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!

Image Dump - Fantasy Skirmish stuff over the past few months...

So, over the last 6 months, I've been full steam ahead on a fantasy skirmish project. As usual with my projects, it grew from a few characters and some enemies for a dungeoncrawl RPG, into an attempt to utilise the large collection of fantasy figures I had amassed. This blogpost is an image dump from my Instagram of the various figures I've been working on in the past months - above you can see a wide range of stuff, including toy crabs and loads of Reaper Miniatures Bones beasties!

Here you can see a mix of a Minotaur, Mordheim Freelance Knight, misc. PCs and NPCs, a troll, a Deadzone Plague creature for my zomb-apoc, some refurbished pine cone and cocktail stick poisonous space cacti and last but not least, this beast...

The Reaper Miniatures Bones Jabberwocky! Hopefully one of the heroes has a Vorpal Sword to go snicker-snack!

This fantastic figure from the Hordes Circle Orboros faction. He'll be a necromantic Priest of Carcosa (yeah, I'd been watching a lot of True Detective...) in muted browns, with pale skin and yellow spirals...

Some human warriors from the first GW Lord of the Rings boxed set. Just because. These will be Kingsguard-inspired.

A Ringwraith discovered in my collection. He'll be "The Pale Rider", an emissary of a great evil in my fantasy skirmish games.

The Crimson Knight - I had the figure and had been listening to the A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones audiobooks, listening to descriptions of Ser Amory Lorch and thought that this figure might make an interesting villain...

Another figure I love, this time from Warmachine, a Thrall Warrior. I love the pose, armour and the expression on the skull works alongside the normal skeletons I have to join him.

A couple of nasty surprises for my players - I need to make some closed boxes too!

Last but not least, my human mercs Mordheim warband. I was generally happy with these, but decided that I'd prefer to have them on round bases, specifically lipped bases, as they're my favourite for 28mm fantasy...

 

Check back soon to see these painted!

 

Wyrdstone!

You can always tell when I've been playing actual games - the amount of objective markers and counters I build and paint goes up rapidly! These wyrdstone shards for Mordheim (or Song of Blades and Heroes etc.) are small rock chips on Renedra plastic bases, plus the normal sand and gravel. To paint them I started with a light basecoat, then a mix of snot green and fluoro green. I added three different washes to give them a sort of glow - watered down green ink, watered down fluoro green and finally a coat of the brilliant Citadel Nihilahk Oxide (verdigris Technical wash). They certainly stand out on the table!

Ghoulish

I've got quite a large warband of various Undead figures to complete for Song of Blades and Heroes and my RPG project - here's the first bunch, some ghouls...

The two adult male ghouls are Warhammer, the last metal edition of ghouls produced by Games Workshop, sculpted by Paul Muller.

The mother ghoul (with baby...is it hers? Is it...a snack?) and child ghoul are from the fantastic Heresy Miniatures (and are available as part of Andy's current Kickstarter, check it out!) and are also sculpted by Paul Muller!

Both the GW and Heresy figures are great - the mother and child certainly edge it due to the "ick" factor, but due to the shared sculptor they fit extremely well together!

 

On an off-topic note, I bloody love the Blogsy app for the iPad! The integration of Blogger, Instagram and Picasa is perfect!

Treasure Trove

Another recently built and finished objective marker - this one was another refurbishment from an earlier completed piece. Once again, my issue with the former piece was the basing - I'd built it a base from the Warhammer regiment movement tray set, but have since moved to round bases on almost all of my stuff. I thought this would suit the round base much more.

I carefully removed the base sidings, glued it to a lasercut MDF base and added cork, cobbled plasticard and my normal gravel and sand. The additions were then painted, my normal flock and grass tufts were added and finally I added some rust and weathering here and there. Jobs a good'un!

Sacrificial Virgin...maybes.

As part of my Mordheim collection I also re-based this figure from Ramshackle Games - it's a free figure that they offer as part of an order that I thought would make a great objective marker for a scenario. I'd originally based it up on a 25mm square base, but decided to clip that off and glue it to a round MDF base I picked up at a wargames convention. I added the sand and gravel as usual, undercoated it black, repainted it in my normal basing colours and added flock and tufts. I gave the figure a black/brown "muck wash" and added rust to the banding and padlocks, but other than that this was painted around 6 years ago alongside the rest of the warband!

