The Salamander Army Takes Shape

 I had to have a bit of a break whilst we had our kitchen redone - my painting room was he room chosen to be “the studio flat that we all lived in whilst the work was being done, so the whole room was just full of stuff and meant all of my paints had to be packed away…..

But that’s all done now and so I got out the salamanders again as the striping and starting painting had happened before all of that.

Anyway, I settled on a nice and simple paint scheme as I have waaaaaaay too many figures and scenery waiting for some attention. So decided that I wanted to get these done and on the table quickly. First up, a grey primer for the salamander warriors and onto painting sticks as I was going to multibase them

The scheme relied on contrast paints, washes and a bit of touching up

Pleased that I was getting through the rank and file nicely, I started on the fun, flamy elements of the army. First, a red undercoat for them

A Phoenix, three flame elementals, three flaming bird thingies (not sure that’s their official title) and a bigger flaming bird thingy for a hero.

Once again, I was keen to get these done quickly, plus (and most importantly) I’m rubbish at actually doing flames on models, and so decided to go a little more abstract on the flames, as shown in progress pics below

Steady progress being made for once and next up is some more painting and onto the basing!

A New Project - Kings of War Salamander army

Well, it’s been a very long time since any of us posted anything here. The usual reasons posted on any hobby blog which hasn’t been updated for a while apply, but also a more personal and sadder one. One of our stalwart gaming group passed away at the start of 2020 and frankly he was the one who was keeping the blog going.  We all took a bit of a knock from that and still miss him terribly, but I’ve now decided that I should get back on the blog, partly as paying my respects to Nat as he’d have wanted us to get painting (he was always, quite rightly, telling us to paint and play instead of buying more things!) and as a diary of what I’ve done.

So, what am I starting with? Why a complete army for a game that I’ve never played of course!

Kings of War looks like a very good game. I’ve become disillusioned with age of sigmar and 40K for a number of reasons, with the main one being that I can’t fit a game into an evening anymore. But I do really like the sci fi and fantasy genres so I’m moving over to trying the games produced by other companies, including the Mantic stable, which look great and seemed designed to fit into an evening’s play.

Idly scrolling through eBay (and yes, I do count searching specifically for “Kings of War army” as “idly scrolling”!) I happened across a large, but very badly painted salamander army for auction….. I stalked it for a few days, telling myself that I already had too much stuff and didn’t need it…… and then obviously pounced at the end when my willpower crumbled away in seconds. But it was a bargain!

Here are some pictures of the unboxed win

As I’d hoped, it just needed a bit of work, but nothing looked unsalvageable. I decided that I’d paint strip the bigger, posher resin green models for the most part (I was pleasantly surprised to see that the resin stuff produced by Mantic is lovely these days, easily the match of other producers), but that I’d just overspray the rank and file salamanders with undercoat and go from there. I reasoned that the larger models would be more visible whereas the rank and file would merge together more. And it would have driven me a bit bonkers having to paint strip everything.

Into the bio strip….

Happy with how things were going, I started painting, which I’ll update next time.