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!

Aly Morrison's Marauder Miniatures sketchbook

Happy New Year Oldhammer devotees! I've got a cracking first post of the New Year for you. Last Saturday I attended Games Workshop's 40th birthday bash at their HQ in Nottingham, partly in the hope of seeing some old miniatures on display. In truth there wasn't much to be seen, but I did hit upon an absolute nugget of gold that made the trip more than worth the effort. Aly Morrison was manning one of the display tables and he had brought along his old miniatures sketchbook from his days at Marauder Miniatures!

It was great to chat with Aly, and he was more than happy to share his memories about his early years at GW/Marauder. His sketchbook was absolutely fascinating, and Aly very kindly gave his permission for me to photograph it and share the images with my fellow Oldhammerers. I was so excited I decided to photograph every page! There's somewhere in the region of 73 pages here, so you may well want to grab a cuppa and a biscuit and settle down to enjoy the view...These pages are roughly in the order in which they appear in the sketchbook, but some of them will be out of order because I've grouped some similar pages together.

I've always been a big fan of Aly's figures, but one thing I have to confess is that I had no idea how good an illustrator he is. In addition to his scrapbook he also brought along some very early illustrations he did at GW. Jon Boyce has already published some of these on the Oldhammer Facebook group, and I'll upload some more in a future blogpost; in my opinion they really are the epitome of Oldhammer.

Another characteristic of Aly's that is evident in many of the illustrations is his sense of humour. It's well worth taking a closer look at some of his notes to see what I mean!

Finally, before I let you loose on the images, I wanted to point out that I have included links to various Marauder Miniatures pages on the Stuff of Legends website throughout my accompanying notes. I have done this simply because the similarity between Aly's concept sketches and the finished product is quite uncanny, which I think is testimony to his ability as a sculptor.

If you want to see any of the images in closer detail, simply right click on a an image and choose open in another tab.

Enjoy!

First up are some MM20 Orcs. A number of these weren't illustrated in the catalogue pages but can be seen in a mail order flyer from the time:

TFOG Slann colour scheme and my first sculpt

Trying to get some Slann painted for the Tale of Four Oldhammer Gamers project is like wading through treacle! I'm really struggling with these little frogs. It's partly me being indecisive about a colour scheme, partly I'm finding it difficult to paint detail on the frog skin, and finally it's just a case of committing to a painting project and then finding I want to paint anything but that project!

So in the interests of trying to write at least one blog post per month on my progress, here's a side-by-side of two different colour schemes I'm contemplating:

"Traditional northern European" green vs "Amazonian tree frog" blue and orange. So what do you think? Any preference?

I've managed to get this blog post in on the very last day of the month. This is due in part to much of my hobby time this month being spent on a new pursuit - sculpting. I enjoyed converting my Odo figure last month so much I figured I would try to sculpt a complete figure, and here he is:

He's based on a painting that can be found on the rear cover of the Lost and the Damned Chaos book. I'm pretty pleased with him as a first sculpt, although I acknowledge of course that there's a lot of improvement needed! But the main thing is I really enjoyed doing this, and I hope to do a lot more next year.

I wish you all a happy, healthy and hobby-filled 2016!

Odo the Melange-addicted mutant space pirate

The Oldhammer Forum has been running a painting challenge organised by Jon Boyce (aka axiom) as part of their Oldhammer Legacy Warband theme. The premise is simple - contributors paint a themed model (this year's theme is "space pirates"), all contributors enter a draw and the winner gets to keep the entire warband. Due to the disparate nature of entries, a spot colour of turquoise has been chosen, and the eventual winner will do the basing, to tie the warband together.

My contribution was originally intended to be an "alien bounty hunter". I had the idea of converting an old Citadel Fiend Factory figure, but somewhere along the way I lost it! It was while I was looking for the figure that I hit upon a different idea after discovering the body of an old Citadel AD&D Umber Hulk and the head of an old Citadel C Series giant in my bits boxes. Odo was born:

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!