Tag: fantasy

How to… Make your own jungle terrain

Just a quickie! quick and simple jungle terrain!

I bought some aquarium plants from my FLPS (Friendly Local Pet Store), picking up 2 packs of plants which totalled less than $8.  I figured they may look cool as either jungle/oasis scenery, or maybe as some scenery for an exotic alien world. So, here goes…

Step one:
These suckas are all joined together, so you’ll want to take your scalpel to them to separate them up. (Remember to cut away from yourself, kiddies!)

You’ll want to try and hack them off the base too, much easier than it sounds… I had to get a heavy duty Stanley knife to this mofo. You should then be left with the foliage, thus:

I did leave a couple of pieces on the base, although I did reduce the size of the base. This will make for some slightly higher pieces of terrain.

Step two:
Now you’ll want to get some foam board that you’ll a) have lying around or b) will go and score from the craft store for about $3 a sheet, which will last you for ages. Cut out the size of base that you want your scenery piece to be, then shave the edges at an angle to make it look more natural when you put it on your gaming surface. Don’t worry, it does’t have to be perfect, you’ll see why soon.

Then, when you have your base, glue your foliage on! Again, don’t worry too much about the weird base bits, this will be taken care of.

Step three:
This is my favorite part, the messy bit. Get your spackle (or ‘filler’ as we Brits call it) and some pumice, which is essentially sand mixed into paint, which works just as well if you don’t have access to pumice. Now liberally slap on your spackle first. Build it up where you want, like around the base of the leaves etc. I had also grabbed a couple of rocks out of the garden which I included on there too, to include a more natural feel. I brought the filler all the way up to the rocks too, to make them look buried:

I added a layer of the pumice after the filler had dried, you can see I left a ‘pathway’ through the piece to make a bit of a feature of it, and added a couple of skulls from my bitz box in there too…

Here is an example of the other piece made a little higher, more like a small outcrop of foliage:

Step four:
Paint the bastid!

Basecoat is Graveyard Earth, washed with Devlan Mud, drybrushed with Graveyard Earth>Bleached Bone>little bit of Skull White

Mud trail was basecoat Scorched Brown>Devlan Mud wash>drybrushed Scorched Brown>Scorched Brown with Bleached Bone>little bit of Bleached Bone

Now with drybrushing, and some scenic odds and sods added:

Another shot:

“be vewwy vewwy qwiet, I’m huntin’ aweiens!”

And that, dear readers, is it! you should be looking at a lovely new piece or pieces of scenery! and all for under $12!

Stay frosty

H.

How to… Paint Tomb Kings – max results for minimum effort

In honor of the new, and rather delish Tomb Kings release last weekend, I wanted to post up a ‘how to’ article on painting up your undead forces in double quick time in readiness for battle.

As you may have seen in the current issue of White Dwarf, they give you some ideas for different techniques for painting your skeleton warriors. They look great, but are rather in-depth, probably too much so for those of you, like me, who are not only a full time computer masher during the day, but also a full time dad and part time rock star. My point being, you don’t have too much free time to paint.

Part the first:

Once your skellywags have been assembled (arguably the most time consuming part of this) you’re going to want to spray undercoat the little buggers. I’ve used Duplicolor Sandable Primer, matt white, which costs about $6 from any auto store, and is far superior to the expensive shite that Games Workshop tout as spray paint. I leave them overnight to dry, although they are dry to the touch in a few minutes, but I’m usually doing something else, yay for multitasking.

You should be looking at a nice, white skellie, yes? Good, then we can move onto…

Part the second:

Get a pot of Devlan Mud*, insert your wash brush, or other larger brush, then liberally slap it on all over the mini. I tend to do a second coat on things like the face and ribs, as they have the most detail. Try not to pool it if possible. Set aside to dry. I have been working on a unit of horse archers, as you can see. The GW washes dry, so by the time I have washed one, moved on to the second, the first is already dry.  You’ll already start to see things taking shape, thus:

Some of you out there may choose to stop at this stage, which is fine, but they still need to pop a little bit, IMO. This leads us nicely into…

Part the third:

This is where your little creepers will come to (un)life.  Get your brush that you use for drybrushing, open your Bleached Bone paint and drybrush them. This will give that extra dimension to them (whoah! 3-D!). It’ll pick out the ribs and facial features a little more, plus give them a little more ‘dry’ and sun bleached feel. You could even add another drybrush step here with Skull White, which I did, as I do it on just the face and ribs, very lightly:

The bone parts are done! Simple, eh?

Part the fourth – details:

You’ll still need to paint your quivers, bows and other bits after this, but again I keep it simple. For the bows I use a Mechrite red base, washed with Devlan Mud. The quivers with Hawk Turquoise washed with Devlan Mud (this is to give the overall feel of wear and dirt over a couple of centuries). The quiver flap and straps are base coated in Chaos Black, and a quick line highlight of Greatcoat Grey (PP3) and then Codex Grey . DONE! You can add details like hieroglyphs and what not, but the aim of this is to be quick, right?

