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.

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.

The Warriors of Chaos Arise!

I've been wanting to post for awhile now.  Unfortunately, that's been a problem due to circumstances beyond my control.  I've been painting and hobbying on a regular basis since the last post which was over a month ago.  The problem has been the camera issue.  Let me explain.....

I use my Samsung Galaxy s3 to take all the photos you see on this blog.  This camera/phone is also the one I use for my job, provided to me by my company.  Needless to say, I don't pay the bill on it but use it as I would if it was my own personal phone, hence all the wonderful pictures of what I do with my free time.  It's a pretty good deal for me.  Well, a few weeks ago my company switched providers to save on the phone bill.  I guess when you switch providers, the phones lock even if you own them and the former provider is supposed to provide a code to unlock them (since you own them after-all).  Well, this was supposed to be a 1 hour process.  I believe 18/20 of the phones we have unlocked with no problem.  Mine was 1 of the 2 that didn't.  We're on week #4 with a shitty temp phone with no date in sight of getting my old phone back.  But alas, I found a way to take pictures using my wife's old US Cellular s3 phone.  Problem temporarily solved....yay?  I should just drop the $300 and get a decent camera, but I'm cheap and would rather spend my hobby money on models and paint rather than cool cameras.

End of my little rant, getting back to hobby business at hand.  As I've said before, I haven't been idle since this camera issue came about.  I've been painting my chaos warriors for awhile now.  Yeah, I admit I'm going a bit slow with them.  I'm not in a rush and I hate batch painting.  I'm painting about 2 at a time and just really enjoying myself.  When I'm doing crazy batch painting of 5-8 models at a time, I don't feel I'm giving each particular model the proper paint job, or I just get burnt out after the second batch and don't want to paint anymore.  Some people go for a baseline tabletop standard quality job as quickly as possible to get they're army on the table and start tossing some dice.  Don't get me wrong, some people's baseline tabletop standard is quite good.  I just prefer taking my time with each guy and try to get even the lowliest orc to the best paint-job I can achieve.

So lets see what I've accomplished since last post.....

 

 

 

 

So there we have it.  12 chaos warriors plus a BSB.  I fretted for a bit trying to come up with a paint scheme I liked.  I decided that I want to do an Army of Khorne and thus went with the khorne red scheme with flashy bronze/gold for these particular warriors.  I know now that I probably should've went with dual weapons rather than sword/shield since the mark of Khorne causes frenzy which doesn't work with shields.  I only read this after I had already built them and was halfway thru painting.  It's not that big of a deal, because I'm not sure if I'm going to even being gaming with them, plus I could always just nix the mark when I use this particular unit.  I know very little of Warhammer Fantasy, so I could be entirely wrong with how the chaos marks work.

The theme is going to be an army marching from the frozen chaos wastes, so I'm probably going to put some snow on those bases when I get all 24 of them painted up.  I've done some research into how I'm going to go about mixing up a snow slurry, so I have a good idea in mind.  The bases themselves I went for a barren dead ashen wasteland feel.  I think the snow will really tie everything together once I apply it.

I finished these particular guys up about a week ago.  During that time, I made a trip the my local GW store and was talked into participating in a painting competition.  The guy peaked my interest and I'm curious to see how I stack up again other hobby enthusiasts.  I believe it's on the 28th of this month and the category is "Thing that blow things up" or rather "War-Machines that use scatter dice".  There are three categories, Gold which is for advanced painters, Silver which is for (I'm guessing) your average painter who has painted a few models and understands the basics, and Bronze which is for the new painters entering the hobby.  I was told I can only compete in the Gold category which I thought was kind of funny.  The only rule is the entree has to have been purchased in that particular store for the month of June.  Realizing that the only artillery piece that the Warriors of Chaos have is the Chaos Dwarf Hellcannon, and that's an online order only piece, I had to step outside the realms of chaos.  I have the Island of Blood boxset, and there's a ton of skaven in there, so I decided to pick up a skaven piece.  

Here's a pic of it currently in progress after tinkering with it after a little less than a week.

For those of you unfamiliar with this piece, this is the Warp Lightning Cannon.  More specifically, this is the platform for the Warp Lightning Cannon   This entire plastic kit that allows you to build 2 different versions of the Warp Lightning Cannon or 2 different versions of the Plagueclaw Catapult.  I was originally going to build the Plagueclaw Catapult, but after further research, the Warp Lightning Cannon uses scatter dice and (in my humble opinion) looks cooler than the plagueclaw, regardless of they're subtle differences.

This model is the first model I've ever used rust effects on.  Needless to say, it's been a learning process.  I'm also using some secret weapon washes I bought awhile back that I never really used before.  So far, I'm pleasantly surprised with them.  They do a good job in adding that extra layer of grime and filth to the metal and wood parts, giving it that ramshackled look as if filthy rats built it in the sewer kingdoms.  The only downside I found is that these washes dry a little too glossy for my tastes.  I'm sure my dullcoat will take care of that when the time comes.

Well, that's it for now.  I hope this update was worth the wait.