Baleful Realmgates

Baleful Relmgates

So, having finished my 1000 point meeting engagement force for Age of Sigmar, I sat down and properly re-read the rules. Seems like you are generally supposed to have to pieces of terrain per player. So I figured I would pick up some baleful realm gates, because they are interesting, have little murals of skeletons on, and you get two in a box.

Painting these was messy. Very large so you have to pick them up as you paint them. The method was to paint them all over with Dark Reaper. Then I picked out a few of the bricks in russ gray. Followed with an all over wash with earthshade. Followed by a bone drybrush all over, and I finally used the filth wash I talked about last time I did some terrain painting in various cracks and crevices. I then went around and picked out all the Bronze in a fairly standard way. The portal energy was done using contrast paint. First I painted it all over with gray seer, and then the magos purple contrast paint.

I think they came out well enough, for quite a quick paint job.

More Ghosts

WoooooOooooOoo

Not much to say about these really, it's the other 10 Chainrasps from the starter box. Now they are painted, I have painted my entire 1000point meeting engagement force for Age of Sigmar. Which is nice.

The only remotely interesting detail here is that there isn't really a leader. When I originally assembled these I had every intention of running them as a single unit of 20. The chap in the stocks there is the alternate build of the leader model with the candlestick. I suppose this is the tension between collecting and painting cool models and making viable gaming pieces.

I don't think anyone I play against is going to care too much that the unit leader does not have a weird candlestick thing.

From Golden Light They Come

Adeptus Custodes Kill Team

I couldn't face painting another 10 Ghosts today, after painting 10 Ghosts yesterday so I decided to finish one of those projects that was hanging around half painted.

I hate that, when you end up with a half painted project just knocking around. Seems to always take forever and a day to get back to it. I laid down the gold basecoat, wash and highlights for these guys ages and ages ago. At some point I had done the blacking in of all the rubbery joins and things; today I finished them.

Custodes in Kill Team are interesting. They do a good job of not dying and destroying everything that stands before them, unfortunately, most Kill Team scenarios require capturing objectives and things.

Fun though.

Painting wise I largely used standard kinds of methods. The red leather was a bit of a first, hand to pick up a couple of new paints. It's gorthor brown with red highlight. Did use athematic blue contrast paint on the power blades and it looks amazing. Highlight them up as if they are normal swords and then just slather the athematic blue on top. That's all power weapons from now on sorted.

Hope you enjoy. Tired now. Back to work tomorrow.

Chainrasps

Chainrasps

I feel like I am letting down my skeletons by painting these spoops. I like skeletons a lot. However, in meeting engagement, they really have a place because they have a little more mobility. I've had the nighthaunt side of soul wars for a long time; since a good friend of mine bought it for the storm cast and was like 'do you want these for thirty quid'.

Death things

Lahmian Vampire

I know, I know I can't stick to any project. Today a bunch of death models. This was spurred on by the new Generals Handbook which includes a way to play with only 1000 points of models. I put a list together, and I needed to paint up a few extra bits and pieces.

Warhammer Day DIY Funko Pop

Funkopop

So this one takes a little bit of explanation. Games Workshop gave a licence to Funko Pop. Funko promptly came out with three different big headed vinyl dudes. A Dark Angel, A Space Wolf and an Ultramarine.

Today (technically, yesterday) is (was) 'Warhammer Day' a somewhat abitary celebration of the Warhammer hobby, a few things were available exclusively today, one of which was this 'DIY' funko pop. It's essentially the Ultramarines one, but just painted flat gray. With the idea being you can paint it yourself.

The Dragonborn Comes

The Dragonborn

Who's played Skyrim? I've played Skyrim. A lot of Skyrim. More on that later. I had of course seen that Mophidius had acquired a license to produce a Skyrim miniatures game, but I have enough models. I was resisting. However, my good friend the IT guy decided to buy me one as a gift because (he's awesome?) we had talked about video games (smashing every stereotype about men who work with computers) and he knew about my Skyrim addiction. So no I'm going to have to collect a force for the main game when it comes out. Which was probably his plan all along right. We've all done that...

Gellerpox Infected (Citadel Contrast)

The Gellerpox Infected

Okay, so this represents my second play with the new contrast paints. As I said in the last contrast related blog I really think the secret with contrast is to use a suitable subject. These Gellerpox Infected are perfect for contrast because they are mostly organic textures. These were very quick to paint, and while yes I could have done much better if I had taken the time to go full classic method on all of them, these are some more models that I was unlikely to ever get around to painting 'properly'.

Alabaster Automata

Alabaster Automata

Relic Knights. Well. I blogged about this game before, back in 2017. You can read that blog post here. In case you haven't been keeping up, that Kickstarter still hasn't delivered. Due to spiraling costs. Nevertheless, Ninja Division has started to put out a small number of new sculpts, and are ploughing the profits from them back into fulfilling the original Kickstarter.

It's a long sad story, and not one I want to particularly retell here.

This model is for the 'void' faction, which is essentially the bad guy 'meta faction' which can be hired by any of the three main bad guy factions.

According to the Ninja Division website:

Chained to her duty and torn between two worlds—that of the chee and the "living"—the Alabaster Automata struggles to find the true meaning of self as she battles throughout the galaxy in the name of the Chee Collective.

I think they are going for the human-created robot gains self-awareness trope. Which I suppose explains why she (it?) is proportioned and dressed like a love object. I used to be really into Anime and had a definite fondness for this kind of content, then I grew a bit and discovered shame.

A bit of an indulgence then in terms of the subject matter.

I'm really pleased with how the skin turned out, given the name of the model it really had to be a very pale white skin tone. I actually followed a Games Workshop tutorial for painting raven guard faces. The 'clothing' is my standard black recipe; I did struggle a bit to differentiate the metal of the chains and the metal of the sword. Tried to do more of a dark gunmetal on the chains, and more of a polished iron on the sword. Not convinced I carried it off. 

Blackstone Fortress Ambul (Citadel Contrast)

Ambull

So, in case you were somehow unaware, today Games Workshop launched to much fanfare their Citadel Contrast line of paints. Basically, a very heavily pigmented transparent paint with slightly odd flow properties. The idea is you can paint your model in just 'one thick coat' of contrast and get a passable tabletop standard.

I had pre-ordered a bunch of contrast painted in the colours I tend to favour (black, red, bone) but due to funky distribution issues, I have not yet received my pre-order. However, Helen decided to go down to Games Workshop and pick up some other contrast paints so we would have some to play with. I looked through my shelves to find something that would look good painted in mostly blues and greens.

This is the Ambull from the Blackstone Fortress expansion set which I picked up essentially because I wanted to play the game. I never had much interest in the model, and therefore it was in the 'unlikely to ever get painted' section of my staggering collection of models.

Enter contrast. This is maybe 30 minutes work bashing paint on straight from the pot like I used to paint when I was eleven. It just dries with magical highlights. Could I do better if I invested far more time? Yes! But the Ambull undoubtedly looks better with some paint over no paint.

There is a bit of mottling on the top of the carapace. It looks okay on the ambull because he is a creature. I think the contrast is going to look suboptimal on space marines, however. Best to stick to natural textured things like Lizardmen, Tyranids, Skeletons, Nurgle Daemons or Skaven.