Part the fifth – finishing touches:

Base ‘em! I use a pumice filler for the bases, as it looks like that dry, parched desert ground. Once it’s applied then dried, it’s basecoated with Snakebite Leather, then drybrushed with Bleached Bone, then a little bit of Skull White. Add a couple of tufts of desert flock and you should have a nice looking painted unit, ready to deal some serious arrow violence on your enemy:

 

Following this should get you your mass troops done in next to no time, allowing you to spend a bit more time on your character figures.

Let me know how you get on – good luck!

*I just bought a new pot of Devlan Mud the other day, as my other pot had run out. To my dismay, I find that it’s a slightly different shade, and almost looks like it’s got either Ogryn Flesh or Gryphonne Sepia in it. Bollocks!

Preparing for war!

By the gods! where has the time gone? it seems like only yesterday that I was at AdeptiCon hanging out with Dethtron and Evan… Well, I guess a new position at work, my computer at home taking a shit and generally being bloody knackered are the reasons that I haven’t posted in a while…anyway, enough of the excuses!

AdeptiCon was great fun, and a great chance to catch up with some people from the blogging universe. I met Tasty Taste, Brent, Sandwyrm and a couple of others from the HOP network (sorry, names are escaping me right now!). I also met Papa JJ from Dicerolla who is a gentleman! he approached me and Dethtron at the convention and asked if one or either of us were with Crusader, and thus, the ice was broken! Unfortunately we didn’t get to really hang out much, what with the tourneys going on, and our impending show that night at a venue that was only marginally bigger than my 3-year old’s bedroom. But, friendships were forged and i’m sure that we’ll be seeing Papa JJ again soon for more fermented grain beverages.

My one down point from the con was Forge World. I won’t go on about it, but this is definitely their second strike in my book. They had sod all I wanted at Games Day a couple of years back, and the same thing happened at AdeptiCon. I wanted the ‘event exclusive’ mini, a rather sweet ‘boarding marine’ in pre-heresy armor, but they had sold out. Way to go Forge World. They were painfully trying to get rid of some Eldar Titan that they didn’t want to have to cart home, and from what I understand they did end up taking it home. Well thought out lads…

Forge world: see all this really cool shit here?
me: sweet! hell yeah!
Forge world: well, you can’t buy any of it.
me: >sad face<

If any of you are familiar with the ‘Cheese Shop’ Monty Python sketch, it’s pretty spot on with my FW experience.

So, new Tomb Kings are imminent, and I am super excited. It’s put me into gear full throttle with painting my WFB army, which is also another reason I haven’t posted for a while.

I saw the leaked pictures and pretty much had a nerdgasm. I’ve heard on the interwebs a lot of hate toward the Sepulchral Stalkers/Necropolis Knights, but I think they’re really cool looking, and somewhat over-the-top, which I’ve been coming to expect from Fantasy Battle, considering recent releases. I actually also really like the thought of skeleton troops harnessing them and riding them, it’s just so ‘out there’ and quite refreshing to have this unusual take on what I believe will be a heavy cavalry class for this army. (about bloody time too!). The Sphinx is great too, and the model options just look incredible! I’m super excited about the Tomb Guard though. I actually held a box in my hand at my FLGS the other day, but alas it was still shrik wrapped, but it was on the ‘coming soon’ display. The down side to these guys is that they will be retailing for $41, the same price as a Stegadon… yowch! The one thing that I did find odd about them is the choice of head dress they are wearing, which looks distinctly more Mayan than Egyptian, in my opinion:

A small thing, which I don’t really care about, I just thought it odd… I also managed to thumb through the new army book too, which is gorgeous and lavishly illustrated in full color (yes, it will cost more too). Although we haven’t seen them yet, there will be another wave of TK stuff, as we have seen with other lines, GW will do an initial release, then a second wave. The second wave will consist of what look like plastic Ushabti (3 in a box for about $40 i’m guessing) and some new character figures, including some TK that looks like he’s appearing from a mound of scarabs. I’m hoping that new Liche Priests will be on the cards. Looks like we TK players are stuck with the gods-awful Screaming Skull catapult model, and I didn’t see anything about a new Bone Giant (I HATE that mini!) Having said that, I was in a bit of a rush, and didn’t get to look as deep into the book as I’d liked.

I was also half hoping that we would get new skeleton infantry minis, but alas it was not to be. The cavalry models seem to be out of scale with current horse models they make for other cavalry, which kinda sucks. I would’ve liked to have seen TK dedicated skellie minis, instead of the VCs ones with a couple of egyptian style upgrade sprues in there. There’s a lot I don’t use from those regular sprues, and won’t be using on anything else. Oh well, the pro’s defintely outweigh the cons for the imminent Tomb Kings, and I for one am a happy camper…

The release date of May 7th has totally put the firecrackers up my arse that I needed, and as I wanted to take a much needed break away from painting the Emperor’s finest, this has been perfect! I’ll be posting up some pictures of my progress in the next few days, so stay tuned.

Cheers for now

INCOMING… Tomb Kings!

YES!!!!

