Traitor-ish terminator mashup

This was one of those "grab something out of the lead pile" projects, and it helped that he was already assembled and primed when he emerged. I decided to make him a Word Bearer so I went for a modern colour scheme to suit this Legion:

Beasty boy

This one has been in my undercoated pile for a little while, and happens to be one of my fav beastmen of the classic Realm of Chaos era. A classic Jes Goodwin sculpt.

TFOG February entry - Troglodytes

My every-growing Slann army continues to grow without any Slann. This month I've painted a unit of Troglodytes for A Tale of Four Oldhammer Gamers:

These are Trish Carden sculpts from the 1980s.

As per my lizardmen last month, I've given these "counts as double handed weapons" for those things they are carrying, which comes out at 44 points per figure, so 176 points in total this month.

Troglodytes cause fear but suffer from stupidity. On the plus side they are immune to fear and panic. Amusingly they also "cause nausea" which mean they smell so badly that anyone in combat with them suffers a -1 to hit! So hopefully all told they should cause some fun on the battlefield.

I've gone for a bish-bosh approach again with painting these...there are possibly even some parts I've left unpainted.

Basing-wise, I've tried recessed bases on these (40mm) and I think they've turned out OK. Minimum effort for mediocre results is my maxim for this force. I haven't painted the rim of the bases because yet again I'm being indecisive about the base colour. In my defense I'm just about out of the old Calthan Brown, so I may have to repaint all the bases with some different shade of brown.

So, we are about halfway through this challenge now and I keep putting off painting some Slann. I've got a Troglodyte hero lines up for next month, but from April it will be Slann all the way.

TFOG January 2016: Lizardmen

My entry for this month's A Tale of Four Oldhammer Gamers challenge is a small unit of Lizardmen:

The Warhammer Armies book gives these as 20 points each. I've given them "counts as double handed weapons" for their long axes at an additional 4 points per model, so that's a points total of 96 this month. Lizardmen have a toughness of 4 and 2 wounds each so not too bad. How they actually fare on the day is a different matter of course.

At first glance you would be forgiven for thinking that I've fielded four identical figures, but they are actually variants of the old Citadel AD&D range. In fact, technically they are AD&D Troglodytes, but I'm fielding them as Lizardmen. This range was noted for producing a number of variants for most of its figure lines, but in a number of cases you would have to look closely to see where the actual variation lies. The full variant set for the Lizardmen can be found at The Stuff of Legends (images provided by Richard Scott of Otherworld).

The paint jobs are very basic, and were quick to achieve using mainly dry-brushing; the scaly skin on this figures makes dry-brushing a doddle.

Also, I've finally decided on a basing design. I've decided to base all the figures in this army (with the possible exception of the spider) on round bases with a simply sand and tufts decoration.

My first painted miniature of 2016

...is a Space Marine. Bit of a departure for me, since most of the stuff I've painted so far has been fantasy rather scifi. I've never painted a Space Marine before, but I have boxes and boxes of them, and they kept looking at me. I'd also been investigating the latest Games Workshop paint ranges and I noticed there were some recommendations for painting an Ultramarine, so I thought I'd give it a go.

Here he is:

The figure in question is what has been labelled a "Transition Marine". They are composed of a bunch of armour mark variants and were sculpted in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

I decided on the following colour scheme for the armour, following GW's recommendation: Macragge Blue base, Altdorf Guard Blue layer, Calgar Blue layer and edge highlight, with a very slight edge highlight of some GW grey that I forget (I think it was Astronomican Grey?). I glazed with a few layers of Guilliman Blue. I used this neat, but a chap working at GW Nottingham suggested I should mix it 1:1 with Lahmian Medium, and about 7 parts of water. Or was it 4 parts? I forget. Anyway, I'll give that a bash next time.

I went for a very retro look on the chainsword. All in all I'm pleased with how he's turned out, and I thimk I'll be painted more of these intergalactic peace-keepers...(!)

Blood Angel next!

A Tale of Four Oldhammer Gamers: giant spider painted

In my last post I assembled this brute and applied a small amount of greenstuff to mould the legs into a striking pose and fashion a pair of mandibles. I've now finished painting it:

I'm pretty happy with how it's turned out, particularly given that when I started to paint it it felt like it was all going wrong. One of the things that's really helped to turn it around is a good bit of drybrushing.

I'll be basing it at some point of course, but I haven't settle on a base design yet so I'll leave this for the time being.

A Tale of Four Oldhammer Gamers: giant spider

When I revisited the Slann army list in the Warhammer 3rd edition Armies book prior to starting this project, I was pleasantly surprised to read that Slann animal handlers can take giant spiders. I'd been looking for an excuse to paint up one of these guys for a while, so this was the ideal opportunity. The figure I had in mind was this handsome chap:

I was keen to try to construct the figure in a bit more of an "attacking pose", which was slightly daunting given that I've never converted a figure before. So armed with greestuff, a fair amount of patience, and Google results of "tarantula attacking", I came up with this:

I'm pretty happy with how it's turned out. The figure is unbalanced (hence the support in the images) but I will compensate for this when I base it.

