15 Wednesday Jun 2022
Posted in Chaos, Finished Work, Necromunda
25 Wednesday May 2022
Posted in Chaos, Finished Work
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Returning to the leadpile in search of a chaos character I find this chap, ideal! This is a great little miniature, mid-period GW, neither silly nor especially grimdark (given that he’s a Night Lord, for whom grimdark really means something). It was a pleasure to paint, although I chickened out of trying to paint lightning bolts all over him because my life is still hectic and my nervous system can’t handle the intense concentration that learning new painting techniques can take. It’s still an hour here or there really. Painting is like meditation in that the busier you are the more important it is to try and find some time to do it! I hope you’re all doing well and are enjoying the gradual return to normal. Remember that covid is still out there and some people are medically vulnerable so take care of yourselves and each other!
10 Tuesday May 2022
Posted in Chaos, Finished Work
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Pun intended. I tried to copy the Citadel Paint App instructions but they looked awful so I tried to grimdark them up a bit. To be honest they’re pretty crap but there you go!
31 Thursday Mar 2022
Posted in Chaos, Finished Work, knightmare
Last up was this little collection of minis. Mostly Knightmare, with one of Tim Prow’s recent kickstarter as a leader, and there’s a citadel champion of Khorne in there too. As a kid that champion was my avatar in games, it was my favorite mini and I took so much care when painting it, it was probably my best painted mini. It managed to escape the great sell off of 2002 when I cleared out the attic at my mum’s and sold everything I found up there. It often showed up again over the next few years, and I thought it lived at the bottom of a coin jar. It disappeared during the dark years, 2009-10, when my life and mental health went utterly bugfuck, like a lot of my possessions, and sadly has never been seen again. Where did you go to, my dog-faced darling? A few years ago I picked it up on ebay from Brigend Steve and took great delight in painting him to go into this team. Actually I really enjoyed all of this lot. Knightmare’s beastmen mutants are such lovely sculpts, and Tim Prow’s snake-wizard-lady makes a great Slaaneshi champion.
That’s it for now. Inspired by this chaotic bunch I am working on a some more troops for a 40k chaos army, hopefully it won’t be too long!
23 Tuesday Feb 2021
Posted in Chaos
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I had a load of GW vouchers and I wanted to get something that I would really enjoy building and painting and would look amazing and I vacillated between a Stompa and the Glottkin or maybe a Keeper of Secrets but I settled on a Knight for a number of reasons. One: its awesome. Two: Chaos lends itself to soup armies which are rubbish for playing beardy people (because of command points and all those other things that I don’t really understand but seem important these days) but seem very chaosy… you know, hordes of cultists backed up by some Marines and giant spiky death robot. Three: it looks fun to build and not too finicky to paint.Four: its awesome.
I started by airbrushing the superstruture using vallejo silver paint. I’ve never used an airbrush before but it was great. However I did find that the paint rubbed off from handling later on, requiring lots of touching up. I don;t know if I didnt wash the sprue enough, or should have done more layers of airbrushing or what. I wanted to keep it simple as the best hope of doing this model justice, and I wanted something faintly organic, so I used colour-shift paint for the armour plates to give an impression of a shiny beetle carapace, which I am generally pleased with although I struggled with the highlighting. I used a beige-bone trim for the armour, because I wanted a light-dark contrast. I am reasonably pleased with the outcome. The first time painting anything is hard because you make mistakes and do things you wouldn’t do the next time, which is challenging for a centrepiece model like this. I’m not likely to paint another Knight, the price point is too high and there are too many other big ticket toys I’d like a go at before I retread old ground, but it was a fun challenge and definitely one I’d recommend.
06 Saturday Feb 2021
Posted in Chaos, Finished Work
I forgot to post these with the trolls the other weeks. The trolls were to pull the chaos alter along, the magician / snot demon rides the alter, and these chaps were to be a roving defender or two. Basically I wanted one champion for fantasy and one for sci-fi. The fantasy chap has been painted as an Orc but I think he’s a Ogre. I’m not sure what range he’s from. Nice vintage mini though, with the funny hunched stance you often see on older miniatures. The sci-fi chap is from Ramshackle Games, I think. Its a very rough sculpt, you can’t quite see the fingerprints but you can see the marks from the sculpting tools. That’s not a bad thing or a criticism or owt, because it feels right for something Nurglish. Enjoy!
