40k Apocalypse "Big Cap Battle"

Last weekend I posted that I was preparing for a large 40k game.  Turns out it wasn't large, it was colossal!  I had a great time with the Big Cap gamers and we're already planning what we might do next.  I hope you enjoy the pictures and the ramblings that follow, there's a lot of pictures so this might freeze your browser a bit!

Chaos Reaver.  'Nuff said?

The Big Cap gamers are (left to right) "Slash" Ben, "Viking" Tristan , Ross "Whitehorn", Wiggy the Gnome and Rasta Dave.  You are fortunate I wasn't in the shot :)

Loads more after the jump

Riptide and Imperial Knight

For the last few weeks (or is it months?) I've had a background task of getting a number of big robots ready for a big fun game of Apocalypse 40k that my brother is organising.

He and some of his engineering genius friends have a huge collection (both in number and size) of models for the larger game of 40k and they were keen to have a big landmark battle.  The Beer and Pretzels event @ Spirit Games in Burton is hosting this event so I've been working towards this deadline for a while (as have several others!).  You can see various bits of progress by my brother and others on MyWargame.com.

I'm taking a bunch of dreads and some other bits but wanted to have a couple of larger toys to contribute.  Ben, the genius behind the Imperial Knight above (and seen in many other places including one of Beasts of Wars' podcasts), helped me acquire and build my own Knight and with the recent Tau releases, a Riptide was my second slot easily chosen.

So what have I managed?  Find out after the jump.

Back to bases

Another week gone by and more hobby goings on to report.  I'm currently planning for my next Malifaux tournament  so if you can make that you'd be more than welcome.

I've been working on basing (or re-basing in some cases) my miniatures in better ways since taking up small scale skirmish games.  For Malifaux in particular I am picking up minis from the various factions and its an opportunity to use different themes.

This lady is a gunslinger from the Iron Kingdoms range that Privateer Press supports alongside its RPG.  A couple of months ago I took part in a short campaign and this was my character.  Long term she's going to appear as a Gunsmith in Malifaux which means she's an Arcanist.  I had an idea in my head that I wanted really steampunk bases for any Arcanist figures I get, so I was looking for something special.

Fortunately I found Foundations of War on ebay and they had a range of resin bases that matched what I had in mind.  Using pieces of clockwork watches they've made some great looking bases.  Hopefully you can see from these varied shots how great the detail has come through.

 In case anyone is counting, that's 4 guns shes got :)

This next chappy is the Arcane Effigy from Malifaux.  I've used him in my Zoraida crew (as is her want) to boost the amount of cards and spells the hag gets - especially useful if you are planning to 'Avatar up' during a game.

This little chap is attached to his based by a pole of metal and it looked a bit naff frankly.  This clockwork base was perfect to re-base him onto with the raised central shaft from the cog.  I still have 3 more bases from the set, one is already painted and I have a figure in mind to mount on it, so in time that will appear on here.

These tiny chaps (sorry they are a bit blurry - its because they are so small!) are Malifaux piglets but I am using them collectively as the Lost Love(s) for my Kirai crew.  As I have used a Spirited Away theme for that crew, following the film's story her parents have been enchanted and turned into pigs.  So while not physically lost, they are spiritually.  I've swirled up a bit of wood filler on this base and painted it as mud - seems to fit them nicely.

Finally a bit of a WIP on my Gatormen posse.  I painted the minis a while ago, but my Minion army for Warma-Hordes still isn't based properly.  I picked up some woodland path bases from Fenris Games of various sizes and am working my way through the army.  This one has a nice little stream sculpted into it which I've added water effect too.

Yin the Penangalan - weekend painting challenge

Quick post this weekend.  On passing through my game shop on Friday I couldn't resist picking up Yin, the Penangalan for my Kirai crew (Malifaux again!).  I've been working on a lot of hobby projects that trickle on for weeks if not months, so I thought I would buy a fresh mini and get it finished in a weekend as a challenge.

Here's the box artwork - Yin's an unpleasant looking character and I thought would be a fun mini to paint.  Lets see how the art translated to figure.

 

Here's the completed figure.  I must confess after undercoating I was worried I'd lost a lot of the detail, I didn't look at the figure too closely before spraying and things looked very smooth while the paint was wet!  I think it dried largely alright, however I have noticed that the Malifaux plastic miniatures in general have very light/fine detail so I may have to be more careful in undercoating in future, one of my wastrels has a very vague face at the moment!