I started painting it last night. So far I'm not massively happy with how it's turning out, but I hope I'm just going through the "it gets a bit crap before it gets better" stage of the painting process!

Unreleased female Space Marine (1993): the Bryan Ansell collection

During the time I've spent trawling through Bryan Ansell's collection of Citadel Miniatures castings, looking for unusual and unreleased figures, I've uncovered a few gems. The feature of today's post is certainly one of them!

From 1993 I present to you an unreleased female Space Marine:

The Kev Adams collection part 3

In this week's post I feature some of Kev's painted Machineries of Destruction, plus a prize-winning chariot he painted for a Citadel Open Day.

I'll mostly let the pictures do the talking. I've tried to focus on Kev's incredible attention to detail when it comes to the bases.

All three of the Machineries of Destruction featured here are the actual ones from the covers of the boxes in which these kits were sold. You can see the box covers on the Stuff of Legends.

Enjoy!

MD2 Skull Crusher, Mighty Goblin Stone Throwing Trebuchet

The Kev Adams collection part 2

In the first installment of this series of blog posts I focussed on the goblins in Kev's collection; this week it's the turn of the orcs, ogres and trolls, and features some of my favourite of Kev's conversions and paint jobs. Many of the bases are adorned with Kev's characterful trademark foliage.

First up are some converted orcs which are, for me, the stand-out figures in Kev's collection.

Here's a classic Perry twin orc sculpt, one of the first slotta orcs, a line of figures that Kev went on to dominate. The original sculpt (no. 14 here at SOL) is a great figure, but Kev manages to make it more menacing and war-like with the addition of armour plates on the arms and the helmet protrusions:

A Tale of Four Oldhammer Gamers...ribbit

So this thing is happening. Back in July, just prior to this year's BOYL, the esteemed Warlord Paul of The Black Hole blog suggested we take on the challenge of "A Tale of Four Gamers", an idea that first appeared in White Dwarf 218 back in 1998. The "we" being Paul, Chico (Oldhammer on a Budget), James (Realm of Chaos 80's) and myself. The armies would be of an Oldhammer flavour and we will fight our battle/s at BOYL 2016.

The rules are simple in that between now and BOYL we must each amass a force of 1000pts at a rate of roughly 100pts per month, and to blog about our progress at least once per month. We haven't set ourselves a cash budget in that we each already have most, if not all, of the miniatures we will need. So the bulk of the challenge will lie in the painting and the modelling.

The forces chosen are:

- Chico: Hobgoblins
- James: Chaos (Nurgle)
- Paul: Undead
- Myself: Slann

John Blanche's wonderful Slann illustration from the 3rd edition Warhammer Armies book.

Why Slann? Well, since returning to the gaming scene at BOYL 2013 I've only painted two forces: a chaos warband for BOYL 2013 (that didn't actually make an appearance), and a human/giant force for BOYL 15. Both forces had one thing in common: a predominantly red/gold colour scheme. This was coincidence rather than design but I think it's fair to say that I'm now utterly bored of this colour scheme! So part of the reason for choosing a Slann force was because I could experiment with very varied colour schemes. If you think frogs are just a dull green colour then try googling Dendrobates and check out the wonderful colour schemes of these amazing little creatures. What better inspiration could I have!

I also discovered when researching Slann army choices in the 3e Warhammer Armies book that Slann animal handlers can not only take warhounds, but giant scorpions, giant spiders and sabre-tooth tigers! Brilliant opportunities for painting and modelling there.

So look out: the frogs are coming.

Ribbit.

The Kev Adams collection part 1

As many of you will be aware, Kev "Goblin master" Adams is currently working for Bryan Ansell, producing loads of various greenskins for Warmonger Miniatures, and is also working on a range of chaos beastmen types (not yet released). I was fortunate to share the Warmonger stand with Kev at the last Salute, and after having a good old chat we decided that Kev's collection of vintage painted figures needed to be photographed for posterity. The majority of his collection is at his parent's house, who were wonderful and generous hosts for the day. So I set off with Kev and a camera in early July to take some pictures.

What I saw blew me away! This is the site that greeted me when we arrived at Kev's parents' house:

A spotter's guide to recasts part 2: recasts for Comic Relief

A few months ago I published a post on spotting recasts, which was essentially a guide to dispelling popular misconceptions as to what constitutes a recast. In this post I want to take a different stance, which is to give you examples of figures that are recast, but which at first glance seemed to be the genuine article. Before I do that, however, I would like to highlight how this particular situation has affected me personally, and how I'd like to address it by making a "bad thing good".

I recently acquired some unreleased Games Workshop Lord of the Rings figures. The figures looked fine: good sharp castings with no obvious imperfections. But I should have looked at them more closely. Thanks to the keen eyes of one particular Lord of the Rings collector it was pointed out to me that unfortunately they turned out to be recasts (more on that below). Being of an anti-recast inclination I couldn't bring myself to sell or trade them (even to people who know they are recasts but still want to buy them). So I'm going to give them away. If you are interested in acquiring one, read on...

