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Category Archives: Eru-Kin

Frogs of WAR!!!

13 Friday Apr 2018

Posted by Alex in Eru-Kin

≈ 21 Comments

Tags

Eru-Kin, Painting, Rogue Trader

Greetings Earthlings, sorry it has been a while, but I’ve been on a break, so meh 🙂   I had a lovely time hiking with the kids last week – we racked up 60 miles (each) over five days, which is pretty incredible when you consider my youngest is only 8! I’d be back out there now if I could, and even though the weather was crap, the worst day out on the hills is way better than a sunny day in the office… But alas, RL demanded my return, so I have been easing back into the usual routine this week. As such, I only managed to finish up three more Eru-Kin for my planned BOYL army, but these three are kind of interesting because I didn’t really have a clear idea of how they would fit in to the overall army I have in mind… Undeterred, I’ve been painting them slowly in between other jobs & hoping for some inspiration along the way. See what you make of them:

Paint-wise, these guys got my usual Eru-Kin treatment, so nothing exciting to talk about there, (though I did try out the Windsor & Newton artist inks that I mentioned last month on the skin for a more vivid colouration). While painting, I did have the hoped-for inspiration in terms of how they would fit in with the army and theme. The two shield guys look kind of honour-guardy to me, so they could easily flank any character to provide some additional protection, but the other chap was more difficult to figure out… He is marketed as a Musician, and is a cracking mini, but I’m not sold on the whole ‘command group in space’ idea from the RT era – I don’t know why, but it doesn’t quite click for me, so I knew I wouldn’t be using him in his intended role. I did consider using him as some kind of sonic weapon specialist, or maybe a comms operator, but I discounted these ideas because I felt that he would become a bit too anonymous… To be honest, I love the mini and felt that deserved a more prestigious role! Then I had a major flash of inspiration:

Ya see where I’m going with this? That’s right folks, I’m going to use him as a Beast Caller – a rare and highly specialised caste among the Eru-Kin, and therefore worthy of respect and protection from an honour guard. I imagine that the Beast Caller uses his mysterious ululations to repel rare and dangerous indigenous reptiles from the settlement during peace time, but uses these skills to summon them and drive them to assault the enemy in time of war. I see four major attractions to this concept:

1: This should provide an interesting dynamic in-game, with a powerful assaulting force underpinned by a comparatively fragile single link… What would the beasts do if the Caller gets killed? Rampage? Escape? Revenge?

2: It gives me a perfect and long-awaited excuse rational reason to go and buy some lovely minis that I have had my eye on for ages – Toy-Hammer is well and good, but I have the perfect range of pulp dinos in mind for this part of the project… I’ll keep you guys guessing on that for a while 😉

3: The visual impact on the army should be superb – it gets me out of the need for vehicles to add bulk and height to the force, but most importantly, Dinosaurs are frickin’ awesome, and any excuse to get them involved in an army should be grasped with both claws. Immediately.

4: I get to legitimately use the word ‘ululation’ in conversation.

So there we have it – a small but interesting development on the Eru-Kin project. So, what’s next? Well… I’m away on business the week after next so that kind of disrupts any major plans in the short term, but I want to get some more undead sorted out, and I have a load more Eru-Kin to get organised. It’s only(!) 14ish week until BOYL, and I still have heavy fire support, assault, and psyker support to add, plus some Dinosaurs to get sorted! It looks like I’ll be waiting a while for the weather to improve enough for a mass priming session so I suspect that the next week will be all about assembly & basing… It’s necessary work, but very boring for you guys, so I’ll try and finish a mini that has been sat around in her undercoat for a while & do a post before I hit the road again.

Cheers dudes, keep it (un)real 😉

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More Eru-Kin, and the Fembruary challenge

29 Monday Jan 2018

Posted by Alex in Eru-Kin, Fembruary Challenge

≈ 39 Comments

Tags

Eru-Kin, Fembruary, Painting

Happy Monday folks – been a while, and I have had precious little time for painting, but I do have a some stuff to share. I’ve had three Eru-Kin squad leader types in their undercoats since before Christmas, but they were on the back burner while I got my version of Arkhan finished for Azazel’s painting challenge. I don’t like having stuff sitting around unfinished, so I got these done as quickly as I could. Check ‘em out:

The banner guy is a small conversion – he had a Lizardman sword added for weapon continuity reasons, but he’ll have to wait for his banner I’m afraid. They are destined to lead their respective squads to BOYL this year – roughly identified by the colour of their loincloths (or skin in the case of two of the squad leaders):

 

Now, challenge time… It is an increasingly congested market at the moment – it’s a challenge keeping up with all the challenges! But… I am issuing the call to all WIPsters and hipsters, painters of hammers old and new, Inq28ers, collectors and gamers. Dear reader, no doubt you have heard of Orctober, Deadcember, Slaanuary, and all the various themed months of the year… I would like to propose that we add Fembruary to the list – a time of year for us to collectively challenge the male domination of our collections, and commit to painting some female miniatures for a change… Sisters of Battle and/or Silence, Witch Elves, Sorceresses, Inquisitrixes, Escher gangers, Daemonettes and Shield Maidens – whatever female minis you have on the to-do list, I challenge you to bump them to number one in the queue for the month and get some paint on ‘em… Let’s do something cool ok? Ok???  Ok.

