The day before Dogs Breakfast

Tomorrow is Dogs Breakfast, and I almost reached my goal. Almost.

Slaves are finished. Clanrats are painted to a bare tabletop standard. Giant Rats are painted. Doomwheel is also painted to a bare minimum.

Nine Globadiers have been converted but are unpainted. Five Jezzails are unpainted also. At least these have base coats on them. The new plastic Screaming Bell hasn’t been released yet, and I have had to temporarily glue my old metal bell together. Bare metal. Shocking.

I’m going to go out on a limb here, but I don’t think I’ll get best painted army.

Feel the heat

A quick post today, I am wiped. 39 degree heat, and almost eight hours of solid modelling and painting. Not to mention roughly the same regime yesterday.

I picked up the new plastic Doomwheel yesterday. When I have some time I might do a little model review on it. It is a good piece, and I am quite happy with how it looks.

The other side, and after basing.

This is where it is at as of today. These are all base colours, and tomorrow I’ll do a Bedab Black wash when I get home from work. This should do for Dogs Breakfast on Saturday. After that I can do all the proper highlighting and what have you.

Same goes for the Clanrats. Just need a Bedab Black and Devlan Mud wash and should be very rough tabletop ready.

Got all the converting done on the Glabadiers. This took quite a while, but I think they have come out well. The one with the sword is my Bombadier. Unfortunately I don’t think I’ll have them painted at all for the tournament. Shame.

The Twlight Host

It has been a while since I breached the subject of the UnderDark Campaign. With good reason, really.

Things haven’t been doing so well. In the last couple of turns the Dark Host has taken a pasting from the Chosen, while the Surface Warlords became the punching bag of the Syndicate. With Darkpit, the Dark Hosts base, taken and the Surface Warlords losing all their warrens, it looked dire. So dire in fact that members of both factions decided to do something drastic and merge the two flagging entities. And thus was born The Twlight Host.

While I was against the idea, and still am, it has bore some interesting fruit. I now have a bunch of like-minded individuals on my side. True they are pathetic surface-things, but still, you take allies where you can. The aim now is to, well, not die a horrible, horrible death.

Wailing and whips

Somehow I managed to finish off the slaves today. I also gave 15 of the 30 Clanrats a base coat. Then I ran out of spray. Aaargh!!!

It is quickly becoming one of those weeks, and the week hasn’t even started yet. Our landlord called up, and our place is going on the market in two weeks. Right in time for Christmas. Thanks a lot, jackarse.

We have decided to bite the bullet and actually purchase a house. Of course, such a large expenditure coincides with me wanting to buy some new skaven stuff. Fantastic. Absolutely fantastic. Things just keep getting better.

Back to back

This morning I made shoulder guards from some of the Clanrats using the smaller ornamental shields on the Bretonnian Knight of the Realm sprues. I cut the pointed half off of the shield and used the knife to make dents, gouges and nicks in the armour.

I also put together this quick unit filler. To be honest, I have no idea what is happening in this little diorama. It’s like some weird back-to-back last stand. Highly unlikely!

While the unit filler was drying I based all the Clanrats. In the time it took me to do then the unit filler had dried enough that I could base it too. To finish off the days work I did a Khemri Brown layer on the slaves, as well as a Goblin Green layer.

I will base coat the Clanrats tomorrow, though I do think I need to pick up some more black spray. I also need to fill in the joins on the Clanrat unit filler. At some point I will have to put together an army list and see how much of 2500 points I can field. This tournament should be interesting.

Greenstuff. Isn’t that warpstone?

All engines are on full throttle.

In the last couple of days I have been hard at work on my skaven. First task was to base the remaining slaves and get them undercoated for painting. So that is 44 actual models to make a 50 strong Skavenslave regiment. Or, more likely, two 20 plus ones.

Second was solving my problem with the Plague Monk standard falling over. A quick rummage through my bits box yielded this old lead shield. I filed off the attached arm, drilled holes in the shield and Plague Monk, and pinned it in place. This seems to be doing the job of keeping the model on its feet.

This was followed by a quick basing, and when that was dry, an undercoat.

After a lot of considering my timeframe and bank balance, I decided to start converting some of the unused Plague Monk bodies into Clanrats. The plan is to initially do 30 and see how that goes. I have roughly another 20 spare bodies around the place, though I’m hoping to pick up a couple of boxes of the new Clanrats that come out in a matter of days.

So above we have 21 of the Plague Monk bodies, with a monster base included for the unit filler.

This is the front rank, with standard bearer, champion and musician. For the command models I am using Packmaster bodies, as these have armour plates on them. While putting shields onto most of the rank-and-file will make them look more like Clanrats, I needed to armour them up some more to make sure the point got across.

