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.

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!

Painty stuff: Adeptus Mechanicus (Bob Olley/Rogue Trader)

I've been collecting Citadel Miniatures for many years, but until recently I've been one of those stereotypical collectors who tends to stick new acquisitions in drawers to gather dust. It wasn't always so; until the late 80s I was a keen gamer, and over the past couple of years I've taken up that pursuit once more. One thing though that I've never really spent much time on is painting, which is a shame given the number of figures I now have. So I'm trying to do something about it. I've painted a handful of figures (most of which I haven't actually completed), but I'm now going to try in earnest to improve my painting.

There's a good chance that you share my love of the painted figures that appeared in the 'Eavy Metal pages of White Dwarf in the 1980s and early 1990s. Vivid colours and an imaginative approach to colour combination was the name of the game back then, and this is the approach that I'm trying to emulate. Here's one of the first steps on which I hope will be my road to that destination:

There were a couple of techniques I wanted to experiment with when painting this Rogue Trader era Bob Olley sculpted Adeptus Mechanicus: thinning paint, and glazing with inks.

Yes, I appreciate that you painty types who are reading this probably think I'm stating the obvious when it comes to thinning paints, but it's not something that I've formerly been fond of. This has been particularly true whenever I've used colours such as yellow and orange, and I've been of the belief that these pigments are already thin, so why thin more? Consequently I've ended up with rather thick and not too pleasing paint jobs. So on this occasion I was determined to give this thinning lark a go. The figure was undercoated white and the first thin coat of hobgoblin orange/red core (old Citadel paints) was applied. As I suspected it looked very thin, but I let it dry for a couple of minutes and perservered. About 4 or 5 thin coats in my mind was blown! I was so pleased with the result! Thinning subsequent highlight and shadow colour combinations made layering so much easier. My eyes have been opened!

I'm also a big convert to thinning with inks. I used Winsor & Newton or old Citadel inks on this figure, and glazed pretty much every part. The glazes really give depth to the colours and at the same time lift them and make them really vivid. Another conversion for me!

I have to be honest and say that once I'd painted the orange clothing - which I'm really happy with - I got a bit bored with the remainder of the figure, and painting the other parts was a bit of a chore. Ah well, I made it to the end at least.

So now I'm hooked, and I'm looking forward to sharing more painty stuff with you in future, and I genuinely would appreciate your feedback in how to improve my technique. One of my goals is that once I'm up-and-running and gaining in confidence, I'll be turning to painting my collection of unreleased figures.

My latest John Blanche acquisition

I'll just leave this here...

As featured in "Ratspike"

Paint schemes for mounted Realm of Chaos warriors

I'm currently painting up a mounted unit of Citadel Miniatures Khornate Chaos warriors for Oldhammer Weekend and I turned to the old Realm of Chaos cavalry in Bryan Ansell's collection for some inspiration on painting the horses. If you're also looking for a little inspiration then take a look at the images below - many of these can be seen in the pages of the two Realms of Chaos books and in the pages of White Dwarf issue 104 (and probably several others from around that time).

Beastmen unit for Oldhammer weekend

Here is my current WIP - a beastman unit for Oldhammer weekend.

I'm putting together a Khorne unit, with 5 Bob Olley "goatmen" and 5 Jes Goodwin "dogmen." The unit champion can be seen front row on the left.

Here is a cloe-up of one of Bob's goatmen, a lovely figure:

I've gone with traditional Khorne colours for this unit. My new best friend for this particular painting exercie is the old Citadel brown ink, which gives a fantastic depth of shade:

I'm currently building up a narrative for my Oldhammer weekend chaos force, built on the stats I rolled, which I'll cover in more detail in a future post.