For myself, I’ll be tackling Annie Norman’s (of Bad Squiddo Games/Dice Bag lady fame) ‘Ghosts of Gia 1’ collection, plus ‘Olivia Nutron Bomb’ from BOYL last year. These 10 minis are grown up, no-nonsense representations of post-apocalyptic femininity – no silly battle heals or unnecessary/unfeasible cleavage here:

I’ll be approaching this project with an 80’s punk/goth/new romantic vibe – think Siouxsie and the Banshees in glorious technicolour… In fact, the gang/squad is going under the working title ‘The Banshees’, and will be perfect for Necromunda, RT, or any post-apoc pulp games.

Finally, I want to give a big shout out to Annie – for those that don’t know, Annie is a hobby nut who set up her own business specialising on providing a range of “Believable Female Miniatures” across all genres, (that’s quotation marks, not ironic apostrophes), and is increasingly making waves on Kickstarter to grow this range. I really admire her vision and determination to make the hobby more representative – something the whole world desperately needs IMHO. Annie rocks – go check it out on www.badsquiddogames.com

Baby, we were spawn to rock

12 Tuesday Dec 2017

Posted by Alex in Eru-Kin, Side projects

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

Eru-Kin, Undead

Greetings fellows, I have three more Eru-Kin to share with you today – these are the last three basic troopers. These guys share the same body as the second set of three that I painted up, but have bare heads, so they add more interest to the group. I persevered with purple, blue & a khaki green skin tones:

I love how they look amused when viewed from the right, and evil when viewed from the left 🙂 I just have some sergeant types to finish and then I’ll call this phase done with three squads of five, but don’t worry, I have many more to add to the spawning in the new year!

It hasn’t all been about the Eru-Kin since my last post – I also did a bit of building for Azazel’s ‘Painting Decemb-uary’ challenge. The aim is to finish up a ‘big thing’ that has been sitting around waiting for paint. Trouble is I didn’t have anything suitable in the queue, so I had to delve into the lead pile for something to tackle. The choice was made for me when I spotted my Death Dragon from Grenadier Masterpiece Editions… I’ve been putting off getting started on this wee beastie for ages – it is a huge piece of lead, and quite the challenge to build. I bit the bullet and put the dragon together over the weekend – much pinning and gluing required! Here she is as of Sunday morning:

Obviously the elastic bands will come off once everything has set 🙂  Next stage is to give her a nice scenic base and a new converted rider, (the one that comes with is a teenyweeny mage type who might well end up in my planned chaos gnome army… yeah, that’s another project for the future). I’ll be running the completed piece as a counts-as Arkhan the Black, Mortarch of Sacrament in my AoS Death legion… Mwhahahah!!!

Peace out dudes!

Spawn to be wild!

30 Thursday Nov 2017

Posted by Alex in Eru-Kin

≈ 27 Comments

Tags

Eru-Kin, Painting, scenery

Greetings fellows, another quick update for you this week – been chipping away at my new Eru-Kin project and have three new troops to share with you, but first up I want to share a little terrain project that I have been doing on the side. I have been wanting to do a nice bit of jungle terrain for ages now – visions of steaming alien deathworlds, bizarre prehistoric ‘lost worlds’ and psychedelic fantasy jungles are all inspirations here. Two things have motivated me to finally get my bum in gear with this – 1: my Space Frogs need a home planet, and 2: the release of a certain Frostgrave spin-off called Ghost Archipelago, (which looks like a fantastic game!).

When thinking on how best to make this happen, I thought back to Aiden’s superb jungle terrain for the Inquisitor Cynole game at BOYL 2016, and to Paul’s stunning deathworld jungle project over on Sho3box. I’m not about to question such hobby geniuses, (genii?), so I decided to trawl the interwebs for suitable low-cost aquarium plants, and picked out a few brightly coloured examples to base up:

I’ve sprinkled a liberal pinch of skullage around the place – partly to show scale, but also because we all know that skulls are cool! And no… I’m not sure where the rest of the bones are either, (best not to ask I think). I’ll be adding more to this terrain set as time goes by, but I’m quite pleased with how this little side project has started out.

