Tag Archives: WHFB

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!

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.