Recent Assembly...

I went a little mad on figure clean-up/assembly recently - here's a group shot of what I based up:

High Elves from the flashbacks in Fellowship of the Ring (plus Haldir!), a Formorian-turned-Goblin leader, a cowering Empire soldier, some metal Mordor Orcs who have been slightly converted to be added to my Game of Thrones Wildlings, the Moon Duke (at the back), an Oldhammer Manticore, Theoden and Gamling of Rohan, an ancient Citadel Gandalf and finally, an ancient Citadel Norse (to be used as a lower-level hero for my Vikings in skirmish games).

The Formorian started out like this, in a box of free Orcs and Gobbos from my mate...this was my favourite item in there and I had the perfect use for him...

I stripped the previous paintjob and cleaned up the moldlines, lopped off the halberd past his hand, found a donor staff from a Goblin shaman. I found him a suitable base (40mm in this case!) and cut a hole in it so the integral base would sit lower - easier than sanding it down or removing it. I added a spare GW rat and spiked skull to the base and I'll be adding sand and doing some slight gapfilling - he'll lead my Goblins from The Hobbit (I bought these to use as troglodyte mutants of some kind - he'll be the perfect leader for them!).

The Moon Duke - I love this miniature! The axe head was missing so I found a suitably classic-looking replacement from the original plastic multi-part Space Ork set. 

Finally, a closer shot of the Manticore - a lovely old Warhammer sculpt. He's small by modern standards, but the pose is suberb and he's got a lot of character - something the modern plastics seem to lack. The figure was an eBay purchase in a job lot a while back - I had to find a replacement tail and chose a plastic spike-ended tail/tentacle from the Chaos Spawn kit - I still need to finish up the join between the main body and tail. When I'm painting him the tail will get a sort of dripping-poison effect...

Comments most welcome - hopefully there'll be painted pictures sooner rather than later! I've spent most of today tidying through my boxes of unpainted/part-assembled figures/bits/sprues to get it into some semblance of order and it's still going to take a few more hours tomorrow!

Games Mat and completed Terrain

Huzzah! Terrain collection and games mat for historical gaming and perhaps more traditional fantasy all put together! I'm deliriously happy with this - everything here is brand new for January. The canvas gaming mat follows a great guide at Tobi's Paint Pot.

Things left to add:
- buildings - a number of Dark Ages houses and a pig sty to begin with - my plan eventually is to have enough buildings to play Song of Shadows and Dust but set in a Dark Age town
- more trees! I have another 5 bases of trees to complete at some point
- hills - I have the bases and foam, just awaiting the bark chips
- fences and walls

Phew! I also have around 25 Dark Ages villagers plus livestock assembled and undercoated to populate the settlement I plan to build and I want to put together some carts for the Vikings or Wildlings to ambush! Many plans! 

Here is my current SAGA Viking force making a shield wall on the new games mat and terrain.

Terrain - More stuff started!

My first wheat field using good old coir matting - I've already beveled and sanded the bases for another 3 of these - a really simple project to go along with a small Dark Age farmstead. Whilst I was on with the MDF bases for this I sorted out a bunch of small bases to make some rock likes from bark.

I bought a second-hand Garden of Morr kit back at the start of October - I decided to start cleaning it up tonight but decided to get rid of the silly amount of skulls on it. I love the GW terrain range, but they will insist on adding cartoony skulls to every empty spot. Inspired by sho3box, I'm going to remove all of the superfluous skulls of daftness. Some will just need removing, others will have paving sculpted in their place and some will be hidden by foliage. I'm looking to use this graveyard with lots of different genres - I'm happy enough with the gothicness, just not the cheese.

 

This will take a while.

 

Terrain - Woods!

I purchased the materials for this terrain project a while back - I ended up buying over a hundred trees from a Chinese eBay store and the lasercut MDF bases from another eBay store. I also had a couple of bases of Woodland Scenics deciduous tree armatures based up as post-apoc terrain (for dead trees) that I decided to remove from the original bases and repurpose for this project - they will get clump foliage eventually!

Most of the trees from the Chinese store are great, but needed some clean-up before I could glue them to the individual bases - this is par for the course though, as the moldlines on the WS armatures were pretty bad to be honest!

Hopefully I'll get sand/gravel on these soon so I can start to sort them out - I have another 5 bases to go (I'm going for a full woodland board at some point!) and I'm itching to get them game-ready! There's also a lot of smaller trees/bushes leftover from the eBay order that I'll be buying more bases to get them based up, particularly for use with my 10mm Hordes of the Things games and 1/72 Lion Rampant Game of Thrones plans!

