February Round up

Well, that's Febraury come and gone... Time flies. Yes I know that february is the shortest month in the year but it seems as if my painting progress has stood still. I did manage to get some time on my painting chair but not nearly as much as I would have liked.

Work and a little vacation time got in the way. Now the time off has been great, it's always good to get some time away together with your family but work has really been bogging me down. I now have to do the work of three people and just heard that because of cut backs there won't be any replacements or new collegues soon and things will continue as they are. Not a good prospect because I get home knackered and can't be bothered with much more then my dinner and some tv.

But Hey, let's look on the bright side. I did finally get my Space Marine Assault Squad assembled and ready for undercoating but I want to make a little tutorial out of creating flying bases for them and really want to do that well and want to take my time for it.

I also managed to get the hazard stripes on my drop pod, finally. And I'm redoing the battle damage on it. When I looked at it again I remembered why the damage didn't look so good. When I painted the pod I was so bogged down by it and wanted to get it done so I kinda took a short cut and now I realized that I need to do that again so I'm working on it.

My new army the space orks didn't see much brush time although I did get my first Nob finished as a sort of trial version and I'm not unhappy with the colorscheme.

Last but now least on the hobby front I did manage to score my first massacre in warhammer fantasy with the 8th edition. I squared off against a 2000 points lizzardmen army and the poor guy had no luck at all with no less then 6 salamander misfires in a row so they did nothing all game. In the end the only thing he had left was 1 wound on his Slann.

And then the blogging news. I have been really bussy and tried to get as much spare time into painting and modelling that I kinda neglected the blog and it showed. I had about 130 views less then in January but then February had a couple of days less as well. I didn't get much links from other sites and blogs so most hits were from my followers (thank you) and passers by thanks to the kind people that have my blog on their blog roll. I also seem to get a lot of hits from Google. It seems my blog get's first page when you look for "Space marine scout snipers" or "Painting battle damage" so that nice.
I'll try to push out a little further in March and want to see if I can pump up my followers number to 45 and get some links on other blogs again because that really helps.

Seb

Fantasy Friday: Chaos Ogres

A while back I got some ogres of a member of my gamingclub as a gift for painting up his Ogre Kingdoms Army. I thought I could use them for my Chaos Army and so after some conversions this was the result. Most people comment on how good they look when they're on the table completely ignoring the rest of my army. lol.

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The conversions are quite small and subtle and you would probably only recognize all the work that went into them if you have ever put some ogres together yourself. A lot of weapons were switched from left top right handed and a lot of extra small details added like the horns, arrows, armour plates,... I also made the banner interchangable with a large weapon so I don't have to take the banner in a WYSIWYG game.

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I don't like the look of the "official" Chaos ogres so I'm even more proud and happy with the way these turned out. The only thing I'm not happy with is the free hand on the banner. I really need to sit down again and do that again.

Seb

Fantasy Friday: Giant

Last week I missed the Fantasy Friday due to a ton of work that I had to get finished before the weekend. This week I'm trying to make it up to you by posting lots of pictures of one of my favourite models that I have painted.

I present to you: "Langors the Chaos Giant". Now you might think that he looks nothing like the typical chaos giant but that's because I don't like that model and so I tried to make him look as a regular giant with chaos bits added. The fluf behind this fella is that he was captured and held prisoner in the city of Praag by the empire soldiers. Then when the city of Praag was sacked by the forces of chaos he joined their ranks. You can still see the shackles and chains around his neck that once kept him a slave. He also made a pair of fancy trousers from the emperial flags.(see detail) He also picked up some shields and now uses them as armour plates. It's not a lot of conversion work but I really like this model as it is.I think this is one of the best models GW has ever made with all the extra bits you get to customize your giant.

In these pictures you can see the giant roaming the borders in the north looking for unsuspecting peasants. It's more a showmodel then that I actually use him on the table very often. Giants are a bit of a hit or miss factor and if you're not carefull a pretty big point sink or risk to any of your own army standing too close.

Cheers,
Seb

Wednesday W.I.P.7

Painting has been slow this week. I did manage to get a Nob done but the other painting projects almost came to a halt.



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 First there's the drop pod I'm trying to finish but I can't get motivated to make the final push. Eventhough it's a pretty simple model it's a pretty big paintjob. I somehow lost interest when I realized I underestimated it big time. I did manage to find a nice tutorial on FTW to make the hazard stripes and I started work on them and the good thing is that when they are done the pod will be finished. I applied the yellow basecolor so I can paint black diagonal lines over it and I even marked out where the lines should go but even a simple thing as applying the yellow was a hard job as painting yellow is one of the most frustating things to do when it comes to painting miniatures. The yellow just doesn't cover well so first I did a layer of faundation paint Tausept ochre  and then two layers of sunbright yellow. I'm already regretting picking yellow as my main color for my Orks army ....if only it wouldn't look so nice when finished..

