Something a little different

Before I start this, let me first tell you that I have no idea what line of miniatures this one is from.  I bought this miniature probably around 1995/1996 back when I had about a grand total of $10 to my name.  It's a pre-slotta miniature, so it's probably from sometime between the mid-80's to the mid 90's,  Ral Partha's TSR series or maybe even the Grenadier miniature line.  I looked around the web to no avail, so if anybody has any idea I would be most intrigued to know.

Getting back on track, I painted this miniature back in the 90's originally, and it turned out terrible.  When I rediscovered my love of the hobby, he was one of the many that got the simple green treatment, and then sat in my drawer for the next few years.  While taking yet another break from the fellowship projected, I wanted to paint something different when I stumbled upon him.  I always thought this guy looked cool, so I had a crack at him.  Here are the results.

 

 

He really was a joy to paint.  I wanted to practice layering metals and he really proved to be a good model to do just that.  I wasn't sure how I wanted to base him, and since I have an over abundance of 25mm circle bases, I figured that would work fine.  I'm pretty sure I'll never use him in gameplay, but after spending years in my parents attic, he deserved a worthy paintjob.  I believe I did just that.

On a side note, after I painted him I realized he looked a lot like a warrior wearing the Dungeon Set 1 in World of Warcraft.  Take a gander for yourself.

 

Maybe it's because of the gold trim.  I dunno, but it reminded me of the Valor set.

The Warhammer Chappel

I think it was either Friday or Saturday that while I was painting the 3rd hobbit in my Fellowship project I just go really bored for some reason.  I'm one of those painters that if I get bored with a miniature, I'm not going to do a good job.  I start cutting corners and get really lax on proper blending which causes the entire piece to look rushed.  I don't like my painting to look rushed as I put a lot of time into whatever I'm painting and I always go for the best quality I can produce.

This boredom sometimes happens when I'm going back a forth on a color, trying to get the colors to blend nicely but I keep messing it up.  This is exactly the case on what happened.  So rather than calling it a night for painting, I decided to paint something else.

After staring at a few projects in my room that are ready to go, I decided I wanted to paint a piece of terrain rather than a miniature.  I just finished up yesterday with the piece and I'm quite pleased with how it turned out.  Take a look....

 

This particular kit has been out of production for a few months now (probably almost a year), so if your trying to find one at a decent price, it's going to be difficult.  I managed to grab 3 of these kits for $30 at my two local Games Workshop stores.  Well, I grabbed 2 and one Fortified Manor kit (which contains the chapel kit along with the watchtower and a few extra components).  So yeah, 3 total.

As far as putting it together and painting goes, I had fun with it.  I probably should've read some other people's blogs about putting it together as I fell into the trap of attaching the statues to the building before painting it which caused painting that area to be slightly more difficult due to tight quarters.  The painting was pretty straight forward and I got to use my new liquid copper airbrush color.  I painted it on with a brush since I don't own an airbrush and was pretty happy with the results.  Unfortunately, you can really drybrush the airbrush color since its very thin due to the alcohol content in it.  I decided not to go for any OSL effects around the torches as I wanted this to be a very simple piece.  I also didn't greenstuff the seams and gaps as I thought this added some character to the building as a whole.  Overall, I think it's a nice piece of terrain and I already have a few ideas of what I want to do with the next two chapels.

I will return to my Fellowship project and hopefully have an update on that soon.  Thanks for reading!

The Fellowship Project

We'll start off by saying "Happy 4th of July".  Yay!!!  Okay, now that that's out of the way, on to business.

In my last post I mentioned entering my skaven warp cannon into a local painting competition.  Well, I did just that last Saturday and ended up winning the painting challenge for the month of June at the local Games Workshop here in Libertyville and snagged a $15 gift card.  Here is a quick picture of the entry.

And no, I didn't come up with the "You Dirty Rats". but I thought it was rather fitting.  The next painting challenge for the month of July is free reign to do whatever you want.  I picked up a Hellpit Abomination kit, but I'm not sure if I'm going to complete it before the end of the month along with my other project.  Too much to paint, so little time.

I also mentioned something in my last post about going back to Lord of the Rings.  Well, I've done just that.  This isn't going to be a picture heavy post as I just began this project a few days ago.

