Tag Archives: Painting

Eru-Kin – On Guard!

10 Tuesday Dec 2019

Posted by in Eru-Kin

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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!

Great news – I’m not dead!

27 Wednesday Nov 2019

Posted by in Eru-Kin

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Greetings Terrans – wow, it has been quite a while since I’ve posted… Simple reason for that is that it has been quite a while since I painted anything!! You know how sometimes you plan to take a short break from something, and then before you know it, 4 months have flown by? Yeah… that’s pretty much what happened. It’s a strange feeling – after a couple of weeks of not painting, I just didn’t have the urge to do a damn thing. I had a pile of unfinished minis that got the occasional & unfulfilling 20 minutes of paint here and there, but I wasn’t excited about them and they never seemed like they were getting closer to being finished. Gradually, my hobby gear got tidied away to make way for family life, and this made it even more of a chore to get stuck in & pick up a brush… Meanwhile, the wider hobby world continued to evolve around me, with a seemingly relentless wave of new stuff & breaking news that just became overwhelming… I couldn’t keep up, and couldn’t summon the fucks to even try.

It isn’t that I’ve been idle – far from it! I’ve been hitting the gym, I’ve been getting some longer runs in, and I’ve been putting more time in with the family, (much to their dismay). Hell, I have even been watching TV of an evening! Work has also been progressing nicely, as it slowly emerged from a chaotic time into something approaching ‘normal’. All of these important RL things very easily filled the time that had previously been occupied with toy soldiers, and given my lack of fucks to give about the hobby, it really is no wonder that I fell out of love with it for a while…. And then a strange and wonderful thing happened.

I had a very nice ‘out of the blue’ message from Papafakis asking how I was, and basically checking that I hadn’t died or anything, (thanks for caring bro! 😊). He also has Tytus (gameoftravel) visiting at the moment, and is rocking some fab looking RT games – and man, before I knew it, I started to give a slight fuck about the hobby again – just a little quiver on the fuck’o’meter needle so to speak. Also, it hadn’t even occurred to me that folks might worry about my lack of blog activity, so I figured I had better a) paint something, and b) post something… And so, after a rather long-winded explanation, here we are – an actual, honest-to-goodness painted thing:

So this is one of the fantastic Eru-Kin minis that I picked up in the Diehard KS a few years back – I didn’t manage to finish this guy in time for the army that I took to BOYL in 2018, and he’s been in his undercoat since then, (along with several other minis from the range – oh, the shame!). He wasn’t a joyous painting experience, but for the reasons stated above rather than any issue with the mini itself. It was tricky to match back to my original paint jobs, but I think I managed – here he is with some of his Amphibi-bros:

Funny thing – as well as being horribly rusty with the brush, I also found my sense of scale had gotten worse during my hiatus… I didn’t realise how big this chap was until I put him next to some other minis for this photo! I’m guessing he’s supposed to be a leader of some sort, what with the arm-mounted communicator (or possibly snack dispenser), and his natchy bionic eye… He looks like a leader to me, so that’s how I’ll fit him into my army.

Anyhoo, that’s me for now – I won’t make any promises about posting again in any particular timeframe, but I do promise to make more of an effort to do some painting, to get more hobby done, and to keep you updated. Peace out!

Getting back into the groove

15 Thursday Aug 2019

Posted by in OldHammer

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Greetings Terrans, how goes it? I’m still coming to terms with life after Wolf Time – motivation to paint anything has been pretty poor these last couple of weeks, and this has combined with a general low mood, but my mojo is slowly coming back… I know from experience that the best remedy for any kind of slump is to focus on the positives and just do what I can, so I’ve been getting some decent running in the bank while the weather has been good. I also decided to crank out something quick and easy on the painting front, and have sort of committed to clearing my neglected minis pile, (which for me means ‘undercoated and based’). Fortunately, I had this wee beasty lurking in my heap’o’shame:

He’s a Diehard Miniatures Undead Minotaur – a sod to photograph but a lovely sculpt, and for me, the perfect mini to get back into painting. I’ve followed my usual approach to undead here – mainly ink washes, only using ‘proper’ highlighting for the bone & metal, and then some rust, blood & goo added for good measure… nothing taxing, just a basic zombie jobby! I also finished up this long-neglected chaotic type:

I think he’s from the Pantheon of Chaos range, but I can’t find him on their site so feel free to educate me in the comments if you know better! Regardless of provenance, he’s a superb mini with loads of old school charm. I’ve painted him to go with my version of ‘Konrad Venkel’ from PoC… I vaguely had/have a notion to build a chaotic warband in the service of Malal, so black & white predominates on these guys, and an overtly insectoid look abounds. Clearly this is a slow burning project – I painted Konrad back in August last year, so at this rate, I’ll have a decent warband by the time I retire! For now, the party stands thusly:

 

Aaaand that’s it I’m afraid folks – nothing else doing at the moment! I’m going to be away from my paints for a week, and then I plan to crack on with the rest of my neglected minis – mostly Diehard Eru-kin and a certain Necromundan celebrity. I’m not sure what to expect after that – I have vague plans for a Wood Elf BB team, expanding my DoK for Warcry, some sci-fi civilians and a RoC warband, but not sure what order to approach this in… I’m kinda keen to try Warcry, so maybe DoK might get to the head of the queue? We’ll see.

Anyway, that’s all for now folks – onwards and upwards!