Dark Eldar Warp Beasts (Khymera/Dire Wolves)

Here is a few pictures of my most recently painted miniatures for the Dark Eldar force, A pack of five Khymera Warp Beasts ripped straight from the nightmares of a beastmaster.  I decided to go with a contrasting and vibrant paint scheme on these models trying to make the different elements of the sculpt stand out.  The Dire Wolf models are not my favorite, however i believe they support the materialization of a beast from the warp perfectly and view these beasts as "creating themselves" rather than the decaying imagery of the dire wolves.  I decided to go away from natural tones (as the warp is all but natural) Going for a predominately Blue/black, Purple and Green colour scheme.  The bone was painted a light grey washed with green the same time as the muscle and then further highlighted with more of the same grey colour.

New Dark Eldar and Skaven Mordheim Warband

A quick comparison between the new and previous ranges of the Dark Eldar Wych Model.  The one to the left was just recently painted as a prototype to go with my existing Dark Eldar force, after looking at the two side by side it is easy to pick out the difference in scale and proportion of the models,  although the old ones have the gladatorial feel to the the new models are all together much more unified and look much more cohesive as a force.  The under suit adds a new element to the model, which i've decided to paint with a visually black latex feel.  This is achieved by painting a base coat of necron abyss and then highlighting with fenris grey, after this give it all a wash of bedab black, and some asurmen blue, and voila instant latex/pvc catsuit.

Below is a picture of my current skaven Mordheim warband, the centerpiece, snich, is taking the role of my skaven assassin adept and was painted last week when ambition struck.

Greater Daemon of Slaneesh - Keeper of Secrets, Forgeworld

After a  long hiatus from blogging, i'm back with a few pictures.  I haven't stopped painting or taking pictures of my pieces, i just haven't been posting on this blog, so there is a little bit of a back catalogue to work through, Including a Campaign report from the past month of gaming at Black Knight Games.

Here i have some pictures of the work in progress greater daemon of Slaneesh that i purchased from Gamesday Canada 2008... it's been long overdue.  

As a side note, this model was the victim of a flood recovery at which point it was near destroyed... it has taken a great deal of TLC to restore it, including having to handcraft new fingernails for her left hand.  This was done using a cast off section of old sprue and a dremel grinder to get the slender length i needed from the plastic. These were then filed and shaped with a hobby knife and files

You can see from this angle the two tone nature of the paint scheme i have chosen... i wanted to make the model look as if it were changing the pigment of its skin to appeal more to the enemies it was fighting.  It has been plenty of fun to paint and over all i'm happy with the results. I'll take more pictures in the future!

Night Goblins, The Never Ending Paint-a-thon

So, after awhile of not painting anything (consider it a break).  I've a few new painted models to show off... nothing spectacular, just a few night goblins to add to the endless swarms of models.  I'm not quite sure why i like hoard armies, i just do, the idea of marching millions of expendable units to battle really appeals to me.

The Phoenix Has Landed

In my attempt to put a dent in my painting schedule i've managed to get a Phoenix Mirmadon painted to the point where i can show you a few pictures.  This warjack was painted much like the Griffon using the same spray paint technique to achieve the white armour.  I'm happy with how it has turned out so far.

Amassing the Retribution

Yes it's time to owe up to the large amount of unpainted miniatures i have staring me in the face and give them a decent coat of paint.  The process always seems to be more consuming that it originally does at the offset, however i try not to let that deter me when putting the brush to plastic (or metal or resin whatever it may be).

I'm trying out a new painting technique on the Mirmidons in my Retribution of Scyrah force for Warmachine to try and speed along the painting process a little.  To start with i've given the model a prime of black at which point i coated the entire model's accessible points with Astropath Grey and set it aside to let it dry.  After the model had ample time to make sure all the paint was dry i sprayed the model sparingly with white spray paint from the angle of the light source.  After that the model had a good base colour with shading to work with, I then sealed the model with a spray of matte varnish and touched up some of the details where the white was too strong or not strong enough.

The rest of the model was painted much in the same way i would paint the Mirmidons normally, just this time with the white armour of the model completed in a fraction of the time it would normally take.

This method is not fool proof and the convenience of this method does show on the finished product.  Although the model is not 100% complete, i'll post some pics to see what you think of the zenith spray technique and its results.

