Dark Elf Warriors Unit

Dark Elves!  Gotta love em.  Gotta love em so much I have decided to paint an army of them during this year.

Warhammer Armies 3e Entry for Dark Elf Warriors.

It is intended as a Dragon Rampant force with an eye to use in Warhammer related games.  Dragon Rampant units tend to be 12 models strong.  I have 20 of these guys which I would need for Warhammer, so I went with painting all of them at once, otherwise I would probably never come back to them.

Plastic Dark Elves Designed by Aly Morrison

I got some old plastic Dark Elf warriors from a buddy recently and couldn’t resist using them for the core of this force.  They are actually Aly Morrison sculpts.  They are chunky nuggets of fun.  I expect that this miniature is a Talisman prototype that somehow made it into production as the regiment in the box set above.

 

I ditched the stock shields immediately in favor of the classic Marauder miniatures shield – probably sculpted by Aly to increase the Alyness of this product to 11.  The rounded shape balances out the outrageously pointy shoulder pads.

 

20 Dark Elf Warriors

The colours are very restricted for me.  Just Black, silver, gold, red, with a few other colours for hair here and there.  This will keep the army looking tight, as I intend to mix in a fair mix of Dark Elf models, or other Elf models that I can shoehorn in there convincingly.

Tray has 3 extra spaces for characters and afford handling during play.

They get a movement tray, which is handy for storage and generally keeping them together both on my shelf defending against my many cats and during massed combat games.

The hex bases I love for these types of projects as they allow you to lock the bases in formation and still look good when standing alone in skirmish games.

The little leaves are from birch tree seeds.  They are lovely things to work with.  I have enhanced the colours simply by using red, green and brown washes on top of them.

 

The Temple of Painted Bizaza Masters

I painted these using the master castings so the details are much more crisp than previous efforts.  They  are very straight forward to paint as they have very open stances.  I find painting the 2 handed weapons separately and attaching them later is a good idea.

I tend to use lots of shading and glazes on them.

I like the copper and leather basic equipment colours on these guys, they benefit with bright contrasting colours as spot colours.  I have used a jade green colour on the stones and jewellery tends to be gold.

The eyes are basically like cats eyes with a vertical black oblong.  Lots of purple and red washes work well around the yellow eyes to give them some warmth.

 

 

I knocked this thing together last week.  Basically layers of polystyrene and some foam card for the rails.  I created a stone face tile and made a siligum mould to pour plastic resin castings.

 

El Jefe

El Jefe is the leader of my new Frostgrave warband.  He is a heavily converted Slann Animal handler model from Citadel.

 

Here is the actual warband…

Freelancers

A mercenary cavalry patrol.  This company has it’s origins in Estalia.

The unit was made from the European Men at Arms plastics from the Perry Twins with some Citadel Empire Militia heads added in 2 cases.

Although this type of armour would not have included a shield, this being Warhammer we add one.  The shield is great for giving the unit some visual punch which is important for showy troops like knights.  I have left the barding off these knights as I expect that would be the first thing you would sell if you were a knight down on his luck.

Old Worlder Mercenaries – Handgunners

These guys are made from Perry twins European Mercenaries plastic boxed set mixed in with 5 old Grenadier models, still available from Mirlton.

I went for an Ultramarines Blue and white (over Elf Gray) colour scheme as I wanted forgiving colours to paint that stand out on a green tabletop.  I have kept the colour scheme very tight as I wanted to blend miniature designs from 2 different sources.  As it turns out the 2 sources play very nicely together in terms of scale.  Both models have integrated bases so they both ended up standing at approximately the same levels as illustrated below.

Southlander Dog of War

 

A Perry Mounted Men at Arms combined with a Perry Mahdist Ansar head painted for the Fantasy 100 club on the Oldhammer forum.

I have been spending too long on painting recently so I set myself the challenge of painting this in one sitting to a good tabletop standard. Good way to test paint a figure when you are planning for an army I have found.

might do another 5 of these guys and add some kind of shield to them to Warhammer them up a little.  Historically shields were fairly old hat by the time armour of this style had developed as gunpowder weapons were a common thing by then.  Shields are a good way to bring some interesting animal print onto this model to reinforce the idea of him being a gent from the southlands of the Warhammer world.

 

That’s all for now. 🙂

 

The Armour of the Moon

Back in March Axoim via the Oldhammer forum came up with the idea of running a challenge where people would paint a single model under a common theme and then the entire collection of figures would be awarded randomly to one of the participants.  The theme was basically a force of multi-racial lawful warriors sworn to seek out and destroy the forces of chaos.  The name for this warband, “The Dogs of Law”.

I duly volunteered to paint up a Slann for this, someone gotta represent for the frog people, can’t have the dry skins getting all the glory!

The simple approach would be to just paint up a suitable Slann model from my collection but being me I can’t just take a simple approach, ideas come and demand expression or they will just bounce around in my head irritatingly for years.  The idea which appealed to me the most was one rooted firmly in proper Warhammer cannon.

