Realm of Chaos – Nurgle’s Children 2019 #16: Plague Toads (again) (Forge World)

January 18, 2019 by Azazel

Today – Miniatures! Here’s the final three of my Plague Toads. This trio bringing me to nine painted ones. This batch being the “yellow” ones, following on from the “brown” ones and the “green” ones. And yeah, I know I need to do a new Nurgle army shot sometime soon.

Individual glamour shots of each of the three, though I skipped the profile and rear shots this time. Perhaps I went a bit conservative on the “glow” from their yellow-green eyes this time as well, but I think they still stand up decently.

You can see what I mean about it it here. It’s there, but it’s subtle. Perhaps too subtle to stand out on the tabletop.

Ah well. I’m just happy to finally have the last* of these done finally!

The nine of them, with their colour coding can be used as three distinct units of three, or they can all be put together to make up a mega-sized unit of nine Plague Toads!

*of course, I didn’t say anything about Pox Riders!

Realm of Chaos – Be’Lakor the Dark Master: The First Daemon Prince – Diabolical December ’18

December 30, 2018 by Azazel

Finally, Be’Lakor, the Dark Master is complete. I originally started this figure just over three years ago, as part of the original Painting December, which was a personal challenge that became the genesis for our monthly painting challenges. It’s been a rather epic battle to get up the motivation to complete him, due to all the tons of little fiddly bits, and basically, negative inertia towards the model. This is why the challenges exist. To motivate me to get models like this one completed. I based him on the rolled-edge 50mm round base, as a regular 60mm base seemed much too large, while the regular 50mm base seemed a bit.. I dunno. Boring? I didn’t have any official GW 50mm bases at the time (that I could find), so I only had those alternative ones that are a mm or two shorter. I also mounted him up on some cork to increase his height and make him look a little more imposing.

His colour scheme is different to the “official” GW one. It was inspired by a google search I did when trying to figure out how to paint him. It may have been inspired by Noridicus‘ paint scheme, over at Heresy-Online, but given that he talks about how he’s also seen this sort of scheme used, it might have been one of the models that inspired him that also inspired me. I dunno. I know that Nordicus’ model looks great, and I think my rendition also looks pretty good as well.

Finally, I thought a scale shot would be in order, as without it many of these larger models seem to be much smaller than they actually are – so here he is alongside those two bastions of model scale, a Space Marine and a Primaris Space Marine! So, in the end it took three years to get him painted. I’m not sure that it’s been worth the wait, but I’m very definitely happy to have gotten him completed finally!

…now there’s one model left from that original Painting December trio. The Marauder Giant, an otherwise wonderful model with a stupid patchwork tunic. There’s no way he’ll be completed for Dauntess/Diabolical December, but perhaps as a centrepiece model for January?

Realm of Chaos – Nurgle’s Children 2018 #15: WarZone 1st Edition Dark Legion Undead Legionnaires (as Poxwalkers): TG9511PB & TG9505PB (Unit-Ed October ’18) (Zom’tober?)

October 30, 2018 by Azazel

Yeah, another bloody mouthful of a post title. Maybe the worst yet. Still, there’s a lot of crossover with the content of this post.

Firstly, the models themselves. They’re 7 of the 8 models from the two old-school WarZone blisters, TG9505PB: Warzone Dark Legion Undead Legionnaires and TG9511PB: Warzone Dark Legion Undead Legionnaires. Clicking those links will take you to Prince August’s site where both are still available from original stock after all these years. Pretty good sci-fi zombies, to be quite honest. Old-school WarZone collectors often get in contact with me and ask if I have anything to sell so I like to point out when the figures on show are still available where possible. (If I ever do sell any, I’ll post them up here – I promise!)

The missing eighth of the models was actually painted a few years ago. Now, I haven’t played WarZone for many, many years at this point – but some of the models were real crackers (some were awful as well, no argument there!) These sci-fi zombies with guns were always pretty cool looking, but I never really had much of a use for them. Still, I did a bunch of Blessed Legionnaires when I gave the Nurgle Cult army a first-go-round back in 2015 or so. Need to rebase that Spawn of Demnogonis as well onto a proper 32mm base.

Obviously, this lot fits in with my own monthly challenge – that of Unit-Ed October. Because it’s a unit of models. A unit of 7 in fact – Nurgle’s (un)holy number! Coincidence, yes – but a fitting one. Paint scheme-wise, I painted 6 of them in the same Auscam as the main elements of my Imperial Guard force – the 11th Terror Australis Regiment. The 7th has his carapace armour painted in greys in a nod to his Warzone Bauhaus roots.

