I have to apologize for the lack of posting lately, the hobby has been on hold as I was working on the house and working extra to get ready for vacation. May will be a little break in logging my progress...I'm so clever with my picture I found. Internet points for me.
I'll be back at the end of May, look forward to some hobby madness as I:
- Tackle assembling and painting Dark Eldar
- Making a sweet diorama display board for the Dark Eldar
- Begin working on the Fantasy High Elves Sea Guard list for the team tournament
Hope everyone is have a great start to their summer and getting a little sun outside of the hobby! See you soon.
Every so often, I get a project I get really really excited about. This has to be it. I've decided that next year at Adepticon, I'm not going to do 3 days of 40k. A good friend of mine, Dan convinced me to team up for the fantasy team tournament. We have a pseudo-inside joke about sea monsters from years ago when the White Dwarf did a huge spread on boat battles and sea monsters. We lovingly named them M.F.S.M "Mother-Loving (changed for the kids) Sea Monsters" or when in the presence of kids "Most Friendly Sea Monsters". We've decided to make a team themed on sea monsters and pirates.
The vision of our lists is that I'll be running Lothern Sea Guard with an allied "Sea Monster" (I'll get to that later). My team mate, Dan will be running Empire with a pirate theme. The thought is that the High Elves are on the hunt for a sea monster that has been plaguing their trade routes, and they hired a mercenary pirate ship to aid them in the hunt. What the Empire doesn't know, is their ship was used as bait to lure the monster out.
Our display base will be two ships, the empire one being devoured by a giant sea monster and the high elf one trying to spear it down.
To make it even more epic, we're in the process of recruiting other 2 man teams that would like to fit the pirate theme. If we can get a few teams to participate, I'll make a giant sea table. A team could either bring ships to display their armies on or bring an island that they can plop down on the table (for the pirates to raid). It'd be great to do some progress shots on how everyone is doing.
Right now, my list will probably go this route:
- High Elf Noble on foot
- 14 Phoenix Guard - these will be individualistic models that will be the "Sea Monster Hunters" on a diorama base
- 25 Sea Guard
- Bolt Thrower
- Friendly Sea Monster (using the rules of the White Lion Chariot). I'm either going to model it like the Loch Ness Monster or have some sea beast with a high elf rider.
I have to say, I'm really getting excited about a vacation. In less then 2 weeks, the wife and I will be in Rome. We also booked stops in Florence and Venice. With the craziness of Adepticon and the flurry of hobby activity after, I really haven't given myself much time to recharge.
Part of what is making me so excited is all the historical sites. I'm not Catholic (my wife is), but one of the things I'm most excited about seeing is the Vatican. Since my Dark Eldar Wyches are in full swing, I hope to get some inspiration from the Coliseum. For any of you reading from Europe, I'd love to get some ideas on things to see that are off the beaten path.
This week will keep me busy with things around the house, I'm going to assemble the glass display cases I picked up from Ikea, and I need to finish unpacking all the extra boxes in the basement. My goal is to get a skin tutorial in before I leave and do a little more assembling of the raiders. I really hope the venom gets released this summer as rumored, it'll save me some time going into detail with a conversion.
For my Dark Eldar army, I was faced with a challenge. Wyches had to be on slot bases since the connection point of the foot was way too weak to connect with any specialty resin bases. I also wanted to have a base that could both work on a desert "arena" area as well as on board a raider or my pleasure ship (out of Return of the Jedi) that I'll eventually have.
I picked up a bunch of diamond plate plastic from Plastruct product code: 91682. I started by cutting out various shapes and gluing them down to the base. I then added one layer of sand, not overlapping any of the plastic.
At this point, I wanted to make sure the sand looked like it was blowing over the edges of the decking. I layered on a second portion of sand over the edges of the decking and raised other areas of the sand to give it depth.
I then primed the models and started with the decking first.
- Based Tin Bitz
- Heavy drybrush of Dwarf Bronze
- Drybrush of Chainmail
- Washed with Devlan Mud
Now I let the ink dry for awhile and could start on the sand.
- First I drybrushed very lightly another coat of Chainmail to pick up the raised part of the decking
- Heavy coat of Khemri Brown on the sand
- Drybrush heavy Desert Sand
- Drybrush Bleached Bone
- Painted the lip of the base black (personal preference).
I'm happy with how they turned out. Simple but effective. I'll spend some time next stepping how I did the flesh tones. This weekend will be a lot of work around the house but I'm going to try and build some of my beastman Wrack substitutes so the Wyches have something to fight in the arena!
I was out doing a little shopping with the wife and we drove through a parking lot of the local strip mall. My wife started laughing and pointed to the sign. Although she has no intentions of ever coming to the dark side of her hobby, she at least picks up on the humor.
I couldn't resist taking a picture.
I'll be traveling to Toronto and Minneapolis this week so I won't be able to get any painting in until the weekend. I'm going crazy with all the cool options the Dark Eldar have. I think it's going to come down to playing a bunch of games to see how they all work together.
I had a blast painting the raider and the test wych model. I didn't add any of the extra crew on the raider yet since I wanted to make sure that they'll fit in the new battlefoam trays I have coming. I went with a different metal color for the exhaust, which helps break up all the silver. Additionally I downloaded a bunch of Japanese Kanji translations... since my Kabaal is the "Kabaal of the Death Rune" the word on the side is "Death Dream" and I put "Poison" up in a couple places. Figure it'd make it more fun.
For the wych, I kept with my desert / diamondplate basing scheme. I'll post a how-to on that as soon as I'm able to prime my next set of miniatures (pouring rain here). Here's how I did the skin tone - I wanted to keep it easy.
- Base Dneb Stone
- Heavy wash of Leviathan Purple
- Paint raised areas Dneb Stone
- 2/3 water & 1/3 Asurman Blue wash
- Raised areas 1/2 Dneb Stone 1/2 White
I'm pretty happy. For the hair it was:
- Base Mechrite Red
- Paint Blood Red
- Wash Leviathan Purple
- Highlight Blazing Orange
I just got the first season of Sparticus Blood on the Sand, looking forward to getting some inspiration for making my abhuman wrack gladiators. This has been some of the most fun I've had on a project yet.
I really want to put together wracks for the Dark Eldar, but I think I'm going to go a different path when it comes to conversion. I've heard we may get new models in the summer timeframe but that's not stopping me from coming up with some neat ideas.
I really like the idea of having a gladiator arena in my display board and with that it would be cool to have different beasts and subhumans fighting it out with the wytches. What better to be a good adversary to get butchered up in the arena then a counts-as wrack? My first thought was to go with some sort of catachan base and add spikes, armor, and cruel weapons. I just never really liked the models so I figured I'd scrap that.
There are some awesome pre-made gladiators from Dark Art Miniatures but most tournaments require mostly GW based minis. That throws out the easy method of just doing premade miniatures.
I then scanned the GW website for some suitable plastic replacements (plastic is so much easier to work and game with). Two kits I think might be a great baseline for gladiators are the Beastmen Gor Herd and the Maurauders of Chaos. Both of these have a dark look about them. I'm torn on which would be the better kit. Maybe ultimately I do a mixture of both? I'd love to hear your thoughts.
