4 Mar 2018

Tzeentch comes to the SilverFox Challenge

Well hellooooo Bloggerland!

The SilverFox Challenge continues apace although that pace has slowed recently due to work travel. That said it looks like it's about to go a bit mad around here as someone mentioned GoGX...

But that's another post entirely...

Here then are the next entries in the 2018 Challenge! And today we're going all Tzeentch. Well except the last chap but more on him soon.

First up 20 bases of Brimstone Horrors. Love these little guys as they were so easy to paint. My aim was to try and present a carpet of flame rolling towards the enemy and I decided against trying to paint the teeth etc as they would distract from the overall effect. That and I wanted to get them done quickly!
 




And next up we have one of my favourite units so far to paint: Kairic Acolytes. These are foot soldiers of the Disciples of Tzeentch faction.
The skin was the piece I wanted to get sorted first. I opted for a base of Rakarth Flesh and then 2 washes: 1 with Sepia and 1 with Reikland Fleshshade. I'm pleased with the results.
 
Next came the armour and loincloths. Blue is the traditional colour for Tzeentch so was a natural choice. There are actually two different base blues involved although not easy to see to be honest...
The face masks went through a couple of colour choices before settling on Gold. I haven't washed them down at all as I wanted them to be shiny and standout.
 I'm pleased as well with the way the parchment came out on the scroll.
The weapon blades started pink and have toned down through the use of violet washes and white dry brushes. I opted for these colours as I get bored painting leadbelcher weaponry.

This is the command squad. You'll note the lack of banner. And no musical instrument. These boys can't take those staple members of the command squad and instead have a piece of parchment and a bird-handler. The bird is, er, not here yet. He's out somewhere...
The shields took a bit of working out colour wise. Again I didn't want to overpower the rest of the model so opted for black. I've used a couple of coats of Gloss Black Wash to make it a little more shiny. The leadbelcher rim and decoration has not been toned down either.
 "Do you have time to discuss our Lord and Saviour: Tzeentch?"

The big stick is a Glaive. No I don't know what it does either! I'll find out when everyone else does.

And now the one who isn't Tzeentch. In fact he's not even Games Workshop.
One of the bonus rounds in the Analogue Challenge was Childhood. My Dad introduced me to Spaghetti Westerns when I was a kid and I've loved them ever since.
The music of Ennio Morricone is second to none when it comes to film scores and my first LP was the soundtrack to the Dollars Trilogy. 
 So here is good old Clint Eastwood as the Man with No Name. Il Buono.
I took a few liberties with the colours as I don't paint historical figures.
I don't have a game ready for him so he'll be a nice display model for now.
And yes he does have his cigar!

B/Fwd 520
Brimstone Horrors 80
Kairic Acolytes 200
Il Buono 10

Total so far 810 / 3650 or 22% complete!!

Still on Target...

1 Mar 2018

GoG X is upon us!

I’ve decided to go out on a limb and branch out with a brand new army!

“Leaf it out!” I here you cry!

Sorry

I realise that you didn’t log on just fir me to wattle on with puns.
J

So….I made the mistake of mentioning that the GoG blog was nearly ten years old. After a flurry of texts I found myself staring down the possibility of a brand new army. AoS is much more favoured these days than 40K so it seemed natural for the next Tale of X gamers to be an AoS thing this time round.

Who to choose?

I’ve got quite a few other projects going on so I didn’t want a horde army with tons to paint in it. I also fancied painting something a bit different and one force stood out as one that no one else seemed to have already.

I saw the Sylvaneth and they instantly caught my eye as they offer what looks like a unique painting experience as they are very different to pretty much everything else in terms of textures and details.
So the Sylvaneth have become my next AoS force. Hence the trees puns. Six months to do 2000 pts so I have to get cracking. I had a look at the army list before buying (a first) and as it turns out the starter sets really are a great place to start with these fellas. So a few of those and some other bits and bobs soon took me to 2000pts (gulp!)

I placed my order with Element Games and true to what the other GoGs said, they proved themselves to be well priced and delivery was quick. I’m just waiting on the arrival of some other hobby supplies and these will get started…..well once I’ve finished my tray of terminators. 



Quite a stack to get through.

It always sounds so simple at the beginning…… doesn’t it.

TTFN


25 Feb 2018

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.






23 Feb 2018

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!

12 Feb 2018

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

9 Feb 2018

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

5 Feb 2018

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.