If you missed the first article then catch up here. It’s been a bit over a month and we’ve been hard at work (sort of) on the next steps of our projects so let’s see what everyone has done! 

Bair

This has been a surprisingly productive month for me. After starting the year real slow I tripped and painted over 2,400 points of Tomb Kings across March. Oops? The original plan was to slow-grow, but characters, a couple blocks of infantry, and some chariots later and here I am. While I haven’t played any games yet with Tomb Kings (unless this publishes after March 29th in which case I’ll have 1 whole game with them) I have played about a dozen games with Dwarfs now. I prefer to play with painted minis/armies when I’m able to, part of the reason I’ve been so productive on the Tomb Kings, but have had a lot of fun with dwarfs. With shooting being predominantly weaker than it ever has been (at least in editions I’ve played, 6th – 8th) I’ve been opting for a melee heavy force and it’s been doing great work; enough about dwarfs, I’ll write more on them later, for now have a look at this if you want to see them.

Back to Tomb Kings.

I will do a whole How to Paint Everything article on all of them later but I’ve been asked about my bone recipe enough that I want to include that here quickly:

• Spray Colourforge Hyrax Brown (or similar deep/dark brown)
• Drybrush heavily in Morghast Bone
• Drybrush a big lighter with Ushabti Bone
• Drybrush much more lightly with Screaming Skull
• Hit some recesses with Seraphim Sepia

It’s really that easy and is the beginning of how I painted everything here and why it’s all happened so quickly. Added some contrast for turqoise (Kroxigor Scales) and a few other colours. Really fast scheme but comes out good-enough! I really loved painting up the new Bone Dragon and really did not enjoy trying to take a photo of it!! Very excited to get it on the table and watch it die too-quickly by accident.

I converted a Battle Standard Bearer, something that I think is necessary for all Tomb Kings armies due to the re-roll on LD tests helping My Will Be Done and Arise! tests for other characters, as well as From Beneath the Sands to bring your scorpions up exactly where you want with ease. Was very very happy to be able to get my hands on an old Khalida model which will be standing in as a mortuary priest too! Apophas might just be my favourite on-foot Tomb King model though, just an incredibly cool concept.

My characters:

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Yes, yes the Casket of Souls (which is old and metal, there) is not meant to be on a base. I know that. I don’t care. It didn’t look right having so little basing on it and I wasn’t able to magnetise it! So I glued 4 40mm square bases together to make an 80mm square which is just a little larger. I plan on just measuring its aura from the Tomb Guard and Casket models themselves for “correctness”.

And the rest of the units! Those Ushabti I was really unsure of on the blue skin right up until they were finished. I might go back and add a highlight anyways since the face details get a little lost, but they look a bit better in person too. I take these photos with my iPhone, it’s not that fancy.

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Perigrin

Wow, Bair kicked my ass in terms of number of models painted for this project. I ended up getting pretty heavily distracted and painting a few units of Chaos Dwarfs, but I did manage to get some goat boys built and painted in this last month.

I have been having a lot of trouble getting my hands on Beastmen models locally; AOS isn’t a big game here and everything seems to be out of stock every time I have money. The other day while poking around in my unbuilt models, I found a box of Frostgrave Demons that I had bought about a year ago and had been intending to use for a project that I never got around to. A look at the box and the sprues inside revealed that they would make fantastic Bestigors. I also found an old Reaper Pathfinder mini that I had bought ages ago, I believe this guy is a Pactmaster of Katapesh but he looks like a fantastic Shaman to me. My lore concept for this army is that a Tilean noble court fell under the sway of Chaos and were cursed to become Beastmen, and as such are used to a nicer life and better things than most Beastmen. My idea is that they are, in true Tilean tradition, mercenary scumlords that sign up with Warriors of Chaos, Chaos Dwarfs, and other evil/amoral factions for riches and wine. The golden bronze armor came from my urge to use one of the new Speedpaints, this one being Hoplite Gold over a black to white gradient undercoat. Really a huge fan of the Speedpaint metallics, some of the best metallic paints I have ever used.

