From the moment the Nighthaunt range began I was struck by the urge to make weird Mechanicum chaos creatures out of them. I picked up a load of Nighthaunt models in one of the Hachette partworks series, which I have come to think of as GW sales, and then I left them for years! Eyes bigger than my stomach, as my dear old Mum would have said, etc etc. Anyhoo, throw in some spares from various Skitarii and other bits from my bitzbox and here we go… I tried to use a blanchistu set of tones too, just to pretend like I knew what I was doing….
I’ve been sitting on these for months waiting to have the time and energy to post. This horrible bunch are Fibrius Clustor and his warband. We’ve got Fibrius himself, which came from a Kickstarter, and is a lovely miniature. Fibrius could be a daemon prince, the magic using leader of a Plague Marine army, or a powerfully mutated human cultist well on the path to ascention. Then there is the big tube creature, from the same Kickstarter. These two are beautiful and were a joy to paint. Big Tube can be a Greater Daemon, a spawn, a daemon prince, or perhaps a Beast of Nurgle, depending on my feels. Up next we have some Oldhammer goodness, a Rhino and some original monopose plastic Plague Marines. The Rhino had already been converted towards Nurgle, I just tidied up the conversion a bit and repainted it. The Plague Marines are pretty limited but I made some conversions. In theory these are table legal in 10th edition, with a Plague Spitter and Plague Weapons modelled in addition to the missile launcher (Plague Launcher?) and flamer (Plague Flamer, i dunno). I think that they’ve come out alright considering how shonky the minis are. I hated them at the time because the Realm of Chaos branded Chaos Marines were so good and these are so basic. But they’re a step on the path that led us to where we are now, with amazing Plague Marines. The final bits of this warband I am not so happy with. Firstly, Newhammer Chaos Spawn, which were tricky to paint and unrewarding. In the end I did lots of layers of different shades to try and get a dusky bruised and rotting effect. This wasn’t especially successful. Finally a fansculpt Space Crusade style dreadnought. This was difficult to paint mostly because the sculpt is a bit of a stinker. It looked alright on screen but it doesn’t fit together well at all, and the detail is scrawled on with a point, and where it is sculpted on its pretty basic and has fingerprints in it and generally looks like a beginner’s piece. We all need to start somewhere, and I am happy to support enthusastic amateurs. It’s just hard to get a piece like that looking good, especially with my limited skills.
A digression into newhammer, I painted these guys because I like the miniatures so much. Full of detail and bursting with ideas. I like the idea that this is how some people slip into chaos worship, without even realising that they’re doing it.
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!
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!
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.
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!
Hello again and welcome to 2020. Since my last post its been Christmas and New Year, and then we’ve done something silly and got ourselves a new puppy. I’ve not had a lot of painting time since then 😦 She’s lovely though.
Now, the two main points of “interest” with this warband were 1) further experimentation with contrast paints; and 2) painting a random selection of miniatures in the way that I did when I was a kid! Point 2 needs no explanation, but point 1 maybe does. I followed some intructions for painting with source lighting from above. So I sprayed these minis black all over, then gave a grey spray from above, and then a white spray from above. I was hoping that the white would help the colours to pop out, as if there was a strong sun above – this warband is wandering parched chaos wastes. I think I’ve had mixed success. Mostly the source lighting failed and I don’t really know why. Likewise where it worked I don’t know why it worked. Was it my choice of colours or paint? Why are the mutants so dull whilst the Warqueen looks great? Still, I think I’ve learned a few things and I’ve painted some lovely miniatures. I really enjoyed painting the Warqueen – one problem with the beautiful modern minis GW is churning out at the moment is that they are so very detailed that it is hard for us mediocre painters to do anything with them. This one has just the right amount of stuff on it, a challenge but not impossible. The chap with the warhammer was fun too…. his tab just says OLDHAMMER but I can’t remember getting him. The chaos toilet was great, I really enjoyed painting it but I think that I could have done a lot better. The zombie ninja was fun too and simple. I messed up the shaman lady, I should have used different colours. The chaos warriors were tricky, I am not pleased with any of them really. The not-chaosette was a nightmare to paint, lots of faint detail, hard to get any of it right. The rhino-monster I enjoyed and I felt like I got the tattoos right too. In true chaos style, even the paineous bits were a pleasure!
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.
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!
Doris Plunger's Lead Mess 