The Crimson Court - Warhammer Underworlds

When my good friend Lewis of The Die is Cast! suggested us both painting up the gorgeous Crimson Court warband from Warhammer Underworld as a mini-challenge around 10 days ago I was initially apprehensive - I'm out of the painting groove currently, with no real reason as to my lack of enthusiasm for it! I picked up the boxed set when I was in Leeds for a work conference and ultimately decided that I'd give it a go!

Here they are - they're somewhat lacking the "Crimson" aspect, maybe more of a Puce Court? It doesn't quite have the same ring does it?! I had the colours of House Bolton in mind for these and I'm pleased with how they turned out! I may return to them some day to add some further definition to the greyish white hair and maybe some additional shading on the armour, but overall I am very happy. The figures are honestly gorgeous, with weirdo batboy being my favourite, followed by the hulking mace/polearm wielder! I wish I'd kept some elements separate for painting, so if you find yourself with these guys mid-assembly, DEFINITELY keep the cloak on the big guy separate!

Let me know what you think, and be sure to check out Lewis's brilliant blog for his painted version!

A Cluster of Spiders

Greetings! Here’s hoping you aren’t an arachnaphobe! These eight-legged beasties have taken a bit longer than I originally expected! I blazed through the bases of the 8 *normal* spiders (normal if a spider roughly the size of a medium beast of burden can be described as normal...) and had most of the spiders drybrushed...before realising they still had approximately 1200 moldlines to clean (after I’d spent a good chunk of time cleaning them up already!). Those spiders are actually from Sainsburys supermarket, from their Halloween selection. I’ve had them for a couple of years with plans to do this and finally got around to it for Rangers of Shadow Deep.

The other two (the ones with more than eight-legs and a lot of eyeballs) were from eBay - I believe they’re from the Bloodborne video game boardgame that was released - I also have a lovely weird sort of greenman/wodewose that came from the same game in the to-paint queue.

With another line that takes me up to a nice 200 points - still getting trounced, but feeling good about it!

But wait, there’s more...

Blogposts that is, coming today to clear my backlog of completed minis! Huzzah!

Cursed City: The Blood-Born

So, I was one of the folks that was lucky enough to get my hands on Warhammer Quest: Cursed City - I pre-ordered it through those lovely chaps at Mighty Lancer Games. I literally can not remember the last thing I pre-ordered from Games Workshop, so that should give you an indication of how much I loved the look of the box. Here are my first finished miniatures from it!

When it came to putting the box together I decided to create scenic bases for all of the figures - breaking up small model bricks into more interesting shapes, gluing them to the bases (to fit with whatever scenic parts the miniatures incorporated) and then carefully chipping the edges. I then followed this with fine gravel and sand to finish them off.

I generally love the contents of the box, I love the lore, the atmosphere, the heroes and the villains. That being said, my least favourite miniatures in there are these three - the Vyrkos Blood-Born, young vampire servants of Radukar the Wolf.

As for why, It’s hard to pin down. I like the concept - freshly created vampires, still slightly feral (note the wolf-paws for feet!), graceful and lithe, the turned youngsters of the noble houses of Ulfenkarn. Is it the hair? I know it’s over the top but I like that it adds a sort of anarchic/punk aspect to them. The weapons? No, they’re very nice swords. The clothing?

Nope.

Oh well! Despite not being my favourites, they were still a pleasure to paint! 

I’m very pleased with the red vines crawling up the ruins - I imagine that these are an effect of the city's domination by the vampiric overlord - the death magics that he wields corrupting even the plant life of the once fair city, roots and tendrils from the plants seeking freshly spilt blood and gore. That’s my excuse to paint them such a vivid red - that, and my love of the red weed from War of the Worlds.

Finally, I also painted one of my favourite parts of the box - the unlucky zombified kitty! I painted him orange to match my lovely ginger tom Leon. In hindsight, the orange blends a bit too much with the bloody bones that are on display - I’ll go for a paler colour for the other one from the box to add a bit of a contrast.

So where does that leave me on the ol' Hobby Bingo board? Only with my first bloody line! Huzzah! By my reckoning I'm at 140 points - probably less than I'd have wanted to have been at this point in the year but probably more than I finished in all of last year! Here's to many more squares crossed off!

Carrion Crawler (Reaper Bones Charnel Grub)

Bit of a random figure here - I was searching for my basecoated Oldhammer ogre collection the other month and found Mr. Slimy here in the same box! He's a Reaper Bones Charnel Grub which is apparently their way of saying "Dungeons & Dragons Carrion Crawler". If you click that link to the Forgotten Realms wiki and click the "3rd edition" image of the Carrion Crawler you can definitely see where Reaper's sculptor found their inspiration for this particular sculpt!

As far as fleshy slug-maggot-tentacle creatures go, this is a nice enough figure. It's years since I cleaned up the standard figure and I remember struggling a bit to get all of the moldlines. It's sculpted with a nice trail of slime that it's obviously travelling along on.

Originally I'd planned on painting this creature in pasty maggoty colours, befitting a subterranean-dwelling beastie and I was almost finished with painting in that particular style when I decided that I disliked it's flaccid tentacular clubs (ala a giant squid) - they just sort of hung trailing onto the ground. Instead, I decided to chop off all the tentacles and splice the clubbed ends onto wire (with creative use of the pin vice), followed by drilling holes to allow these to fit nicely. These were then bent into shapes suggesting that the Carrion Crawler had just found some kind of prey and was either in the middle of an attack or a threat display. 

It was at this point that I decided to make things a bit more interesting - I needed to basecoat again, so why not in a lurid pink/orange combo, with the slime being in the aforementioned acidic orange? I also used copious amounts of gloss varnish to finish off this sickly-looking, potentially acidic or poisonous, dungeon denizen!