And finally, I found out via Rantingsfromunder’s blog that there’s a thing called Zom’tober in the minis blogging community – though it’s one of those Blgospot ones, and we know that WordPress and Blogspot are a pain in the arse when it comes to getting on with one another. Unfortunately, it seems that Zom’tober has some pretty specific rules about completion that rule me out participating …pretty much ever.

To take part you just need to paint one Zombie or Survivor (or more!) each week, in any scale you like, posting it to your blog by that week’s Sunday (we use Sunday’s as the end of each Zomtober week). So that means posting one or more newly painted Zombie or Survivor minis each week on or before the 7th, 14th, 21st and 28th this year.

Doesn’t really work for me. I finished 4 of these suckers at once 2 weekends ago, and then the final three last weekend – with the blood effects across all of them applied yesterday evening in two sittings. I mean, they’re zombies! Are there any other figures that lend themselves so well to batch painting?

So while they don’t exactly fit into the Nurgle Daemons army, I’m sure that nobody reasonable would complain about a bunch of poxwalkers thrown in there as well. I’ll have to figure out where I’ve stashed the Blessed Legionnaires and that other zombie and pool the lot of them together for the next time I do an “army in progress” type shot for the Nurglites.

Oh. And after taking the above photos, I found the 8th model. While he’s fully painted, he does need a bit of touch-up to get him to the point where he’ll nicely fit in with the rest of his cohort here. I might attempt to get him done before the month ends, so I can bump my monthly total up that little bit more towards the 31 I want to have done…

Edit – Got that last one touched up, retook three of the photos tonight (following night to original post) and replaced the original pics of three with the four.

Reaper 14207: Traeg, Reven Hero/Beastman Champion (Neglected Model September ’18)

September 27, 2018 by Azazel

Hey! A Reaper Miniature that’s actually not a Bones model!

This model is a long-neglected one with a story behind it. Sometime in the mid-noughties, the main independent games store in the Melbourne CBD (Mind Games) was having a painting competition involving Reaper models as a sort of promotion, apparently involving Reaper Miniatures themselves. I was a regular back then, and so I decided to join in. I looked amongst the offerings, and found this guy. So I bought him and took him home. I didn’t like the shitty square, lipped base that he came on, and decided to rebase him on a larger base, and as I’d “envisioned” the leaping-over-rock pose from the moment I saw the model, and a 25mm round just wasn’t large enough, or have enough gravitas.

So the next time I was in, a few days later, or possibly the following week, the sales attendant who I was on good terms with asked how it was going. I told him I’d started it and it was coming along, and that I’d changed up the base. He told me that the base thing would prevent me from entering and pointed to the part of the sign that for some reason specified that the figure needed to be based on the base it came on. I don’t remember my reply (it wasn’t rude, I’d have remembered that much).

So the next time I was in, he asked me about how the model was going again, and I told him that I’d lost interest because of the basing thing and wasn’t working on it anymore. He then told me that the base woundn’t matter, and encouraged me to finish it anyway to enter it, but the thing was, by that point, my enthusiasm had been completely deflated and the figure sat for over a decade, every so often I’d think about wanting to try to finish it, but basically, fuck-all had been done on it since.

And that brings us to now. This figure has sat in the tubs of stuff I’ve wanted to finish for at least a year now, but my recent run of working on Beastmen, along with this being a Neglected Model month was enough to finally get me to properly work on finishing this model off, though it was still something I had to force myself to do for the entire process – and it involved a hell of a lot of the work, as I hadn’t gotten a huge amount of it finished before the comment about basing that put me off completing the model.

Anyway, as you can see, he fits in reasonably well with the Citadel goat-headed Beastman Gors, despite quite a few colour choices that separate him (skin, fur, loincloth, shield). As I said, though – I was building on what was originally done in 2005 or thereabouts while trying to finally finish this bastard rather than going for a complete repaint (because then I’d never get the fucking thing completed). The armour was originally black where it’s now a blued silver, so I was probably going for a Khorne-theme back then rather than generic. Bloody typical!

Oh! And he’s now available in Bones!

This guy concludes my little Beastman/Beasts of Chaos tangent for this month, unless something amazingly unexpected happens in the next three days.

Realm of Chaos – Slaves to Darkness Beastmen VII: Slaangor (Neglected Model September ’18)

September 26, 2018 by Azazel

I’ve completed a few more of the old Realm of Chaos Beastmen that have been hidden away, part painted in figure cases for years or decades. This trio feature a pair of duplicate sculpts, both with broken weapons, both repaired in different ways at different points in time, and a variation on the same sculpt. These three of course are Slaangor – that is, beastmen dedicated to the Lord of Pleasure, Slaanesh.

