Mustafar or Mars?

I finally finished my lava world scenery set!

Using a great basing tutorial I had found, I made some drop on scenery tiles for the lava. They took a lot of painting as there was numerous layers to build up the lava effect. Pretty pleased with it tho'!

As it was modular I decided to add an extra tile so it could be useful for AoS as well

YTD 284!

TTFN 

Trees and Deserts

Lots to do this year but I've found myself stymied by the current contents of the painting shelf.

My Sylvaneth have been half done for a number of months now and I can't bring myself to pack away unfinished figures in the fear that they'll never see the light of day again.

I have therefore resolved to paint them before continuing with anything else or starting any new projects.

They are straight forward in theory as they are predominately being drybrushed however this is taking longer than I expected as some of the extremities are a bit flimsy and I'm having to be fairly cautious.

Blues and white are added after the greens and browns to try and get a magical glow to the sigils.

 Not much more to do and then they can have some varnish and their foliage added.

I've also done a few more colour tests for my Martian gaming mat. I'm leaning towards the scheme on the right but with lighter highlights as found on the other two samples.

I shall muse on that a while longer.

TTFN.

Progress!

I've gotten my bum into gear and pushed ahead to finish off the massed dryads that were glowering at me from the paint queue. 60 at once can be somewhat of a chore but its a great feeling once they are all completed.

Only 12 figures to paint to finish off the army! I'd best get cracking with them.......

....but only once I've finished off these bad boys! It's bizarre, but I really enjoy painting Iron Warrior stuff. Before I started them I would have been convinced that painting the dull metallic colours would bore me and that the stripes would drive me mad. Actually the opposite is true!

Varnish and basing and they'll be done. Then back to the Sylvaneth.......maybe.

TTFN

 

Some progress....

...but it doesn't feel like much.

I've been plugging away at my new AoS army. The Sylvaneth are all together now apart from the GW woods which I need to do but I want to do the army first.

Dryads are done baring the 4 I've still got coming. I got 48 Dryads with the starter sets but I wanted to round that up to 50 so I'd have full units so I ordered a sprue of 4 to get me to the 50 mark. I was then later sipping all the spares away and discovered that some of the bits from Treelord sprues work well combined with dryad bits. That gave me another 8 dryads emerging from the ground and will take me up to 60 once the extra sprue arrives! Nice!

The big 'uns are some nice models but ooooh soooo spikey! Now to wait for dry weather so I spray the little beggers.

Last night I wanted to paint so the scenery for my 30K siege plan got bumped up the queue. Just the first grey colour applied with a heavy drybrush but its a start.

TTFN

Heroes, Villains and some everyday folk.

I’ve started putting together the Sylvaneth at work in my lunchtimes but it’s going to take a while so I’m all fired up to get a few more things painted at home whilst that progresses.

Painting the unique figures is a real dose of fresh air that I do enjoy every now and then. It lets you go a little further on a figure than you normally can.

Hence these two.

I couldn’t resist with Mr Patriot. I’d starred at him for a while unwilling to commit to a boring dark suited hitman type thing. Not sure where the idea came from but I was sold. It took me longer than I would normally spend painting a figure but it makes me smile so was worth it!

The camo cape was fun as well. I kept the rest of her plainish to emphasis the cloak.

Gotta have some people living in Pulp City!

  

These two big uglies have been sat unfinished for ages so it is a pleasure to get them completed.

Clearing this lot off of the painting queue was nice and I enjoyed the pulp city vibe so decided to try and get some of the loose scatter started as well. They shouldn’t take long.

So 14 figures finished changes the tally for the better.

Purchased          85

Painted               -62

NET                   23

TTFN

"There are no Wolves in Newbury" - only rats!

Hi all, WolfGeezer here, popping my blogging cherry. Although now that I have discovered the existence of this site I see there are several references to me and pictures of my models on here going back years. I have been persuaded into joining this GoG X challenge, which will be the first of any such challenge for me, so figured I should start with a quick intro post.

While I love playing all these games since J introduced me to all this stuff about 13 years ago, it took me a couple of years to really start to enjoy the painting. I loved the list building, deployment strategy, on the fly probability calculations, responding to the opponents plans and of course the fickleness of those dice!

Painting itself seemed to take way too long to get end products that I still really couldn’t be proud of. How I wish I had Duncan Rhodes to guide me like my 10 year old son has, rather than making it up myself. Unlike most of the guys here I have largely remained a one trick pony wolf. Starting with a Space Wolf Ven Dred and Rogue Trader era Grey Hunters, my collection grew to about 15k points in 5^th edition. With all the points reductions for Wolves since I suspect it is still around the same even though I’ve probably got another 5k in old points.

After 3 or 4 years I picked up a Tau army through a couple of Ebay lots, added some new shiny (some of which made it out of the box, none of which have actually made the gaming table) and the whole army has probably only seen 3 battles. Perhaps they would have seen more action if I had changed my tactics from shooting once then charging. I can still remember how much Jamie laughed the first time I used them, charging them in against his plague marines to pretty much zero effect. I've almost built a White Scar army, used once to table Jamie's Necrons to a number of cries of broken aimed towards my flyers. I picked up the base of a Custodes army just before this challenge was announced, so given Tau and Wolves will have new releases this year I fully expect them to remain in the box until at least 2023. 