And here's a pic of a very sad and mostly unpainted warmachine army looking back at me.

Thats 1 heavy Mirmidon, 2 light Mirmidons, 11 Mage hunters, 12 Invictors, an Assassin, 2 Snipers, A Soulless Unit Attachment, an Arcanist, 4 Archers, Rayvn, Garryth, and Narn

WIP Plagueclaw Catapult Paintjob

Here's a few pictures to show you how the plagueclaw is coming along, now with a few coats of pain and nearly finished and ready for the tabletop.  A few things are left to remain such as some more work on the plaguemonk crew, and the "standard" as well as a few miscellaneous details that need touching up here and there.  I decided to go with the orange rust instead of verdigris to go along with the theme throughout the army, it also adds a little more colour where there are plenty of greens and greeny blues already involved in this piece.  Enjoy!

Pre-Heresy Deathguard Plague Marine

To break up the repetition of painting so many rats over the past while (yes there are more on the way, pictures coming soon), I decided to work a little more on the deathguard army after a inspiration hit to paint Plague Marines that still retained a semblance of their former legion colours.  Of course the armour would be caked in dust and filth, but under all that i wanted there to be a connection to the days when they were once among the emperor's finest.  Here is the result!

This model is from the Havok Plague Marine boxed set, which i believe is currently unavailable, although i'm not 100% sure on that one.  The base colours used on the model were Astronomicon Grey and Knarloc Green, and an assortment of various browns, oranges, greens and yellows.  If there is any interest I'll post a tutorial on how to achieve this look relatively simply, believe me it's a great deal easier than you think!

Scratch Built Treekin Model Painted

A quick update, here are the painted pics of the scratch built Treekin that i posted earlier today.

Scratch Built Treekin Model

After some work i've managed to piece it together, a rather large and natural looking Treekin model.  The majority of this model is actually made with twigs and dead pieces of wood i gathered, all super glued together, with a sculpted face and details made of "green stuff", and talons made of plastic roughly cut with an exacto blade.  Spanish moss, slate and various sizes of sand and gravel were added to make the base and model feel more overgrown.  Here's some pictures!

The model was spray varnished to seal the wood and vine pieces.  5 more to go :) !

Plagueclaw Catapult Conversion

The conversion was inspired heavily by another conversion that was found on the internet using the Orc and Goblin's Rock Lobba model as a basis and an assortment of pieces from the Screaming Bell and Plague Monk kits.  Here' how it turned out.

This was a relatively simple and effective way i find to make a plague claw catapult using some spare bits and a the rock lobba model.  Please feel free to leave any questions or comments.

Skaven Slaves and Rat Swarms

After a few days hard at work i've managed to whip up a few units to show off, one being a work in progress unit of 50 Skaven Slaves, the second be 5 finished rat swarm bases.

First off the Slaves!

Skaven Slaves are a very useful unit to the Skaven army.  They have the strength and toughness of any other skaven core unit and are less than half the points of a typical clan rat.  Being that i usually take units of 40 and up for clanrats, the rule of strength in numbers goes double for these guys.  With a base leadership sitting at 2 they need all the help they can get from the extra ranks of rats, and even with a full rank bonus they're still sitting at a leadership of 5.  Hopefully with fifty models in the unit it will keep them from prematurely breaking.

One of the nasty little tricks this unit has is its ability to deals str 3 auto-hits to all the units around it when it breaks!  I plan to get this unit into combat as quickly as possible, take as many enemies out with their numbers and then have them blow up on the enemy when they're finally finished fighting.  Sounds like a ratty tactic to me.

I'd like to field four units of fifty slaves in games around 3000pts and up, two or three should suffice for anything smaller.  Simply the numbers should scare any over confident general when facing off against the skaven

Secondly the Rat Swarms!

Currently i'm sitting at 10 of these bases... given that they are 5 wounds a piece, move 6 inches and are unbreakable makes these well worth the few points you pay for them.  They arn't a heavy hitter, but seeing as they can now wound any toughness on a 6 they're all the more valuable to take as shock troops.  Fun little models to paint although there isn't a great deal of variation in the models seeing as it only comes with two different types of tiles.  Once again these should serve visually intimidating sitting at the front of a skaven army on mass!

