warhammer – Page 2 – Lair of the Lagomorph

Really Tiny Space Marines

Back after what must have been the biggest break this blog has seen! I’ve been traveling for work and as such have had pretty much no time to paint in October between the trip itself and preparation for said trip. I’m back at home now, and started something I’ve been eyeing off for a while now: Legions Imperialis – the revamp of the old Epic 40,000 game system.

As I mentioned above, I’ve been thinking of getting started in Legions Imperialis since it launched – something about the scale of the battles really appeals to me (For the same reason, I’ve also been eyeing off Warlord’s epic scale offerings). What prompted actually diving in was a couple of happy occurrences: I was lucky enough to stumble on someone selling all of the books second hand for a steal, and my local game store had a sale a few weeks later during which I picked up the Battle Group box for the marines.

While I was travelling I re-read Legion, which might well be my favourite Horus Heresy novel, and (re-)enjoyed it so much that I decided these marines should be painted as Alpha Legion.

When I popped open the box I finally realised how tiny these models actually are. Looking at pictures online isn’t quite the same as holding the models in your own hands and as you can see from the comparison shot with the 28mm marine above, this is quite a departure from what I’m used to painting!

I often see Horus Heresy era Alpha Legion painted in a metallic blue/green colour. I decided to stray closer to blue here, with the markings in a minty green. The painting (by necessity!) is really simple. I started with a black undercoat and airbrushed some Ammo Mig Warhead Metallic Blue all over the models. The exhaust covers on the rhino and the boltguns on the marines were then picked out in Vallejo Model Color Black, and the bare metal details were painted in Scale 75 Black Metal. The markings were painted in Army Painter Kraken Skin. The models then got an all over wash of Ammo Mig Deep Brown Panel Line Wash, which was wiped off the raised areas to keep things clean.

The models come with these nice textured bases that I wanted to use rather than cover up, so I decided to go for an overgrown ruins look. I basecoated the surface with Vallejo Game Color Heavy Bluegrey, followed by the same panel liner as the models. I then applied a wash of heavily diluted AK Muddy Ground texture paint (a tip I picked up from the Cult of Paint youtube channel) all over the base. This adds a bit of texture and a nice gradient brown to the base while not hiding the texture modelled into the base. I then glued on a few bits of foam turf from Woodland Scenics, and applied some light washes of AK Slimy Grime Dark and Slimy Grime Light to add some green colour in patches. I’m satisfied with the outcome, it looks in scale to me, keen to hear what others think.

Overall these were fun and quick to paint, I think the metallic paint does a lot of work here, and makes the models pop despite their size. Unlike pretty much all my other models I did not varnish these as I didn’t want to lose the shine contrast between the marines and the base. I have a whole lot more of these to paint now, but I’m happy with the scheme so can safely proceed from here!

Night Goblins

Warhammer: The Old World

After a few posts promising a unit of goblins as the next addition to my Orcs and Goblins army (and a few posts apologising for failing to deliver!) I’ve finally finished this large unit of Night Goblins!

With a cool 42 models in it it is one of the largest units I’ve ever painted, and took me quite a while to get through. With its rather sizeable footprint it was a bit awkward to photograph too, a lot like a large terrain piece.

I ended up batch painting the unit row by row (i.e. seven models at a time), except the shields and the basing which were done for the whole unit at once. Each row was relatively quick to do, but together this added up to a lot of work (Basing took me a whole evening!).

The banner was quite fun to paint, although I went in to it without a good idea of what to put on it. I decided a mushroom would be a good option given the Night Goblin moon was already represented at the top of the banner pole. I painted on a mushroom and then wasn’t sure where to go from there. I ended up taking a photo of the banner and doodling on the photo on my iPad to test out designs to add to my mushroom and I settled on what you see below. It was great to be able to experiment with designs without painting over and over again so I’ll do that again, a good lesson learned.

You might have noticed the shaman holding the green-headed staff on the right of the unit. This is one of the army’s characters, in fact the only wizard I have planned in there at the moment. This is a classic model that I picked up on eBay alongside the netters you see in the unit.

The night goblin models are the newly re-released plastics that were the standard kit back in 6th edition. There is a more modern night goblin box which is from the 7th edition era which is now marketed as an Age of Sigmar set. I really like the older plastics and I’d been looking for a second hand box when GW announced they were re-realeasing them. That made me and my wallet very happy, those second hand prices were getting sky high.

