Yeah, Truescale baby!

Hi guys - GR here.

An insanely talented gentleman by the name Jeff Vader of Officio Convertorum mentioned a couple of weeks ago, that he thought it would be cool if I truescaled my marines, since I have so few. I love truescaled marines, but I was a little reluctant, since I have built a couple of power armoured true scale guys before, but never tackled a terminator. However, last night, while trying to fall asleep, it came to me how I should do it - Obliterator legs! I've used them before on Pandemion, my Nurgle lord, but this was a whole new challenge.

Anyway, I set to work, and while there is still a lot to be done, I really like where these guys are going (lots of sculpting a detailing to go):

I had to completely redo the halberd, since the normal version looked ridicoulous on this scale. It obviously still needs some cleanup and detailing. The torso is made from a chaos terminator back, combined with the GK termi front, and sculpted to fill out the gaps. The thighs and groin are from the GK termies as well, with some bulking up with putty done. The shoulderpads are from Micro Art Studios, if I'm not mistaken (I bought them 3 years ago, been lying around my bitz box for a looong time.)


The "regular" Grey Knights:

Very simple conversions - basically a terminator, with the back vents cut away, a backpack added and heightened by sculpting a mid section.


And a pic for scale - they are pretty impressive in size, and actually look like the 8 foot tall, 600 pound genemodified killing machines they are - even compared to my acolyte, who is pretty buff:

Check back soon for more, and please leave a comment if you've got any great ideas or critique. :)

Stop painting! – Start playing!

So I done a lot of painting lately, I always do, but outside of intro games I haven’t had a game in a few weeks. My two regular gaming buddy is busy at the moment, one out traveling with his work and the other has just become a dad, which has made it a little harder to get games into the out schedule.

I finished my redeemer and the reckoner from the tutorial tonight, and I’m trying to see if I can get a game in tomorrow, but I will have to do a little traveling L

So here some pictures

 The last one is the reckoner I did for the tutorial the other day, it help the process along that the first things had gotten some paint

And what else? I’m have come to an epic point where I got more painted points than unpainted. I got 122 points painted and 111 still lacking paint. I still don’t own all the warcasters or the judicator, so there is still some way to go. But I think I need a break, so either commission painting or a new army, and I'm thinking new army ;)

I thinking about doing Skorne for a journeyman league this fall, and I'm regularly stopping myself from ordering the battle box online. My plan is to do the regular battle box, going for a beast heavy army and doing a caster swap with Makeda3.  

GR is helping by hating all Skorne models beside the titans, and threatening to destroy my painted jacks if a buy any of the ugly models. I have been trying to tempt him into playing a little Warmachine/Hordes by giving him some intro games and telling him the earthborn dire troll is coming in plastic. Only time will tell if I am successful :)

That was a little late night rambling from me

/Johan

The Daemon Host is finished, and some minor progress on the henchmen.

Hi guys, GR here with a small update.

I've managed to put some paint on the Daemon Host last night, and got some pictures of him. To be honest, I'm kinda on the fence on the paint job - while I think it conveys a good feel, I think it could have been better - the freehanded scripture on his body just didn't want to go as planned, and the transitions on his torso isn't as smooth as I'd like. The latter I blame my crappy apartment lights for - I usually paint at my gaming club, where there's much better lighting. Bad lighting has a tendency to mask colour tone problems and transitions, and I think that's what happened here.

Anyway, enough with the excuses - here he is, and I still think he's turned out pretty well:

I also got some more work done on the preacher (now he has 3, count 'em 3!!! loudspeakers to preach the emperors holy words):

... And some cables for the arco flagellants helmet combat drug supply:

Painting dark red – a tutorial

So this is my first painting tutorial. I’m doing it because a couple of guys asked me how I did the red on my PoM army. It is pretty simple, but everything is easier to understand with pictures.

I had a new reckoner standing ready for paint so the guide is based on me painting the top plate of it. I would usually do all the plates together, but it was a lot faster to just do it on one plate for this guide.

What do you need?

I’m using GW paint, and the reason for that is it is the easiest brand to get in Copenhagen. You need Khorne Red(Base), Wazdakka Red(Layer), Evil suns Scarlet(Layer), Bloodletter(Glaze) and Agrax Earthshade(Shade).

Step 1

I’m going for a dark red so I’m priming with black. After that I simply lay down some base color with Khorne Red. You all ready know to thin down your paints with water or some medium so won’t get into that.

If you want a brighter red, I would go for a white primer and lay a much brighter base color like evil suns scarlet.

Step 2

I want some shadows at the borders and a slightly darker red, so I lay down a shade of Agrax Earthshade. It doesn’t do much on the big plates but on smaller plates and around bolts it gives a nice dark shadow.

