Mountain Chaos Trolls

It has been a little while since my last post and I suppose that that should not go without comment. I had a holiday so was out of the habit of posting and then work got a bit busy. Any-hoo that was then, this is now.

I have owned and played a small Warhammer Fantasy Warriors of Chaos army for some time that was built around a small troupe of Trolls. The only problem was that I was slightly intimidated with the thought of painting them.

My normal way of encouraging myself to paint an army is to put myself into a tournament. It gives me a deadline and a list of models to complete. To this end I signed up to a doubles event at Warhammer World. Therefore for your entertainment I present the first two figures; two chaos trolls...

  I elected to use these old Orcs and Goblin figures for three main reasons;

1. I don't like the Chaos Trolls GW produces
2. I quite like these models
3. I can get them quite cheap on ebay....

You will notice that these two chaps are the same basic model with just a little tinkering. I swapped the weapon around and played with the pose by straightening him up a bit and twisting his arm positions. By placing a rock under one foot I have made a subtle difference to his stance that hopefully hides the fact that they are the same model.

Vlad Von Carstein

I am currently painting Vlad for a friend. The sword was in pretty bad shape so needed some work; in the end I did what I could and was ready to paint.

I have tried to keep genuine to the GW colour scheme which maximizes the distinction between the black and gold armour. The gold was an attempt at NMM, but it has come out quite dark. I was hoping it might pop a little more, but wanted to keep a natural look. I had some trouble deciding on a hair colour and this is the third attempt. In the end I went for quite a dark colour to draw attention to the pallid colour on the face.

Hope you enjoy.

straightening the vampires sword

I have a longstanding arrangement with my friends in the local gaming community. This is that I will agree to paint any figure they want, so long as it is only once per lifetime...


Well, a good friend from my local gaming club decided to take advantage of this offer and passed me a Vlad von Carstein model from GWs Vampire counts range to paint

The only problem with this is that it is a fine cast model and the sword was in pretty bad condition.

The sword was not only bent out of shape but had a pretty strange split near the end. The owner had already assembled it, so I could not swap it at the GW store ( I understand that they will swap with no hassle), so I had to try some repair work....

I have heard that you can reshape finecast by first placing in boiling water, putting into the shape you want and then putting into cold water. I tried this and found that once the sword was put into the hot water it became very floppy and I could put into any shape I wanted. The problem was trying to make a straight sword and holding it straight long enough to put it into the bowl of cold water. Eventually I got it as straight as I thought I could get away with.

I then filled the sword with green stuff, let it dry and filed it flat. Not great, but better than I started with. Next up I will get to throw some paint at it.

Ghoul King leaping. What is not to love?.

I have spent the last few weeks playing with a Terrorgheist model.  I played with his wings and gave him a new base. The Terrorgheist box set also includes two rider options. Not wanting to put them onto the Terrorgheist I now have the option of adding them to their own bases. The first of these that I have played with is the Ghoul King.

The model has a natural running or leaping pose and I wanted to accentuate this. The slight problem was that he will not fit on a 20mm base and still rank up, the back (right) leg just gets in the way of figures behind him. This can be overcome of I could move his left leg to the very front of the base. I solved both of these problems by adding a gravestone to the base. This not only gives a point to fix to off the front of the base but gives a reason to leap and helps raise him up a little to make him look a little more impressive.

The gravestone is taken from the Renedra gravestone kit. I think it looks great and works perfectly on this situation.

I kept with the same colour scheme that I have used with all of my ghoul figures. However I was very keen to made the figure look life-like so I have added multiple washes of red and purple to his cheeks, ears, elbows and knees to show up these more vulnerable areas.

Hope you enjoy..

Terrorgheist conversion completed

I have spent the last few weeks playing with a slight conversion on a Vampire counts Terrorgheist. I wanted to spread his wings out a little to try and emphasize  his flying beast nature. At last I have him completed...

