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.

One last post for June

This will be just a quickie.  I've had these two..... not sure if I'd call them models or tokens, but regardless, I've had these two guys sitting on my desk for a long time.  Well, I got tired of looking at them in black primer so I painted them up on Monday.  I basically followed the steps from Tale of Painters tutorials.

The way the skin was done with the Lahmian Medium glaze was a bit different than what I'm used to.  It really didn't start to take shape until I added the Sepia wash.  I'm not sure how I feel about it, but I think they turned out pretty good, minus a little frosting from the purity seal.  All in all pretty good.

Dwarvern Command

I know I've taken a slight sabbatical on LOTR lately.  Well, probably since like March/April'ish.  I do have a few projects coming up that will involve more LOTR stuff.  Anyhew, this past week I opened up my Dwarf Command box that has been sitting idle for over a year in one of my various storage Tupperware containers.  I cracked open the box and inspected the miniatures.  Sadly, it's a first generation failcast product with holes everywhere and fiddly parts on the verge of braking along with shards of pink rubber from where the molds failed.  I wish I could say this was rare, but with most of the older line of LOTR stuff that got cast in finecast, this is the norm.  I'd be willing to bet money that if you bought any Lord of the Rings miniature in finecast even now (note; not The Hobbit finecast), you'll have a similar experience as myself.

Well, I sucked up my disappointment and cleaned up the miniatures where I could and did a rather amateur job green stuffing and remolding warped parts.  I'd use liquid greenstuff, but I always have issues using it.  Whenever I pick up a pot, it's always half cured and I always get piss poor results whenever I use it.  So, I cleaned them up, slapped some paint on them, and here is the final outcome...

Not particularly thrilled with the blue color, but it suits them.  The two guys with shields did not have a good cast and I did the best I could to try to resculpt them.  I mean, the shields were warped and both were missing the bottom half of the detail.  The captain on the right had part of his bottom right armor completely missing and I had to resculpt it.  The shield bearer on the left had a weapon that was overly brittle and I had to soak it in super glue to give it any strength.  I would've resculpted the shaft, but I was afraid I'd warp it even worse in the process.  Even part of his hand holding the axe was messed up to the point where sculpting would've damaged it even further.  All in all, this was some of the worst finecast models I've ever worked with.  I think for what I received from Games Workshop versus the final result, I did a pretty good job.  Comments always appreciated.

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!

A little side-step into 40k

I'm posting something a tad out of the ordinary for me.  Anyone who knows my blog and my tastes knows that I'll dabble into other realms, but usually with swords and magic, not guns and warp storms.  No, I haven't converted completely over to the dark side, but I did have fun with this little excursion into the 41st millennium.  I must admit, the 40k universe has always fascinated me.  I love the lore and the dark gritty futuristic sci-fi feel of the miniatures. 

I remember when the Necrons first came out in the mid to late 90's when I was a teenager.  I thought the idea of crazy T-1000 terminator machines was pretty cool and I remember picking up a box set of the first bulk troops and some scarabs.  I slopped some paint on them (they looked pretty terrible) and when I eventually fell out of painting miniatures all together, they got thrown in a bin and spent the next several years in my parents attic.

Fast forward to about a month ago.  While I was at my local GW store browsing, the manager said to me "Hey Dave, your like a big painter hobby kind of guy" in which I responded by saying "Yeah, you could say that".  He then says "Well, I got this painting competition coming up that's a bit unusual.  Basically everyone who enters has to buy one blister pack of any hero model of any system then throw it in this box right here".  He then lifts up a random cardboard box that already has a few models inside.  "This Saturday, everyone who's bought a blister pack comes back here at noon.  We then draw names out of a hat and when your name is drawn, we pull and random blister pack out of the box and you have a month to paint it.  All the models are due by April 25th, and everyone votes on the best painted model.  The person who's model gets voted best painted gets to pick one model from the competition to keep, then the 2nd place person gets to pick, and so on and so forth until everyone gets a model.".  I started thinking to myself and eventually came to the conclusion that this was a brilliant idea.  Not only does the store make a decent amount of money from the deal, but it forces people competing to paint something that they're not used to painting.  I love a good challenge and within 5 minutes, I had picked a Brae Shaman (mainly due to the fact it was $14) as my entry fee, payed for it, and dropped it in the box.  The gauntlet had been thrown down.

The following Saturday I showed up at the store expecting maybe 5 or 10 people at the most to be participating.  Apparently we had over 20 and I'm guessing that a fair amount know how to paint.  That's a pretty good turnout for a painting competition where the prize is someone's painted model.  The GW manager then showed everyone what was in the box and it pretty much ran the gambit of 40k and Warhammer Fantasy.  There was one Goblin Captain from The Hobbit range in there too which I thought was kind of funny seeing how most of The Hobbit stuff is in the process of being shipped back to the main warehouse in Nashville.  Getting back on topic, he started drawing names.  During which I was hoping to get one of the newer Harlequin models or something with a lot of detail where I could embellish it and try to show off my painting prowess.  My name finally got drawn towards the end, and the manager's hand went to the box and pulled out..... The Necron Overlord.  "Great, a very mono-toned model" I initially thought as I stared at it in my hands.  I left the shop after the drawing and went home.  I opened the blister and started snipping stuff and cleaning the pieces until this was infront of me.

Stolen from the GW FB page of me dropping off my entry

As I looked at the pieces and the box art, I was thinking about what I could do.  A rocky base was definitely in this models future.  I know enough about 40k to know that the Necron's are as evil as they come.  As far as they're weaponry goes, I believe they use gauss technology which I believe is to disintegrate they're foes?  I'm still not sure, but I though maybe tossing some skeleton remnants on the base would give it the feel I was looking for, regardless of it being in continuity with the lore.  Also, the box art had some pretty cool OSL effects from the eyes and orb that I could try my hand at.  Okay, at that point I think I had a model I could do something cool with and after watching the Warhammer TV video on youtube, I had a pretty good idea on the paint scheme when it came to the gold and bronze bits.  So I put the model together, greenstuffed my seams, carved out some cork and got to work.  After a few hours, I had the bulk of the work done and today I finished up the detail work on him.  This is the end results.....

It was a different, but fun model to paint.  I enjoyed it in the sense that I got to try my hand at something new.  I think part of this competition is to pull you from your comfort zone of painting models and armies your used to and put something completely new in your lap.  If that was the case, bravo, mission accomplished.  We'll see how the competition goes tomorrow.  Hope you guys enjoyed the pictures and weren't too bored with my ramblings.

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.