There are bad things going on in Warmington-on-Sea… a few years ago I picked up a box of Warlord Games’ Dad’s Army miniatures for their Bolt Action game. I was going to turn them into an Imperial Guard platoon, but this was a lot more fun…
A newhammer diversion! A few years ago, just at the point when GW started releasing cool new minis again but we didn’t know how much awesomeness was to come, I spent a GW gift voucher on the Start Collecting Adeptus Mechanicus box. Then it sat there for years whilst I did other things… so I thought I’d better either shit or get off the pot, and decided to, er, shit…
What I was aiming for with these miniatures was to try out some fun conversions and learn some blanchistu stylings. I certainly did the first, but I simply am not a good enough painter to use such outwardly minimalistic techniques effectively, and my attempts to add layers and bursts of colour have made it all a bit of a dogs dinner. Still, I enjoyed myself, especially the process of imagining what the Dark Mechanicus might look like.
This Explorator Team are from a minor Forge World recently fallen to chaos. The team itself aren’t high enough up the hierarchy to realise that their worship of the Omnissiah is now chaos worship, they just follow their leaders and see their mutations as gifts from that Omnissiah. Sooner or later they’ll just be another set of fanatic berserkers, doomed to end up chaos spawn with interesting metal bits embedded in their protoplastic limbs.
Having recently painted Old School Miniatures’ wonderful Bumcannon, I found their recent Baggage Train offering in my hand, calling out to be painted. I think this is a lovely set, though the daemon isn’t as good as the bumcannon daemon. The dwarfs are fantastic though, I especially love the one with the octopus. There’s not a lot to say about this group… oh yeah, there was a fifth dwarf but it became seperated from the group and forgotten about so who knows if it will ever be painted! Oh yeah, part dau, another thing I love about this set is the baggage itself. In amongst the boxes and bags is a small rodent. I’ve painted it as close as my fat gorilla hands would allow to my dear departed gerbil friend Lavender, pictured below on her uncle Doris’ knee having climbed up his trouser leg in search of seeds or indeed a big lump of cheese. Photo included so that you can see that a purple-grey-silver rodent is real and not my disordered imagination :D. Oh yeah, part tri… my first experiments with Citadel Colour Contrast happened in this paintjob. Mixed outcomes, too early to draw any conclusions.
I was sorting out my painting miniatures recently, following our house move. Clearing out the old and tidying up the new, that sort of thing. I was putting all the minis from the various games, assessing what i had completed and what I hadn’t so that if a visitor expressed a desire to play e.g. Burning of Prospero, I knew whether the minis were painted or not and if so, where they were. It turns out that, either by forgotten design or a common-or-garden brain fart, I had painted all the Iron Armour marines as Space Wolves. That wasn’t so bright, I needed a squad of Thousand Sons or the game would be wrong! I lacked a spare squard of Iron Armour or similar 30K miniatures and didn’t want to buy a set as I have more marines knocking around than I will ever get round to painting (and I sold off a big box recently too!). Instead I fished out some ‘old’ marines, making a squad of marines from the Imperial Space Marines, Space Crusade, and 2nd Edition box set (with a Tactical Space Marine as a sergeant). I gave them a random set of weapons to imply that this is a rag-tag collection fighting a guerrila war in the ashes of their home using whatever weapons they can find. Painted them as quickly and as roughly as I could (maybe contrast paints will make this sort of thing even easier). Nice work. Now does anyone want a game of Burning of Prospero?
Hello again everyone, and welcome to another installation of Bastard Fat-hands Difficult Modern Painting! This month, the Gellerpox Infected are very difficult to paint. I actually got the Kill Team boxset because I wanted the Rogue Trader and entourage, but I painted the Gellerpox gang first because they fit with the Death Guard from Dark Imperium. I am happiest with the Nightmare Hulks, which were a lot of fun to paint. I am least happy with Vulgror, I struggled with necrotised/undead/zombie dark skin. Obv. I could have painted him differently, but I like to try out new things. The VoxShamblers were tricky, in the same way that the very-similar PoxWalkers were tricky. I tried to give them three different skin tones here, but it came out very samey. The sculpting is wonderful though, I love most the hospital-trolley leg club, that really tells a story.