The Warband ofJarl Asbjorn

Jarl Asbjorn, favoured of Odin, leader of a vicious band of ne'er-do-wells!

The Jarl and his 4pt SAGA starter warband - 2pts of Hearthguard and 2pts of Warriors. I'd originally assembled the warriors purely from the Viking Hirdmen set, but decided to mix them in with the Dark Age Warriors set for a bit more variety. I used Renedra plastic bases with coins on top to add a bit more heft to them (much better for gaming I find). More on these soon!

Conquering the Lead Mountain - a #6MMRPC Facebook Group!

Well, this was slightly delayed! I'd planned on having a little Facebook group set up for the 6 Month Mountain Reduction and Painting Challenge set up to coincide with the launch of the Challenge on September 1st, but alas, life gets in the way at times! Anyway - I hope the challenge is going well for folks (I'm also a little behind on reading my Feedly, so I haven't had a chance to comment on a lot of the most recent posts - soon!) and I hope those of you with Facebook (whether you're taking part in the Challenge, or you'd just like to join to have a place to chat about your current projects!) will join us at Conquering The Lead Mountain!

Jungle Flora - Spikers

I built these alien plants a bunch of years ago, after collecting some pine cones in the woods of my home town. For years they'd languished in a tool drawer, until I rediscovered them and decided to tart them up...

To begin, I removed the spikes and their bases - they were originally on plastic 40k bases, but luckily I'd picked up some MDF bases at Vapnartak for this exact sort of thing! I glued the pine cones to the bases, then built up the rest of their bases with cork. I addd my usual sand and gravel, then took the cocktail sticks and whittled them somewhat to make them a little more natural. The spikes were then superglued in and the plants got a grey spray priming. I stuck pretty close to the original paint job I'd given them, which drew its inspiration from the classic 40k cacti (for which I bought some polystyrene ovoids back in March of this year...).

Let me know what you think of them in the comments below!

A Clutch of Beastly Eggs

I recently put this objective marker together for a Song of Blades and Heroes scenario, which is converted from the old Warhammer Skirmish rules. These are to be used as jabberwocky/wyvern/griffon eggs, but I also made some piles of smaller eggs which will be used with the same base as a spider's nest...

Completed pictures soon!

The 6 Month Mountain Reduction & Painting Challenge - Introduction and (Self-Imposed!) Rules...

I've recently been talking to Dave over at The Spider Web of History (check it out for historicals, zombies, post-apoc and more!) about our shared lack of focus on our current projects - the gamer's curse, flitting from one project to another, all the while purchasing more and more miniatures! I'm pretty sure wargaming turns you into a hoarder...

With this in mind, we decided to set ourselves a challenge, in order to start to deplete our plastic/lead mountains and get some of our already-purchased stuff completed! Here are our rules, beginning 1st September 2014...

1. No purchasing of new miniatures, EXCEPT if you use a joker card.  Like in a deck of cards, you get two jokers to use on a figure purchase during the six months of the challenge.  Could be a blister pack, an ebay bundle, or a single figure...you can't splurge. 

2.  Gifts do not count against you. Christmas and or birthdays etc. Also, if you're given gift cards by your hobby illiterate family or friends, you can without penalty use them on anything you want miniatures wise.  I luck out here, as I'll have Christmas and my birthday during this 6 Months.

3.  Paints, terrain (or materials), and other hobby supplies do not apply to the no purchasing rule.

4.  At least one hobby related blog post and/or Instagram update a week.  If you Instagram, be sure to hashtag your pic with #6MMRPC

5.  Zombtober will be part of the 6 month challenge so, Zombie related stuff during October is ENCOURAGED!

So, what do you think? Fancy taking up the challenge with us? I'm sure you have plenty of stuff to be on with at the moment in your own lead and plastic mountain - feel free to contact myself or Dave if you fancy partaking with us!

More HotT Undead...

I've been very busy adding more to my Hordes of the Things Undead recently - this is a bit of an image dump from Instagram...

The Necromancer's Acolyte - a Magician in HotT. The Acolyte is the guy on the rocky spire, whilst there's a brilliant dwarf jester and some death cultists backing him up. These are all Warmaster figures.

Spiders - these are Beasts in HotT. I found these in the art shop in my town, in the jewellery section. The tree stumps are the stalks from some squashes...