Antiriad is a corruption of Anti-Rad suit

The Slann of the Warhammer world are the remnants of a once mighty spacefaring species and so I wanted to create a character which gives a tip of the hat to all that jazz.  There were a couple of notable influences on this, Homer Simpson and the old computer game The Sacred Armour of Antiriad.

In rod we trust

So that leads to this chap who is based off an old Eagle Warrior from 3rd Edition Warhammer:

Slann Power Suit Conversion

Side and rear detail

“Moixa’remoh was once a humble servant of the Temple of the Moon at a time when the temple was set upon by raiders, devoted to the chaos god Tzeentch. During the course of the battle a great miscast of magical energies by the chaotic sorcerers directed at the temple had the curious effect of reactivating the warp reactor of an artefact of incalculable age.  As a high Slann artefact, it was much more than a mere machine.  The suit was symbiotic,  autonomous and intelligent and aware of the impending threat.  It reached out to the closest Slann mind, the mind of the servant Moixa’remoh who was drawn to it, and into it, bonding with the spirit of the suit.  A new prime operational directive was instated, enforce order, annihilate chaos…”

The Armour of the Moon

The colour choice for this one was to be more or less limited to olive and bone.  I wanted the suit to look ancient so I used a good deal of weathering on it with the exception of the mysterious glowing green weapons, the gold visor and the edge where the visor would have been clamped shut for aeons.

Rear details

Right side

Left side

Elevation

It is a space suit after all 🙂

Now don’t forget who’s planet this is!

Demon Frogman Eagle Warrior

No update in a while but fear not loyal reader for I have been relentlessly working on a sculpt for a Demon Frogman Eagle Warrior.  This is but the beginning my spawn-kin, when I get enough frogmen sculpted I will surely do a professional production run if you wish to get your hands on copies.  Rather than have a text heavy post I will point you to the discussion about this project in on the Oldhammer forum if you are interested.  I will paint up the prototype and post it up soon.

The (almost) finished green

Quick and dirty prototype casting

Size comparison

Right side view

Left side view

 

Rear right

Rear left

Knavecon Sheep

I figured it’s high time I followed up on the sheep I made for our Oldhammer game at Knavecon 2014.  Here they are in all their painted glory:

Baaaaaaaa!

And this was the original green for the little fellow.

The green

And with a slightly more careful paint job, the final ones got a pretty flat, devoid of highlights and shading paint job in the end:

A nicely painted prototype

Here is a scale comparison with my favourite scaling model.  As you can see they have been designed for the smaller people of miniature gaming (such as halflings), with an emphasis on cuteness over realism:

One of the Emperors finest protects His flock from the predations of xenos scum

They may someday even be used as nasties in a killer sheep scenario….

And remember RT aficionados you may think you are save but do not underestimate a sadistic GM

The final part of this project will be to take 2 of the little blighters and re-sculpt the legs to look like they are being carried and then send them along to the next stage in the production line to Mr. Saturday who will proceed to incorporate them into a commemorative fimir raider model to mark the convention.

Cold Blooded Killers

Finally made some headway with the Lizardmen, huzzah!  This selection of 14 models will be added to the previous 10 Lizardmen I painted earlier on in the project.  Mr. Saturday was kind enough to supply me with a bunch of these classic citadel plastics which I think fit in a lot more nicely with the Oldhammer vibe than the current range of  Lizardmen – who look like bobblehead dinosaurs to me.   They fit in nicely with the Bob Olley venerables which I had  painted previously.  So that makes for 24 Lizardmen….which is too many really.  So with 24 of them done I now plan to take the biggest 4 lizardmen from Bob Olley and rebase them on a 40mm square base to make me some Troglodytes.

Lizardmen Warriors

 

The keen eyed among you will note the presence of a Snakeman in there.  It’s great to be able to work in a classic and unusual model like this fellow.  I think the original model had a little damage on the neck but I just painted over it and made it a feature rather than do complex green stuff restoration.  Of note also is the use of parts from the Savage Ork kit.  I thought that the original weapons were a little on the weedy side for double handed weapons or spears.  The aesthetic is somewhat shifted to modern with these conversions but then that’s me, one foot in the past and one in the present, like a navy seal carrying a broadsword.  The effect of using the oversized weapons is to make the Lizardmen feel crazy strong like this chap mightily wielding a massive polystyrene boulder against the greatest actor in the world:

A Gorn from Star Trek The Original Series – and if by some miracle he happens to be reading, f*** you J.J. Abrams, or “The Butcher of Star Trek” as I choose to refer to you as, although I am sure that will be changed to a more generic “The Butcher of the Stars” when you butcher Star Wars.

I used the weapons, along with the hands in many cases.  There is a difference in size between the hands but I doubt you noticed that.  I opted to paint the flint stone weapons black and then highlight the extreme edges and gloss varnish the blade.  This is to give the impression of them being made of obsidian (volcanic glass) rather than stone.  And to finish up (and keep Cheetor happy) here is what they might look like in a skirmish based system:

Lizardmen in a dispersed formation more suited for Sci-Fi gaming

So next up with these guys is to make them a movement tray and amalgamate them with their scaly brothers.  I may add some shields from the savage ork kit at a later time – did I mention how much I like that kit?

 

L8RS