The Age of Sigmar has come.....

The Age of Sigmar has officially arrived.  Some celebrate while others cringe.  I look at it like "Hey, new miniatures to paint and maybe I'll get a few games in".  Either way, the miniatures are pretty sweet.  I picked up a copy of the game yesterday and spent my entire Saturday putting everything together.

Lots of stuff in there, and if your curious there are numerous "What's in the box?" videos floating around.  I'm just happy I got to get my grubby little paws on the miniatures at last.  Assembly is fairly complex, but they add a nice handy direction guide which is pretty easy to follow.  So here are the unpainted armies after assembly....

 

The top picture is the Simar guys, the bottom is the Khorne Chaos guys.  I still have a bit more to do with them such as basing and gap-filling before I can prime and splatter paint on them.  I think I'm going to start with the Sigmar dudes, but I might flip-flop back and forth.  I'll update my progress as time goes on, so stay tuned.

The Age of Sigmar is upon us... in a day and a half

T-minus a day and a half, but who's counting?  So in case you haven't heard, the new Age of Sigmar comes out this Saturday, replacing Warhammer Fantasy.  I'm not 100% sure how I feel about that.  I mean, I would've liked to have had an 8th Edition Warhammer Fantasy army fully painted with a few games under my belt before this new game comes out, but I only myself to blame for that.  I could be pissed of at Games Workshop, but Fantasy was losing them money and instead of killing the IP completely, they decided to completely redo everything, including taking a rank and file large army wargame and turn it into a squad skirmish based battle.  I'm cool with that, but I'm not too thrilled about the Warscrolls.  Basically, no more point-building system, rather bring everything you got and throw it on the table.  Gone are all the rulebooks and army books.  4 pages of loosely written rules and 14 or 15 70-page PDF's.  I'm not going to speculate further on the game.  I only hope it's fun.

With that being said, last Saturday when I went to pre-order the new boxset, I saw the new White Dwarf had a model included in it.  An Age of Sigmar model to be exact.  So I bought the magazine, brought it home, ripped out the mini, and painted it up.  Here's my first Age of Sigmar dude.....

 

So this was an interesting model to paint, and I mean that in a good way.  Lots of shining gold, lots of little details, and a fairly light color pallet.  Seeing how two of the main gold colors for these guys haven't been released yet, I had to improvise.  I ended up working my way up from Gehenna's Gold to Reikland Fleshwash to Auric Armor Gold to a mix of Auric Armour Gold/Runefang Silver to..... Ironbreaker as my final highlight.  I found the runefang silver alone wasn't working.  Maybe I got a bad batch but the pigment and the binder kept separating on me no matter how much I shook it.  Ironbreaker just had better coverage and I found it a lot easier to control the transparency of it, even when I was diluting it.  Holy shit, look at me, I almost sound like I know what I'm talking about!

Anyways, it was alot of fun to paint this guy up and I look forward to cracking open the box set and slapping some more paint on The Stormcast Eternals.  Until next time!!!

Gutrot Spume

In keeping with the trend of showing the fruits of my labor the past few weeks, here is another model I just finished up.  Gutrot Spume, the nurgle lord of the sea?  I think it's something like that.  I never fully read "The End Times", but with the Age of Sigmar almost a week away, I should probably get that.  In any event, here is the model...

This particular model I really enjoyed painting.  It's so different from a lot of other stuff out there and it has tons of details.  Usually I'm not a fan of this much detail, but it really does tie the entire piece together.  From the look of the leaked "Age of Sigmar" pics, this seems to be where GW is heading.  This was more of a casual paced model, as I would pick him up every now and then and do a little work on him, then switch to something else.  It took a long time for him to finally see completion, but he got done and I'm quite pleased with how he turned out.

The Second Maggoth Lord, Morbidex Twiceborn

Another month has past since my last blog post.  I'll fully admit when I've been slacking on my hobby, and this past month I was not slacking.  I've actually been rather hard at work on many things and hopefully in the month of June (or July) you all will see my hard work come to fruition.  Seriously though, I've got like 4 projects that are around 75% done which is odd for me.  Usually when I start something hobby related, I either focus solely on that, or I put it up and forget about it for a few years.  Oddly enough, "The Wandering Painter" is becoming more and more truer everyday.

I know, I know.... I'm beating around the bush here.  Nobody comes here to read my random thoughts.  You've come to see miniatures... hopefully above average miniatures that will motivate you to dust off your brushes and get to work on your own projects.  Anyhew, without further delay, I present for your viewing pleasure....