Once I made the above, I remembered that I had the small spiders from the Warhammer Arachnarok giant spider kit kicking around somewhere. I decided to add another base and mix them in - so happy with how these turned out, they're now one of my favourite units!

I'm having four behemoths in my army - all skeletal giants. He's the first, with morning star and mace. Mantic legs and the rest is Warhammer Fantasy plastics.

Undead Wight Champion - a Hero in HotT. This figure is a classic Warhammer Familiar. I love the pose! I gave him his faithful undead uni-hound. A one-horned canine. Because I can. The dog is from Mantic.

The second Behemoth - another mix of plastics again and impossible to photograph well - he has a double-handed spiked mace. Oh, and the skellie of a large humanoid for company.

Finally, everything based up (wood filler to level out the bases with the inbuilt tabs, a few rocks here and there and then fine sand applied with watered down PVA) and awaiting spray-undercoat. They've now been done and are in the painting queue! 

More to come shortly!

Quick Project: Dice Rolling Tray

One of my gaming friends happens to have a habit of flinging dice off the table/into miniatures in his clumsiness - I saw that spacejacker, over on Instagram (check out his feed, which is a constant source of inspiration! He also has a brilliant blog too), uses a dice rolling tray. What a great idea! I went to eBay, where I found that I was looking at about £30 for a nice one, and decided to make my own...

This was incredibly simple - it's a cheap wooden box (my parents sell various boxes and they seem to accumulate this particular type as spares - it's bare wood, with a strip of detailing going around) that I took the lid off. I used the lid for this one as it didn't need to be too deep - I cleaned it up by removing the "detailing strip" with a scraper, filled in the holes from the hinges and clasp and gave it a sand with fine sandpaper. I then gave it a few coats of the grey emulsion (leftover from painting a bench), which I then sealed with some clear coat spray varnish. The most expensive part of the project was actually the felt, to line the tray - this was measured and then cut to shape. I used a thin coat of PVA applied with a brush to hold it down.

I also "borrowed" a box from my parents to hold my dice collection - I decided to use the leftover felt to line that too! Really simple task but very effective. 

Vapnartak 2014 - Spoils of Wargaming

Well, Vapnartak was fun! It was bigger than I was expecting, with a lot of stuff that I'd have liked to buy (I'm looking at you, Lead Adventure/Empire of the Dead/Misc. Foundry) but I managed to keep my purchases to a minimum. I didn't exactly have much in my monthly budget for miniatures...

The spoils.

Treemen! I really wanted to replace the dodgy ones in my fledgling Wood Elf Hordes of the Things  force. The current ones are a) too puny to be a behemoth and b) striking a ridiculous Travolta-esque pose...

Previous Treeman...

The new ones are from Kallistra Miniatures and are nice and bulky - I'm going to sculpt another in a similar style, but with a silver birch feel (it'll be a bit skinnier/taller).

Sheep! As suggested by Spacejacker (of Tiny Solitary Soldiers) for the bases of the giants (Behemoths) allied to my dwarf army.

My housemate wants me to build him a Harry Potter "Forces of Voldemort"  Hordes of the Things force - I'm a fan of the books and films and I really like the idea! Obviously I'd need a "Good" army to pit against them - the stag was purchased to paint up as a Patronus...

I also picked up a skeleton (54mm? Maybes.) and a lion (10mm), just because. All of these misc. metals are from Irregular Miniatures. The skeleton might become a Behemoth for my undead Hordes of the Things, or an objective (I'm sure my necromancer would like to get his hands on the remains of a titan giant...).

A busted up Celtos figure from the tabletop sale. This is as a gift for a gaming friend - it'll be his God for his Hordes of the Things barbarian army. He'll get a nice sword and a cork-base..
Finally, I picked up a new pair of clippers, some Citadel Bloodletter glaze and some round MDF bases. My current clippers were looking shabby, I fancied the glaze for use with the Hordes of the Things undead (and I got some use out of it straight away on the beards of the Forgeworld Chaos Dwarf unit I completed last night). As for the MDF bases, they always come in handy - I also have some pine cone/cocktail stick creations that I've wanted to make some better bases for for a while (they're currently on normal 40k bases) that were to be used as spiker plants in the jungle terrain. The smaller bases are perfect for this. The larger ones will be for objective markers.

Did anyone else attend?

