Are we the baddies?

One of the warbands I rolled up for BOYL has a dark elf champion. Since he gets chaos armour as a reward I needed to find an elf-type figure in heavy armour which was a bit of a struggle. I settled on the rather lovely Evil Knight from Midlam Miniatures. He's slightly too tall which I'm doing my best to get over, a bigger issue was the theatrical raised fist which I resolved by repositioning it slightly, drilling through it and giving him a halbard to hold.

I really enjoyed the opportunity to paint a classic Khorne colour scheme - usually I try to go for generic schemes to give me flexibility but I can't see me using this figure for anything else, as a non-Khorne elf champion (without chaos armour) I can represent with the figure on the left.

I don't think I've put him up on the blog before, I finished him off after BOYL a few years ago but forgot to post about him when I got back. I see dark elves as embittered exiled sea / high elves so he's a standard elf warrior with gloomy, but again generic, colours, and a shield design out of the high elf list in Warhammer Armies.

Let's see how my new Khorne champion fairs tomorrow!

Four human followers of chaos

So I did manage to finish these in time for BOYL... now I have just one champion to complete and I'm ready!

Comparing the Slaves to Darkness and Lost and the Damned followers tables is interesting. For humans the former gives the option of light or heavy armour, a spear or a bow, and a shield. The latter table is "slightly different ... and better reflects the current range of Citadel Miniatures" or, to put another way, better reflects our setting.

Previously when I've generated human followers I've gone with the heavy armour option so I could use my chaos warrior miniatures. I wanted instead to get some bow-armed figures painted to give me more tactical options, as running a very small warband can be a bit dull.

The only humans I have with shields and bows are Khan on the right from the C01 Barbarians range, and a chaos thug which I didn't want to use as he has a near-identical posture. They're a bit of a mixed bag but I think that's fair enough for the collection of followers who might end up in a champion's retinue: the Marauder thug is clearly headed down that path while the two Renaissance archers are probably more recent converts from one of the backgrounds that the Lost and the Damned table provides - brigands or unemployed mercenaries perhaps.

They're very different sizes - the classic Citadel / Marauder figures being much bulker and the Front Rank archer (third from left) noticably skinnier as well as slightly taller. The Foundry (ex-Citadel) archer on the left is really quite tiny, after I first bought these my feeling was that actually they were too small to use but I'm coming around to the odd sizes being natural human variation. He's been modified with a dark ages warrior head to make the historical figures look less orderly, of all of them I think I'm happiest with how he's come out.

Now to try and finish my spare champion...

Three (very slow) chaos dwarf renegades

My first painted figures of the year...

Progress on these has been painfully slow, at times due to low motivation but mainly because life has been really hectic. I look with envy at people who can say "work's been really busy... here's a platoon I've finished", but that's not something I can manage at the moment.

I'm quite pleased with how The Master turned out, and Marik on the right is a nice simple job, but Pulper on the left is a very busy figure that I'm not totally sure about visually. He looks OK in these pictures but from a tabletop distance he's a bit of a mishmash. He's an iconic figure though that I'm glad to have painted, in fact this whole set has been a favourite of mine since admiring the ones my mate Ed owned back in the day.

A minor milestone is that I now have 5 chaos dwarves, which handly is an average roll of 2d4 for the Realm of Chaos followers table. It's also a convenient number for another project I have in mind.

Next stop is some humans for my chaos warband for BOYL in a month's time - I'll need to be a lot quicker painting those than I managed with these dwarves!

Orc- and goblin-tober

Despite my grumbling about Mordheim in my last post the game did give me the motivation to get an orc painted in time for Orctober, as well as a goblin sidekick.

After my pasting last time I decided to try a fresh orc warband, and since armour is reassuringly expensive in the game I went hunting through my collection to find some unarmoured figures to bulk out the group.

As far as I can tell Citadel have never made an unarmoured orc archer so this chap with a crossbow got drafted in. I love the variety in the heads of the C16 orcs, and also their "everyday" quality, so I've pulled a few more to the front of my painting queue to give me more options for reinforcements or more to the point replacements... in true tradition of newly painted figures he didn't survive the battle, and my poor luck with the serious injuries rolls continued meaning he won't be back next time.

I particularly enjoyed painting the goblin, to me this era had just the right balance of sinister charm. I'm going for a brighter skin tone and more colourful clothing with the goblins compared to my orcs, I maybe could have gone with slightly brighter clothing but have erred on the side of caution. It'd be good to get one and or two more of these done as well, but realistically I don't think I'll get around to more for a while and frankly I find the prospect of painting a whole Fantasy Battle unit distinctly offputting. The fact that this chap was undercoated with the aim of going to BOYL '13 gives an idea of just how offputting...

Small, easily attainable warbands are definitely the key selling point of Mordheim to me!

