years (although mostly an earlier version, which was part of the Dresden Files roleplaying game). As I mentioned earlier this book is from 2013 and represented a refreshed version of Fate. I’d actually never read it, so it’s been sitting on my shelves unread for 10 or so years. One good outcome of this series is that I’ve finally read through it.

The core concept of Fate is the Aspect system. The way that works is characters, antagonists, locations, basically anything in the game works have aspects, which are short descriptive sentences. These sentences can be used in the game to change what is happening by spending a resource called fate points. For example a player with a character with the aspect “Avid wargamer” could spend a fate point to get a bonus to a roll to do with statistics (this is called invoking an aspect), the player justifying this because their character is very familiar with probabilities. This works for locations too, if a location is “dimly lit”, the player could spend a fate point to get a bonus to hiding. The games master can also use these aspects to make the player’s life difficult (called a compel), for example by making the “Avid wargamer” fail to resist going into a games store when they’re meant to be meeting a friend somewhere else. When the GM does this, they offer the player a fate point which they can spend later for a positive bonus. This whole aspect system is very cool and makes the game really character driven.

There are quite a few other systems to the game but I’m focusing on aspects because I think they’re an interesting mechanic that I’d like to leverage in wargames. It would be quite easy to give aspects to units on the battlefield (e.g. “Bodyguard to the King”, “Want to prove themselves”, “Fled in the last battle”) and give players a pool of fate points they can use to invoke the aspects of their own troops for bonuses, or compel their opponent’s troops to do something negative, but passing a fate point to the opposition in so doing. I think it would be great fun for more narrative games.

From a book writing perspective, I think this is a really well laid out book, with an abundance of clarifications for the reader. The pages above are a good representation of the style of the book, with a rules section (left page), a play example (right page, italics), and where appropriate an example of what the rule looks like on the character sheet. You also have these dark tabs on the edges of the pages that make it really easy to find sections by quickly flicking through the book.

Overall I’m impressed with the book, and really like what the game is doing. In practice my group has struggled with Fate, the system as a whole just doesn’t quite work for us and that’s why we stopped playing it. However it is packed with great ideas and I’ve re-used plenty of them throughout the years and plan on doing so plenty more in the future. Fate has also clearly had an impact on many later roleplaying games, and I find Fate mechanics or ideas all the time when reading/playing other roleplaying games.