Hordes of the Things: General and Hero

Continuing the theme of a look at the build-up of my Hordes of the Things Undead army, we come to the start of my heroes for the force:

I was amazed to find these brilliant Warmaster figures amongst the various bits and pieces from the forces I've purchased - they're a Dark Emissary and a Truthsayer from the Dark Shadows/Albion campaign that Games Workshop ran! I actually really enjoyed that campaign/background and I loved these miniatures! I needed a Grand Necromancer for my Undead and the Dark Emissary fit the bill perfectly - the Truthsayer will be set aside to join the dwarves and elves when I get round to starting them! 

I also found a Tomb King Lord on throne amongst the odds and ends - his throne was atop this mound of skeletons and broken weapons. The pieces were glued, so I took them apart and cut away the base tab on the Dark Emissary - that was quite a fiddly job! I was very glad for the purchase of a new hobby saw! A bit of chopping here and there and he was added to the base, which I built up with some cork. Perfect lord for the army now! 

I discovered this chap yesterday in some bags of 10mm historicals that were part of the collection I've acquired - I'd guess that he's a priest of Sigmar or something like that, another Warmaster figure - I'm over the moon with him, such a lovely characterful sculpt! He'll be an apprentice Necromancer for a second Hero choice for my undead when used at 48pts!

Gladiatrix with Bullwhip

I wonder how many dodgy Google hits that blogpost title will get then? Hah! I was having some real issues finding an arm to complete this female gladiator - I'd decided on the whip due to the size of the Dark Eldar arm, but unfortunately I was at a loss as to what I could use to replace the other missing arm. I've also trimmed the crest off the helmet on this one, just for a little variety, as the poses between two of the female gladiators were very similar and they had the same basic helmet.

After digging through the various Eldar and Elf parts (not many...) I have, I remembered that I had a bag of Heroclix from my fledgling (even after 3 years) Superhero project that could provide a suitable donor - in this case, Livewire from the Legion of Superheroes. The arm was a suitable size, fit nicely with the pose and the figure was a duplicate (although, I'm not a fan of the Legion of Superheroes, I'd have happily chopped his head/arm/legs off, even if I only had the one...). 

The arm was amputated with clippers, the moldlines were cleaned up with a scalpel and finally the arm was drilled and pinned into place! I'm going to do the green stuff filling on the whole bunch of gladiators at once, so that will be coming up shortly! Just a few more of these to go and then I'll have to find a few more miniatures to add to them - luckily the Junker Gladiators range has a few more candidates!

Comments most welcome - I'll be starting to paint some miniatures for Zomtober shortly!

Fall Freebies...

Found these in a car park today - the same little seedpods that are sold as leaves for terrain and basing. Have a nice wander, find some birch trees and grab yourself a modelling freebie! I grabbed a spare carrier bag and scooped up a bunch of them! 

Post-Apoc Gladiators - Pit Beast

This is another of the Urban War Junker Gladiator figures - In this case, a large ogre-sized Pit Beast. Normally it would have a boar-like head, so I'm guessing that it's the result of either mutation or genetic engineering - the only problem is, the head was missing from the bunch of figures I traded for - I'm looking for suggestings as to what I could use in place of it...

He's now been pinned approximately 8 different times - the arms and hands were seperate to the body. I ended up using an old action figure base for him - seemed to fit perfectly!

Piratical Scum

When Dark Vengeance hit the shelves I immediately invested in the Cultists from an eBay reseller - After pondering various uses for them, I finally decided that they would best suit the role as "generic 40k scum". The plan was to make them look a little less rag-tag (removing completely makeshift weaponry - the barbed wire-wrapped maces, the morning star-esque weapons and replacing them with swords and axes) and a little less Chaotic (replacing certain heads with too many lenses, removing the little cult symbols and brands). Above is how they look right now...

My favourite is the leader of the band of merry savages - I wanted to be able to use them as pirates playing on the Space Hulk tiles, or a marauding band of thieves on an Imperial planet. I've filled in the Chaotic symbols on the armour plates and replaced the sword blade. I kept the guard on the weapon and used an axe from an old Commissar. I also gave him a flintlock pistol to fit the piratical scheme and my favourite part - the bearded head from the Space Wolf sprue, originally meant for a Scout. It fit my vision for the miniature perfectly!

Finally, the flamer trooper - I wanted to put up another picture of this guy as the camera washed out all the detail on the head. Seemed to fit the miniature perfectly - I love the gloves on this miniature!