The Second Maggoth Lord.... Morbidex Twiceborn

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So flew it alone on this one.  No Warhammer TV to assist with color scheme, no Duncan Rhodes to show me how slow I work with his awesome British accent.  So yeah, I went it alone only going off the box art and my own imagination as far as colors went.  I decided to go with the rosy skin triad from Reaper for the maggoth beast as I thought the fair skin tones the box art used were a touch too light for my tastes.  Also, I really enjoy doing the sore skin around the cuts and infection, so I decided to put in the added effort to make him appear gross as can be which is actually fairly different from the box art.  As far as Twiceborn is concerned, I spent almost as much time painting him as I did the maggoth beast.  He had a fair amount of detail on him, and I wanted him to have a fairly clean paint job.  I'm not used to painting straight green skin, so I experimented a little bit with the color scheme and eventually went with Deathworld Forest as a base, followed by Elysian Green, followed by a fairly diluted Yriel Yellow.  With my non-art background I didn't realize that a bright yellow works great as a highlight for brighter greens.  It really gives it that pop that makes the raised surfaces stand out.

So I think up next we'll bust out some LOTRs and then return for the 3rd and final Maggoth Lord to complete the set.  I also plan on completing a few more projects that are almost done before summer ends.  I'm hoping this summer will be productive as far as my painting is concerned.  Hopefully far more productive than my last two summers.  Thanks for looking!!!

The First Maggoth Lord, Orghotts Daemonspew

Before I begin with anything, lets talk about last weekend's painting competition.  So I came in 3rd place for my Necron Overlord.  It seems facebook voting was my downfall.  Maybe I need more friends... mehh.

Now, to the point of this entry.  I've spent the last 2 weeks putting together, cleaning, filling gaps, and painting this guy, The Maggoth Lord Orghotts Daemonspew.  Here he is in all his disgusting maggot infested glory.

This model was a lot of fun and I hope I did it justice.  There are so many little details on this miniature from the maggots and grotesques bits, to the horns and metal work.  I followed GW's paint scheme on this model, only deviating from it on a few bits here and there.  I wanted to do a little something extra with the base, as he's a lord and all.  I decided to prop him up on rocks and throw a few skeletons under him.  For some odd reason, I really like using skeletons on these hero/lord characters.  All in all, I'm quite pleased with the way he turned out.

So what's up next, maybe another Maggoth Lord?  Maybe some Nurgle Chaos Warriors?  Maybe some LOTR stuff?  Maybe a Freeblades Band?  Maybe some odd ball Chaos thing?  Who knows?  Thanks for looking!

Spring time for Nurgle

This is actually a very fitting update for me as for the past week.  Papa Nurgle and his cohorts have had me in a headlock this past week.  This probably wouldn't seem to be surprising as it's spring time and most people get sick around this time of year with the changing of weather patterns and spring coming into full swing.  Pollen flies and shit grows and people get sick.  This is actually an oddity for me as I rarely ever get sick, let alone bed ridden for almost 5 days.  Needless to say, it sucked and I didn't get much of anything done besides increasing the stock price of Kleenex and Robitussin while I burned through my precious PTO days.  I can honestly say I hadn't been that sick in over 10+ years, and I'm still coughing and dealing with the residual effects.  Damn you Papa Nurgle.... DAMN YOU!!!

As I said before, this is a very fitting update as I actually managed to finish the last miniature of first box of Blightkings tonight that I recently purchased.  I've never painted anything "Nurglish" or even anything that was designed to be extremely gross to look at, so it was challenging at first.  GW actually has a pretty good video on youtube where Duncan goes over the general basics on how to paint one of these guys.  I basically followed his color scheme, minus the armor in which I opted for a more traditional vibrant olive palette over the darker one that he uses.  If anyone is curious, just type in "Blightkings" in the youtube search on it should be one of the first videos that pops up.

So here are the first 5 blightkings I did up with another 7 to go....

The one in the middle has to be my favorite one so far

So there we go, 5 Blightkings ready to go.  I had a lot of fun painting these guys.  Doing the corrosion on the weapons, the boils, the puss effects, and the skin bruising was something pretty new to me.  I especially liked doing the bruising effects on the pale skin as it's a really easy technique to use with just diluting your washes, letting them dry,  and slowly building it up over time.  It's like glazing, but with washes and I have a new appreciation of lahiman medium.  I've tried to dilute washes before, but I usually ended up with a streaky look which just look awful.  Lahiman medium allows you to dilute and keep the same properties of whatever color/washes your using.  Fantastic stuff. 

Hope you guys enjoyed it, and expect to see some more Warhammer Warriors of Chaos in the near future.

OOP Warhammer Watchtower

This entry will be a less wordy than my usual entries on this blog partly due to the fact that it's almost bedtime and I wanted to put this up sometime this weekend.  I decided last weekend to do a terrain project since my pile of unfinished terrain is starting to stack up.  I chose to do the OOP Watchtower.  I was hoping this would be a quick project, but alas, it took me over a week to finish.

I went back in time with the photography on this one due to the fact that it really doesn't fit good in my light box.  I don't think the cluttered desk takes away from the piece, but you be the judge of that.

 

It was a fun project to paint.  The little bits here and there were a little frustrating, but for a piece I mainly dry brushed, it turned out much better than I thought it would.  Thanks for viewing my work.