It's been a while...

So, here's what I've been working on lately - all the pictures are from Instagram (link in the sidebar!) where I usually update daily (it's a lot easier to upload pictures and comment on them through my iPhone)...

Most of my Fantasy stuff is now based on the round Warmachine-style lipped bases - I hated the look of square-based minis fighting round-based minis, so I decided to go back and rebase my Mordheim mercenary warband!

I'm also a bit obsessed with weighting my bases - I've done it for years with the hollow-bottomed 40K bases, but I decided to start and do it with this sort too - I clip out the slottas, clean them up with a Dremel and add a 2p coin to the base. Adds stability and heft, especially good when it's a plastic mini!

This is where I'm currently upto - new bases, sand and gravel added, painted, static flock! I took the opportunity to make some slight changes here and there and I'll be going back over the figures to finish off the paintjobs (they were paintied about 6 years ago and could do with some highlights here and there. Also in this picture are my Hellboy/BPRD figures - they got rebased too and I'll be tarting up their paintjobs in due course...

I got this GW Skull Temple second-hand on Facebook, stripped off the paint and cleaned it up, then cut out some MDF to base it up on. I added sand and gravel around the sides...

...and then went over it all with a fine brush and some PVA, adding sand to the various cracks and crevices where it would of settled naturally. It's since been spray undercoated grey then given a light coat of black/brown to start. It'll be painted to fit the rest of my fantasy collection (cream-coloured stone with green washes for algae and the like).

I bought this cobra ornament at a car boot sale last year, thinking it might make a nice terrain piece.

I chopped out a MDF base to fit the bottom and added sand and gravel - I also cleaned up some parts of the statue with sandpaper (and removed the eyes before painting). Also shown is a recent conversion - a Dark Eldar Sslyth converted into a fantasy Snakeman - I'm going to use him as a vampire in Mordheim.

Finally, painting-in-progress. It's actually finished now, but I'll give the completed terrain piece a post of it's own!

So this is what I've been upto most recently - I have actually completed a bunch of other bits and pieces too, I just have yet to take some nice pictures of them! Let me know what you think of this stuff so far!

Terrain - Arcane Ruins

Finally, the other main part of my fantasy terrain collection - the Games Workshop "Arcane Ruins" set.

I'd seen this set done in a similar style online, although I can't quite remember where - it may have been in some of the pictures for the Get the Girl, Kill the Baddies fantasy skirmish rules. It was the first time I'd seen the set and thought "Oh, that might not actually look completely plastic and childish if painted the right way..."

I left off the silly larger horned skulls as they were a bit chunky and undetailed and I split the set up into a few different bases. The pictures of the set on the GW site are terrible - all the pieces are clumped together as one base and it really doesn't highlight what a nice product it actually is! I used lots of filler on these in order to hide the seams. I also used a green wash as the final layer on the stone - it adds a lovely tinge to the stone.

I'm still pondering what to add to my overall collection to tie in with these pieces - I already have a bunch of jungle terrain that would fit with them perfectly. I also have some bare trees that are a part of my post-apoc project - I'm thinking about re-purposing these to add some woodlands to my terrain collection, plus perhaps some smaller ponds/marshland.

Comments, as always, would be lovely!

Terrain - Small Ruins and Toppled Statuary

In order to add some bits and pieces to my fantasy terrain collection, I also picked up a set of these ruins and scatter pieces from the Lord of the Rings skirmish game - these cost me a couple of quid on eBay.

I carved out some bases from MDF to mount these on and added gravel and sand with wood glue.

It was then undercoated in Halfords grey primer and painted in the same light stone colour as the rest of this fantasy terrain.

Flock and tufts matching the rest of my fantasy terrain collection completed the set! I'm itching to get some fantasy skirmish games played!

Terrain - Ruins of Osgiliath

Another delve into the backlog of posts - these Ruins of Osgiliath were actually finished towards the end of last year along with a set of Arcane Ruins and some of the smaller corner ruins and toppled statues from the original Lord of the Rings boxed set. The kit is lovely - it's very sturdy, easy to put together and easy to make look very good (even if I do say so myself!). I wish there were more of these sets, as a board covered in similar sets would be great. 