More to come soon!

Amassing the Skaven Hoard

I've decided to dig the Skaven out of hibernation for the release of the new 8th edition rules set that was just released yesterday.  My ultimate goal would be to have all my skaven models painted and table ready in a month, ultimately this is going to be near impossible without a great amount of focus.  So lets start by looking at what we have to deal with.

In this picture there are:

80 or more clan rats,

40 stormvermin

15 poisonwind globadiers

50 giant rats

4 rat ogres

80 plaguemonks

12 plaguecensors

a doom wheel

plaguefurnace

screaming bell

warp lighting cannon

20 night runners

5 jezzails

4 support weapon teams

and a host of Characters

i'd say that 20 percent of it is painted another 10 percent is base coloured, and only about 10 percent of it sits unprimed.

To tackle this project i'm going to have to take it on in chunks, after all taking all of this on at once is much too mind boggling, I usually find the best way to get an army painted is work on painting a unit at a time scaled to a 1000 point army.  So if in 1000 points you would take a block of 30 monks and 50 giant rats then paint those two units and accompanying characters.  Not only does this get models painted, but it also ensures that i'll get some games in with some nicely painted models while i'm painting the rest.

Grey Seer on Rat Bone Ogre

This is a quick conversion i did using some of the pieces i had left over from the plague furnace kit, more details on it later, here's a few pictures!

Retribution of Scyrah WIP - Dawnguard

Much of my painting time has been spent working on the Retribution of Scyrah models that i've picked up over the past several weeks.  Seeing as the majority of my plans this week have been canceled there is an abundance of time to get a few more of these minis painted up for my next game.

Warmachine seems to have exploded at the Black Knight, so there is always someone there who is up for a game, lucky me!  It usually seems that I do much more painting than gaming, however that isn't the case here.  I anticipate the overabundance of enthusiasm may calm down when people become "bored" of the game, but for now, i'll get as much gaming in as i can.

Today I have some pictures of some nearly finished Retribution Dawnguard Invictors models painted up using the scheme found on most of the studio models.

Here are the models in the unit i have worked on so far, six in total.  The armour was painted with a base coat of Astronomicon grey and then brought up to a pure white over several watered down layers.  I think i've managed to get it down to 5 layers to produce what you see, although further shading may be necessary due to the loss of gradation, quick sometimes comes at a cost.  The blades have been painted mithril silver and washed with hawk turquoise, details on the armour are washed by a hawk turquoise and white mix about 50:50 each.  The darker metal is a basecoat of boltgun metal washed with laviathan purple.  The bases were painted in Granite followed by Khemri Brown, and finally Dehneb stone.

This is a work in progress shot of the officer of the unit, notice i have yet to paint the gemstones, i'll get to this hopefully soon!

This is the second most recent model i've painted for this unit.  I really like the way the hair turned out.

I've started work on a mage hunters unit as well as hope to get back to the plague tower and imperial city ruins in the near future.  All will be done in time!

Retribution of Scyrah WIP - Painting Tests and Tribulations

For the past few days I've been playing around with slight alterations to the privateer press standard paintjob on the Retribution of Scyrah Models.  There were a few objectives i had when coming up with a scheme; first the paintjob had to have a range from light to dark colour, secondly it had to us a minimal palette, roughly 3 or 4 colours.  I also wanted to bring out a fusion of the organic with technology.  To do this i decided to use lots of greens browns and blues all found in nature, along with white painted with NMM technique to harness a truly sci-fi feel.

This archer model demonstrates the above principles although i am debating on repainting the bow to much closer resemble the rest of the models colour.  I'm thinking of repainting the armoured parts of the bow with the white paneling featured on the armour, and then repaint the stock to have a metallic blue colour. The base has been base coated with chardonite granite, and then brought up with khemri brown and dehneb stone, a combo that i'm becoming rather fond of for various applications.  Static grass and crushed bay leaves were then added to bring some nature to the model.

Once again following the above principles, here's a work in progress shot of a Chimera Mirmadon (Warjack).  The bottom half of the model and left arm still need to be painted, in what has become a rather lengthy painting process.  I'm looking forward to having this mini finished.