Talking for a moment about the command section, these models did not come with one. They are intended for use in a skirmish game and, while they do rank up nicely, they had no standards or musicians.

The standard bearer has a head from the new Chaos Chosen kit, for variety, and a banner made mostly of a spare banner from that kit. I picked it up a while ago to get started with AOS and it is a really good source of bits for Chaos conversions and projects.

The Musician has a horn made from a spare rack of horns from an Ogroid kit. I did put together my Ogroids but they are in a pretty rough halfway phase of being painted at the moment. Big fan of how this guy turned out.

The unit champ was just built out of the Frostgrave Demons kit. I did use a head here that I didn’t use on the rest of the unit to make him stand out.

Pactmaster of Katapesh. Credit: Perigrin

The character here, Rovigo Carsandi, is going to be used as a Great Bray Shaman. My idea is that he is one of the two leading nobles in the decadent, chaos corrupted court, and his wife will probably end up as a Beastlord on Chariot once I find a suitably decadent and noble looking Beastman model/alien weirdo to match up with the Pactmaster model I have here. I already have an idea to make a big, ornate, golden chariot pulled by a big boar with gold chains hanging from it, I just need the figure to go on the back. I love the big golden mask, the silks, and all the jewelry on this Pactmaster and I want the other characters in this army to match that opulence. I know this is a slightly weird direction to take a Beastman army, but I really wasn’t feeling like painting a ton of dirty, dingy colors. If you have any suggestions on a miniature for Lady Carsandi, or any other more decadent and fancy beastman models, I would be thrilled if you left a comment on this article letting me know about it!

HardyRoach

Oh, what big dreams I had in January. It’s almost poetic. So uh, yeah, I got pneumonia! I was very ill for a whole month, and am still dealing with the after effects. As such, my hobbying has absolutely just dropped off entirely. Sucks.

I do have a little bit to show for myself, as I did a batch of test bases (which turned out wonderfully if I do say so myself). In addition, a huge amount of the pre-production is in the bag (like priming and zenithaling). In theory, the actual painting process should be fairly quick, as the “basecoat -> oil” process is extremely easy. I just need to get back into the habit of hobbying now I’m no longer coughing up a lung until I pass out every 15 minutes.

By the way, oils absolutely rule. My bases were done with a simple process of airbrushing the base colours, then slopping a load of thick dark brown oil paint over everything, then wiping most of it off with sponges, then using a brush to blend the edges. Done! And because it takes days to fully dry, it’s a chill, no-stress painting experience. I slopped the oils on at 6pm, and spent the next 2-3 hours just blending as much as I wanted until everything looked perfect. It all went so well that I’m heavily considering making this my standard method for painting, as it’s just really goddamn fun! It’s rare for me that painting is actually relaxing and fun rather than vaguely nerve wracking.

I will, however, reconsider 3D printing those little reeds for future projects. They look cool, but a tray of bases fell on the floor and now 80% of the fuckers have broken off. A good 10-20% broke off just in the process of picking them up and putting them down for airbrushing.

For next month, hopefully some actual units!

Thundercloud

My pledge is about slowly building up a WFB army and doing a lot of Old World/Old World compatible stuff for Warcry. 

For the first month I pledged 5 Goblin Fanatics, a warcry box of Chaos Legionaries (who make great Chaos Thug types), a warcry box of Royal Beastflayers (who are a great box of Ghoul type monsters) and a Mordheim band of Marienburgers with a Halfling Scout and Trollslayer (to start building and painting my Mordheim miniatures in preparation for the 25th anniversary). 

So how did it go?

I actually got the Chaos Legionaries finished before the article went up, and followed that with completing the Royal Beastflayers and Goblin Fanatics, and a bonus group of Underworld Tree Revenants, but wasn’t able to get the metal Mordheim figures finished in time due to a mixture of work commitments and painting up two boxes of Legions Imperialis figures to review.

