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!

A little more fantasy scenery

If your club is anything like mine,then it will have an insatiable appetite for scenery. We recently provided the tables and scenery for a tournament at Legionary 2012, and were able to field 12 fantasy and 5 40k tables with no problem what-so ever; however when I ask what the club members want to spend the club monies on, the answer is always more scenery please.

In a vain attempt to sate this desire, I have plonked together two more fantasy pieces. A magic circle and an arcane ruins. The scenery is all GW and comes from their Arcane ruins set.  

The scenery needed a little help from my greenstuff to help hide some of the joins. I also made a simple hexagon for the centre of the magic circle by scribing into a piece of plastic card. I think every magic circle needs a focal point, don't you?

I painted in a fairly standard grey build up, with a few washes for effect. All in all a nice simple and quick construction.

Back soon,have fun!