Traders - 40K style

Deadlines are coming thick and fast at the moment, with these chaps being needed for our Exeter Oldhammerers session yesterday. I was able to find a fair bit of painting time last weekend, and just about managed to get them varnished in time for the game.

I've owned these chaps for donkey's years, with the Metal Magic adventurer on the left having got his undercoat probably 25 years ago. Originally the plan was for them to be a 40K version of my Fallout traders - quite a prosperous merchant by the look of it, apparently a rather security-conscious one at that.

The scenario called for him to be an Imperial Governor, which he seemed to work quite nicely for as well. The trouble is, now having a toe in the 40K door, you start to think: he probably ought to have some sort of lackey in robes, and here's this guy with a bit of armour on who I ought to paint up, and so on. A slippery slope.

But next deadline... BOYL... 

SAGA berserkers

My first SAGA unit completed, to go with my warlord from 2½ years ago.

I'm only counting them as 3 towards my total for the year as I made a reasonable start on these in 2016 (undercoat, flesh and a few other bits).

Hopefully progress from here on will be somewhat faster, as I feel I'm starting to get myself better setup for painting in our new house, as well as working out how to set targets that will roughly be met.

One aspect is having at least some of my painting stuff on surface (although that may not always be possible) and painting in small batches, so that rather having to get stuff out and tackle whatever's next to do I can find something smaller or larger that can be done in whatever time's available.

More important though is motivation, which for me seems to come down to short-term, achievable targets, ideally with something concrete such as a game at the end of it. "Paint my vikings this year" simply isn't going to happen, endlessly procrastinated and distracted by other shiny things. "Paint my berserkers for the game in two weeks" might just about happen - although the chaps might have to go into battle without their shields.

And polishing off the last little bits generally does get done, as the finished model is where the payoff is for me.

A chaotic milestone

No one would ever call a chaos force balanced, but one of their distinct weaknesses is a vulnerability to missiles and especially war machines. Hence I thought it wise to invest in these guys -

 And yes I'm calling that 3 figures on my tally for the year, via the Predator Rule. 

They did me proud in a game last Thursday, when one of their two hits for the evening, helped by some failed rout and panic tests, reduced the Brettonian left flank to this -

The sight of an uncrewed cannon - warms my twisted and corrupted heart

I'm also rather pleased (after a little less than 5 years!) to have hit the milestone of 1000 points of painted chaos -

Still lots more to do - I'd like to be able to field a reasonable number of points without my beloved chaos warriors, and I've some rather nice figures in my queue which I'd like to get painted, but before that I'm probably going on a little diversion...

Still painting slowly

The less said about last year the better (12 figures painted in the year) and so far it seems I'm still on the one-a-month level... I'm a bit scared to start a new countdown to this year's BOYL, or set any kind of target for that matter, but I'm hoping the output improves somewhat.

I got this chap as part of a lot and he had gone straight into my spares box, but given the time pressure (he had to be ready for last week's game) I couldn't turn down the saving of having a standard ready-built rather than my previous conversion plan.

On the plus side I think I'm getting towards a basing scheme for my chaos types, inspired by Whiskey Priest's orks and the cover of the first Citadel Compendium. It still needs some work but given that I've been all over the place on bases up to now it's nice to have a firm plan in mind.

I'm not so pleased with how the banner turned out - the design is taken from the detail of an Ian Miller drawing, but whereas his looks like some mad alien thing mine's more like an angry bloke with big hair. Ah well, a problem for another day - I'm calling him done!

Orctober 59th

Blimey he's late.

After a long hiatus from painting I nearly managed to get my brushes unpacked when Orctober rolled around, and then I at least started him with a view to getting him ready for a rather fun Realm of Chaos warbands game last week.

It's OK - the giant's been graviton gunned. Got to love RoC

But that didn't happen, so one of my old armoured orcs stepped up to lead my warband instead.

I'm quite pleased with how he turned out - I've emphasised his orc-iness as his day job will be as part of my elite unit in my orc army, which meant among other things the green shield. He's maybe a bit too muted as a result, although I think the belly plate stands out nicely because of that.

Hopefully I'm now back into painting, there seems to be a bit of an Oldhammer community here in the Exeter area so that should be a bit of a motivator. If the rest of the year stops being quite so hectic.

Edit: I should have mentioned that the figure is Gorkus the Exhile from the Pantheon of Chaos Kickstarter (Knightmare Games).

A single dwarf

Even I can manage to get that painted...

Kimril is another of those figures I've owned for an awfully long time, and only just got around to painting. I'm pleased in a way - he's looking a lot better than he would have done if I'd painted him in my youth, although still far short of the standard of a lot of stuff in the Oldhammer scene.

