Dark Elf Repeater Bolt Thrower & Secret Weapon Barriers

Dark Elf Reaper Bolt ThrowersSo hey, I’ve been finishing stuff at a pretty decent rate so far this year. As part of that, I plan to put up everything I finish this year, no matter what it is. So here’s some of the most recent stuff:

Dark Elf Reaper Bolt Throwers

A pair of metal GW Dark Elf Repeater Bolt throwers. I got the pair cheap off eBay already assembled and primed, so the day after finishing the treeman last week, I decided to spray them with my two custom sprays that I got made for my DE/Twilight Kin – since I no longer play WHFB, I’m happily basing everything for Kings of War with it’s more relaxed basing options – so round 40mm bases from Proxie Models to the rescue. By the end of the day, they were all but finished. Of course, I need to do the crew sometime soon as well… I guess.

Secret Weapon Hesco Barriers

Secret Weapon Jersey Barriers

Over the Christmas-New Year period, I picked up a couple of sets of Secret Weapon Miniatures‘ “Bag O Crap”. Which is essentially miscasts and bits that don’t make their quality control standard. I’ve half-written a review of them, so I’ll save the detailed commentary for later, but suffice to say that a couple of other resin companies might want to take note of what Quality Control means. Puppetswar in particular.  These were done in Mid-Jan, but I didn’t get a chance to photograph them until now.

These painted up nice and fast, and (will) look good on the tabletop. I’ll probably need to buy a ton more of each, though… I went for a bright orange plastic that had both been sunbleached and dirtied up in use for the Jersey Barriers. Despite being pretty small and simple, I’m quite happy with how they turned out. These barriers will work nicely in everything from moderns to zombiepocalypse to 40k and everything in between.

Next up: More Zombies!

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

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