Tag Archives: Painting

More Eru-Kin, and the Fembruary challenge

29 Monday Jan 2018

Posted by in Eru-Kin, Fembruary Challenge

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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

Decembruary painting challenge completed!

19 Friday Jan 2018

Posted by in AoS Undead, OldHammer

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Happy Friday folks, and I’m happy to report that my super death-dragon monster of deathly death is finished, thus comfortably getting me over the finish line for Azazel’s Decembruary painting challenge. As a reminder, the challenge was to paint a ‘big thing’ that has been put off for a while, and this certainly matches that brief – I’ve had this project in mind for months, but never seemed to have the motivation to roll my sleeves up and get cracking… You can probably see why – this was a complicated and intimidating kit bash to represent Arkhan The Black in an OldHammer stylee, and is based on the venerable Death Dragon from Grenadier, (still available from mirliton.it as ‘Arkor the Eternal’). This is what I ended up with:

So let’s talk a bit about the build… First things first, this old girl is a big lump of lead, and I made it more complicated by deliberately ignored the ‘correct’ pose to make her a bit more dynamic… much pinning and filling was required to make sure she was rock solid! I used an old GW skeleton cavalry mini to represent Arkhan himself, with some minor conversion work to swap the (MASSIVE) head, add a right arm, add a tilting shield, and sculpt a saddle & banner mount. He also got some manly man-chains to steer the bugger. The base got quite a lot of attention as well – Arkhan gets a bunch of spirit host attacks in AoS, so I wanted to represent this on the model. The banshees from the Mortis Engine kit fitted the bill nicely, while some trees & scatter filled in the gaps and added a third point of stability for the dragon. One final thing to note – cleaning the mould lines off such a big model created a lot of lead shavings and off-cuts. I glued all this gash to the base and used it as texture, thus avoiding any thorny issues with responsible disposal. I even managed to sneak the rider’s original massive head in there – waste not, want not!

In terms of painting, this piece (is it pretentious to call it a ‘piece’??) provided ample opportunity to cut loose and have some fun. First up, I wanted the spirits to look like they were really glowing, so I had loads of fun with OSL. I think it came off nicely, though I think I overdid it a bit on the dragon’s eye sockets… I’ll sort that bit out next time I have some skellies on the table, but otherwise I am really chuffed with how the glow effect worked. Another bit that got a lot of attention was the banner and (to a lesser extent) the shield, and I really got to push the boat out with the freehand here. I am delighted with how it came out – that banner ended up being one of my favourite ‘things wot I painted’ ever! The rest of the paint job was pretty standard – I painted the trees to match my woodland bases, and I took my usual approach making things look tatty and old. A smattering of leaves and tufts of grass complete the base, though I do need to just go back and add some OSL to the leaves, (they got glued on last, and I didn’t want to risk painting on to wet superglue).

Here are a bunch of close-ups from various angles & focus points – I’ve tried to capture all the interesting bits for your viewing pleasure:

 

So, that’s it folks, what do you think?! I’m delighted with how it all came together & hope you like it too :-)   Huge thanks to Azazel for setting the challenge and motivating me to tackle such a big & intimidating project – it is great to have such a mighty hero to lead my legions, and I wouldn’t have got around to it without this challenge, so high-fives to you dude :-)

Spawn to be wild!

30 Thursday Nov 2017

Posted by in Eru-Kin

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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 :-)