The primary tale I expect to tell on here this year is not of Wolves, or Tau or White Scars, but Skaven, my one and only AoS army. While not part of the original GoG adventure I have been brow beaten encouraged to join in this madcap plan to paint 2000 points. I start a little ahead of the rest in theory as I have a number of models basecoated and some are even half painted.

However, my rate of painting is 10-20% (Ed - it's not that high) of these guys so a major challenge for me and I’m not yet ready to start as I still haven’t finished my biggest ever project - my Forgeworld Warhound Wolfhound Titan. That needs to be at least mostly finished before I start the Skaven and has itself exhausted most of the goodwill of my wife over the last 2 months as I take over the dining table for the weekend and my son who doesn’t understand why after 5 minutes painting I wouldn’t want to play Football/Carcasonne/Yahtzee/Chess/Monopoly or preferably being shot by him in Stars Wars Battlefront or racing him in Forza (whatever number it’s up to now?) The next post will cover my Wolfound as I think he deserves one, but for now here’s some of the Skaven boxes that have been calling me for the last 5 years that I have been ignoring up to now next to the WIP Titan.

   

Game 31

Game 31 was also AoS

Silverfox's Skaven joined my Seraphon to battle Gareth's Skaven and Junt's undead.

The deployment was on the diagonal and there were lots of Skaven....

Filthy little blighters. Apart from Silverfox's ones who were nice. Well they were on that day.

The seraphon and chaos had an aggressive plan pushing forward in the middle...

..holding the left flank....

and Steaming the right with MONSTERS!!!!

It sounded better than how it actually happened. The Undead and Skaven mobbed the big Dinos and dragged them down. The Rotters!

It didn't do so well in the middle either.

Silverfox lead a solid counter attack with a chaos deamon thingy kicking it on the left flank but I don't recall it being enough to hold the day.

TTFN

Game 30

I've fallen behind with posting the games that we are playing. The enthusiasm levels are high in the group and the new edition of 40K has spurred this on further!

Game 30 was a AoS game with Junt & I pitting our Undead & Seraphon against Urn and the Silverfox with their Chaos and Gobbo armies.

This was quite a few weeks ago now so I can't remember what the mission was (if any?) but we got stuck in soon enough!

The Seraphon and chaos clashed heavily and the Undead and the Gobbos got caught in a lengthy drawn out melee.

Sheesh big gobo units are hard to kill but the undead keep coming back to finish the job!

Eventually a win for Undead and Seraphon as we pushed back the chaos and gained control of the field. Or at least I think that is how it ended. Errr Yeah we'll go with that.

TTFN

And so it begins

Junt, Urn and I have been egging each other on quite a lot this year and the result seems to have manifested in to a challenge.

What challenge? To paint 365 figures in a year. This obviously equates to one a day which seems daunting but casting my eye back over the last year I seem to have painted well over 200+ items and that includes big scenery pieces that have taken more than a week for each one. I’ve also prepped and made lots of figures and scenery. Given that I often batch paint big groups of figures the target of 365 seems less scary.

A year dedicated to clearing some of the backlog of figures? Yeah I’m up for that.

Junt also mentioned that we should try and maintain momentum with the gaming itself and suggested 52 games in a year. Given how easily life distracts us from fun things, I think this is going to be HARD but hey…..I’m up for that challenge as well!

The 365 figures that I’m hoping to get done include:

40+        40K Eldar

140+      30K Marines, Mechanicum & Solar Auxilia

20+        Pulp City heroes and civilians

80+        Dystopian Wars for both the KoB and PE

70+        Seraphon

50+        Dystopian Legion for both KoB and PE

150+      Massive Darkness figures yet to arrive from a Kickstarter.

Okay, that actually total in excess of 550 figures which will be something of a reach to achieve but that’s the reason for the challenge. Soooooo many figures waiting to be painted. I wish it were all that is sat unpainted in my study. Gotta start somewhere I suspose!

I was planning to start on January 1^st but I need to get cracking on the Seraphon for February and as such I’ve started the challenge already. 11^th December 2016 is the day of commencement and by this time next year I want to have completed at least 365 figures from the list above. We shall see.

The GoGs are heading for Nottingham on 10/02/17 and I need to have an army ready. I have the BFG’s seraphon on loan under the condition that I paint it and this is a convenient starting point. I’ve got 2 months to paint 70+ figures and I’ll be happy to get 30+ figures done per month as it’ll show me how difficult it is to keep on track.

Now the Seraphon should be a quick paint….

  

…but as usual I find a way to complicate the process. I’ve gone for a wash effect for the main colour scheme but I wanted to have their armour plates in a different colour but also tonally similar to the main colour. This means adding a base colour to parts of the model prior to the quick wash. Probably doesn’t actually take much longer but just feels like it when you’re trying to do 37 in one batch! Probably will only take one more evening to finish the first stage and then onto applying the wash.

Only one thing left to say.

0 finished in 3/362 days

Gulp!

TTFN

Khorne bloodbound

So, over the last 2 weeks I have been pushing out a lot of work to try and get a decent khorne force ready for our trip to Lenton on 18 Jun.

Very nearly there and these are the bulk of my forces, with Skarr Bloodwrath and 10 blood warriors to be added.