Tag Archives: KoW

Mantic Ogre Shooters in WIP-form. Batch two.

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I had a form of “painter’s block” for awhile – partly because work has been incredibly full-on for the past …3? months and just increasing, and partly because painting the Mantic Ogre Shooters was such an un-fun experience that I really haven’t been incredibly keen on revisiting it.

Same colour scheme and steps as last time, with the slight difference of going with muted red tabards this time. If I do a third set, I’ll either go green, blue-and-white, red-and-white, or most likely, blue-and-red. 

Here’s the second unit of Crossbowmen, WIP:

Hot water assembly and bending of parts (straightened up the central guy’s stance a little with widened feet), some GW 40mm bases and a shot of Army Painter grey. The amphora-style jugs came from some dollhouse accessory seller on eBay for a couple of dollars – they’re here to represent the magic item “Jar of the Four Winds” which in the context of Ogres is clearly going to mean some kind of magically-imbued alcoholic beverage.

With some base colours and washes added, they start to take shape. You might notice that the head on the middle guy isn’t a Mantic head and is in fact an Ogre Kingdoms head – it’s one of the very smallest of those, and while slightly larger than the Mantic ones, not excessively so – especially since the Mantic Ogres are a bit disproportionate across their various body parts anyway in a Johnny Bravo kinda way.

As they are now. The brass/gold trim on their weapons obviously needs to be toned down, their armour needs a slight highlight, and the skin is barely and very roughly basecoated. I’m trying a bit of an experiment on the Jars, which I’ll show in more detail once it either fails miserably or works decently.

…and the second unit of Blunderbusses, WIP:

Because these sculpts rapidly become – let’s face it – boring when you need to paint a bunch of them (6 of each is already too many for my sanity) I tried to make this unit a bit distinctive and different from the first Blunderbuss troop. I did this by changing the pose of the leader, and adding a shield in his off-hand. I originally had pictured him to be holding one of the Jars of the four winds with his other hand (which is doable with some kitbashing) but then it turned out that the crossbow unit were the ones getting boozed up. So he got a shield instead.

So after I’d assembled the leader, I needed to work out which head to give him. Since the GW Ogre Kingdoms head had worked okay on the crossbowman, I found another couple of heads that might work, and gave the less impressive of the two helmeted heads to this guy, saving the better one for another model down the line. It still works, and makes him a bit more imposing than his peers.

After all that, and just before undercoating them, I had the idea of adding a couple of small shields to the grunts. I pictured the perfect small metal buckler that I remembered was in my bits box. It took me about 30 minutes to dig around and find it, and I wasn’t even sure if I still had it. I have no idea where it came from, but it worked just fine for the leftmost Ogre’s forearm. I then poked about until I found something suitable for the last guy, and ironically, it came from some OK bits I’d picked up off eBay almost randomly a year or two ago. Now all three had shields, and their boss, a helmet with a slightly more interesting (less boring?) pose.

Obviously the brass on their weapons looks hideous right now, but as stated, it’s not finished. But let’s face it, while I want these guys to look good, they’re not going to be competition pieces – they’re going to be tabletop wargame models. And being some of many, many pretty-much identical Mantic restic Ogre models that I have, they’re not going to get the same love, care and affection that my old individual Jes Goodwin metals do. Still, I’m basically happy with the way they’re coming along. And once they’re finished, I can start working on the fun stuff. You see, I’m holding the real cool and fun stuff hostage to finishing off these guys.

Dark Elves/Twilight Kin – Beginnings

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So as mentioned, the counterpoint to this Ogre army for KoW is a Twilight Kin one. Originally the plan was to use GW High Elves in a KoW “Elf” Army, but through some discussion with JudgeDoug it slowly morphed into a Twilight Kin (Dark Elf) army list via my suggestion of using my few Dark Elves at the time and then Doug finding the most appropriate list for the figures I had at the time. In the last month, however, I found I nice bloke in the UK selling off a shitton of Warhammers, and managed to pick up a whole lot of his Dark Elves (though not as many as I’d liked to! Damn those eBay snipers!). In any case, the “Elves” have had another turn, and now the Twilight Kin going to be a “Proper” Dark Elf force, with a whole new colour scheme I’ve worked out, and the (High) Elves will remain in their previously planned colours – when I get around to painting them. Right after these two armies, hopefully! I’ll also have to ask Doug to rejig the TK army list to reflect the loss of the High and addition of many more Dark Elves.

Citadel Dark Elf Executioner Champion

This first Dark Elf is from the previous/recent metal range. I have to say that while I liked the look of the executioners in pictures, their separate greatswords just looked like an accident waiting to happen. I also didn’t think much of this guy in pictures, as the visual balance always looked right off, with his obscured face, and overly-silly-large-hairdo. Once he was in hand, already assembled and sprayed black, I was somehow compelled to paint him up. So I did. Not sure where he fits exactly into the TK army list, but he’ll go in there somewhere, for sure.

It took me awhile to figure out what colour scheme to give the Dark Elves. While Purple/Black always looks good, it’s also the standard GW go-to colour (like Blue/White for High Elves) so again I wanted to do something at least a little bit different. After close to a day of poking around on the internet and looking at different models, these two images on Google Search helped me decide to go for some deep sea-green armour, based on the look I prefer for Sons of Horus. With sea green chosen for my main armour colour, I gave a local paint store a call to see if they had any sprays in sea green, and it turns out that they can literally make spray cans (or pressure packs, as they call them) in any colour off their extensive colour charts. So I went around, was somewhat overwhelmed with the amount of choice, and chose one from the 6 or so that were in what I felt was the right range. I also decided to go for a metallic tint, since I felt it would work a bit better (and hey, otherwise I may as well just mix up some custom dropper bottles). Later, I found some more images with metallic Sons of Horus, so I may eventually do up a squad of those guys as well.

Citadel Dark Elf Executioner Champion

When I got back and gave him a spray, I then had to figure out what to do with the cloth parts. I originally wanted to avoid any reds, but saw another pic of the Sons of Horus where a very small amount of red was used effectively (sorry, can’t find the pic now) so went with it – on the lower cloak, and also using a reddish-brown for the leather on his topknot-wrap and sword handle. Using a purplish shade to his skin also warms the figure, slightly and provides a contrast to his armour. Again, taken from a good blog article – this one talking about Dark Eldar skin tones. The hair was finished, but it looks like the end of the topknot has had something splash onto it.

I knew I wanted to do some freehand on the cloak, so I was originally going to go with flames on the cloak, Legion of the Damned-style. Then green flames. Then a black cloak with “glowing green” runes – palette inspired by the Cryx boxed set. In the end I went with a faded spiral pattern on the inner cloak, and plain wet-blended turquoise for the outer. I’ll likely varnish the whole model next (after fixing the hair) and then work out what to do on the cloaks – either some freehand or just leaving them as they are. Suggestions welcome. What was particularly nice for me was getting this guy to this point in about 2 1/2 days from the original black sprayed model.

Citadel Dark Elf Assassin

Then there’s his little mate who came with him that I’ve just started – a DE Assassin. Again, not sure where exactly he’ll fit into the army, but not too worried about things like that. I’m basically happy with the cloak being a P3 Coal Base-Trollblood Base, and the metal armour in the same colour as the other model, but not entirely sure about his turquoise thigh-high go-go boots. Perhaps shade them down and see how it looks? I plan to paint his undershorts black and skip the spot of red on his clothing, unless it’s a touch of face paint. But yeah, the main delay on this one is working out what to do with his booties.