Those are the figs from the OOP Mines of Moria.  I chopped off the slotta part and plastic glued them to closed bases.  I also filed down the roughness of Gimil's base so it'll match better with the tomb part.  This is actually going to be a gift for my nephew who's birthday is coming up in a few days.  My two niece's birthdays are next month (Aug.), so I have until then to complete this project.  I might toss a few WIP updates here and there, but I'll definately post the finished product when it's done.  This picture was taken a few days ago, and I've done a little work on this project at the current time.  So far, I have Legolas complete and Gandalf about 80% complete.  Keep tuned to see more of this.  Thanks for looking...

Oh those mischievous rat things

Yep, those damn mischievous rat things have been playing with the warpstone again.  Alas I have completed this kit to the best of my ability.  Enough blabbering, on with the pictures.

This project was alot of firsts for me.  First of all, I've never painted a Skaven or anything Skaven like before.  I've never done rust effects.  I've never even attempted OSL (Object Source Lighting) ever.  All in all, I think the piece turned out pretty good.  The object source lighting is definitely a challenge.  I probably should've started with a smaller piece, but after looking at the size of that warpstone, I could not not try to paint it all glowy.  For the most part, I think it turned out pretty good.  The barrel could've be tidied up a bit, but after spending a few hours on it I kind of just threw in the towel.  It's something I want to play with more in the future.  I opted not to go with the patina look on the copper bits due to the fact that after viewing some peoples work, I just felt like it looked too busy for my tastes.  When I think rats, I think drab browns, greys, and other earthy tones.  Turquoise just looks out of place to me.  The cork basing turned out better than I expected.  I'm quite pleased with that.

Again, after 2 weeks of on again off again painting, I think its pretty cool looking.  I'm also going to be entering this little bad boy in the local painting competition this Saturday for a chance to win a big'ole $15 smack-a-roos.  I'm looking forward to seeing what the other people will be bringing out.  Also, for any Lord of the Rings fans out there, my next project is going to be the fellowship from the Mines of Moria boxset (for my nephew) with hopefully some comparison shots to how I first painted these particular models 3 1/2 years ago.  It should be interesting.  Stay tuned!

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.

I've done the unthinkable

As the header would suggest, I've done the unthinkable.  I purchased my first (and second) Warhammer Fantasy Battle armies.  I've been struggling with this decision for awhile.  Do I really want to commit that sort of time to a game I might not even like?  Well, after the guy at the discount bits and bobbles place at Adepticon told me all GW was 20% off plus no tax, I was pretty much sold.  So I ended up buying two battalions of Chaos and Skaven, and ended up purchasing a copy of Island of Blood off the second market on ebay for dirt cheap.  Technically, that would be 3 armies.  Needless to say, I'm going to be busy for awhile.

I've spent the past few days clipping, gluing, and smoothing down mold lines.  It's really amazing how long just putting together models and cleaning them up is.  When you do one box of 12 figs, it really isn't that bad.  An hour, maybe 2 if your a perfectionist.  When your doing an entire army comprising of many boxes with numerous bits and pieces, the time really adds up.

Here's a look at the progress I've made...

 

Not a "gi-normous" army, but pretty well sized.  A box of chaos hounds, a box of chaos knights, a box of forsaken, two boxes of chaos warriors, a box of dragon ogres (my fav thus far), a demon prince, and a few special characters to lead this rag-tag band of misfits.  Will I ever play them or even WFB?  Probably.  If Adepticon taught me anything, its that I need to diversify my tastes in miniature wargaming.  I'm not going to forget of LotR SBG, and I still plan on doing my corsair army sometime this year.  In terms of gaming, I have plenty of armies to play basically any point match that comes my way, so this diversion shouldn't change the plans I still have for SBG.

With all that being said, I think its time to reflect on the other 95% of my hobby.... the painting.  Its funny, because you really don't realize how far you've come as a painter until you do a direct comparison of your work with something from the past.  Its like when you look at yourself in the mirror, and you really don't realize how different you look from 10 years ago.  You look in the mirror daily, and you don't really notice the subtle changes happening day to day until you whip out a picture from years ago.  Then it really becomes evident.  In terms of hobbying, its kind of the same way for me.

I think the above pictures are a good example of what I'm talking about.  On the left is a test figure I did last night to get my color schemes down for my Khorne themed Chaos Army.  On the right is an old Heroquest chaos warrior I painted roughly 3 years ago when I rediscovered my love of this hobby.  You can really see the difference in both model quality on GW's part, and the progression of my own painting abilities.  The figure on the right represents a skill set at the very basic levels.  I understood the core concepts, but actually physically doing them was a challenge.  Only thru hours and hours and countless miniatures did I develop into the painter that I am now.  I'm not a golden demon or crystal brush quality painter, but I'm getting better with every miniature I do.