 

So, on to the latest spawning for my Eru-Kin faction – I have three more basic troops to add to the mix this week. These guys share the same body as the first three that I painted up, but have different weapons & heads so they add a nice bit of interest to the group. I also wanted to try out some new skin tones, so I tested purple, blue & a khaki green:

I’m pretty pleased with how they turned out – doesn’t it all make more sense in a freaky space-jungle?? I think I’ll repeat these skin colours with the final three troops. Here they are by squad – as denoted by the loincloths, just to give you an idea of how it is all coming together, (the General has photobombed a couple of shots too):

 

Anyway, that’s yer lot for this week! I’m aiming to get the final 3 troopers finished for the next post, plus maybe some more jungle terrain… I am also looking to dip back into Fantasy & build something a wee bit special for my Undead – hopefully ticking off something for Deadcember, and Azazel’s ‘Painting Decemb-uary’ challenge along the way! Catch you all next time 🙂

More Space-Frog fun, and a random piece of scenery

21 Tuesday Nov 2017

Posted by Alex in Eru-Kin

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

Eru-Kin, Painting, Rogue Trader

Greetings Humans, I have a super-quick data burst for you today. I have some more Eru-Kin to share with you – three duplicates of the second of the ‘basic troop’ sculpts, with further experimentation on the same basic skin colours… Not much else to say about these guys really, as everything I said in my last post applies to these guys! Here they are:

 

And with their spawn-mates:

 

More to follow on this project, but that’s not all folks – I also did this:

Aw Yeah!! My very own wargaming Tardis!! 🙂  Ok, so this started life as a toy rather than a mini, and the scale is not quite there, but it’s close enough for government work and I’m really pleased with how it came out. Here’s an underneath shot to show how the bare plastic looked before I painted it.

 

A big improvement, I hope you’ll agree! I deliberately went for a beaten up & weathered look, and I’m so glad that I did. The wood grain in the toy was a joy to pick out with a drybrush, and the windows & signage just needed a few washes to tone them down a bit. Look! It even lights up!

 

I know this seems a bit of a random thing to paint up, but there is a method to the madness… Firstly, I can see this getting dropped in to many other games in general – Frostgrave, Necromunda, Rogue Trader – either as a scenario point, (in fact, I seem to recall that there was a Rogue Trader scenario that included The Doctor… I might have to dig that out), or just as a nice piece of scatter terrain. But more importantly, the games I run with my boys were getting a bit bogged down in the fantasy setting, but this will allow us to break out & play any genre of game in the future. Robots, pulp, aliens, dinosaurs, pirates – all are possible with your very own genre-busting Tardis to ride around in… as the 10th Doctor tells us, ‘People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually, from a nonlinear, non-subjective viewpoint, it’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey… stuff.’ I plan to use this as a surprise plot point in a Crimbo game with the kids – hopefully right after the Dr. Who Christmas special  🙂

Anyway, that’s all for now dudes – more Eru-Kin to follow of course, but I also need to get planning something for Deadcember as well…  ‘tis the season after all 🙂

A frog in the throat

15 Wednesday Nov 2017

Posted by Alex in Eru-Kin

≈ 22 Comments

Tags

Eru-Kin, Oldhammer, Painting

Hello there! A little bit of painting to share with you all today – some troops for my new Eru-Kin project. The Eru-Kin Kickstarter provided a wealth of cool and unusual sculpts to choose from, including a batch of 4 sculpts that form what I look on as ‘core’ tactical troops, (‘Braves’ in the RT Slann background). I’ve got three of each sculpt, and decided to batch paint them one group at a time, (so the next few posts are going to be broadly similar I’m afraid). In the interests of trying to make them look a bit more individual, I have incorporated some of the old RT fluff regarding skin colour & patterning and exotic animal hides – there is some rather extreme colour experimentation along the way… I’ll be honest, there are some colour combos that don’t exactly rock my world, but hey-ho, it’s an army of space-frog-lizard-men things so who am I to judge! I’ve finished the first batch so let’s take a look:

I repeated the grey-blue armour with the odd red panel here & there, as per my test subject last week, but with different skin colours & patterning for each… I suspect that they would’ve looked much better if I had stuck with yellow flesh, (as per the test mini I did last week), but then they would have been practically identical so it’s pros & cons really. I also picked out the loin cloths in different colours & added some exotic animal print patterns – again, a call-back to the RT Slann fluff, (I suspect that the base colour of the cloth might be used to mark out different units as the army grows).

From a sculpting perspective, these guys look much less ‘Predator-esque’ than last week’s test piece… The similarities are there, but I feel like there is a different design ethic going on here… I originally had my test piece pegged in to be the General, but these latest guys are actually far more typical of the range so I may end up changing my mind on that… I suspect that the Predator dude might end up being a sniper/assassin specialist type in the final army, but we’ll worry about that further down the road. Here they are together:

 

Anyhoo, that’s it for now dudes – short and sweet today, but worry not – there is more to follow 🙂

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