This new set came with a transfer sheet with a couple of designs for the shields. I loved the moon design on those transfers so that was an easy pick. I’ve never applied this many transfers in a single sitting!

I’m glad to see the end of this one, I’ve been painting it on and off for what must be a couple of months now (inter-spaced with a few other small projects such as the Fanatics I did a while back, which will be launched from this unit), and it took some determination (and a fair few hours) to get them finished this week. I love the look of these models as a massed unit and am chuffed with how they came out. I’m going to paint up a smaller scale project next I think!

Fanatics!

Warhammer: The Old World

It’s been almost two months since the last post, probably the biggest gap in a while! It’s been a rather busy period family-wise (lots of birthdays in my family in July/August) and work-wise so I haven’t gotten much painting time lately. I’ve also chosen this period to paint a rather large unit of night goblins for my Orcs and Goblins army, so rather than wait another month to post something I decided to take a break from the big unit and paint up some supporting models, namely these fanatics!

For those of you unfamiliar with these rather fun models, fanatics are Night Goblins that have consumed a concoction of “special” mushrooms that give them the strength and willpower to twirl about while wielding oversized flails. They are hidden in Night Goblin units and get released when enemy units get close.

These models are older metal versions that I’ve had for quite a while now, so nice to get some paint on them. They are painted much like the rest of the army, although with more black cloth! For the recipes, check the first post on the army, which featured a Night Goblin perched atop an Orc Warboss!

That’s it for painting updates, but some campaigning happened since the last update on that so here is where things stand.

We had a win each for the Beastmen and Ogres in Turn 5, with the Ogres capturing the Beastmen’s home territory as a result of the first battle, but the beasts held their own in the second battle, scattering the Ogre army back to its own home territory.

The moves for turn 6 have been planned and we have one battle this round: my Dwarfs against the Lizardmen encroaching on my territory from the south!

Here’s hoping I can get through this busy period soon and resume more frequent posting!

Giant!

Warhammer: The Old World

It’s been a little while between updates, but I’ve been slowly chipping away at the miniature I’ll be showing today over the past month. Slowly because it’s getting chilly here down under and my hobby table is in a cold part of the house (and therefore is being visited much less often than usual!) and slowly because I’ve been really enjoying the process on this model!

The model as you probably realised from the post title is a giant! This is the plastic Warhammer giant from the mid 2000s, which is still current in the range. I got mine during 8th edition for my Ogre army, and like many other models from that era it has sat mostly unpainted since then. I rebased that army for Age of Sigmar so this model was transplanted onto an oval base, before being cut off that and put back on a square base for the return to classic Warhammer.

As I mentioned above, I thoroughly enjoyed myself painting this model and I went probably above and beyond what I would usually do for an army model, although I always do tend to try to spice up centerpiece models!

I really wanted to make it look like his pants were made from banners he’d collected over the years, so I painted them in a patchwork of colours, and applied transfers from all kinds of sheets I’d collected over the years to add some interesting patterns to the patches. From memory there are transfers from the Bretonnian, Eldar, Imperial Knights, and Space Wolf ranges on his pants.

Another detail I enjoyed painting because of the scale of the model was the nails, I tried to go for a dirty nail look with some muck caught under there. This might be a bit hard to see in the photos though, I think the best example is in that top photo on the hand that is holding the hapless man.

I spent a bit of time on his face, I don’t get to paint large scale heads very often given my usual subjects, so this was a fun new thing for me to do. I tried to go for the classic pale/red/blue zones on the face which I think worked out nicely, but I’m keen to see how you find it.

Overall I had a great time painting this giant, but it’s time to move on to smaller models again! I have the largest unit in the army lined up next, a big unit of night goblins which will likely keep me busy for quite a while so the next post may also be a bit further away than usual!

Goblin Wolf Riders – Part 1

Warhammer: The Old World

Back this week with more models for my Orcs and Goblins army: some Goblin Wolf Riders!

These are classic models (late 90s I believe!), which have been re-released as part of the current set of Warhammer Old World releases. This might be laziness on GW’s part, but I’m loving the fact you can buy some of these models without having to go through exorbitant eBay prices! These are the models that were current when I started the hobby, and couldn’t afford them at the time so this is very much an exercise in nostalgia for me!