Finishing off the my Dark Imperium boxset, this Blightdrone. After the trouble I had painting the Death Guard from that set I put off painting the Blightdrone because I couldn’t face more failure. There is so much lovely detail on the Nurgle minis but my painting skills are not really up to it. I hope that it doesn’t put kids off – I know that it finding things hard used to put me off things, but I wasn’t raised in an environment that rewarded persistence. However I am pleased with how this has come out. It took a long time, and its not Golden Demon standard, but I’ve learned from the earlier DG and applied that learning and I am quite pleased. So now I have a small Death Guard army, just like I wanted way back before the DG were relauched. Being a sucker for punishment I have built the Gellerpox Mutants from the Kill Team Rogue Trader boxset to go alongside. You’ll get to see them in however many months! I lke the Blightdrone, its basically a really angry clam! I don’t eat molluscs, but I am reliably informed that they are basically delivery systems for getting heavy metal pollution from the seas into human beings, which is delightfully nurglish.
I’ve also included a picture of my ‘lightbox’ set up, as someone was grumbling about the quality of my photos! As you can see, I’ve got TWO daylight lamps and my shots are still quite dark, so if anyone has any suggestions for getting better shots with that set-up, please let me know. I’m a bit of a technophobe and have not brain so maybe I am missing something obvious!
What a lovely experience it was, painting this little warband of Chaos Dwarfs. The wonderful bumcannon monster is by Old School Miniatures, in homage of course to the legendary limited release bumcannon of yore. The tenderiser is mostly the original, though missing its shield and the lower half of the daemon pushing it. I replaced that with an old plastic boar. The chap with the lobster arm is from Hasslefree, whose sculpt is clearly based on the dwarf Yorri from an illustration in (I think) Ignorant Armies.
This was a great little project and one I really enjoyed. I hope you like them as much as I do.
I haven’t really been anywhere, I’ve been painting plenty of things, but somehow never got around to taking photos and putting them up here… poor blogging form.
Still working my way through the Battlemasters pile. Once these models are all painted there will be two fine armies, although I might need to go back to the beginning and repaint some of the early figures! I’ve improved gradually over the years and I expect some of the first BM minis I painted will look even more amateurish than my usual output! If that ever happens I will of course take some bad photos of the armies!
Savage Beastmen wave their choppers in the air!
Knights Panther and Gobbo Wolf Boyz meet in battle!
Imperial Knights Panther and Lord Knights charge into battle!
Finally finished these tricky bleeders. I’m not very happy with them. Like the Death Guard, they are lovely minis that I think really encapsulate the Nurgle plague zombie look. They are heavily detailed, and you can see by looking at them how much time the poor sculptors must have spent looking at icky pictures of diseases and weird infections and gross skin conditions. But they are blinking hard to paint. There’s just so much there, so many different textures, so many tiny details. In the end I had to accept that there is only so much a boy can do!
One of the bits of The Lost And The Damned that is often overlooked is the section on Tzeentch Thrall Wizards. Instead of a Champion and warband, you can have nine wizards instead. The wizard champion is enhanced by their followers and becomes more powerful in the game. They can all receive chaos gifts and rewards and all that stuff. This has long appealed to me, and so I finally got around to putting a warband together.
There are some fantastic oldhammer miniatures here, all of which were a pleasure to paint. Probably the one I’m least happy with is the Samantha Phox, which is an atrocious mini really – not for the sexism (though it is mildly sexist), but the terrible anatomy of the arms and head (and boobs). My favourites here were the wizard with the staff and bare feet, and the Hero Quest evil magician, but they were all a pleasure to paint.
I hope you enjoy the photos as much as I enjoyed painting them.
The whole warband.
The wizard with the biggest staff must be the champion, right?