Wolves and Deamons and Un-dead....oh my!

 Hello,

So I'm new and this is my first post, but given that I was introduced to war gaming by Eddie Artillery at Junior school over 30 years ago I've been around for a while.

As a typical gamer I have a limited attention span and far too many projects on the go at all times so a challenge that focuses me to finish something is always welcome. For AoS I usually play Un-dead, now my Skeleton archers buffed by a Wight-King giving me 90 odd dice are great but maybe I should do something else, something different, Chaos maybe, Order or Destruction?

Immediately I thought that this would suit my Wolfen project. I always liked the Confrontation Wolfen, great sculpts, a different race to the Elf/Dwarf/Orc fantasy stereotype and they are frecking giant man wolves, so whats not to like. I thought that maybe I could proxy wolves for Stormcasts to get an Order aligned army in but after much deliberation I went with Beastclaw Raiders. Not only are they similar sizes but the look of the figures kind of match the snowy northern wastes style of the Ogors. It would also give me an excuse to do snow bases, something I've wanted to do since I started a Game of Thrones Zombie, John Snow North of The Wall project that I haven't finished yet.

I already have 2 of the Wrath of Kings Goritsi Kickstarters from Ebay and a couple of specials packs from the badly run CMON Black Friday sale, along with a few Confrontation originals from Ebay, and I have a set of Werwulf archers coming from Meirce Miniatures latest Kickstarter as well. All of those coupled with a Beastclaw start collecting set (great value) and I'm most of the way there. One more start collecting set and that's 2000 points. So £40 to spend and I get to finish something I've been planning for several years and play with it.... brilliant.

Then somebody mentioned going to Lenton!!!!

Now I can't use CMON and Rackham figures at Warhammer World as its a purely GW place, which I get and as I want to go I'm going to have to pick something else to do, but what.

I have a Mournghul, some Terrorghiests and Varghiests to finish off for the Un-dead, add a Vampire Lord on a dragon and it would be done, but again that's just adding to my Un-dead horde. Really not a lot of work needed to finish them off, maybe too easy to be a challenge, but again only a £40 cost.

Lastly (well not lastly actually, I have some Bretonnians kicking around somewhere as well as 2 long OOP dark elf chariots that would go great with a Dreadlord on a dragon or 2, and High Elves, Chaos Marauders, Beastmen, Gargants, Skaven, Lizard men etc but they'd all cost too much to finish so weren't seriously considered) .......so lastly there is a Deamons of Khorne force. 30 Bloodletters a Deamon Prince, Skull Cannon a kit bashed Bloodthirster from those bits left over on the sprue after you've finished making one. I need a bit more for this, another Bloodthirster 10 more Bloodletters.....Its not Un-dead, its Lenton compliant but its not my first (or even second) choice, so what to do.

Well really there is only one thing that you can do given these circumstances......that's right I'm going to do all three. 1000 points a month, easy.

Wish me luck.

The blog gets all growed up!

We're hobby butterflies, seemingly utterly incapable of keeping our minds on one thing..... so a passing comment from Eddie about how the blog was TEN FREAKING YEARS OLD led us down a meandering path of increasing geek-based excitement and has meant we've agreed to mark the occasion with something awesome..... as Britney might say, we've decided to "hit me baby one more time"!

The blog was started to chronicle us getting a new army painted from the large amount of unpainted figures we all had on our shelves of holding.  I can happily confirm that we now all have far, far more stuff on our shelves than we did back then and so we're going to do another "Tale of X gamers", but this time there are 7 of us instead of 5!  The idea is to end the work with a playable army of around 1,500 2,000 and spend a weekend in Nottingham at GW HQ being utter geeks!

So, the rules.....

a) paint at least 250 333 points of models (cumulative counting is fine so you can work around real life) from March until August.  Your 250 333 points must be uploaded to the blog by the end of each month or suffer relentless mockery from the rest of the participants until you've caught up......
b)  Attend GW HQ on the September weekend to celebrate!

To start things off, I'm going Empire/Free peoples s I've had a box of stuff hanging around for about 10 years that I've occasionally added a bargain eBay win to.  This is the start of me getting it sorted:

Lots of troops planned, at least one monster and some warmachines I should think..... exciting times!

Areonef Marking part Deux

Adding the extra little detail markings to the US Nefs has spurred me onto doing the Brit ones as well. I'd always thought they were lacking but had struggled to be inspired with ideas for what I could add. Whilst searching for the US ones I saw World War One aircraft markings and that is where I drew the inspiration for the tail details for theirs.

So I started in the same place for the Brit ones and wasn't disappointed. So using the tracing paper approach I ended up putting roundels and identity letters onto all three British Nefs. The tail colours have ended up being quite 'tricolour' but hey it still looks a load better than the plain colours in my opinion.

I also added the funnel colours which make a big difference.

This is another three finished this year so:

Purchased: +20
Painted: -20

Net: 0

Thankfully I'm not anticipating buying much else other than the next two Nef when they are finished so getting some more done should put me well into a net negative number. It would be nice to get to -365 but this might be a tall order depending on the occasional bouts of weakness that result in naughty internet purchases.

We shall see.

TTFN

Aeronef Markings

I've been a bit stuck on how to approach the marking for the Aeronefs I've finished so far. The Brit ones are still needing something adding but I think I know what however the US ones are done.

I've not done a lot just enough to add to the model but not look to silly.

I'm not going to worry about the basing until they are all done then I can have a big basing session to get them all finished.

TTFN

Termies and Nefs

This week I've managed to make some progress on both sets of terminators.

The Iron Hands have received their coats of red and this leaves them ready for detailing, decals and weathering. Plenty to do still but progressing well.

The Iron Warriors will take a bit more work. I've added both the black and white to their pads in a random fashion as I did with the MKiiis. I don't want the hazard striping to be too uniform. Once the white has two coats I then carefully add the stripes. This took a while but I like the effect once finished. These will need a little tidying up but after that they can have their yellow wash to complete the hazard panels.

Once that is dry the whole figure will have black wash to dull down the metallic grey and to make the yellow a little less glaring. Then they'll be at the same place as the Iron Hands and I can batch paint all twenty eight to finish the details off. It'll be nice to finish off a whole tray that has been sat untouched for over two years.

Also finished are the two US Aeronefs for the Martian VSF. I keep referring to it as Dystopian Legion but it really has evolved past that so VSF it is from now on. I'm thinking of adding decals to both these and the Britiannian ones but I want to have a good snoop around to choose the right sort of decals. I'm thinking of white WWII style stars for the Yankie ones but I'm not sure if that will modernise them to much?

Hopefully Blotz will have the next two ready soon.

Two things finished. Puts me at +3 YTD.

TTFN

Edit for a requested picture.