Given that this week is Comic Relief in the UK I'm going to donate £1 to every person who expresses an interest in acquiring one of these figures. For those of you who don't live in the UK, Comic Relief is an annual event here in the UK that raises money to tackle poverty (http://www.comicrelief.com). To get involved in "Recasts for Comic Relief" just email recastsforcomicrelief@gmail.com and I will donate £1 for everyone who emails. By sending an email you are effectively entering yourself into a prize draw, with 6 random people receiving 1 each of the figures.

If you have a particular preference for one figure, or would like to rank your preferences, then feel free to do so in the body of the email. I can't guarantee however that you will get the figure you are after.

You have until midnight on Thursday March 12th to send an email. Comic relief is on Friday March 13th, at which point I will donate the money, and the figures will be posted the following Monday. I will cover the cost of standard postage to anywhere in the world - if you want to add insurance on top then I would request you do so at your own expense.

The figures in question can be seen below, together with a close-up picture of Beruthiel to show the metal "marbles" indicative of recasting. I will leave it to the person who alerted me to the fact they are recasts to explain:

There are what as known as marbles evident on the casts. Marbles appear as tiny balls of metal which are caused by air bubbles in the rubber mould. GW minis do not have these imperfections due to the nature of how the moulds are made. The castings themselves are also slightly less crisp than their original counterparts as they appear to have been gravity poured castings rather than centrifugally spun cast.

You can see on first glance that the figures seem fine, although Beruthiel is probably the roughest casting of the lot (marbles are evident on all the figures). Look closely and you should be able to see marbles on every figure.

Queen Beruthiel

A wish called Wanda

Those us who collect Citadel Miniatures can be a bit obsessive, it has to be said. We are driven to collect all examples of a particular range, or in some cases, of all ranges! Consequently something that really gets our collecting juices flowing are variants: figures that closely resemble one another but have slight differences that mark them out as different. Such figures are usually share the same basic body sculpt, but are noted for head swaps, modifications of weapons etc. Despite the breadth and depth of figure knowledge in the Citadel collecting community, new variants are still coming to light, and this blog post presents what is in my opinion a prominent addition to the range of variants.
The variant in question is that of Wanda, a character who features in the Shadows Over Bogenhafen and Death on the Reik Citadel scenario pack figure ranges (scans courtesy of the Stuff of Legends):

Wanda: top left

Bryan Ansell's Rogue Trader Space Marines: part 3

If you've seen my previous posts on this subject (Part 1 and Part 2) then you'll already be aware that Bryan has some wonderful old Rogue Trader Space Marines in his collection, most of which were painted by the 'Eavy Metal team and appeared in various publications of the time. So today I present some more for your delectation.

Bryan Ansell collection: Warlock of Firetop Mountain miniatures

Just a quickie from me today. Yesterday, James of the Realm of Chaos 80s blog posted the Metal Mayhem articles from the now defunct Warlock magazine. Within these articles could be seen the figures from the 1980s Warlock of Firetop Mountain range by Citadel. James posed the question as to whether the figures illustrated were the original plastics or metal counterparts.

Well, not only can I confirm they are plastic, but they now reside in Bryan Ansell's collection:

Nicely painted, I'm sure you will agree.

A spotter's guide to recasts and recasters

The issue of recasting and recasts is an emotive one in the collecting and gaming community and has on occasion led to people being falsely accused of being recasters. I have been collecting Citadel Miniatures for three decades, and I have often observed people make false assumptions on what constitutes a recast, and as a consequence are far too quick to declare a given figure a recast, and it's owner a recaster.

The Bryan Ansell collection: Space Marine Scouts (Rogue Trader era)

Just a quickie today to showcase some of the painted Games Workshop/Citadel Miniatures Space Marine scouts in Bryan Ansell's collection. A mixture of metal and plastic (from the Advanced Space Crusade set). Some of the plastic scouts are particularly well-painted, and the metal scouts look great with the face paint!

Unreleased unseen Heroquest (?) prototype figures (Bryan Ansell's collection)

This is potentially something a bit special. I say "potentially" because there's a bit of a mystery surrounding the origin of these figures. They were all found in a zip-lock bag in Bryan Ansell's collection with "HEROQUEST" written on the bag in marker pen. Although I can say for sure these are unreleased sculpts, I cannot be certain on their link with Heroquest. First the figures, then the reasons for why they are a mystery:

Barbarian

Unreleased Rogue Trader adventurer (Bryan Ansell's collection)

Today's offering from the Ansell horde is yet another unreleased Rogue Trader Adventurer:

This figure is labelled "Feral Shaman" on the tab and was produced in 1987. I don't know who sculpted it but at a guess I would say Trish Carden or Aly Morrison. Could be wrong though. No idea who painted it but it was part of the collection of Bryan's painted Rogue Trader Adventurers that can be found in this advert from White Dwarf 99:

I have no idea what he's carrying under his arm - any suggestions? Also, does anyone recall reading about feral shamans in the old Rogue Trader rulebooks or White Dwarfs, or do you think he's just a "generic character"?