There's a bring-a-giant-slayer spot on what it seems will be one of the fabulously decorated tables at BOYL, where hopefully he'll get a run-out and come to a suitably glorious end.

I'm really looking forward now to getting some paint on some other dwarves, which after all was one of my first objectives when I got back into the hobby, but currently it looks as though they're about fourth in the queue. So next year probably...

Beastmaster complete, challenge failed

2 weeks until BOYL '17, 24 figures still to paint. Perhaps time to admit defeat?

My beastmaster is complete -

He's an Alternative Armies Dogman Elite, so arguably not proper Oldhammer, but then his hounds aren't very Oldhammer either. Apart from his mohican I was aiming for "ordinary" - his hounds should be the interesting part of his unit - and I think he's turned out quite well.

Unfortunately that's going to be the only unit of the warband that I finish before BOYL. While I'm sure there are some who would make good use of the remaining two and a bit weeks to churn out another unit or two, given that we move house on the Friday of BOYL there won't be much miniature painting in my near future!

I'm not sure what I'll be aiming to paint after BOYL, it probably depends what the wargaming options are in my new part of the world. I'm keen to carry on with my plans for this warband, but it might be one more project that ends up on the shelf...

Modern-ish chaos hounds

9 weeks until BOYL '17, 25 figures still to paint

My painting has slightly fallen off a cliff for the last couple of months due to the pressures of real life. I'm starting to have to face up to not meeting this challenge, but I'll get a few more churned out at least!

I had a bit of a hunt around for chaos hounds when I decided to add some to my warband. Naturally my first thought was of the classic chaos hounds, which have been nicely showcased on vonkortez's blog, but not having been a chaos player back in the day I'm not emotionally attached to them and by modern standards they're a bit on the small side.

As an alternative the hellhounds from Heresy Miniatures looked rather nice and I was on the verge of ordering some of them when a batch of 1999 chaos hounds came up on eBay.

I'm mostly pretty pleased with how these came out, especially the scorpion tailed one, where for once the colours I ended up with were about what I had in my mind's eye. The green and grey one isn't quite as planned, but I'm still fairly happy with it.

The colour schemes are meant to reflect a creature being formed without quite understanding how actual creatures work, and for the same reason I've gone for blue on the fleshy parts. They still need basing (as with the rest of the force) and a handler - coming soon!

But at least that's a further 69 points with paint on.

Pigfaced Tom from Pantheon of Chaos

19 weeks until BOYL '17, 27 figures still to paint

My miniatures from the Pantheon of Chaos Kickstarter arrived last week and since I have a couple of them in mind for my BOYL warband I thought I'd get to work on the first of them.

Tom is a bit on the short side compared to the others, and compared to the other beastmen I've painted recently, but still fits in nicely with the group. There's some lovely detail on him as well, perhaps too much and it amused me that my interpretation of his various lumps and bumps differed slightly from the painted version over on the Knightmare Games website.

In fact those images helped me make sense of the miniature, although once undercoated the detail made a lot more sense.

He's clearly intended to be carrying a shield but I didn't want to hide the figure away behind a board, so instead I see him as ready to take his axe in both hands and start hewing.

I really must tackle my basing scheme at some point, I'm putting that off for now and so storing up a big job for later...

Ulfhdhnar, you shall go to the BOYL

21 weeks until BOYL '17, 29 figures still to paint

Having first undercoated this chap aiming to take him to BOYL '13, and then having him queued up to be the last figure I painted in January I'm sort of pleased to have him as the first figure completed for March. But a bit concerned about that lost month and the way my schedule is stacking up!

I'm also only sort of pleased with how he turned out: overall happy with him and I think the limited colour palette worked quite well, but the colours aren't quite what I had planned. The gloves were intended to be paler and the armour brighter - I still need to get the hang of the visual outcome of shading. But good enough for the table, and almost certainly better than if I'd painted him four years ago.

Beastmen across the eras

26 weeks until BOYL '17, 30 figures still to paint

I tried quite hard to resist eBay as a source of beastmen, and have hopefully found enough currently-available models from a variety of manufacturers to make up over half my unit. But I had to conclude that my tastes have been heavily influenced by Games Workshop beastmen, and that even some of their more modern ones are actually rather good.

With my broo from the beginning of the month I'm covering quite a range of years, from Citadel's very earliest up to a plastic(!) figure which I understand kids these days would call an ungor. One of the challenges I face with assembling this group is scale creep over the years balanced against a very valid question of just how uniform should a bunch of mutants be? In the end it comes down to a matter of my probably odd and definitely arbitrary taste, but for me the larger contemporaries of the ungor (gors?) are too bulky whereas the pestigor in the middle is a wonderfully mutated model and, while big, in keeping generally with his companions.

I might have to revisit all of this when I get the remaining models I'm currently planning on using in my hands, and see how they sit together in practice.