This made my sullen Monday, which included missing my train to work after a somewhat surreal weekend, a lot sunnier. As a Tomb Kings player, I was beginning to think that these guys would be put on a back burner (like every other army I play) but it would seem I was wrong! This morning I received an email from Games Workshop with a little taster teaser of what is to come. A new piece of art, and a couple of little pictures which appears to be parts of  new minis!

Does this mean new plastic skeletons??? Does this mean some decent looking Liche Priests that don’t look like some shitty rip-offs of the Universal Pictures creatures from ‘The Mummy’? Will we even have mummies??? Will we have plastic Tomb Guard??? Will we have a Bone Giant that doesn’t look like a dead Care Bear? Will be have machines of destruction that aren’t a f*cking nightmare to put together?? oooh the possibilities!!!

My thoughts on the ‘teasers’ – i’m thinking one is definitely a Tomb King, possibly Settra or maybe even Queen Khalida? Not too sure on the other though…

Happy Monday(s)!

Warhammer Fantasy Battle is HERE!

Indeed, the new 8th edition of WHFB is now sitting on my table here at work, positively glowing with awesomeness. I picked this up on the day of release from my local(ish) game store, but as that weekend was also Godzilla-Fest I didn’t have much chance to take a peep at it. My palms were a little sweaty paying $75 for the book, and with my Fiance standing right behind me, I couldn’t make up an alternate price either. All I got after making this purchase was ‘you could have bought me some Fluevog’s for that!’

Indeed.

I have yet to actually get some time to myself to bask in the epic magnitude of the book, but I have afforded myself a few cursory glances, and I got really excited from the bits that I did see. The $75 price tag may seem a little steep (or indeed effing verticle) to some, but when you actually see what is inside, it is more than worth it. The detail and passion that it has obviously been lovingly wrought with is evident. There are some incredible pictures of ‘Apocalypse’ style battles going on, and they do take the breath away when you see it.

By the way, the book weighs an absolute ton. No, really, I mean its really heavy, man.

This version appears to be gearing more toward the ‘epic armies clashing with hundreds of minis’ more than the sort of small scale conflicts of the previous editions. I still have my hardback copy of the 2nd edition, and all those years ago, the dreams of WFB I had are what are being realized in the pages of 8th edition.  I can’t sing the praises enough of the presentation of this volume. I’ll write another post on the content as and when I can wade through it all.

I should consider myself lucky (I think?) as it would appear that there is actually a shortage of this core rule book. i’ve been forum hopping and a lot of local games stores have been told they won’t get all or any of their orders for another few weeks. Of course there are those who are brandishing pitchforks and torches to the gates of GW saying they are incompetant and are going to crash and burn for this etc etc.  Maybe all the naysayers out there should look at this in a positive light: the demand has been way above and beyond what GW expected, which can only be good, as they wanted to bring back interest to fantasy. They’ll print more, and everyone will get their books, but take a second to think about that, eh?

Thats it for now.

Cheers!

Tomb Kings archers

Completed 8 Tomb Kings archers, the first of my first Warhammer Fantasy Battle army! I’m quite pleased with the results, so the rest should be a snap to do. My buddy Colin lent me this pot of pumice stone filler type stuff, which I panited onto the bases for a realistic sandy/desert type effect (Thanks Colin!). The Skellies are relatively easy to do:

  • Spray undercoat in white
  • Liberal wash of Devlan Mud all over (be as messy as you like, but make sure you get all the nooks!)
  • Drybrush Menoth White Base (or equivalent, e.g. Bleached Bone)
  • Drybrush with Menoth White (or equivalent. You want a slightly off-white)
  • Hey presto – painted bones!

And for the blue parts:

  • Undercoat with Hawk Turquiose
  • Wash with blue ink
  • Wash with Devlan mud
  • Add Menoth White to Hawk Turquoise for some simple edged highlights

And for the gold/brass bits…

  • Basecoat Shining Gold
  • Wash of chestnut ink
  • Drybrush of Shining Gold
  • Light drybrush of Brass Balls
  • Tadaaaaa!

The red was simply Mechrite red base, then highlighted with 1/1 mix of Mechrite and Blood red. I didn’t focus too much on these highlights, as this is supposed to be a quick army to paint. Blacks were simply line highlighted with Greatcoat Grey with a thin line of Codex grey to finish.

For the bases:

  • Basecoat Graveyard Earth
  • Drybrush Menoth White Base
  • Light drybrush Menoth White
  • Snakebite Leather for the base edges (two coats required for this, else the white will show through.)

Here they are:

C+C welcome!

Cheers

Paul

War-torn and bleeding…

Can you see the dawn approach?
or see the fire in the sky?
Now the closing chapter of humanity,
the inevitable fate of mankind

Can you still believe in hope
on this darkest day you have known?
Will you still thank your precious god
or have the seeds of doubt been sown?

Will you admire the landscape
of broken bodies, of fallen men?
will you know the falling rain
as it burns onto your skin?

Devastation – untold
Pain and misery
the dying breath of hope
war-torn and bleeding…

Will you attempt in vain
to wash the bloodstains from your hands?
will you stop to lament the lost
their lives offered in your name?

Like a statue will you stand and stare
as though a cenotaph of despair
an inscription no-one will read
in this your final hour of need…

battlefield