The set was purchased along with the Arcane Ruins set in order to build up my fantasy terrain collection, which was fairly limited (I mainly had sci-fi and jungle terrain). They're based in such a way that they'd fit with any of my other terrain and armies. They'd even work well as ruins in a Warhammer 40k jungle or similar setting.

What I did on my "weekend"...

I recently started a new shift pattern at work - 3 days on, 3 days off, 12 hour shifts. I actually love it! I previously worked 5 days a week with split days off, meaning I didn't really have time to see my family and friends whilst also having a bit of painting time. The new shift pattern works great! Here's what I managed to finish off over my "weekend": 

I finished off the Scabbs figure I showed the other day, as well as 3 bomber zombies for my WWWII setting, a halfling thief for Mordheim, a zombie-huntin, blood-splattered granny with a shotgun and a not-Serenity from Ground Zero Games. I also got some painting done on a pulp investigator from Reaper an a cowboy supporting his gutshot mate.

I spent yesterday finishing basing up this horde of miniatures - I fancied something new to paint and I'd almost run out of figures that were undercoated and ready to go. I wanted something a bit sci-fi/Rogue Trader to go with the wasteland/spaceport/shantytown terrain I've been working on. I pulled this horde of stuff out of a bunch of boxes - there's various aliens (Black Cat Bases, GZG, Star Wars pre-paints) and some random pulp/horror stuff from Horrorclix. I needed to base up some of them (with some pinning) and add sand/gravel to the rest of them. I then spray-undercoated a bunch of these with the not-Khemri Brown Humbrol spray. They're now good to go!

Back to the terrain shortly!

Upir' Likhyi

A rather rubbish photo, but most of the details should be visible - this is the start of my Undead warband for Mordheim - a vampiric nobleman. I picked up the figure rather cheap still-in-blister from eBay a few years back. The sword the original figure comes with is absolutely rubbish, a clunky piece of...well, it's just not good. I replaced it with a plastic sword and hand from the current Vampire Counts skeleton plastics. It's one of the fanciest ones from the kit, with a lovely bat-shaped pommel. 


At the moment I have the plastic necromancer and the four zombies from from the corpse cart, a number of zombies converted and resculpted by my friend Si, a couple of Heresy ghouls - the ghoul hag (eating baby) and ghoul child plus various mixed plastics to turn into more zombies and dregs.

Return to Mordheim - Dwarf Pirate Slayer

Meet Snorrison, the Slayer Pirate! Formerly of Long Drong's Slayer Pirates, Snorrison decided to return to land full-time and seek his fame...

This gentleman is one of the Storm of Chaos Dwarf Slayer army "Doomseekers" - he'd normally be swinging round two axes attached to his hands by chains, but I picked him up as part of an eBay lot minus a couple of pieces. My friend Si helped me out by sculpting the parrot and the hand clutching the pistol - the inspiration came from a lovely piece of concept art from the Warhammer MMORPRG. Next up is the halfling thief and the beginning of an Undead warband...

Return to Mordheim

Finally managed to finish off this lovely classic miniature over the weekend - he's a rather old Games Workshop Chaos Warrior wearing a beastman skin. I love the armour and hammer!

I've had about three different shields on this gentleman before settling on an Orc plastic shield with one of the plastic building detailing parts from the original Mordheim box. I've always loved them and yet never really found a place to use any of them. I decided that it added a lovely slice of weird to an already quite strange miniature! 

Another of my projects from over the weekend - assembling Lord Carver, BMMD, Esq. from the Hordes Thornfall Alliance - I can't decide between Thornfall Alliance (a force of boar-men - think beastmen but from wild boars...) and the Blindwater Congregation (crocodile/alligator-men with a US Deep South/swampdwelling yokel-theme, plus frogs and giant turtles - being a massive fan of reptiles and amphibians, I really like these guys...). Thoughts? This was one of the many miniatures I decided was a must-have when I first saw it - there's just so many different things to love, utter badass!

This chunky little fellow is a Mordheim Halfling Thief - a miniature I've liked for quite a while, yet never got around to picking up. I finally found him unpainted and cheap on eBay - £2.49, amongst a bunch of other auctions I couldn't refuse. So I got him, a great retro Chaos Sorcerer and 80% of a Chaos Knights plastic regiment for under £10. Fairly good!