The main problem I have with him now is that he is just so very wide.. With a wing span of a eye watering 14 1/2 inches (37cm) he only just fits into the cabinet in which I store my figures. Even then I have to put him in at a slant to get him through the door! I decided to build his colour scheme off a purple/black base colour. I did this because I didn't want him looking too grey because it can look a bit drab. This has caused quite a lilac colour scheme to come through, but I am getting used to it!

Hopefully it does not look too unnatural close up. To complement this colour I have gone for quite a dark bone colour. This is built off a base of bestial brown (Mournthang Brown) through Snakebite leather (Ballor brown) to Bleached bone (Ushabti brown). I may yet add a gloss varnish to the red areas to make them glisten and appear more alive(?)

The width of the figure can make him difficult to interact with other figures on the tabletop. For this reason I chose to lift him as high as possible so that infantry and cavalry figures can fit underneath his wings. I placed him on top of walls from the excellent gardens of Morr set.

His left foot rests on a gravestone. Both of these connections are glued and pinned and are quite robust. I fully expect them to be able to withstand the rough and tumble of gaming.

Hope you enjoy!. Remember that you can make each picture larger by clicking on it.

A little bretonnian zombie gathering

I have a little zombie collection for my Vampire Counts army, but I thought that they could do with a little addition from the Bretonnian army...

I took some Bretonnian peasant bowmen and added some basic zombie bits. The conversion was very very simple, but keeps the same zombie look as the remainder of my zombie horde.

To help them all appear as a single horde I have kept with the same three basic colours as the other zombies. These are green, brown and cream. I hope they look OK.

Man with a bear and a hurdy gurdy

What more could anyone ask than a musician figure with a bear as a pet and playing his own little hurdy gurdy?

This model first came out two years ago and I loved it so much I had to buy it then. Unfortunetly I got distracted and failed to paint him for some time. Now he has a little paint on him I have fell in love all over again...

 ...and what is not to love? The bear is very cute and paints up very nice.

The only real problem areas were on the guy. The cheeks were too raised for my painting style and I found the bandaged hand was a little clumisly modeled. When I looked on line all the hurdy gurdys I could find had a nice black and white checkered edge so I added one to this model.

I quite like the basket on the chaps back, but the spare drumstick looked a little too much like a loaf of bread.

Spread your wings and fly little Terrorgheist!

Did you know that even with his wings held fairly tight to his body, as above, the Terrorgheist has a wingspan of 14 1/2 inches (almost 37cm). I know this because I have been playing with a Terrorgheist conversion to show off his lovely wings. I believe that with the wings stretched out they could reach a whopping 26 inches (66cm), but even I am not daft enough to try that conversion - just yet!.

I first played with flying beast conversions with an Imperial dragon for Karl Franz. I have recent looked again at this model (following a chat on the excellent Warhammer forum) and felt inspired to have a play with the biggest Vampire counts beast.

The majority of the animal is built as normal, but the wing to shoulder joint had to be repositioned. I put a solid pin in there and set about hiding the joint by building up layers of muscle around the gap.

 I did this in a number of stages for two main reasons.

First I wanted to make sure the muscle  looked OK. With my limited sculpting ability I wanted to pace myself so I didn't get too frustrated with my lack of ability and I wanted to review each step.

Secondly, this starts off as a big model,when you have made it so wide it becomes very awkward to handle. I need the figure to be robust to play with, so I need to make sure I don't snap it in half in one go, so I fixed each wing individually and then let them set before having a go at the second one.

Pictured below is the finished model ready for its undercoat and resting on its back. It was a difficult birth and I guess it needed its rest. I certainly did!

Ogre Firebelly

I have a longstanding arrangement with my friends in the local gaming community. This is that I will agree to paint any figure that they want me to paint, for free, in whatever style they ask for. This arrangement does have a number of constraints of course. The constraints are;

• You only get one figure per lifetime (if you can work out how to get two lifetimes, you get two figures)
• I can take as long as I like to paint the figure
• I can photograph the figure and add it to this blog
•  If they ever want to sell the figure, I get first option and at the current cost that you can buy the unpainted figure for.