I think its important to go back and look at work you did when you first started painting.  Nobody starts out as a world class painter.  Only thru actual experience do you progress in skill level.  Sure, after awhile, the progression slows down as you try to master different hard-to-do techniques.  But do yourself a favor, and when your struggling on a project or having problems getting motivated, take a look back and just see how far you've come.  I know from looking at the two mini's in the picture I've come a long way, and still have a long way to go to reach my ultimate painting goals.

"Build-O-Thon" week or "I didn't feel like painting really"

Yes, another quirky title, but it really sums up the past week or so since I've posted last.

Rather than entertaining that thought just yet, I want to talk about something else.  Being as vain as I am, I usually check my blog once a day or even every other day, just to see if anyone has stumbled across my little dark corner on the interwebz.  I really do appreciate the feedback when people leave it, and it oddly enough brightens my day just a touch.  I'm going to make a mental note to try and leave more feedback for other people.

That being said, I noticed the other day my view count skyrocketed, and I figured someone either was really checking out my blog or I forgot to turn off my "Don't tally my visits" (or something along those lines) button again.  I really didn't think much of it until I went to visited the Adepticon website to check the results of the LotR tournament.  Apparently, my humble little blog is listed on the front-page of the Adepticon website along with a couple others under "Coverage".  I have to say, not only does it make sense as to why my view count skyrocketed, but it also gave me a little warm fuzzy inside.  Kudos and my sincere thanks to whoever listed me up there.  It's the little things that tend to brighten your day a little bit.

Lets get back to my overly quirky title.  Looking over all my new toys I bought at Adepticon, I felt a classic case of "Oh shit, I have way too much to paint" syndrome.  I'm not sure if anyone has ever felt that, but I tend to get that after I buy 100+ models and don't know what I want to get started on first.  I tend to sit in my chair, looking at all my cool new stuff as ideas float through my head.... and I just end up sitting there.  After 2 days of this, I looked to my shelves of things I've been collecting over the past few years, and still having the terrain building bug, I decided to crack open a few of my GW terrain boxes that have been accumulating dust and actually glue some things together.  After about a week or so of cutting, cleaning, scrapping mold lines, and gluing my fingers together, this is what appeared....

Holy gray batman, its the same color as half of the armies being played down at the local GW store.  I know, I know, low blow... but seriously kids, paint your damn models!  So in the picture we got the Tower, Chuch, Witchfate Tor, Dreadstone Blight, Deathknell Watch, and a few shitty Uruk Beserkers a gave up on halfway thru painting.  Some of these kits were pretty easy to put together while others were a bitch (lookin' at you Witchfate Tor).

Seriously, that Witchfate Tor was a pain to put together.  Of course the box I got had the directions for the Dreadstone Blight instead of the intended kit, but I'm an engineer by profession (land surveyor to be specific).  I've built some of the toughest models in the GW catalog.  I conquered both the Watcher in the Deep and the Beast of Gorgoroth before the recall.... yet this kit had me questioning my own abilities.  Being a grown adult and having trouble with this kit, I can't imagine some kid getting this for Christmas, then trying to fiddle his way through it.  I think that would constitute as child abuse in some states.  It was a pain to put together due to multi-level design and the floors having to be put together perfectly for the walls to fit snug around them.  On one level I have 10mm gaps between two of the pieces that are going to need alot of TLC before I even slap any primer on.  Also, the floor design to make it fit snugly into the previous floor was poor designing.  I'm thinking of magnetizing it so I can control the fit.  I have a feeling many weeks of time will being going into that piece.

So with having built what you see there, I still have a few more kits that need to be cracked open.  When GW stopped producing a few of they're terrain pieces, I went on a buying frenzy to get as much as I could afford.  Sadly, I've run out of room in my workspace to build anything else that is large until I finish some of what I have.  If that isn't motivation, then I don't know what is.

Also, I mentioned the uruk beserkers on purpose.  I actually finished those 3 that were on my desk when I took that picture.

 

Not my best work, but I can also say that it's not GW's best work either.  You figure I bought these right when finecast came out.  Yep, major flaws in these guys which is why I've attempted 4 times to paint them and gave up.  I finally said "fuck it" and just went for it.  For what they are, they didn't turn out as badly as I thought they would.  3 down, hundreds to go..... ugh....