I'm going for a generic chaos warband rather than this new-fangled Realm of Chaos notion of power-specific forces and so far am enjoying mixing and matching the colour scheme. I don't really have a theme other than "drab with highlights" - for the cow-beastman I was going for a two-tone look and am happy with how he turned out, except for the design on his shield which I feel is a bit clumsy. The pox-ridden chap I deliberately gave an un-Nurgle highlight colour, and the ungor (whose scheme is lifted from one of the beastmen in Bryan Ansell's Warhammer Armies force) I again wanted to give a suitably contrasting shield. I'm quite please with how that came out as well - I'm just hoping this plan keeps working as the unit gets larger.

I need to speed up a bit as well...!

1.3% of a Snickit challenge

30 weeks until BOYL '17, 33 figures still to paint

I was aiming to have a few more figures painted over my Christmas break but it's good to at least get my "Broo with Sword and Shield" into the completed column. Or even the needs-basing-and-varnishing column.

I'm pretty pleased with how he's turned out, or at least I was until the photographs showed up some problems. I'm a bit concerned about the amount of time I spent on him though - I seem to spend disproportionate amount of time faffing over relatively minor parts of the model and reworking areas. I'm hoping that'll improve with practise, it will need to if I'm going to get anywhere near completing the challenge.

And he certainly looks a lot better than he did the last time he had paint on, many years ago.

Two weeks' productive painting

BOYL was good for enthusiasm but it was the deadline imposed by last Friday's game that got me actually painting. Figuring I needed six more orcs for my 1000 point force I eventually scaled my ambition back to these four chaps, and made do with a few more that really are due for the stripping jar.

It's hard to know what different people rate as productive output, but this is about my limit for two weeks, and with the motivation of a proper deadline and a bank holiday weekend in there as well. As a result some of the spinning plates of my life are left looking distinctly wobbly, so in conclusion a figure a week is probably my best-case steady output. It's a useful corrective to bear in mind when contemplating Snickit's recent painting challenge.

That said what I'd really like to do is some dwarves for that (about 50 figures) plus finish off my orcs (2 or 3) plus 1000 points of chaos (about another 20 figures) and still make progress on my SAGA vikings. Maybe not going to happen...

Still, at least in the meantime I now have a more respectably sized unit of savage orcs than I had previously. Need work on the bases and tattoos yet though.

First finished figure of the year

Arguably one of my first truly finished figures since I took up this hobby again - he's properly based, varnished and everything...!

It might seem from that that I'm on for an even worse "painted" count than last year, but I've been putting bits and pieces of colour on several of his warband as well, so things are progressing.

In last night's game of SAGA for the first time ever my warlord didn't die, so maybe I'm slightly getting my head around how to play - although the winning warlord is now feasting in Valhalla along with his entire warband, so maybe not!

Next week it looks like I'm going to get a chance to try out Dragon Rampant, so the focus might switch back to orcs for a bit.

Do you have a flag?

My main orc warriors unit does, finally.

I must admit to a fair amount of procrastination for this one - adding the replacement arm was a bit daunting, not to mention the banner itself.

The banner is arguably slightly over the top size-wise, but I blame my younger self for that. We never really paid much attention to standards when we were playing 2nd edition, but when 3rd came out they seemed to be given much more prominence, and army standards were introduced as well, so obviously enormous banners were called for. I found the template for my original at my parents' house a few months back, so felt compelled to reproduce it. I must say it came out rather better second time around, not least thanks to Nico's excellent tutorial.

The banner is newspaper soaked in watered down PVA and allowed to dry before painting - although it still sags alarmingly while being painted it eventually mostly flattens out - if anything I feel it could do with being a bit more wavy.

The one part of the process which really didn't work for me was trying to make the standard pole - hence the use of actual twigs, which have the additional advantage of coming pre-painted! The twig is slightly on the chunky side, but I do like the idea that he's carrying around most of a tree with a battered flag attached...

Figures painted for year to date: 6

A smidgen of savages

My hobby time rather plunged off a cliff in the last four months of the year, with the result that of my target of 50 or so miniatures to paint since early September I've managed only a handful of savage orcs and a shaman.

A handful of savage orcs

I tried to keep their colour scheme to pale clothing (where worn at all) and light wood colours. Along with the blue war paint I'm hoping that they'll stand out from the drabber normal orcs on the table, without themselves being garish.



I'd ideally add some more war paint at some point (I rather like what Thantsants did with his), and devices for their shields, and also give them a matt varnish to knock back the gloss finish that their skin has ended up with. For now though I need to consider them table-ready and move on to other things.

I also want to considerably add to their numbers - while a small group has some tactical value as a slayer-type unit, really I'd like to be fielding a tribal contingent of probably 40+ of them. Not any time soon though!

Mostly still not painted