Here's where I currently stand for the year, with a bunch of other completed figures to blog about!

Dunbarr Torok, Ogre Bounty Hunter

I’m in the process of collecting a whole bunch of classic ogres from GW and other sources - this began with a couple of figures for various warbands and has spiralled into lots of different ogres that I may one day use as an army in Age of Sigmar or Saga: Age of Magic! This is the Ogre “Bounty Hunter” sculpted by the one and only Jes Goodwin for Games Workshop somewhere around the year of my birth (1986). It also happens to be one of my favourite miniatures of all time! 

I love the various details - to begin with, his clothing is just superb - a multi-textured mix of fabrics, leather, furs and chainmail. He is the epitome of hardened veteran, with heavily weathered and patched equipment that I imagine he is massively comfortable with the usage of. He grips the severed head of his latest target, dripping fresh blood onto the ground below himself.

One leather glove covers the hand currently gripping his main armament, a massive sword that only an ogre-sized creature could lift, never-mind use successfully! The notches in the blade of the sword suggest that it is well used and it is backed up by a wicked dagger that would be a longsword in the hands of a human.

Speaking of human hands, he has a couple of them hanging from his various pouches - I like to imagine that these were taken as some kind of punishment - perhaps a bounty was posted to take the hands of a thief? 

Finally, a note on the paint scheme - I went for a dark scheme overall that seemed to suit the mood of the figure, with a dark green as the main colour of the fabric of his hood. I wanted to clearly show off all the pouches, trinkets and trophies and I think the dark main colour helps with this. As a final touch on the details I added a bunch of small tattoos on his glove-less hand and lower arm - I imagine that he has served in some mercenary companies and these are mementos of battles where he was first over the wall or had a particularly notable kill...

Getting there! I have even more to post about soon!

The Throne of the Goblin King

Presenting the throne of the Goblin King! Or Ogre King, Ghoul Queen, Bugbear Emperor... You get the idea!

This is from the Escape from Goblin Town boxed set accompanying The Hobbit films - I realised the other day that I’ve bought almost all the components from the set apart from the dwarves and Gandalf! All in separate auctions or at wargaming shows (my last score was a bag of about 30 of the lovely (disgusting) goblins at the Vapnartak show in York a couple of years ago). I’ve also got the rickety platforms all painted up and a horde of the goblins that I believe I’ve shown previously on the blog!

What can I say about the terrain piece as it comes from Games Workshop? Mediocre? I can see why it was done that way but it certainly lacks something, hence why I added foam to bulk out the missing rear (see what I mean in the final picture (which is not mine and was found online for reference)) - the reverse of it is effectively just...not there! I used scraps of polystyrene glued together to form the rest of the rock outcrop, then carved it into shape and slathered over a mixture of PVA, a little sand and wall filler to create the texture of the rock. Once dry I worked out where the metal banding holding the (fancy formerly dwarven bed) to the rock would go and connect to the other side, which I then carved into the plaster mix and foam, to create the grooves for it to sit in. I made the banding with thin card, cut to size and then glued in place. I added rivets to this (pearls from a water filter) and then mounted it on a shaped piece of plasticard.

Painting this was a joy - I got so many colours in there for all the grime, mold, moss and algae and added patches of flock for the thicker areas of moss. It could of ended up a boring slab of grey rock, but these added life to the piece and set it nicely in a damp underground catacomb or pit. One thing I’d like to mention is the fact that this is also the King’s toilet - how grimy and glorious is that?! There is a bucket full of turds just underneath and a hole in the seat!

 

Magister Cthirian Coldheart

Introducing Magister Cthirian Coldheart and his familiar Mórðvíg! Available for all resurrections, curses, enchantments and glamours, with a specialisation in bringing ones allies back from the grave...

This gent is a lovely *classic* wizard from Reaper Miniatures in the Bones plastic material - I love all the details and shapes used in it’s sculpting. This guy is intended for use in all sorts of different games but as I was painting him I had it in my head that he’s generally a good guy that has developed a slightly unhealthy interest in necromancy. Purple is the colour of Death Magic in Warhammer and Age of Sigmar and I do think of it as a very appropriate colour for wizards! Thus, I tried to incorporate a bunch of shades of purple in his scheme - I hope you agree with me when I say that I think I achieved this! Also, this miniature has been sat undercoated in my collection for aaaages! I picked him out of the backlog last month and cracked on!

 

Fantasy Commissions

I also finished some commission miniatures on Saturday and handed them over to Nathan of Corehammer at the Fiasco Wargames Show in Leeds yesterday..

Dwarf Thief

Paladin

Ranger

Witch Hunter 

All Reaper Miniatures and a lovely selection! The Ranger is from the Bones range and sadly the detail wasn't quite as nice as the metal figures. These are for use in his ongoing Dungeons and Dragons campaign.

Merric Tealeaf, Halfling Rogue

I gave my housemate the recent starter set for 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons as a Christmas gift - neither of us had played it before and he expressed an interest in running a campaign of it - here's the character I put together for those games:

Meet Merric Tealeaf, Halfling Rogue, Thief, ex-Brigand. Not a bad man, as such, just willing to do some bad things every now and then. His warband-mates tended to express some disgust at the fact that he wasn't usually to be found in the front rank in most fights, but he tended to work best from the shadows and by using his wits rather than brawn. 

Amusingly they left him in charge of the coinage and treasures they discovered...
Sadly, after 3 or 4 sessions the rest of the players seem to have become distracted and my housemate apparently struggles to keep to one setting for an extended period of time...

The figure is a Reaper Bones Hellakin Gorecutter. I changed the short sword he was previously wielding for one that looked a bit more vicious and stealthier (from the Dark Elf Witches plastic kit).

Comments are welcome!