First Esher Gangers

For our campaign my gaming group is painting up a few units you can hire as part of your list if you control enough of their respective planet. One I'm working on at the moment is a gang of twenty esher gangers to be hive scum from a factory hive world. There will be twenty with two heavy stubbers. The rest with be armed with autoguns but I'm using a full mix of models to keep things more interesting. Here's the first six hanging out on my red planet board. I've gone for a tabletop quality style, with neutral browns, silver and greys for the majority of the colours. Some tabards in a yellow and crazy hair colours as a nod to their classic colour schemes.

Hope you like them.

Vindicare WIP

Just painting this chap up following the white dwarf paint splatter article. I must say the Execution force box game assassin models are really wonderful. Even if I wish the vindicare was aiming his rifle at something so I can point him at stuff and say 'Pew pew'. Simple pleasures. I'm aiming to get all four painted up to be able to pick and choose for our escalation campaign we've just begun (More on that to follow).
Really just this guys gun and base to do. I'm most looking forward to painting the Eversor.. he's running on a wall... ON A WALL!

Necron Tomb Citadel Forgeworld Tile for Jungle board.

Here's the complete board. I'm really very pleased with how this turned out. I've had my smug face on since I did this last week. It's the first project I've done with my new airbrush and compressor so I'm pleased it has come together nicely. It has also boosted my confidence to get back to my other forgeworld tiles and see if I can get the finished for the red planet Epsilon 0001. Here's the walk through for anyone whose interested:

After giving the board several washes in hot water with fairy liquid to remove the release agents and waiting for it to dry completely I began by undercoating the entire tile with army painter matt black primer. I then used army painter gun metal in two thin passes to cover all the tomb sections, trying to leave a little shading into black near the earth areas and in spaces such as the curved trench through the main courtyard section.

I cleaned up the earth areas with a little black undercoat again. I used a large drybrush to apply some thinned washes. Agrax earthshade, Biel Tann green. Nuln Oil and Athonian cammoshade to do a little shading and to provide some drips and streaks on the more vertical areas.

Air brush time! I used Vallejo burnt umber (in fact all the paints I used are in the Vallejo air basic colours set 71178) to paint the earth areas with a good coat using two passes with the air brush set to its widest coverage setting. I then narrowed the airbrush's coverage and used the burnt umber to shade all the metal areas hitting any corners, and all the edges on the detailed panels on the flatter areas shading only the side away from the pyramid as if it would leave it in shadow. I also did the small earth patches that have collected in corners on the tile and a few lines down the larger verticals on the pyramid.

 I didn't want to make the metal look rusted or corroded but tarnished from millennia of jungle gribleys and plants , mud and water from running over it. My idea for the planet was that of something like a mangrove swamp, where the jungle is flooded and drains frequently.

I used mud brown to lightly air brush over the earth areas. I mixed light grey, burnt umber and black to spray the rock areas. Once dry I sprayed over again with more light grey into the mix and again with almost pure light grey.

I used a large drybrush to further pick out the rock areas with terminatus stone dry.

Here's another shot of rocks. Sounds dull but looks nice.

Here you can better see where I've used burnt umber air brushed onto areas I felt might be in shade or might be tarnished. The wash effects such as the green up by the circular whatssit where I would later stick some vines and the nuln oil, athonian cammoshade and agrax earthshade patches that I wet stippled and pushed around with my finger to leave some areas of colour tarnish and more circular stains to represent the effect of water, flora and fauna on the terrain. Also just to break up the surface from being one big silver patch.

Main sections complete.

The umber that represents tarnish and soil build up looks sufficiently different from the earth outside. I gave the mud areas a dry brush with underhive ash dry using my large drybrush. Dry.

Time for some object light sourcing. The board has a portal and some random circular thing. Being necron there had to be some glowing green somewhere. I painted the areas with Vallejo air olive green being careful with the thinner paint not to put so much down it dripped over everything else. I then used the air brush to spray with a thin but wide coverage of olive green, then added progressively more white and then cleaned the brush before spraying pure white for the final layer.

Here's a close up of the circular thingymajig. I needed to clean out the brush and so there was a little splatter I had to clean up when wet in one of the final green/white layers. It also ended up being concentrated slightly to one edge rather than perfectly central because frankly I've not used an airbrush like this before but over all I'm happy with how it came out.

The portal I was very careful to aim centrally and narrow the air brushes spray with the progressively lighter layers. Through luck and hope rather than talent some of the spray bounced off the portal area as I painted and lit up the inside edges of the portal and spread a little onto the floor area. Yey.

Here'ss the board fully painted from above

I used army painter highland tufts 6mm (just a few) and wilderness tufts 4mm (about half a pack) on higher areas of the earth and in some of the earth or stained areas on the tomb itself. I then used army painter poison ivy (the whole pack), cut to shape with a pair of kitchen scissors to climb up and fill some of the corner areas of the tomb. Complete board!

Here's a close up of some of the ivy and tufts, the tufts have their own glue, the Ivy I attached with liberal application of PVA.

Here's a final shot of the portal and plant life on the complete board. I look forward to our friend Sam's Necrons marching out of it soon.

Tempted to do a necron army now....

Mechanicum building for red planet board finished!

I decided the building needed more detail to break up the red, but didn't want it just to be a wall of silver instead. So as well as picking out a minority of details in silver I went for the mechanicum symbols to really pull the eye around. For some reason when sticking this I'd only used their tiles on one side... I suppose I should have thought through the painting when building hey? Next time eh?

The mechanicum symbol classically has the white band on the left and the black on the right with the skull on the right and the metals on the left. For some reason this was inverted in the building kit. Ah well. It took several layers of carefully painted white to build up to a clean colour over the red. The black just required neatness. I didn't do any shades or highlights as I didn't want either colour to end up looking grey or blue or something other than a mechanical ying yang! 

Here's a shot of the building, sorry about the random shadows from my blinds but the light was too strong to take a photo without them!

Here's the admech symbol free side, its a little blander but the extra grey from the interior seems to help a bit. You can also better see here where I've gone over all the red with a drybrush of kindleflame to show up the details.

Here's what is complete so far. The three realm of battle tiles and the repainted forgeworld tile and my two area terrain pieces. I've since repainted the Forgeworld tile as when laid out like this there was a glaring colour match fail. It is now more in line with the other boards. Pics to follow later. I noticed that the building had good orange-brown tones on the roof shadows but in painting I'd obscured the shading near the base and it didn't blend so well with the board, given I knew what I was painting it for I thought I'd better correct it. I just used a spray catching the edge of the building in the oxide red and leather brown colours that make up the board surface. I didn't use bone as I felt this might overcook the effect and draw the eye away from the building.

Here it is with that final spray and also sitting on a board section to show it on the board as it will be in games. Hope you like it!