The two on the ends needed their weapons repaired. The original weapon was a mace shaped into the rune of Slaanesh, as you can see on the beastman on our right. I attempted to repair it into it’s original form by making a replacement using another model with the same weapon to create a simple mold with Oyumaru and then greenstuff (kneadatite) for the part – then pinning it onto the stub. It turned out nicely on the front half, and rough as hell on the rear. I did this a couple of years ago. For the other model, I did it a few days ago using the pick end from a Chaos Marauder and simply pinning it onto the end of the broken mace, in order to differentiate the two models a little more.

All three were incredibly garish when I got them out of the case. Here’s an example of some of the flaws I used to make in terms of composition years ago. As you can see, I could still freehand just fine, but I apparently thought that there was a need to use all of the colours on way too many models. Speaking of freehand, please enjoy the four photos of this model, showing off some of its many tattoos. There’s also a rose you can’t see on the upper inner left thigh, as it’s now covered by the shield.

I think the updated and completed version is a pretty solid improvement over the overly-garish (unfinished) attempt from years ago, while keeping the best elements of the original paintwork…

Here the three are alongside the other Slaangor that I painted awhile back. It’s on a larger base because I decided that it was a Champion of Slaanesh. You’ll note that all three sculpts share the same base. Keep this in mind next time you see someone bitching that GW’s new digital sculpts reuse elements.

Once again, these are Jes Goodwin sculpts, though these aren’t amongst the strongest of his work. As with many of the figures of the day, they’re not particularly dynamic, and these ones are also particularly “flat” sculpts.

Realm of Chaos – Slaves to Darkness Beastmen VI: Dog-faced Khorngor III (Neglected Model September ’18)

September 23, 2018 by Azazel

Okay, so only one of this pair is actually dog-faced, and both seem kind of generic in the sense that one of them looks very Werewolf – though human sized rather than the Ogre-sized Werewolf that seems to have taken off in the past few years of Miniature Gaming. That figure in fact is the brother figure to Wilhelm Chaney, the original 2nd Edition Bloodbowl Werewolf (bottom of the linked page). As such, the model could easily be used as a Werewolf if needed for something, albeit one armed with sword and board.

The second one of this pair of early Khorngor could just as easily be used as a Slaangor, at least for us Oldhammerers, due to the bovine head that could tie nicely in with the original Keeper of Secrets.

The reason I went with Khorngor for this pair – at least for the title of this blog post is because when I looked them up in Slaves to Darkness, they’re both pictured in the “Khorne” section as Khorngor. I’ve kept the paint suggestive but generic, so they can easily fit in with a “proper” Khorne unit, but also just as easily be used as unaligned Beastmen. Similarly, I’ve used Chaos Marauder shields on them, both because I think they work with the models and poses of this pair, and because I didn’t intend to freehand any rules of Khorne et al onto them.

Like the others I’ve completed recently, these are Jes Goodwin sculpts, and the quality shows through even today. Such a shame he’s no longer sculpting…

Realm of Chaos – Slaves to Darkness Beastmen V: Dog-faced Khorngor II (Neglected Model September ’18)

September 15, 2018 by Azazel

What’s the hot new thing for all the hip players out there? Beasts of Chaos? Beastmen? Well, time for me to be topical for a change (no, not like that lotion…)

Which brings us to the first of this month’s neglected models – a pair of my old Khorngor Beastmen from the Realm of Chaos era. The armoured one of the two is the only one of these that I have, while the second, less armoured model here is one of three of the same sculpt duplicated in my collection.

Like the pair that I just linked, this pair were again part of my nascent Imperial Guard in days gone by (aka, the original Rogue Trader era), but were kept when I sadly sold off my original Guard force and stripped – only to have started repainting in… well, fuck knows when. But it was when I was still giving my fantasy models square bases, and even using green flock. So quite awhile ago. All I really did was base them and basecoat the fur on the one, and that plus adding some bright red armour with horrible bright yellow trim on the other. So basically, these two were the opposite of something like the Warzone guy I shared the other day where it was mostly touch-ups – this pair was pretty much done from (almost) scratch. Such are the variations within the category of Neglected Models.

One thing I am particularly happy with is the freehanding on the shields, especially the red one. I originally worked up some Chaos Marauder shields, but then checked out what I’d given previous Khorngor and so went with the freehand route instead. I’ve got a couple others coming up who I’ll probably give those sculpted shields to, though. When I finish them. Interestingly, it seems that the upcoming Battletome for Beasts of Chaos features rules to Mark our Beastmen once again, so proper Khorngor (and the others) will be a thing on the tabletop again.

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Painting, Modelling, Miniatures, 1:6, Games… Whatever else I find interesting.

Category Archives: Realm of Chaos