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.