Storm of Magic Tomb Kings Empire Allies, Finecast Rant

Storm of Magic looks cool, I love taking too many mages in every army I play, from not being able to pick my lore in Empire to Goblin Shaman spam and Liche Priest saturation, so this expansion is right up my street. The monsters and the terrain looks sweet and I will probably end up buying ALL of them (minus perhaps t6he manticore as I have an old Dark Elf one). Also tweeking my attention is the any army can ally with Daemons or either undead. COOL. So this seems like a great opportunity to whack out my old tomb kings for you:

These guys were my Liche priests and High Priest:

This was my Tomb King/ Tomb Prince with dubious GS work including the snake:

Last but not least I had added for fun some dead empire troops so I could add some crazy colours and generally enjoy a bit of kit bashing and poor GS work:

The game has changed significantly since the last edition as well as a brand spanking new awesome Tomb Kings book (,which I love except for the cover!) I plan to expand my units to around 35 skellies each and I've bought some Lahamian Vampires to act as liche priests. (I've always hated the Priest models and this hasn't changed, the new one while cool just looks wrong to me.) As part of that Idea I've knocked out a few more trusty Empire undead, simply kit bashed from the new models:

Next Up are my necrotects, I bought two as they're a snap at just 60pts and I had a plan once I'd seen the model; that being the awesome marble mask at his belt. Well I like the models face alot too so I went for two models and then on one carved off the mask and with a little GS work sorted out one wearing it. The model is on a (left over) GS rock that seems a little tall so I'll work out something for his other foot to stand on so he's less lop sided!

Hear is a quick shot of my necrotects with their new best buddy the empire captain, which brings me onto a bit of a finecast rant after the pic:

The above mask conversion would have been next to impossible on a metal model, in fact the necrotect model would be a royal pain with that whip arm constantly falling off and unbalancing it before perhaps snapping off after bending into and out of shape one too many times BUT I've opened 5 finecast mdoels and 4 of them have had casting bubbles. both necrotects had a bubble on their whip arm, one on the wrist guard you can see the GS cover up and the other closer to the end of the arm which also took off part of the hanging bandage (which I also fixed, sorry not to have a pic of that). The Empire captain is perfect, go buy one! But Ludwig schwarzhelms cherub has a bubble in the top of his banner cherub's head and the cherubs spikey headband is issing its front skipes. Kurt Helborg is missing half his sword guard. Both have horses in two halves which will require trimming/ drilling as the pins are too large and holes are full. This is piss poor frankly and I will be exchanging these models. I was really looking forward to finecast and am feeling rather let down at the moment. Some GS work was always required on certain metal models to fill gaps or patch up stupidly placed tags but nothing that required actual skill to fix like this, on a bad model this could take ages or even be impossible to fix. There's no point in crisp detail if there are blooming great holes in it!

Rant Over.

Step by step sternguard with Zenith Highlights Pt 2.

Heres the next few steps on my Sternguard vets for the Fallen Princes Squad Competition:

I'm finding it quite tricky remembering to stop and do pics step by step so I realise pic 1 is of a different 5 guys to the other pics :P (I am doing all 10 though!). I want to take these guys through my standard painting steps so they still tie in with my army while still trying to keep the zenith effect in mind at all times:

First up was to layer some thinned down Blood Red onto the lighter edges. By keeping it thin I could go over the shading a little and not worry or help to blend the colours. Then I went back over with thinned down 50/50 macharius solar orange/blood red covering less of the light portions of the armour and layering again where light would fall:

Next was to line highlight up with vermin brown (you can see I started to block out chaos black and stopped for a pic!)

Here I block out more of the base colours on the model:

Then I begin to layer up these details. Using lighter highlights towards the top of the model and darker washes for the lower areas of shade:

Here are some none-too-fantastic shots of each of these 5 models, hopefully you can see how the areas of shade have been developed and become increasingly clear as the other details on the model emerge:

Finally if you have a few minutes spare and want to check out new blogs here's a great site of blogrolls of all kinds of mini war gaming and modelling: http://figoblogotheque.blogspot.com/

BA 1k list

Heres my current 1kpts list, I could do with converting the razorbacks to 2xplasma-lascannons but haven't got round to it! I weathered up all the transports more to go with my more recent painting style.

The list is:

HQ:
Librarian, shield and rage

Elites:
Priest

Troops:
Tactical squad: powerfist, meltagun, multi melta, rhino.

