The Fellowship Project Finally Complete!

It's been well over a month since I posted anything.  It's not like I've just been sitting around, but summer tends to be one of my more less productive times when it comes to this particular hobby.  My professional career kicks into high gear and I quite frankly have less time to do hobbying really.

Lets get down to business.  The fellowship project....  So a few posts back I showed a picture of a few unpainted miniatures from the out of print Mines of Moria starter set along with the DeAgostini Mines of Moria display piece primed in black (the way I bought it).  I've basically put a ton of hours into this piece because I wanted every miniature to be as top level as I could get and this project is a birthday present for my nephew.

Take note, this is going to be picture heavy.

So we'll start by showing the piece as a whole with the miniatures.

 

Now lets take a look at just the base itself....

Now the miniatures....

So there is the miniatures.  Now maybe a closer look at the display with the miniatures.

So I think that about sums up this project.  My thoughts.... I think all in all it turned out pretty good.  That being said, I hated painting these miniatures.  The sculpts are terrible and it's hard to tell what is what.  Of all the Fellowship models available, these are the worst.  I know it's early plastic, but they could've done a better job with the casting.  Aragorn model looks nothing like Viggo Mortensen as well as Legolas looking nothing like Orlando Bloom.  Gimli's head is so scruntched together it was hard picking out any of the details.  All the hobbit models look like generic hobbits (minus Samwise, he actually is the best looking model of the bunch in my opinion).  Boromir is another model that I liked in this set.  The rest are pretty bad.

When I picked up the paint brushes for the second time in my life (as an adult), these particular models were some of the first I had painted.  One thing that has always annoyed me when looking at other people's blogs and hobby sites is the fact that they show they're awesome paint jobs, but never models they did when they first started painting.  As a painter who's been painting roughly 4-5 years now, I like seeing my old models compared to my new, as it gives me insight on how far I've come as a painter.  I would love to see some of these top painters first works, but alas they never post them.  I might not be a top painter, but I like taking comparison shots and posting them for the world to see.  I hope it gives people who are struggling insight into the fact that we all didn't start off as fantastic painters.  

Take a gander at these.....  the ones on the left are the ones I just painted and the ones on the right are ones I painted when I started up again after a 15 year hiatus (in which I was amateur back then at best).  Note, the ones on the right have been used in games many of times, so there is a little wear and tear on them.

As you can well see, there is a very clear cut difference between now and then.  It really is amazing how your skill increases with every miniature you paint.  That's about all the pictures I got for now.  I hope this makes up for my lack of LOTR and content in general lately.  I hope you guys like what you see and I hope my nephew enjoys them.  Thanks for looking!!

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.