To do this I rustled up as many armoured heads as I could. The older skaven heads don’t fit neatly onto the Plague Monk bodies as is, so I cut the join ‘bulge’ off of the head. With this gone they seemed to fit fairly snuggly. Arms still have to be added to the rank models.

With a closer shot of the command models. The drum and arms come from the Empire Halberdiers box. The champions arms come from the Empire Militia box. I also used the skaven banner from the older plastic Clanrat box.

While the armoured head, coupled with the eventual inclusion of shields, might have been enough, I wasn’t convinced. Biting the bullet, I broke out the Greenstuff I bought recently and had a go at sculpting armour for the Clanrats. Mostly I took this route, filling the robes opening with Greenstuff and sculpting chainmail. Though on some I modelled plates instead.

I have never used Greenstuff before, and I am glad I started with something smaller and not as prominent on the model. It gave me a chance to become familiar with the qualities of Greenstuff. I doubt have even begun to grasp the use of this material, so my education of the hobby continues.

Inherit

Today is the start of inheritance.

After much time, my spies have returned with a magnificent prize. I almost wept for joy as it was passed to me by the bemused postal worker. So far I have read most of it, but I don’t think I have digested it all. Give me a couple of days and I’ll post up my thoughts on the new army book.

That is not all I did today, though! I did some calculations and figured I am going to need some more slaves. So I dragged out some old zombies, as well as started to build some unit fillers. This should bring me up to 46 slaves. I’m going to have to dig around a bit and rustle up 14 more, to make it an even 60. Or three units of 20.

I am particularly pleased with how this unit filler is working out.

This other cardboard box is the ensuite

Wow. I mean, wow. It has been a hectic couple of days. I meant to update days ago with Plague Monk progress, but something came up that drew my attention.

The local paper arrived the other day, and opening to the Real Estate section yielded a picture of where I currently live. Apparently for sale. Hmm, surely I would have heard about this prior to its submission to the paper. A call to the land lord later and the mess is cleared up, sort of. It isn’t supposed to be in the paper, they aren’t selling the property. Yet. They might. Or might not. They aren’t sure.

At least we haven’t been forced to live in a cardboard box quite yet!

Onto the Warhammer.

These are from a couple of days ago. Mithril Silver has been applied to all the metallic areas, save for the welders face plate. Shortly after taking this picture I applied a Devlan Mud was to all skin areas, and a Bedab Black wash to all the other areas.

Today I finished them off. Dheneb Stone was applied to the robes and a drybrush of Vermin Fur was done on any fur. Flesh Wash was used to create rust stains on the metal. Elf Flesh was used to highlight the skin. I then did another Bedab Black wash over the robes, using Dheneb Stone to highlight when it was dry. The hoods were highlighted with Rotting Flesh, and I used Emerald Green and Amethyst Purple on the warpstone and cabling.

A closer look at how the paint scheme was achieved. I still have the standard bearer to do, but he is a bit off balance still. I have to find a way to weight the rear of his base a bit more so he doesn’t go head first into the ground.

And this is the Plague Monks/Mechanics unit filler, the ‘welder’.

Now I have thirty-two slaves to paint. I signed up for Dogs Breakfast, a tournament in a couple of weeks. I would like to take my skaven, but I’ll have to see what kind of a list I can build in the new book with the guys I have. If all else fails, I’ll break out the Bretonnians!

M to the O to the N to the K

Another day slaving over the Plague Monks/Mechanics. I got all the Rotting Flesh areas on, as well as painted over any colours that had gone over the black. I also got part of the way into applying the Elf Flesh layers before I ran out of time and daylight.

I’m happy with how this is coming along. If anything, I can notice how my paint application skills have started to improve. Hardly any of the base colours are blotch or streaking, something which I often have a bit of trouble with. Mostly because I didn’t have the patience to wait for them to dry and do another layer. Now, I am the Zen Master of painting. Or in the very least, the Zen Work Experience Kid.

Last night I got an email about Dogs Breakfast, a tournament that happens once a year in these parts. It is scheduled to happen shortly after the new skaven army book release, so I am considering attending with my new skaven army. Of course, that means actually getting my skaven army up to 2500 points or so in less than a month. Should be interesting.

Do not let these guys fix your car

This whole Xbox being broken thing is bearing some unexpected fruits. Obviously I usually fritter away countless hours blasting at zombies, soldiers and whatever else game developers decide to throw at me. These have been recaptured and turned into painting!

I started work on the Plague Monks/Mechanics this weekend. The Bestial Brown layer had been applied, as well as the Khemri Brown coat to all the lower robe areas. It actually took quite a few hours just to do these two colours, largely because they represented 75%-90% of the models area.

As well as doing this I have also been editing some of the next Skavenblight Gazettes content. It all seems to be coming together in some fashion, though the real test is going to be after the new book is released. That is why I am trying to punch through the few articles we have already had submitted, just so their isn’t going to be such a large backlog of stuff.