Making slow headway

The Seraphon have been fun to paint but they have been slow progress. The Big nasty ones are nice to do but very time consuming with the patterning on the Carnosaurs skin.

Still, I'm fairly pleased with how they have turned out.

These still need a matt varnish and obviously the bases need doing as well. I'll hold off doing these ones until I've completed a few more prior to the Lenton trip. Not long to go but I should still have time enough to get a couple more things finished in time.

Sadly I don't think I'll have a chance to include these two lovelies!

On to the next phase for the Iron Warriors during lunchtimes. Trim picked out in gold prior to a blacking out of the shoulder pads and a wash of Nuln Oil. I do want to do some yellow hazard striping but I might do that sparingly as I suspect it might well be a frustrating task.

Got a new light box like I mentioned in my last post. Managed to completely fail to use it for any of these photos.

Twonk.

TTFN

Games 6 & 7 of 52

Still going strong on the gaming and we've managed to get two more games in.

Game six was another round of Zombiecide: Black Plague. We've nearly gotten through most of the starting missions now and this one was fun but didn't pose that much of a challenge in the end. We’re pretty up to speed with Z:BP and a lot of it does seem to hinge upon the necromancers and the strategic removal of the spawning points as you eliminate them. We managed in this game to remove all the spawning points furthest from our end goals so in the end we grabbed the last objective and legged it whilst the legions of the undead started to conga line their way across the board to us.

Good fun but not as hard as some of the missions have been.

Game seven was a more involved affair as Urn and I are heading north to Lenton in Feb and we needed to get an idea of how to play AoS. So we slapped some units on the table ignoring points and balance and just had at it. Seraphon and Undead (Me & Junt) vs the Dark Elves (Urn and his lackey) as an unlikely scenario but we didn't care!

Set up was an un-informed sort of thing as we had no idea how it would affect the unfolding events.

We soon got stuck in though with the Seraphon rapidly closing with the Dark Eldar in a great mob of tooth and claw.

Their allies sent in the cavalry….

….but this was to prove to be a step to far as the rest of the Skellies didn't make much ground as they failed some charges. Yeah. They stood around a lot! Bone idle if you ask me! Geddit? Bone? Idle? I’ll get my coat.

The lack of skeleton support proved to be the undoing of this strange alliance as the Seraphon got ground down despite some early gains.

It got lonely at the end for some of them.

TTFN!

More Dark Elves and an epic confession

Following on from Executioners the other week, some more nasty Dark Elves for AoS/Warhammer/insert other fantasy ruleset.

First up are 10 Cold One Knights.  I tried to do some research into what these should look like, but I found there was almost no reference works at all on giant riding lizards.  Imagine my surprise and chagrin as I discovered that not even Sir David Attenborough has done a programme on them.... I obviously penned a letter outlining my disappointment in this fact to the BBC.

I decided that I quite liked a blue colour that I had from the GW range with a suitably theatrical name - Incubi Darkness - and research on blue lizards showed that the underbellies were often a lighter shade of the same colour, so that's what I went for.  I went for bone coloured horns for contrast.

The Knights who ride these are the nobles of Dark Elf society, so nice shiny armour for them, with red trim and shiny red shield designs.

I'm rather pleased with the colours and the lizard skin.  I kept the clashing red and blue as the rest of my Dark Elf army wears red and there's no way the nobles would change their clothes to better match riding beasts!

In a stroke of luck genius strategic planning, the shield design on the leader as the same as one of the decals that I had, so the standard bearer gets designs for both the unit itself and the Lord in the bottom corner.

Next up, another lizard..... a ruddy big one. 

Imagine my surprise when I found out that Sir David Attenborough also hasn't done even one episode on many headed hydras in their natural habitat!  Fear not, another missive to the BBC has been sent to admonish them for this clear oversight.

I stuck to the same colour scheme as the Cold Ones as I figured perhaps they were related.  A nice bright crest was added as the natural world seems full of poisonous animals with bright colours to demonstrate how dangerous they are to scare predators away.

I wouldn't fancy being one of the two handlers of this beastie....  They're some old metal Dark Elf animal handlers instead of the one that come with the kit as I wanted to be different.

I also discovered that its very hard to take a picture of a many headed large beastie whilst capturing all of it.  I went for some muted blood effects too.  I'm not normally a huge fan of these, but I got to wondering when painting it how many heads it would use to attack things, so I added some effects to one claw and two of the heads as a result of my idle musings.

These two units had their first outing last night and did jolly well - the riders dove into action and were dragged down but the Hydra killed lots of stuff, for fun.