Putting brush to lead: completed, and an apology

Before getting into the meat of this post I'd like to post an apology to those of you who follow this blog and have left comments recently. In the past I have been alerted to them when they appear in my Gmail inbox. I hadn't received any notifications for a while, and given that I usually receive some comments I eventually started to get a bit suspicious, and so revisited some recent posts. What did I find, but sure enough comments had been left, so I was perplexed as to how I had missed these in Gmail. I eventually realised it was because of some new feature that Gmail had introduced whereby messages were being categorised into different sections of the inbox, and I had completely failed to recognise this. Now, I love to read your comments and the words of support, so please don't feel I've been neglecting them. I've sorted out this inbox issue and normal service has now been resumed. As for Google Gmail - I'm sure there was a good reason for the changes - but hey, if it ain't broke why try to fix it?

OK, so back in June I posted on how I had entered the painting challenge over on the BLOOD forum, with my entry being a unit of 5 classic minotaurs. Well, with the clock fast approaching the deadline I have managed to finish, and here are the results:

Time for a spot of reflection. Firstly, I'm really glad I entered this challenge. As I indicated before I have dabbled in painting the odd figure or two, but have never actually finished a figure. So a victory point for me, and a huge sense of satisfaction for actually getting these finished. Is it just me or do other people hit the "painting wall"? A bit like what runners face, but possibly slightly less exhausting? For me it comes around halfway through painting a figure (hence why I've never really got beyond that point before) when I've added most of the base coats and start with the detailing. I seem to get an urge to put the figures to one side and start on something else. So having a painting challenge as an incentive was really useful in getting through the wall.

Now onto the thorny subject of the quality of the paint jobs. Overall I'm quite pleased with how they turned out, but there are of course things I would want to improve on, and at least I'm more-or-less aware of what these are. As someone who is new to painting I keep reading advice on how important it is to be neat with your painting; I couldn't agree more! I failed to do this in many areas on my minotaurs, but at least I recognise where these are, and why I failed. Lack of skill, certainly, but also an important factor was impatience. My goal is to paint figures to a reasonable tabletop standard quickly. Give that goal I will inevitably compromise quality for speed initially until I (hopefully) get better. I didnt actually manage to paint these very quickly, but again, I think I could speed up without a decrease in quality if I was to try them again.

I'm reasonably happy with the colours I chose, and I particularly like the skin tones on 3 of the 5 minotaurs - the less orangey ones. For the skin I used Foundry's Flesh 5A/5B/5C. Man I love those paints! So easy to apply (I didn't bother with thinning) and in my opinion lovely shades. For the 3 minotaurs I prefer I started with 5A and worked up with additions of 5C to almost pure 5C. For the 2 other minotaurs I started with 5B and my desire to experiment kicked in when I then liberally washed them with GW's Reikland Flesh wash. I think I applied the wash too heavily and left the skin looking patchy. It doesnt actually look too bad in the pic above but in the hand it's not great. Back to the drawing board there then.

There's a good chance I'll be bringing these minotaurs to the Oldhammer weekend, so you'll have a chance to ridicule constructively criticise them in the flesh.

The August paint challenge has already started on the BLOOD forum - stay tuned for my next foray into the crazy world of painting lead.

Putting brush to lead

I've been a collector for more years than I care to remember, but there was a time when I also gamed and painted. I say painted - I once covered a box set of Citadel Warrior Knights of Law with Humbrol enamel silver paint. That was the early 1980s, and back then I played most of my games (mainly Warhammer with a smattering of D&D, Traveller and MERP) with figures IN BARE METAL! Yes that's right. I know. Shame on me. Fast-foward a couple of decades and these were my next attempts:

A big improvement over a thick coat of silver, but still short of where I want to be, which is to be able to paint to a tabletop standard quickly.

Another year or so later and these came next:

I was fairly pleased with these. I admit, not a Golden Demon in site but pretty close to where I wanted to be. BUT, they are not finished, and that's how they have remained.

Hopefully that is about to change. I've entered the painting challenge over on the BLOOD forum and I'm hoping this will give me the impetus to get my paint brush in gear. Here is what I'm entering:

So there, I've blogged it so now I'm committed. Wish me luck!