The other project I kick started this week was assembling a small assault squad. They will join my other assault squads. I found out the hard way that a 5 men assault squad is just a point sink and total waste of space. 5 men will not do enough damage and get whiped out too easily. 10 men squads do much better. I constructed them and they are ready for their basecoat. I always leave the jump packs and shoulder pads off at this stage because it's much easier to paint this way, I just have to make sure to keep all the parts together. I'll start pinning them and basing them so I can undercoat them and I'll take some pics of that so you can see how I go about that. I really like the method I have created over time by trial and error.mostly ,...error.

Then there's also the Orks and I didn't really do much with them. I picked out some parts and painted them for a bit while I was waiting for paint to dry on other models. Thought I'd put them in the pic too because I did do some work on them,just not that much.

Seb

A Nob well done

Last week I hardly got any painting done. I wanted to get the hazzard stripes done on my drop pod because I found a nice tutorial on the FTW site....But didn't get round to it. I didn't even get to put up a "Fantasy Friday"post here on my blog. I simply had a ton of work to do and ran out of time.I did however start up a new project. I want to paint up my Space Marine Army and get it over and done with so I assembled the last assault squad and started pinning them to their base. I'll put the pics up when I get some done.

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But I also did manage to finish the first Ork Nob. You might remember seeing him in WIP 5 and now I got to finish it. I tried out an Ork skin tone of my own. Unfortunately in the picture the skintone comes out pretty flat even though it has about 5 layers of highlights and some washes. I think I realy need a lightbox.

Anyway, I really like how he turned out. The idea for the army is yellow armour and lots of rust. It also has a lot of chipped armour like I explained in my "Battle damage tutorial". The only thing I never though of is how the hell is he ever going to get that spare gun on his back with his power klaw.!?!

Seb

Mini Showcase: Dreadnought #2

A couple of weeks back I showed you my dreadnought #1 which is my close combat dread. It has a close combat weapon and heavy flamer besides the assault cannon to mow everything down that looks too scary.

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But now I want to show you my other dreadnought that I use for ranged attacks. It has the twinlinked lascannons and missiles so it can strike from afar. It's a very mean killing machine that is able to knock out armour from a distance hiding behind some cover.

Seb

Wednesday W.I.P.6

Last week I started a new weekly feature on my blog called the "Wednesday W.I.P." and this week I will continue with that. (otherwise it wouldn't be a weekly feature now would it...?). But if you read last weeks episode you'll notice something strange. Last week I was bussy painting up a bunch of Nobz and this week I have been painting something completely different.

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As you can see on my blog I have various topics on my Space Marine army but it isn't completely finished yet. I still have to paint 1 more unit of tacticals, 1 unit of assault marines, a Rhino and a Drop pod. The drop pod interior was already done so last week I did the outside. The reason for switching projects is that I promised myself that I would finish the SM army ASAP so I could start fielding it at tournaments. So the Nobz were brushed aside and the drop pod saw some paint after standing on a shelf for the last 6 months.

The drop pod is now about 90% done. I still need to add some detail here and there and I want to paint those yellow and black "caution stripes" on the cargo doors. I'm still looking for the best way to achieve that. I have been fooling around with masking tape but my efforts were not that good and the stripes looked wonky and uneven. Back to the interwebs to look for a nice tutorial on that.

In the comming weeks I will try to get some work done on the SM army and paint a bit of the Nobz in between.


Seb

Fantasy Friday: Changeling



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A new feature that I'm adding to my blog is the "Fantasy Friday". Although I have a 40K army and I'm even building a new army I also have quite some Warhammer Fantasy models. My gaming club is running a Fantasy campaign which is a lot of fun so for the last few months I have been busy getting to grips with that gaming system. Fantasy and 40K are so different in all aspects. Magic is the best example of that. 40K is more straightforward and easier to understand IMHO even if it has a lot of tricky rules of it's own.

This is the Changeling model that was released last august (I think). When I saw this model advertised in the WD I immediately knew I had to have it. I really like the way the light plays with the cloth. This would be the perfect figure for my Warriors of Chaos army, The sorcerer of Tzeentch.


I like the way it turned out. At first i thought I was going to be original and come up with my own paint scheme but I really like the way it was painted by the gamesworkshop studio so I copied most of it and only changed a few details.

Seb

Wednesday W.I.P.5

The plan is to show you a snapshot of my workspace with the project I'm currently working on every wednesday. I'm calling it the Wednesday Work In Progres, catchy huh! The 5 stands for the current week number. This week is week 5. No need to start trawling my blog for episodes 4,3,2 & 1 because this is the first in the series.

I won't be able to finish a project every week and I won't even get to paint a lot every week but I do manage to get some stuff done and to keep my own motivation going I thought this was a nice  little idea. I hope you guys like it too.

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As you can see I'm currently working on a little group of 5 Nobz. I got the ammo Grot almost done and the bases are all done. Just started work on the Nobz themself and seem like fun to paint. Not much to see right now other then the main colors. This step is what I call basepainting. I simply fill in all the basic colors. Hopefully next week you'll see what the next few steps have been.

Seb