Yin is based on an Asian folklore monster, a sort of vampire.  Essentially the head and organs of the creature are mobile and the body is left behind.  This means painting all manner of gore, organs and mucus - a lot of fun experimenting here!  I've used some water effect to make drippy bits of gore hang off the model, gloss paint to make areas shiny and a lot of different ink mixes to get assorted shades of blood.  My favourite combination here was using the old GW Dwarf flesh with a red wash over it to get the wormy body colour with muscle tone - very simple and I think very striking.

Oddly I went for a completely new base style on Yin.  I had the idea that the trail of gore she'd leave behind would really have an impact on a more conventionally setting.  The black and white tiles of a traditional kitchen for some reason jumped into my head so that was my challenge.  Using some plasti-card I got very carried away making little tiles.  I even broke one just because.  Once neatly painted and with Yin in position, I had to carefully apply pools of gore where I felt they may have splattered - above you can see a small pool growing the from the drip on one of her coils.  There's also a large amount of gore where she slithered into position, much like a worm trail.

Big based undead nasties

Despite chugging through quite a lot of hobby stuff in the past weeks and months, I'm not finding taking photos of stuff any easier or more enjoyable, half the time things don't come out looking very good, the other half I notice that the figures aren't nearly as good as I thought!

Well that's the excuse for my slow updates out of the way, here's some pictures.

I've actually had the first bunch close to completion for a while, they just needed some final details and basing.  Its a unit of Vargheists, new additions to the army this latest version of the book.

The kit allows you to make the winged terrors shown here, or huge ghoul like creatures that really don't float my boat - I'm looking for some werewolves to use instead.  I've gone for a slightly unusual colour scheme, using the new GW paints - the space wolf armour progression I think for the skin and a slightly unusual blue to purple blend for the wing membranes and fur.

Each of the new guys is a completely separate sculpt which makes them all very characterful.  The downside is should you get more than 3, the parts aren't multi-pose or even compatible with different bodies, so without converting you are stuck with the same 3 poses over and again.

This chappy with the extra set of wings is the unit champ, my favourite pose of the 3.  I've found the unit to be an interesting addition to my army, so very useful in most match ups if you can save them from being shot!  I've based them consistently with the rest of my newly coherent undead, although I've added some small bits of shale to break up the larger bases.

Next up are the figures I use as spirit swarms who have been around for a while now.  I really don't like the current standard models, so I've used instead Lord of the Rings army of the dead models.  I've used the metal set that included the king which I don't think is available now, but you do get a lot of plastic warriors in the set now.  I've mounted 3 to a 40mm base (what we called Monster bases back in my day, relatively tame these days that size!) and when formed up they do look like a mob of ghostly warriors which is perfect.

I painted these very easily, I recommend the trick.  Painted over a black undercoat (my standard) I dry brushed the entire lot dark grey.  I then progressed the grey tone lighter and lighter till I used only the slightest amount of near white paint.  Once this was all done, I liberally doused the lot in green wash and ta-da, job done.

Its got nasty, big, pointy teeth...

My local games store 7th Heaven ran a painting/ diorama competition this year with an Easter theme - namely there must be a bunny in there somewhere.  I didn't have very long to ponder my entry or find different figures, so with my homage-o-meter running on full I decided Monty Python's Holy Grail was my best bet here.

So here's the finished entry.  Our valiant Sir Boris is ready to confront the beast at the cave of Caerbannog complete with a little title card in case its not clear to the casual viewer what's going on.

So here's a few more shots at various angles.  The piece is based around an old GW Bretonnian foot knight model I've had for an age.  As a grail knight he seemed to fit the bill nicely.

Facing him is a little bunny I put together in a hurry with green stuff and pro-create (not for any clever reasons, just my green stuff is a bit old so after making a few bits I threw it out and used whatever else I had).  Someone pointed out I could have used the Malifaux Jackalope instead - I wish I had thought of that (and had time!) as I do want to add one to my collection, but this little fella did turn out ok and definitely cuter.

The bunny and the knight are about to duel over a small clutch of Easter eggs as you can see from this shot.