Step 3

And now the feathering begins. I’m not a painting genius, so I’m doing a lot of thin paint strokes going out to look like thin triangles. The triangles are overlapping and it just gives the look of a blurry edge to the color underneath. After the shade I do a couple of layers with khorne red once more, which gives a nice blend to the shaded base color.

You want you paint to be a little thinner than usually and use more than one pencil stoke and move each pencil stoke a little further up making each layer cover a little more.

Step 4

And now we go for Wazdakka Red and more feathering.

Step 5

And some final layers of Evil suns Scarlet

Step 6

The final step is a couple of glazes with Bloodletter simply to tie the colors a little better together. It isn’t necessary on all the plates, but a good idea on the bigger plates.

On big plates it can also be an idea to do some more layers between each color mixing the colors a together.

I hope some of you find this guide useful, I will be back later with some pictures of the latest stuff I painted and I will post pictures of the reckoner when I'm done painting it.

/Johan B.

Hi guys - GR here. :)
First of all, we've gotten over 2000 views on this blog as of today, 12 followers and a lot of nice comments - so thank you all for checking out our work, and commenting. :)

I've gotten a bit further on the warband, mostly the henchmen. I didn't have my usual background with me, so the pics aren't as nice as they usually are, but they're okay for showing the progress. :)

Stefan Kraut (Veteran Acolyte, storm bolter:

Terminator, reposed:

Preacher (Acolyte):

Acolyte, Flamer:

The butcher: (shamelessly stolen the idea from Jeff Vaders Convertorum blog)

Andreas 2.0's Legion of Everblight

I finally finished the battlebox for LOE, and I must admit, it was an uphill battle. Don't get me wrong, the miniatures are some of the better ones from Privateer Press, and there aren't that many of them, but the sheer amount of scales on these guys can be very intimidating and overwhelming work - I mean just look at them!

The big guy in particular is just a truckload of linework if you paint him like I do (which in retrospect wasn't the brightest idea). The funny thing about these guys however is that the yellow was a breeze to paint, and it actually came out pretty good with minimum effort. Just look at it! It's so warm and delicious. Needless to say, I am pretty happy with the result.

 

Next up I'm going to paint some Blighted Nyss Striders (pic below). These guys are really ugly with poor sculpts, but their rules are just too good to pass up, so I'll do my best to make them look decent. 

We also have a new edition of 40k incoming, which means I will be airing my Space Marines some time soon, and there will of course be lots of pictures for those interested. Until then, thanks for reading.

/Andreas 2.0

Dmitrij finished, moving on to little sis.

Hi guys, GR here. I'm on a roll here!

I got a good long night of painting done tonight, and I managed to finish Dmitrij and started on the little sister:

Even though I had my initial doubts, I ended up quite happy with him. It's quite a departure from what I usually do (I only used white for mixing into colours for highlighting for example), but I like the look, and he has the right sense of menace.

Sister:

What haircolour should she have?

Painting Dmitrij, zenithal priming, and having no idea what I'm doing.

I was at our local gaming club, Emperors Pride, last with Johan, and feeling a sudden urge to start painting the warband, I took a deep breath and grabbed my brushes.

I had already decided that I was going to try out zenithal priming (read more about this technique here ), and started out by priming Dmitrij.

From there on I started splashing paint on him, very thing glaze-like layers of paint, washes and inks. It was a very complicated process, much more than it needed to be, because I had basically no idea what I was doing (I still don't). His armour has also gotten some edge highlighting, to sharpen up the edges.

I like the result so far, but to be honest, I struggle with painting to a really high standard. I can do good tabletop quality pretty well, but exhibition grade painting sort of eludes me, and I'm a bit annoyed by it. Oh well, I'll just have to keep practicing.

I deliberately kept him in very cool, muted colours - I'm trying to get some of the feel of John Blanches paintings and palette. Of course, he still needs some detail work, and his back-banner-thingy done:

Let me know what you think. :)

Sunshine and new jacks

Hello again! Johan here!

So the sun is back in Copenhagen, and it is awesome! It's not a reason to not build and paint miniatures though. A few days ago I received some reinforcements for my Protectorate army, more specifically a reckenor/castigator/sanctifer kit and a redeemer. A choose to buy these basically because I felt that I kept building lists were I included another reckenor and a redeemer.

And why you ask? The reckenor is just good, reach, SPD 5, assault and a flare. What's not to love? It quickly became my favorite jack when I got into PoM and I really like the chassis overall. I used a vanquisher for a while to get some AOEs into my armies, but I haven't been happy about the results. Yes, the vanquisher is an amazing jack, but I really think the reckenor just does a better job at being a heavy jack, and yes, a 4" aoe with continues fire is amazing at setting stuff like shield walled infantry on fire, but you can't be a beaty heavy jack and shooty heavy jack at the same time(Unless you are a reckenor of course). So therefore I decided to get the redeemer too. I hope it will do better at handing out AOEs and with eFeora its going to set things on fire too.