The Chaos Legionaries were mostly armour and trim, with the most difficult part being the neat painting of the brigadine armour. The hornshields and hornhelms are excellent models, and really suit being used as armoured chaos thugs well. I painted up a Chosen to use alongside them as a Chaos Warrior, giving a modern Chaos warrior to be the centre of a warband and tower over the normal human sized models.

The Royal Beastflayers turned out to be a great little warband that can add plenty of ghoulish atmosphere to a game.

I wasn’t happy with the skin tone until the very end, but it did come together.

The Night Goblin fanatics were the models painted up for my Fantasy army, which is very much still in the tracking down and buying models phase. The models themselves are fairly pointy and easy to catch on things, so I’ll have to be careful with how I store them.

I also finished off an Underworlds warband I’d previously started, but which wouldn’t look super out of place in a dark forest. I got Ylthari’s Guardians from Stormbringer magazine, and they make solid tree spirits/wandering monsters for a forbidding forest. The models were painted mainly with contrast, and I particularly enjoyed the wood.

Cronch

I’ll be honest, this hasn’t gone well for me. I got immediately distracted, as is my wont, and for most of the past couple of months I’ve been lavishing attention on Flesh-Eater Courts (they’re not AoS Bretonnians, stop it) units for an upcoming Age of Sigmar event. Unfortunately thanks to this, the mighty armies of Bretonnia have languished mostly untouched for the better part of a month.

I did manage to get some models built, and play a 1,250 point game against Bair’s Dwarves, using the army list included in the Bretonnian box. Honestly this could have been a make or break moment for me, as I exist in a cycle where I don’t really enjoy games without good model support, but also really lose motivation on models if they’re not going to be used in a game because I don’t actually want to play it. Luckily for me, and credit to Bair I suppose, I had a great time! The system is interesting in a completely different way to AoS, scratches a different itch, and flows pretty well as long as you don’t have to navigate too many special rules sections. I’m definitely keen to get an army done and play more games, and luckily it seems like a small local scene is starting to coalesce which should help to fuel that endeavour.

On top of this, I did get one model painted! A singular Knight of the Realm, pledged in service to Duke Guy de Canteloupe (a vague nod at some local history of my area). I really enjoyed the model, and honestly I’m super happy with the finish! It took quite a while, but I think it was worth sinking the time into the Knights and hopefully I’ll be able to claw some of that back on the Men at Arms and Peasants. I think I’m going to redo the foliage on his base, removing the tufts in favour of static grass for a more classic finish.

Reflecting a bit on armies, I grabbed the Bretonnian box at launch because I was keen to jump in, but my first fantasy love has always been High Elves and to be honest I can’t wait to see which plastics GW relaunch when it comes round to their turn. So although not much painting has happened this month, there has been plenty of buying in preparation for an Elven future.

I am blessed with a wonderful local game store that has tubs full of second-hand plastic minis at cheap prices, as well as an owner with a seemingly endless vault of old kits, and so for a pretty reasonable price I’ve ended up with a bunch of old High Elf spearmen, bowmen, a unit of the lovely old metal White Lions, Teclis, Eltharion, and a classic Bolt Thrower. I’m in no rush to do anything with these, and indeed they might be sidelined in favour of some newer minis whenever High Elves launch for The Old World, but I couldn’t resist the urge to grab them at a pretty affordable price. There’s a lot of paint stripping to do and some parts to source, including weapons for the characters, shields for the spearmen, and most of the command models, but I’m glad to have them tucked away for a rainy day.

I did also grab a Banner Bearer on Pegasus and some Knights of the Realm on Foot, so my Bretonnians will be expanding in that direction in the future. I need to look more closely at the kits to see if it will work, but I’m hopeful that some of the great weapons and heads from the modern sculpts might pair with the old mounted Knights kit to make some convincing Questing Knights.

For next month, I’m going to commit to getting a unit of eighteen Men-at-Arms done, with a stretch goal of finishing the first block of six Knights of the Realm. See you next month to find out what distracted me!

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