A good friend of mine in Exeter is building an Ogre army and has taken advantage of this offer to ask me to paint his Ogre firebelly; and here are the results, I hope he will be pleased.

I have deliberately painted him with quite dark skin. this was in an attempt to make the bright parts of the flame look brighter still.

I have added a bit of reflected light onto the skin, but have tried to keep this quite subtle. Hope it shows up OK on these photos.

The weapon is a little bent. I did straighten it out a bit, but it is obvious from this photo that I should try again. The base matches his army bases and includes some cork bits which are painted to appear like rock.

 Hope you enjoy.

Building a base for a Terrorgheist

A Terrorgheist scream is a truly awesome thing and having been on the receiving end of it with my Empire army was all the encouragement I needed to add one to my Vampire Counts army.

I thought that I would start with the base. Now I have two significant problems with the GW base build;

1. It is just too barren. The base is very large and the small amount of jagged rocks not only look a little lost, but don't look gothic enough for my visual image of a VC setting. After all where are the skulls? I thought the GW approach was at least 20 skulls per square inch of base!
2. For reasons that will become apparent when I go on to assemble the Terrorgheist, I need more height!

This is the base that evolved, and I will talk through how this came about.... 

The base itself was a bit of a disappointment. It was warped at the corner. I tried setting it again by placing in alternating boiling then cold water, but that did not work. In the end I just learnt to accept it and hope that the weight of the scenery on it would hold it down (it has not).

 

I then assembled the trunk of the Terrorgheist. I knew I wanted him to stand on the garden of Morr wall, but needed to learn how high the support for the other leg needed to be. So I made a little mock up. I tried different sized pieces of plastic until I got the assembly to look about right. Thank you blue-tac.

The gravestones were put together using scenery pieces from a company called Renedra. They fit great and were very easy to place. I selected one just the right height to support the beasts left leg. The only slight problem with these is that they have quite a few crosses and Christian iconography, which just does not fit into the warhammer world. Never mind, I was able to find sufficient to suit my needs.

I made a path out of flagstones from a spare GW movement tray kit. I did this mainly because I wanted to use a gate, so needed a reason to have a gate. I had to remove then rotate the gate so that the skulls etc were facing forward on the model.

I then added to old spare tree trunk bases from microart studio to break up the space at the front of the base. Next comes the beast itself!

Lore of Life wizard

Way back at the dawn of time; OK the mid nineties, when Games workshop still experimented with alternative game systems. GW had a go at a game called Warhammer quest. This was a box set with a whole load of miniatures and a set of cardboard tiles to represent a dungeon floor plan. As was their practise at the time, they followed this up with a good selection of add on sets.

 The legacy of this is that there are a few very nice plastic figures out there available for use in GWs current game selection. I have managed to collect a selection of the plastic wizards. Now whilst some are quite badly damaged (I think one has been chewed by a dog!), they are some gems in amongst them. This druid is one such model, and best of all I got him unpainted and un-primed.

I have painted him up as a life wizard, because lets face facts, that is exactly what he is. I have kept the paint scheme as simple as possible to retain the simplicity of the figure.

I am very very happy with how he has come out, I hope you are too.

Nordland Empire swordsmen

Every Empire army needs its fair quota of swordsmen, and mine is no exception. In my last post I carried out a small conversion on some 6th edition spearmen to make them swordsmen. I have rummaged through my unpainted pile and have grabbed some more figures and painted what I can.

Please forgive the standard of the photos today,I have been playing with the settings and have got myself a little lost!

In the picture above you have two spearmen conversions and a crusty old figure from the 1988 catalogue.

Here we have more of the same, together with a modern chap (second from left). I use the same shields to tie them all together into a united force.

Hope you enjoy. Now I am off to set how I set white balance on my camera. Wish me luck!