This completes most of what I want to get done for the Dark Elves and so my attention should now probably turn to 30k...... and it might do if I hadn't got into conversation with a couple of fellow bloggers who heartily recommended Epic to me.  One failure of willpower on my part later and I had procured this on eBay.

I shall hopefully be diving into this in the not too distant future as I do like the look of the game.

Iron Within, Iron Without!

I've just started the next ten Seraphon at home and I suspect that this might well put me behind on the 365 as the then is an assortment of different beasties that will probably take 2-3 weeks to complete.

With this in mind a I have decided to try and get ahead with the figures that are slated to follow the Seraphon on the paint queue. I boxed up 66 iron warriors and brought them to work with the intention of slowly but surely getting them undercoated over the next couple of weeks during my lunch breaks.

However, it probably won't take that long as I managed to get 21 if them done in one lunchtime. I love the MKIII armour. I never had a favourite power armour type and I've been in 40K since the beginning but now these have very much found a place in my heart. I think it is because they are a touch more gothic and medieval looking than many of the others. I just love them!

The colour looks darker than it is as I've used Gunmetal Grey from the Vallej range, a darkish silver colour. This progress is extra good as it might mean that I can finish these at work and have them ready to varnish and base at the same time as the Seraphon I'm doing at home.

That's the plan now.

We shall see.

TTFN

37 of 365

Annnnnnddd we’re off!

Finally!

I was under the impression that the Seraphon would be a quick paint but these seem to have taken ages. I’m pleased now as I’ve done the most numerous elements for this army and now I can crack on with the big fun things like enormous bitey DINOSAURS!!!!

First figures to be counted towards the 365 are 36 Saurus and 1 Old-Blood. 37 down and 328 to go.

I didn't go OTT with the foliage as I was just trying to give the impression of Lustria as was rather than making the unit look like a walking shrubbery.

Boss man..er...Lizard and his chums.

The Old-Blood got special treatment for his colouring. I'm intending to add increasing amounts of colouring and patterning dependent upon how tough the unit is. Big nasty Dinos will get increasingly dark skin and patterns whilst I've kept the Skinks and Saurus's skins light in colour.

I’ve also completed the Skinks. They were pretty much finished before I started the 365 challenge but I hadn’t varnished or based them. This has meant that the last few steps of Army dip, Matt varnishing and base texturing and painting have taken flipping ages.

I had this old shamanic Skink hanging around for a Mordheim warband I'd planned.....years and years ago.

Skink Chief

Star priest to lord it over all the lowly skinks.

So I've donw the first 37 figures in 30 days. Slightly ahead of schedule but not as much as I'd hoped. The next month is going to be tied up with getting as many more of the Seraphon done in time for Lenton on the 11th Feb as I can do.

I suspect that I might fall behind but I'm not overly stressed as I'm lining up 60 Iron Warriors to batch paint after the Seraphon and they should allow me to get back on track.

TTFN

PS: I've treated myself to a light box in the hope that I can get some better pictures!

Games 4 & 5 of 52

The second gaming night last week turned out to be a couple of games of Gorechosen at Urn’s gaff.

It’s such a jolly friendly little game. Simple premise: bash each other’s brains in.

Simple.

The game mechanic revolves around the hand of cards issued to the players each round with each card offering options to the player to either move, attack or do something else…….often quite tricksey! It is simple but provides an excellent level of tactical choice to the player.

In the first game, poor old Silverfox got bashed around by all of us before succumbing to his wounds. My fighter was clearly too busy laughing at his demise because he let his guard down enough to let Urn’s gladiator sneak up and do 28 points of damage in one attack! This amount would have one-shotted a fighter on full health let alone what it did to my poor old champion! Mincemeat!

The Silverbacks warrior used the moment to move into position to deliver the killing blow to Urn…..but was denied by one of the Silverfox’s fan who lobbed a spear through his back dropping him before he could strike! Gutted! Literally!

The second game went differently at first with Urn’s fighter being slashed, stabbed and eviscerated out of the game quite early on. That’s what you get if you go around doing 28 points of damage in one round!

The remaining three danced around whittling away at each other. Sadly the crowd didn’t seem to like this slow cautious approach as someone in the stand decided to launch a spear at the Silverback’s fighter, again, managing to stop him in his tracks,……..again.

It must have amused my champion as much as it amused me as it left him guffawing, flat footed and ill prepared to dodge when the Silverfox launched a thunderous blow which connected fully and sealed the Silverfox’s victory!

Cool game. Great laugh.

TTFN

AoS Warhammer Dark Elf Executioners - painted!