I'm pretty close to being able to base the squad and crack open the undercoat - I have a few more weapons to replace and a few heads to put together - I'm thinking more of the Thunder Warrior-esque helmet you can see above. I've always liked the classic design and I figure that it's quite different for this squad of marauders - I reckon they'd love to think of themselves as "as tough as the Thunder Warriors of legend!" - they might even call themselves that!

For those not familiar with the Thunder Warriors or Thunder pattern armour, see above - they were the proto-Space Marines, the first ones created by the Emperor to unite Terra before he created the Primarchs and Space Marine Legions. I've wanted to put the conversion together for a while but never had much reason - I finally found one!

Comments are most welcome - I should have a chance to work on these early in the new year!

Up and coming...

Just a quick shot of what is currently on my painting table. This obviously doesn't include the other stuff that's already painted. I've already taken photos of the completed miniatures - they've begun to appear on the blog and will continue to do so with snippets of background. I'm attempting to flesh out what will be my main gaming setting (a formerly civilised Imperial world on the edge of being abandoned in the decades after a fairly catastrophic war - Necromunda meets Rogue Trader meets Firefly meets Fallout) and the fluff sections should help me put together the ideas and archetypes buzzing around my head...

Busy busy busy!

I've actually got a lot of miniatures finished recently, but I've decided to take nice pictures on terrain and add a little bit of background - in no particular order:

• Aruk - an alien warrior (ogre-sized) from the Cobalt-1 sci-fi range (with some converting).
• Not-PC Danny from Hot Fuzz (to hunt zombies) from Hasslefree Miniatures.
• Not-Marv from Sin City (same), also from Hasslefree Miniatures.
• Ghoul gunslinger from Copplestone Castings.
• The Ogre from Reaper Miniature's Bones line. More on this particular guy in a future post.
• A Horrorclix Shoggoth rebase/repaint.
• Thrullg from Hordes - a swamp beast that feeds on magic. I'll be using it as alien fauna in Rogue Trader-esque games.
• A not-Gears of War Marine-type. Painted as a Vault (Fallout) Security guard.
• Last, but not least, a vampire-hunting post-apoc cyborg sheriff. Yeah. One of my favourite ever conversions.

I also dug out my Dark Eldar and various other figures, and currently have the following Painting-in-Progress:

• 10 Dark Eldar Warriors - I ended up changing the sand/gravel mix on these. They've gone from bare plastic to the above stage.
• 5 Hellions - mostly basecoated. I've gone with silver/metallic skyboards to avoid the mauve overload...
• Haemonculus (the special character). He's now basecoated.
• Evil Not-Batman (a Heroclix conversion, rebase and repaint).
• The Mime (a Horrorclix conversion, rebase and repaint).
• Doc and Wabbit, two Copplestone Castings post-apoc characters.

Quite a bit to look forward to, right? Comment below to let me know what completed minis you'd like to see first!

I decided to get the Dark Eldar finished as I like the idea of playing a shantytown vs vicious alien invaders.

Also, the new 40k boxed set looks brilliant. I must have 100 autogun cultists!

Basing 101

I've recently discovered that there is a fairly active Wargames club in the town I moved to a year ago, held every Sunday in the rooms above a cafe/restaurant - there seems to be a good mix of different players, with a focus on Warhammer 40k and Warhammer Fantasy, but with other games played. This is exactly what I've wanted for years, so I have started to knock my horde of Space Marines into some semblance of an army that stands a chance of winning the odd game...


Part of this is going over the models that I painted when I re-entered the hobby around 5 years ago. My painting style has changed slightly since then, but I'm still fairly happy with the paintjobs and the conversions - I'm planning on going back over the army unit by unit, fixing some small bits and pieces and adding some additional detailing to their bases...


This was spurred on in a big way by Ron's post over on From The Warp - Rebasing models with new materials. This is something I've done before and the post spurred me on to order a couple of new modelling materials from eBay:

- Modelling leaves - I've been meaning to pick some of these up for a while now. I've used them a couple of times since receiving them in the post last week. They're very nice - rather fiddly, but they're adding a little bit extra to the Chaos Warriors.

 - "Blighted Marsh" Static Grass - a darker mix - I thought this would be useful when mixed with the flock that I currently use on a majority of projects, as such: 

The flock on the right is the one I have been using for a good few years - the flock on the left is a mix of that and the newly purchased "Blighted Marsh".


Time to dig out the Marines...