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!

Dreadfleet - Giant Sea Turtle Skeleton

My first completed piece from the Dreadfleet boxed set, approximately 4 years after getting the box as a Christmas gift! This manse on the back of a skeletal giant sea turtle is probably my favourite piece from the set! It's been painting in progress for around 3 years!

I've decided to finish off all of the lovely terrain and gubbinz from the set before venturing on to tackle the ships individually. My housemate seems particularly keen on this game so I should try completing this one soon!

Merry Christmas Everyone!

Hello folks - just wanted to write a quick post to a happy holiday season to any of my readers! It's been an okay year - I'm looking forward to what 2015 will bring! I'm personally a staunch atheist, but Christmas is a lovely time to get together with my family, exchange gifts and eat lots of good food! Here's a few items of my holiday haul...

Dreadball Mars Attacks Martian team!

Lovely laser-cut MDF measuring sticks for SAGA 

East-Meg Judges set and a box of Saxon Thegns

This disgustingly lovely kit! Lots of interesting parts here - my plan is to build 5 different characters from these!

A small horde of Reaper Bones - the fish warriors will become Deep Ones and the misc. other stuff is for various RPG characters, plus a Giant for Of Gods and Mortals

I do have some other stuff that are currently hurtling through the warp to me, which is nice! Stuff for a Lovecraftian project plus some of the lovely Tengu Miniatures zombies (now sold by CP Models).

Did you get any holiday goodies?

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!

 

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!

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!

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!

2013 Round-Up (just 19 days late...)

Hi guys - I've been meaning to write this post for a couple of weeks now but I have only just gotten around to it! A quick recap of what I got upto in 2013 and my next post will cover my current projects and my plans going forward...

The most important part of 2013 (with regards to my blog) is that GAMES ARE BEING PLAYED! It's difficult to underestimate how good this is - I've been "back in the hobby" for 5 or so years now, but even before my break in wargaming, I rarely played (once or less a year, despite having multiple armies!). In the latter half of 2013 I played multiple games of Flying Lead and Songs of Blades and Heroes - I've been planning out games and settings for years and it was a great feeling to see my painted miniatures and terrain on the table! I even got a couple of my non-wargaming friends to start playing (my housemate and another of my best friends) and, most importantly, they kept asking for more battles!

I've actually gotten a really decent amount of figures completed this year for various different projects and I got stuck into my zomb-apoc stuff during October with Zomtober 2013 - here are a few examples of things completed this year:

Michonne and her two "camoflage" zombies - I'm very fond of her paintjob - she was a gift to myself when I'd finished half of my Studio Miniatures plastic zombie horde! Painted as part of Zomtober 2013

Chosen Space Marines of The Desolation - In The Emperor's Name

Goblins from The Hobbit - this was a lovely plastic kit! Lots of variety too. They're to be used as devolved humans in Necromunda/Space Hulk/post-apoc

Some Private Military Contractors from Empress Miniatures (sold as SAS, mine have a couple of headswaps) - these are for zomb-apoc

Wasteland Sniper - this guy is intended as a scout/herald for a new (Caesar's Legion-inspired) faction in my post-apoc. Warmachine/Hordes

Misc Studio Miniatures plastic zombies - I did enjoy painting the ones in the prison jumpsuits and the Drive-inspired one in the front! Painted as part of Zomtober 2013

A biker survivor (em4 Miniatures) and misc feral ghouls (Mantic Games plastic zombies). Painted as part of Zomtober 2013

Missing from the round-up are various different figures, an orc and goblin warband (Celtos miniatures, for my fantasy skirmish setting), 19 pirate scum (40k Chaos Cultists), 30 or so plaguebearers (plastics and kitbashes!), more zombies... A good painting year in general!

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!