Greetings Terrans, and happy MMXX to you all – I trust you all had a good holiday season, and are fit, healthy, and looking forward to 2020. I apologise in advance – this is a slightly belated post, and is just a quicky to show off the last of the things I painted in 2019. I finally managed to complete the small Eru-Kin army I’ve been working on, wrapping up the force with some psychic support.

First up, here is a duplicate pair of fantasy style mages:

Next a duplicate pair of sci-fi mages (same body, different arms):

Not too much to say about this quartet really – they are identical pairs of very similar models, and are all painted in much the same way. I did add some gold elements to their helmets, and I reversed the armour colouring compared to the non-magical Eru-Kin, just to separate them visually from the rest of their tribe. I also include some bone coloured armour pads here and there, for the same reason.

Finally, here’s their superior – a high-mage type:

He’s a very imposing mini, and is clearly the magical heavyweight of the group! He was good fun to paint, and I pushed the armour colouring a little further from ‘normal’ to reflect his status. I also went for albino skin to show how special he is, and I’m really pleased with how it came out! (This was a very happy experiment with the new white contrast paint).

Here they are as a group:

In practice, these magical frogs will be split them up & assigned to squads within the army – speaking of which, I’m planning on getting my Eru-Kin packed up properly soon to make some space in my display cabinet. When I do, I’ll make a point of arranging them all for an army photo session & share 😊

Anyhow, that’s it for the time being, but fear not – my next project is already well under way. When finished, it should make for an interesting group of minis with a nice woodsy horror vibe…  There should be enough minis and variation to allow me to make up either a team of Blood Bowl Wood Elves, or a team of Blood Bowl Vampires! Both teams have low positional variation, (especially the Vamps), and are very amenable to proxy figures. Fingers crossed it all goes to plan!! 😉

Greetings Terrans, Merry Wotsits and a Happy DooDah to you all. I have a quick bit of painting to share – a continuation of my efforts to work through a few Eru-Kin that didn’t make it to BOYL last year. This time, it’s the ‘Rogue Trader pet Jagla’:

This mini was a beauty to paint – loads of fun bits to pick out, but unlike most of the range, loads of nice variation in texture too. I’ve kept the same colours going for the armour, but went with a ragged earthy look for the cloak & leather. I see him as some kind of pariah, standing outside normal Eru-Kin society, but maybe dipping in and out as it suits him. I painted him with dark skin to reflect his outcast status – high-caste Slann are described as having brighter skin in the RT, so I figured that the opposite should hold true.

His pet Jagla was a straight forward model to paint – I kept it fairly muted to work nicely with the Trader. I actually used contrast paints on this, but supplemented this with ‘proper’ shading and highlighting. The eyes were fiddly to pick out, but otherwise a nice & simple job.

So that’s it for now – all in all, these were a very satisfying pair to paint, and they’ll work perfectly with my (slowly) growing collection of non-combatant minis. I’m down to the last handful of neglected Eru-Kin now, so I’m aiming to wrap them up over Christmas, and then I can hit the new year with some new projects. I have thoughts of building an Inq28 style  Wood Elf BB team, and also expanding my Daughters of Khaine to a playable Warcry warband… Fingers crossed!

Have a good one dudes, be cool 😊

Greetings Terrans, how goes it? I have a quick(ish) update for you today – I’ve been plugging away at my unfinished pile of Eru-Kin, and managed to get these two chaps finished:

They are lovely minis, and really look like some kind of ceremonial honour guard to me, so I’ll probably have them looking after one of the leading characters in the army:

A strange thing happened while I was painting these guys – I kept having the irrepressible urge to do something like this with them:

After some pondering, I realised that there was a huge amount of similarity with this piece of classic Dragon Lance art:

This (and many other) Larry Elmore paintings are etched deep in my memory… cue wobbly flash-back video effect, a la Wayne’s World… (yes, you can make the noise if you like)…

Many moons ago, I wandered into a small bookshop in my local town, and I stumbled across a book called ‘The Art of the Dragonlance Saga’. I spent at least an hour flicking through the pages, and it blew my mind… I was reading Fantasy novels by this point, but this was before I had encountered any genre art, and way before I discovered Warhammer. I knew I needed this book in my life, so I saved up for weeks and weeks to be able to buy it, (pocket money was slim in 80’s South Wales). I think it is telling that this is one of the few books I can actually remember buying… It had everything my juvenile brain could ever want to see – mighty barbarians, elven babes, knights, dwarfs, floating castles, monsters, undead, dragons, wizards… The list goes on and on, and many of the pictures were slavishly studied & copied by my amateur hand.

I moved on from this style of sword & sorcery art as my tastes matured and I discovered the grim-dark insanity of Warhammer, but for a brief time, this book was like a magic portal for me, and was one of my favourite things. In fact, I still had this on my bookshelf up until last year, relatively unloved and rarely opened. That changed when my young niece, who is showing a lot of artistic talent, started drawing dragons. The book was duly passed on, and is now one of her favourite things – I absolutely love it when I go to visit & she shows me the paintings that were inspired by her exploration of it.

Anyway, that’s it for this post – what do you guys think? Do you reckon this painting was the inspiration for these particular miniatures? Was there a favourite book/magazine/film that got you hooked into geekdom back in the day? Drop a comment below & let me know dudes!