I really enjoyed painting these, the goblin riders are so characterful and the old style “big” detailing is a joy to paint. For the wolves I tried something a little bit different. I really wanted a nice gradient on the furs so I basecoated them using the airbrush, starting with a cream colour all over then doing narrower and narrower bands of darker browns over their backs. I chickened out of doing highlights over this gradient so I decided to use oils to shade the furs so I could wipe them off of the raised areas. You can see the effect in the photo below.

I think that worked out pretty well, it’s not quite as clean as properly highlighting things, but it is much more expedient which is exactly what I’m after when painting army models. I have a second unit of these to paint up for the army, so I’ll be reusing the technique although I will be changing the colours to have some grey wolves for those.

For the Goblins themselves, I reused the recipes I laid out last post for the Warboss, so check that out if you’re interested!

Now I promised a couple of posts ago to post some photos of the first games of our Border Princes campaign and promptly forgot to include them in the last post, so here they are, better late than never!

If you remember the last update, my Dwarfs were attacking the Fortress at the center of the map, defended by the Bretonnian force I’d painted up for this purpose. As I was the attacker, one of the other players stepped in to play the defenders and we had a siege game!

The initial setup: two blocks of dwarf infantry pushing the siege tower and ranged units on the hill. On the defending side the walls are occupied by archers and men-at-arms, and surprising the attackers the unit of knights deployed outside the walls!

*The defenders look on as the attacking forces assemble.*

*The knights form up … outside the gates!*

The cannons started shooting the gates, failing to do much and one of them misfired even with the engineer there to give it a re-roll! Luckily it only had to skip a turn, losing a war machine this early in the game would have been dreadful! The Siege tower was pushed forward by the dwarf infantry. On the defending side the knights advanced, resolved to chop that siege tower to scrapwood with their axes! On the walls the archers started shooting at the siege tower and managed to inflict some damage to it (presumably some critical ropes cut!). The following turn the knights managed to close in on the tower and almost destroyed it in combat!

*The knights close in on the siege tower… and start hacking!*

The dwarfs did not take kindly to this attempt to cut down their handywork and retaliated, closing in on the knights. The Demon Slayer and his rune axe made short work of the knights, but the damage was done, the siege tower on a single wound was more of a liability than anything else at this stag. The dwarfs abandoned it, taking a page out of the Knight’s book and deciding to use their own axes on the fortress gate.

Under a hail of arrows the Dwarfs approached the gatehouse and got to work hacking down the gates. The cannons had finally started doing some damage to the gates and the rune axe of the Demon Slayer crashed through the wood of the gates soon enough.

Once inside the walls, a desperate melee started between the Dwarfs and the Men-at-arms led by the Baron started. The combat was inconclusive, but the last turn had arrived and the Dwarfs won the day, having taken the gatehouse and slain the knights for no full units of their own lost (although as you can see above those archers did a lot of work on those units!).

This battle resolves turn 4 and the map above shows the state of things as the turn ends.

The players made their moves for turn 5, and we have two battles lined up for this turn! Both feature the Ogres and the Beastmen, with the Ogres attempting to seize the starting location of the Beastmen, and the Beastmen trying to take the river section off the Ogres.

The defense of the Beastmen home territory has already been fought, although unfortunately I did not get to take many photos.

*The battle was fought in a heavily wooded board, with the beast’s herdstone as the primary objective.*

*Things got very heated up in the area surrounding the herdstorne as both armies maneuvered to capture it.*

*Despite a desperate attempt by the beasts to reclaim their herdstone the Ogres won the day.*

Hopefully you’ve enjoyed this longer than usual post! Plenty of gaming action in the coming months as this campaign gets played out, and I hope to be able to photograph most of it!

Orc Warboss

Warhammer: The Old World

This week I have something else than Dwarfs for you, in fact something that Dwarfs really don’t like: a big green orc!

This model originally came with the limited edition version of the Warhammer Online video game. I never got the game but I did pick up this model at the time (can’t remember where from!). This orc is massive, much bigger than the average character model of orcs for the Warhammer fantasy universe, although probably in line with the Ork bosses in Warhammer 40,000 which are much bigger for some reason.