Tactical Squad: meltagun, multi melta, rhino.

Assault Squad: meltagun, powerfist, razorback (twin las)

Assault Squad: flamer, powerfist, razorback (twin las)

(I just noticed an assault squad sarge is missing in the pic. Whoops!)

Step by step sternguard with Zenith Highlights for The Fallen Princes 'squad' Competition. Pt 1.

First off I'd like to direct you to The Fallen Princes competition here. If your looking for a reason to paint something or some extra motivation this is an excelent excuse, with the competition being the paint a squad its as open as you could want, any game system, plus a transport if you choose. I chose (along with a bunch of others) to do a unit of Sternguard Vets, although mine are for my Blood Angels. I thought it was a grand excuse to paint something a bit differently.

I thought I'd try doing some zenith based highlighting on the models. This is essentially trying to paint the models with shading and highlights appropriate to how lighting from a given source would fall on them. Not a huge shocker but the easiest way to see how this looks is to shine a fine beam of light on a model and see where the shade is. The easiest way to get this effect onto a model is to base coat it in your shade colour and then spray the base colour from above or an angle as the light:

I primed these chaps in citadel chaos black and then having left them plenty of time to dry went in with army painter dragon red from above, behind and to their left shoulder a little. It's a little tricky to get good photos of it as the idea is to get it to look like the natural shading that would be visible in a photo. Still hopefully you can get the idea, it shows up best on the heavy flamer chap at the bottom I think (on the flamer I'll later paint black! Doh!). Yes, so theres the basic effect. Obviously I wanted to take it a bit further and increase the contrast, add highlights, etc. as otherwise Models using this technique seem to end up looking a bit unfinished. So I then sprayed them with leviathan purple using an airbrush:

This failed badly due to my beat up old airbrush so I went in with the purple wash with a brush:

Once this had dried completely I went lightly back in with the Army painter Dragon Red, spraying lightly so as to leave shading all over the model but keeping the zenith effect.

Its tricky to see from the above image but there are a few areas of sharp transition from red to black. Once these had dried well I used two coats of Thraka Green to better blend these areas into each other:

In parts two and three I'll highlight the models up, base them, start blocking out colours and then do the details following the shading already laid down on the models. I'll see about a transport for them too!

If you ever want more ideas on something give From The Warp a click and do a search, seriously!

IG Vendetta complete.

So heres the completed vendetta from my weathering tutorial. The one I went and called a Valkyrie. Whoops. I finished it off by doing a bit more work on the jaws and replicating the weathering all over it. I painted the engines with a shade of green for the exposed metal, shade of devland mud for the greasy bit and washes of red and blue for the heat damaged engine ends. I weathering powdered the engines with verdigris and oil and the landing pads with rust.

I wanted to do something with the HUGE base space so copied a vast number of people in making a small building using the cities of death kit (plus if you want to be a cheese monger you can use it to block LOS, thanks true LOS rules! Sigh). N.B. If your going to flock this then make sure you leave a space for the clear plastic stand (or attach it, but then you have to be really really careful not to paint it!) I wanted the base to be worth looking at but not distract from the model so I kept it in line with the pale dusty browns of my standard basing and a bone coloured building to boot. I then painted all the rocks with charandon granite and then adeptus battlegrey for contrast and washed some darker browns and greys into the base in crevices and at random to break up the ground colour and ad a bit more depth than would be necessary on a 20-25mm scale. I finally used GW dead grass flock, army painter highland tuft 6mm and army painter autumn underground(tiny tiny bits of this) to fill and break up the remaining space.

Crusade Armour testers and another Iron Armour Marine.

Just a couple of pics of a few marines to round out a Pre Heresy RAS squad. Heres a couple of Crusade Armour guys:

They are just basic assault marines and have blood angel arms because I didn't like the ones they came with and they would have been a pain to change to combat poses.

This is another Iron Armour guy, here with a melta, because you can never have too many meltas. On all the troops I did a bit of free hand and heavy weathering including fresh scratches, old chips and mud powder around the feet and shins. Hope you like them!