It's great to be back in the AHPC and I realised in past challenges that the key is getting something quickly done first..... so I completely ignored my own advice and did a big unit in one go instead....!  Hence it's taken me nearly three weeks to make my first submission but the lure of the challenge has had me painting far more than I would have done previously.

But enough of my silliness, my first post consists of 30 Dark Elves, specifically Executioners.

Dark Elves are generally the bad guys and it's no exception with this lot.  These are the chaps who perform all sorts of horrible executions of the Dark Elves enemies, usually involving the ridiculously large double handed swords that they carry.

As you can see, they take being scary to another level by wearing skull faced helms.  I decided to paint these in a bone scheme to serve as lacquered armour.  The only one of these enigmatic fellows who doesn't wear such a helm is the leader.... Is this because he is the only one allowed to speak for the unit?  Is it because he has killed enough enemies that he is allowed to show his face to allow his reputation to scare the enemy?  Or is it because whilst clipping them off the sprue one helmet fell on the floor and no amount of crawling around on my hands and knees searching and cursing could find it?  I guess we'll never know....

I went with a relatively simple scheme of silver, red and gold to keep the focus on the helms and huge swords.

With regards to rules, we've started playing Age of Sigmar from Games Workshop...... a somewhat controversial game as, in a fashion all too familiar to GW watchers, they utterly botched the launch, succeeding in alienating almost all existing players and putting stupid rules in for some units (including such gems as "if you can get your opponent to look you in the eye during your turn, re-roll hits for your medusa" and "if you pretend to ride an imaginary horse during Magnus' turn, he gets +1 to hit").

Fortunately, they've rowed back from the silliness with further releases and it turns out there's a pretty fun game under it all.  It has it's problems, being essentially a first edition after all, but we're enjoying playing and it has our whole group energised and painting.  I've kept to square bases instead of the round bases GW now provide and recommend for the game as I'm old school and I can then more easily use these figures for other mass fantasy wargames rules.

I'm pleased with these guys and there are plenty more AoS figures to come if I can stick to my plan.  I've painted up the maximum sized unit because I owned this many from a bargain eBay auction win (still on sprue!) and then have options on how to use them.

1, 2 & 3 of 52!

Last night saw the start of the 52 games in 52 weeks challenge that a few of us are trying to achieve.

I was a bit daunted by this part of this years gaming objectives as this would, being honest, be an unprecedented level of gaming for me. However we got off to a flying start......well with the long term target.......not so much with the Zombicide: Black Plague mission that Junt, Urn and I were trying to beat.

First attempt last night started okay but we got scuppered by the bleedin' Necromancers getting extra activations that meant they could scarper off of the board. Same with the second attempt. On the third game I sorely tried to lose it for us by nearly having King Mortimer and Gilbert the knight eaten alive but brave Xenia stormed to the rescue.......no....I'm serious.

It was still pretty touch and go with the heroes being chased off of the board by a ridiculous conga line of zombies that keep getting extra activations to bring them ever closer to us. However we did escaped along with all the objectives achieved and no heroes eaten.

Z: BP is a great game. It has a very different feel to the original Zombicide but is still pretty challenging at times. The clearness of the game lies in the built in experience and zombie escalation mechanism which builds the difficulty and tension very well.

All things being equal, Game 4 and possibly more will happen tonight with a round of Gorechosen at Urn's Gaff.

TTFN

Still Making Progress

Since I started my 365 challenge on the 10/12/17 I have been plugging away at the Seraphon Saurus Warriors. 36 of them takes a while especially with all the little bits of bronze on them let alone all the teeth!

They've been given their gloss varnish and their Matt coat but now need basing. I've got the 40+ skinks at the same point and on Tuesday night I spent several hours adding some jungle foliage to their bases. I didn't even add the stuff to all of them but it took ages!

Just texturing and painting to finish these now. I suspect that'll still take a while given that there's 80 odd of the little buggers to do! I usually try to get the slower elements of an army finished first and that is certainly true here but this does mean that I get to move onto the big Seraphon now! Yippee!!

One of which will be the recently finished Sammy the Dread Saurian.

Just a £15.99 T-Rex from Ebay with some modelling clay and Seraphon spares added on. He got an undercoat yesterday lunchtime and has now returned home to join the next wave of painting.

Most of the little Seraphon aren't particularly colourful so it will be good to move onto the larger ones as I'm planning to do more striking patterning on the big nasty beasts. I finished the Scar Warrior and I'm pretty pleased with how he has come out.

Still lots to do before the 10/02/16!

TTFN