05 Tuesday Jan 2021
Posted in Chaos, Finished Work
Initially I painted these to go with the War Alter I posted last week. Both are fine miniatures, from different eras, and I think its not contentious to suggest that the earlier one is the better! I like the big nose and tusks look much better than the blobby LOTR troll-esque look. I thought they’d go well with the Alter, as if they had been tasked to pull it and had stopped to throw rocks at something. But I had a brain fart, and did their bases differently. C’est la vie!
26 Saturday Dec 2020
Posted in Chaos, Finished Work
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This is a bit of a one-off project that I painted for the hell of it, though I suppose that over the last few years I’ve probably painted enough fantasy squads that I could put together some sort of Chaos army, especially if you consider all the Battle Masters stuff… which reminds me, I must finish that sometime. Yeah, a chaos army would definitely work, some beastmen, chaos knights, I’ve got some plaguebearers and some pink horrors, some tzeentch wizards, some chaos dwarf artillery. that would make a good army. Anyhoo, when I pulled a war alter out of the leadpile, I struggled to think what to do with it. It was incomplete, missing a horn, and I considered trying my hand at sculpting but in the end decided that it would be more fun to tell a story with it.
Recently captured by a Nurglish wizard, the alter is just beginning its descent into chaos. It has been desecrated in Nurgle’s name, and sacrifices have been made on it to Nurgle. The statue hasn’t yet begun to change, but is degenerating. When enough sacrifices have been made, our wizard friend is possessed by a demon of decay and his physical form changes. Then men will tremble and plagues will run free!
Happy Christmas everyone, hope 2021 is a better year for us all.
23 Friday Oct 2020
Posted in Chaos, Finished Work
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I love John Blanche’s work in all mediums, and have done since I discovered it – I did my GCSE art written project on John Blanche’s drawings, all the way back in 1994, and I bet I’m not alone in that. I have a particular love for the whole Blanchistu thing and whilst I’m no great painter I’ve wanted to have a go for some time. My first attempt was the Dark Mechanicum squad I posted last year, but somewhere along the way I lost confidence and fell back into old ways. This time I have looked at more models, done some research, and thrown myself into it. I am pleased with the results. Not White Dwarf standard by a long shot, but a good start. Next time will be a bit better. If you’ve got a squad of cultists that have been on the path too long and whose humanity is starting to degrade, then they need a leader who aspires to greatness, whose mutations are more pronounced and less debilitating, and who, maybe, glows with an eerie light! Eagle-eyed viewers may note that he is snapped at the knees and has been glued to that gravestone in order to give the illusion of completeness… this is because my mini was bent and my attempts to fix it were spectacularly unsuccessful. There was some swearing that day, I can tell you.
10 Friday Jul 2020
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This is the second of the three pieces I’ve finished since March, an experiment that failed. Having painted a Night Lord next up on my journey through the Chaos Legions was World Eaters. Now the World Eaters started out as the Warhounds, and were blue-grey and white. When Angron took over he called them the World Eaters and reversed their colours. When Khorne took him over their colours gradully migrated to the red and brass we know today. So I thought that I’d paint a squad of each!
Hunea’s squad were based a long way from the rest of the Warhounds on garrison duty in a distant stronghold, with irregular updates by astropath. They followed at a distance the change from Warhounds to World Eaters, the butcher’s nails, the rebellion. They were able to hear the Legion break down into madness and bloodlust but not be part of it. Finally there were no more astropathic transmissions, the galaxy was at war, and the squad had to decide which side they were on. They decided that no-one cared for them so they cared for no-one, and started to carve out a petty empire for themselves on the edges of known space. After the heresy came the Scouring, and Hunea and his gang fled in the face of overwhelming Imperial retribution. They tried to use a warp storm to hide in and wound up in the Maelstrom where they made a base which they used to raid the Imperium and in which they gradually succumbed to the lure of chaos. They act as sell-swords and security detail for lesser chaos warlords in the Maelstrom, and are mostly trying to avoid notice by bigger fish like Huron Blackheart!
I didn’t enjoy painting Hunea’s squad that much, it felt like I was fighting the minis’ natural ‘feel’; a colour scheme that works for the clean lines of loyalists doesn’t work very well for the complex lines of chaos marines. It felt like I was forcing the paintjob. One of the plastic marines was one from a parts lot that had been stripped but was very badly built. I should have just chucked it in the bitz box and used a different marine instead of trying to repair and reuse it, it looks crap! But you live and learn, innit.
Doris Plunger's Lead Mess 