Category Archives: Wargame Scenery

From the Painting Desk #4 – Gorillas, Elves, Zombies and Scenery

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So with the paint enthusiasm seemingly on the go right now – for another couple of days at least – here’s the stuff I’m working on right now. You’ll notice that those bloody Mantic Ogre Shooters have been temporarily put to the side. The lack of pleasure I was getting from painting them certainly affected my enthusiasm, so I figure a short break from them should help me come back to them somewhat refreshed in a little while. Once those six are finished, I’ll be able to start on the FUN Ogre stuff! Or the Chariots. Those are less fun.

Axis Gorillaz (feat. Damon Albarn)

Anyway, finishing the DUST Zombies recently got the next few boxes of DUST stuff opened – Axis Gorillas! That’s another three boxes disposed of (cleaned up!)

Swordmasters of Hoeth WIP on a temporary regiment base.

My recent games of Kings of War (BetRep to follow sometime in the next week, hopefully-maybe, caused me to start on a unit of Swordmasters of Hoeth, which I guess would be Palace Guard in the KoW Elf army, but is standing in for Twilight Kin Darksome Guard right now. Whatever. They’re Elves! The best part of these (so far) is that they were completely unpainted just a week ago. At the glacial pace I paint, getting to this point is pretty amazing. The basing has set me back 2 or 3 days, since it’s slow, unfun and tedious. (Hi, Cash!)

Basing almost complete. Then crests and boots!

I’m painting them up a little different to other High Elf armies I’ve seen. I’ve had a small collection of unpainted WFB High Elves for 15-18 years, but never had the enthusiasm or a reason to paint them. Ever since The Burning Crusade was released for World of Warcraft, I knew how I wanted to (eventually) paint my High Elves – as Blood Elves rather then the typical White/Blue/Silver with Gold & Red accents most HE armies are painted in. So I’m going Red/Yellow/Gold with Silver and Green accents. It’s giving them a nice autumnal feel, as well as regal & rich – though obviously the colours are highly saturated.

Zombies!

Next up we have some zombies from WarZone, circa the early 1990’s. These would have been purchased during the file sale phase after WarZone 2nd Ed managed to kill our local enthusiasm for the game, and Heartbreaker started to crash and burn. I never actually played Dark Legion, but regardless was willing to pick up a couple of blisters (I’m guessing 2 or 3, since I have 10 figures here?) on closeout. I basecoated the flesh on these about 8(?) months ago when I started assembling my Studion Miniatures IGG KS figures, but like so many projects over the years, (Ogre Shooters!) they got shoved to the side. The initial plan was to use Army Painted dip on them (and the others) but since the DUST Zombies went together just fine and quick using the AP washes, I’m going in that direction with these instead. They have more details and individuality than the DUST figures – and lots more exposed skin, bone and viscera, but I’m still hoping to have them finished in a couple of days. Again, these are more likely to see the tabletop in 40k working alongside Typhus then a WarZone game, but painted is painted, and they can work across several games.

Some DUST Campaigns

Also inspired by wanting to clean stuff up, I decided to unbox these two of my DUST campaign box expansions. Seelowe because of the Character-model Gorilla inside (who you can see above in the background of the Gorilla pic), and Icarus for the Quonset huts, which I figured I could paint reasonably quickly. All of the rest of the contents got shovelled into the DUST Core box set.

Quonset Huts from DUST.

Considering that these have only been out of their box for about 14 hours, (including my sleep overnight) they’re not doing too badly. Hoping to finish them today, and varnish overnight/tomorrow. I might even buy some more, since they’re good looking, cheap and effective!

And that’s it for this quick WIP post. I’ll update again when some of it is finished!

Honoured Imperium

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Space Marine Statue from the Honoured Imperium set. Using Vallejo Game Colour Verdigris.

After asking some guys on Dakka for assistance with putting some 600-pt 40k lists together, CrazyTerran proposed a 750-pt list that had two squads of Tac marines armed with Missile Launchers and Plasma Guns. With this in mind, I started trying to update my unfinished 3rd Edition 40k army from 1998-1999 by bumping my three 7-man squads to 10-man squads – particularly since one of the squads already had a Plasma & Missile combo, and the other two already had Plasma Guns.

Ruined Aquila sets from the Honoured Imperium set. Painted as mid-stone.

While I was looking for bits to build the extra troopers (and a replacement Sergeant for one of the squads) I came across the Honoured Imperium scenery bits I’d picked up about 2 years ago in a box of plastic stuff. Since we’re in the new place now and I can actually do shit, I decided that they looked simple enough to paint, and had potential to look pretty good while also being quick and easy. Despite being distracted by “ooh, shiny”, I managed to get both Aquilas painted in a day, and have been mucking around with the statue for three days doing verdigris in several different ways. I’m going to call it done later today, but I’m still not what I’d call happy with it. I might do something different with the other one, I’m not sure. I didn’t notice the little skulls until later on, so I had to go back and paint them. Just enough to show up, they’re not Undead army character models, after all. I may turn the skull on the second statue into a rock instead.

But anyway, scenery counts as painted models, right?