WIP Imperial Guard Armour Army Painter Spray Cammo

Finishing all of these with highlights weathering etc is taking awhile. But I thought the basic cammo looked so good I ought to get a picture up. It reminded me of the old steel legion cammo but a slightly lighter brown. I used Army Painter Leather Brown to basecoat and then Army Painter Skeleton Bone to put lines across them. It took a couple of coats to get the colour right for both processes. Make sure you leave a few mins for it to dry a little before re-applying and practice line thickness on some paper before you double up the cammo lines to avoid overspray! The cans allow a fair bit of control depending on how hard you press.

This really is the easiest and quickest way I could find to paint up cammo that ensures every tank is the same two colours (unlike some of my older tanks where I forgot the scheme or differing layers led to slightly different shades, lame I know but when trying to paint 4 armies at once you suddenly find its 12months since your last tank got painted). Oh and one can of leather brown comfortably covered all of these tanks with multiple coats and some over, it goes without saying the skeleton bone still had over half left.

WIP Middenland Greatswords on a budget.

In my recent empire aquisition I recieved a unit of 20 old metal greatswords. Great models. I'll show pics of them later before and after as I want to change details like hat/feather/scroll/skin colours/tones to bring them in line with my army a little more. (Its enough of a mish mash and needs all the tie-ins possible!) I wanted to up the unit to 30 as todays warhammer really rewards you for plonking for a chunkier sized regiment. Plus if I ever manage to play a 6k pts battle itd be nice to have a larger unit to look the part (okay units if you count the reiksguard I'm also doing!).

I imagine many like me were excited when I saw greatswords were coming out in plastic. Especially given the drop in prices on plastic cavalry and elites like black guard and black orcs when they went plastic. I was thus pretty miffed at finding the price of a plastic unit would be the same as an old metal one. Still loyal(/addicted) buyer that I am I decided to use the plastic to my advantage!

The boxed set oddly gives you four sets of spare arms and plenty of spare heads. This isn't quite enough guys for a rank of 5 so I added a couple of empire unit champion two handed swords too. these are compatable with the plastic swordsmen bodies (although you do need to do a little matching of peices before glueing, not every arm/head component set match up due to things like mimpressive beards. By picking out the more armoured bodies this can look quite effective even if you do have different legs. (If you have the really old empire sets these have some leg plate armour pieces you can pop on!) You could of course avoid painting up the legs in a completely different colour like me but I thought they looked better this way. I'll get some pics up to compare with real greatsword models once I've got them repainted (er...don't hold your breath on these I'm trying to paint up 7 chimera's at once atm!).

Reiksguard Knights on foot WIP

Many moons ago Knights seemed to be all over the shop in the Empire models range. Both different Knightly orders had their own mounted models and grand masters and also some featured on foot with a variety of equipment. Some may remember the old Reiksuard knights on foot they still show up on ebay fairly often if you don't mind shelling out a whole lot of money for them. I did mind and thought I might convert some of my own. I simply did a head swap with some of the reiksguard heads from the knightly orders box (obviously avoiding the knights panther and white wolf heads! (Tempted to do some knights panther on foot to lead my swordsmen)) and popped them on some great sword models I had sitting around from a couple of rash battle force purchases when the empire was last re-released. There are four suitable plumed helmets so to fill up the gap I used an unplumed helmet from the greatswords box. Some trimming of the torso collar and the bottom of the helmet head is required but this is as easy as converting gets:

Heres a shot of some classic perry reiksguard knights on foot models to compare:

Used without permission: http://www.warseer.com/forums/showthread.php?p=3918843

Averland Detachment

Hers the smallest part of the empire army I picked up, I'll drop a few more posts of them from time to time but Averland has always struck me as one of the best flavour states, being at one end of blackfire pass its hardened troops defend the route taken by many orc WAAAGHs for generations. Also its exciting elector count Marius Leitdorf, infamous as the Mad Lord of Averland; the genius, pompous, rage prone swordmaster is packed with character to lead an army.

They're a very nice tabletop standard. I suppose one day I might do a little work on the faces but I'm really enjoying throwing down with a fully painted army! I got in a game earlier today and was soundly beaten by orcs.

I bought these along with a whole lot more for a bargin price from a Ben Couzens, cool-kid-on-the-block on warseer (I'll link to his beastmen stuff there if warseer sorts its problems out and comes back up soon). He sells on ebay as Komick-Kid. Hes got a few bargain lots up, for a great 40k mordian army, a vast 40k orc horde and a couple of converted giants, check them out!:
http://myworld.ebay.co.uk/komick_kid/?_trksid=p4340.l2559