Tag Archives: KoW

D&D Monster Manual 3 : Treeman/Treant – aka Reaper Bones 77184: Spirit of the Forest – Speedpaint!

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So I’ve been browsing over at The One Ring forum again lately, and one of the cool things the community over there does is have a monthly little painting competition for LotR models. The January theme was “Monsters” but, you know, January is over – but I found the Feb theme of a unit of models to be a little off-putting (I’m better with individuals, generally – and especially with start-to-finish stuff). Then yesterday afternoon, a thought hit me – grab out an appropriate monster of some sort from the pile of unpainted Reaper Bones figures I have from the Kickstarter, and speedpaint it as a personal challenge. I knew that it wouldn’t be winning the TOR comp, but if I managed to finish it, I’d have a pretty cool prize anyway – a decently tabletop standard finished model for wargaming – KoW being the current hotness (even though I have a couple of completed Ents anyway.)

So I took a look through, disregarded several dragons since it was already 6pm on the 30th of Jan and heat-straightening dragons wasn’t something I felt like doing, and eventually found this guy – Good enough for an Ent or Huorn!

My "Proof" pic for TOR.

Basecoating with Citadel Mournfang Brown Base.

Glued Down.

It turned out to not be a fun easy mini to paint, but pretty horrible, with ill-defined “what the hell is that supposed to be?” “details” all over it. It’s not going to win any prizes – over on TOR or anywhere else, but I was at least on track at the end of the first night for a half-decent tabletop model by the end bell.

Paint finished. Just needing the base and foliage.

I considered OSL for the eyes, but decided against it. I wanted to keep it a little more subtle for this model. I went with green Entish eyes over red Huornish ones.

Finished!

Here we go. I’m just happy I managed to get this guy done in about 28 hours from baggie to finished – and most of that being drying time from washes, inks, glue and varnish. Thanks to this comp, I now have another model for the table, and since I can be as slow as all hell to paint, this is a very good thing.

In the end I ended up going over a lot of the sculpted (and painted) details, since these details were so soft and often ill-defined. Things like the inner-joint areas of the model just being putty that was dotted for “detail”. I’ll take the static grass look instead!

Fisty!

Baby Got Back???

No more photos Left! Geddit? Left! /sigh

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!