Sir Boris, close up

Sir Boris, with film accurate heraldry!

The beast, ahhh cutey

Defending the eggs

Close up of the combatants

 

The base is made from mounting card with a couple of increasingly small circles of foam board stuck on top. Into this thicker base I was able to cut appropriate sized holes for the miniature's bases.  Next I used bits of cork, slate and sand to add some texture.  All the gaps were filled and smoothed using wood filler.  Lastly I scattered a selection of GW skeleton bones around the site to show just how wide the vicious streak this rabbit has is.

Warhammer Zombies!

Well another week gone and I'm a day late posting, but hopefully this was worth the wait!  I've added some new gadgets to the sidebar - there's an RSS feed which was a specific request - so enjoy.  I've also picked up a few new followers the last few weeks, welcome all - that's doubled my followers to 6!  

I've not played a huge amount of Warhammer for a while, but a couple of my friends decided we should fix this for 2013 with a slow (continental drift slow) grow "tale of 3 gamers".  My friends have limited time for painting, so the plan is to play 500 point games of Warhammer, once a month.  Each month we will increase the army size by 20 points and everything must be painted to be fielded.

I've had a largely painted set of Warhammer armies for some time, Wood Elves, Skaven and Vampire Counts.  What I haven't done is spruce these up for years, all of them are really inconsistently based and in need of a fix-me-up.  I can't seem to shake my undead fixation, so dispite some misgivings about using them at 500 points I chose them.  For reference my friends are using Goblins and Lizardmen, I'll see if they let me take some shots.

So after the first month, I found that my zombie summoning power was seriously dented by the fact I only had 27 painted.  Here's the shot of them in all their shambolic ruin.  Not based, not finished, this motley crue has been in this state for something like 7 years, from 2 army books previous when zombies were reasonably worth taking.

Operation: Pimp my zombies was kicked off.  I've been sitting on 60 odd GW zombies for ages but recently got some of Mantic's excellent minis (30 to start with) in hope that I'd be inspired to paint a more suitably sized mob.  For the GW mob, some rebasing and choice painting was all that was needed to get them  ready for the table.  My key discovery recently here is the wonder shade Anthonian Camoshade - seriously douse any figure that needs to be a bit drab over a base coat and your rank and file are done (works with skaven and all manner of swamp folk fantastically).  So here we see a GW spruced up and a comedy half zombie from the Mantic sprue - useful where some of my zombies are overreaching themselves a bit!

As there's so many of the damned things I was keen to try some regimental basing for the zombies.  My goblin using friend had a few spare, so here are the results of these experiments.  I've added a gravestone to a couple of them for fun.

I really like the Mantic zombies, so much more dynamic than GW's and a very good price too.

I did add a few more GW zombies to the unit as well as few solo Mantic shamblers.  All of the new additions were base coated in a strong (but unpleasant) skin tone, light greens, greys, light browns and a yellowish variant.  Next loincloths and other assorted clothes were added in darker colours, greens and browns typically.  A fairly liberal coating of dark red was added to assorted viscera and wounds and the teeth picked out.  This is all hit with camoshade and we're largely done.  I've added some brighter red blood to the more dangerous zombies where they've managed to find a meal and made everyone's eyes glow a selection of unpleasant colours using Tausept Ochre as a base, then a bright yellow plus optionally a shade if I wanted a really odd colour, blue or something.

So here's the entire unit of 48 ranked up - the standard and musician are frankly ancient lead GW figures, which while nice, fall over all the time so I need to sort those out.  I could use a banner too.

Here's them again without the flash - not sure there's much new to see but some of the colours show up differently.  The bases are simply sand stuck on with PVA (under and overcoated to stop it coming off) painted dark brown then drybrushed with medium brown.  Finally some some more PVA to glue random clumps of flock were added - I like the idea my undead are attacking over broken earthlands.

To finish, here's a complete army shot of the forces I've previously posted on this blog - essentially my most recent undead additions to my army and all consistently based.   Use the labels on the right to see the detailed posts about my Wight Lord, Skeletons and Ghouls.

The idea is to add to this growing horde by updating my existing collection to a fresher state or paint some of the hordes I have collecting dust (including the other 42 zombies) - or more likely completely new stuff as the evil retailers out there realise that undead are clearly the coolest figures.