Regardless of the size, the model is packed with details and was really fun to paint. As this model will be leading my Orcs and Goblins army (another army!!?), I wanted to make sure he showed off the colours of the army: black, red, and yellow. These colours were not chosen at random, but rather they feature heavily in one of my favourite Warhammer arts of all time: the night goblin painting that graced the Night Goblin box for a while as well as the Ravening Hordes supplement for 6th edition. I’ve taken a photo of my copy you can see below for reference. I believe this is by Adrian Smith, who has done some of my favourite art for the setting.

As well as the main colours, I decided to match the skin tone from the painting, which is a yellower green than I’ve used on orcs in the past (see my Orks for reference). This model of course is mostly covered in armour so I used the freehand on the armour to make use of those colours, with the goblin on his shoulder directly matching the colours of the Night Goblin champion in the painting.

As is usual now for the first model(s) of a new army, I write down my recipes so I don’t forget them. Hopefully they can be of use to you too.

Skin: Vallejo Game Color Cayman Green, GW Agrax Earthshade, Vallejo Game Color Cayman Green, Vallejo Model Color Green Yellow, Scale75 Sherwood Green
Leather: Vallejo Model Color Chocolate Brown, GW Agrax Eathshade, 50/50 Vallejo Model Color Chocolate Brown/Vallejo Model Color English Uniform, Vallejo Model Color English Uniform
Bone/Wood: Vallejo Model Color English Uniform, GW Agrax Eathshade, Vallejo Model Color English Uniform, 50/50 Vallejo Model Color English Uniform/AK Ivory, 25/75 Vallejo Model Color English Uniform/AK Ivory
Silver: Scale75 Black Metal, GW Agrax Eathshade, Scale75 Black Metal, Vallejo Game Air Silver (This last one just on blade edges)
Light Bronze: Scale75 Necro Gold, GW Agrax Earthshade, Scale75 Necro Gold
Dark Bronze: Scale75 Decayed Metal, GW Agrax Earthshade, Scale75 Decayed Metal
Red: Vallejo Game Color Heavy Red, GW Agrax Earthshade, 50/50 Vallejo Game Color Heavy Red/Kimera “The Red”, Kimera “The Red”
Yellow: Vallejo Game Color Heavy Goldbrown, GW Agrax Earthshade, Vallejo Game Color Heavy Goldbrown, GW Contrast Imperial Fist
Black: Vallejo Model Colour Black, Vallejo Model Color Dark Sea Blue, 50/50 Vallejo Model Color Dark Sea Blue/AK Ivory
White: AK Ivory
Basing – Rocks: Vallejo Model Color Dark Sea Blue, Vallejo Model Color Light Sea Grey (Drybrush), GW Agrax Earthshade, Ammo Mig Medium Rust Pigment
Basing – Dirt: AK Muddy Ground Diorama Texture, Ammo Mig Medium Rust Pigment

I’m quite excited to paint Orcs/Orks again, the new release has made a lot of the older models for the range accessible again which is great news for someone nostalgic for the era of Warhammer in which they started, i.e. me!

Dwarf Warriors

Warhammer: The Old World

After all these diversions painting Wood Elves, I’m back in the realm of trusty axes with some more Dwarfs!

These are the old Battle for Skull Pass starter set models, which are quite basic one piece models (hence the flat poses!). The upside of this is detail on them is limited and they’re quite fast to paint.

Painting-wise there is nothing groundbreaking on these, still using the same recipe as the unit of Miners that kicked this all off. It’s quite a fast scheme and looks fine on the table!

A big part of the drive to get these models painted was to make this army legal under the newest ruleset. I was a bit light on core units, so a small block of warriors filled that void nicely.

You may notice these are on a spaced out movement tray, while my previous units were close together. The new edition of the game has dwarfs sitting on 25mm bases rather than the classic 20mm, so rather than rebasing all these, I knocked up some movement trays in tinkercad that add the missing 5mm around the models and printed them on my filament printer. I did this for all my current units, which means it’s a good time for an army photo!

Having all this painted up gives me far more than I need for the campaign which means I’m good to go on that front which is very exciting!

I should have some terrain for the campaign done up soon, so I’d expect that to be the next post!

Tree Kin

Warhammer: The Old World

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!

Dryads

Warhammer: The Old World

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!

Treemen

Warhammer: The Old World

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!