So last night a began putting the new jacks together and I got a bit greedy. I had acquired and old metal castigator in a trade, but I didn't really see myself fielding it any time soon, and then I started cutting, clipping, and gluing. A couple of hours later the castigator had turned into a brand ned reckenor. I put together the new heavy jack as a sanctifier and used the spare bits to upgrade the old castigator. And here you go!

It's just a picture from my phone and it aren't that great, but I hope you can live with it. I'm also able to field a Vindictus tier 4 theme force now, which actually was one of my plans when I started last year, now I just have to paint some jacks and a second unit of Errants. Hopefully I will start tonight on the painting, but we also have a terrain painting weekend coming up and I have to do some prep-work for that too. My plan is to take some pictures while painting the reckenor and putting together a painting guide for how I paint red.

So a lot of ideas! :)

/Johan

Rainy nights, gray plastic bits and greenstuff galore.

Hi guys, GR here.

I've gotten a bit further tonight. It's been raining cats and dogs all night here in Copenhagen, so I've spent all night in my local gaming club, messing around and doing a bit of progress.

I've finished the Daemon Host, with the last greenstuffing done:



I've also put a more suitable mask on the Sister Repentia - I know they're supposed to be bald, but I think the hair is so nice, it'd be a shame not to use it:





Lastly, I've started working on some acolytes (Stefan Kraut is one of them, there will be 5 total):

Gimpshop and Menites

I was so lucky the other day that GR took some pictures of my Warmachine miniatures, more specificly around a 100 points of Protectorate of Menoth. The pictures is a lot better than those a can produce on my phone, so I’m quite thankful to GR. He also gave me a fast course in photo editing using GimpShop. So check out my first gallery.

I also got a game in against Skorne. I played High Exemplar Kreoss and he fielded Supreme Aptimus Zaal. The game went out to my opponent's favor, by me very quickly getting behind on attrition. So I didn't really get time to take a lot of pictures and write notes for a battle report because I had to focus on the game to even get a small chance. But I got a single picture from the end of my first turn!

I choose to give temple flame guard with UA a chance, I have been running Zealots and they have done very well for me, and I think I still prefer them to the flame guard. But I will properly give them another shot or two ;) 

I hope you like the pictures and I will try to get a battle report together soon!

/Johan B.

Small blast from the past

Hi guys, GR here.

While I was taking some pics of the latest progress on my warband, I spotted a miniature I made about 2 years ago, standing in the display cabinet of our local gaming club. It was actually made to tease one of our resident members; he's a bit of a fluff geek, but since he's fairly new to the hobby, compared to us old rats, he's not familiar with the old background. He was ranting about how silly it was to have the Deathwing KNIGHTS wear feathers, and thought the general amount of feathers on the Dark Angels miniature were too damn high.

I calmly explained to him that it had connections to the original background for the Deathwing, that they were native american themed, with fitting names; Two Heads Talking, Lame Bear, Cloud Runner, etc. His look of disbelief was worth it. I actually had to google up some images, in order for him to believe me.

Anyway, this got me thinking; a native american themed DW army would be cool . I've always loved the iconography, the mohawks, etc.. I grabbed some bits, and bashed this guy together. I actually think the concept works pretty good, but the painting was so time consuming (painting nice bone colour takes a loooong time) that I dropped the project. Still, I think it's worth showing:

While away from home...

2.0 here

So right now I'm sitting a few hundred kilometres away from home in the kingdom of Jutland or whatever this dark place is called. I don't have any of my painting supplies or miniatures with me, which means I have to recreate in some other way. Fortunately the local gaming store was open today, and that gave me the chance to look at something different. Although I'm a huge Games Workshop fanboy by any standard, I would still categorize myself as open-minded to alternative games. Johan will be posting alot of hordes/warmachine, and GR is mainly focusing on GW products, so I thought I'd give myself a different focus - behold

Just kidding... Well not completely. I will of course keep painting GW and P3 miniatures, but at some point during my summer vacation I intend to pick up one or two of the new plastic boxes from Wyrd's Malifaux. I have previously owned some of the miniatures and played a single game, but 40k just took up all my time back then. Now that Wyrd has released a second editon of the game and some cool new (plastic) minis, there is no longer any good reason for me not to look into this strange new world of wonders/horrors. There are new improved computersculpts for alot of the old minis, which P3, as a slightly bigger company, could learn alot from. The first box I'm going to pick up and paint will be this badboy.

It might be hard to make out just how cool these guys are, but thankfully the Wyrd web shop has some high quality pictures - http://wyrd-games.net/shop/Crew-Boxes/

Check it out if you are a fan of the heroic-horror-steampunk-fantasy genre, or if you just like great miniatures. 

Thanks for reading

The Daemon Host evolves - and a couple of new characters

Hi guys - GR here. Thanks to the people who have already signed up as followers of this blog. :) I can see the other guys on the blog have made their debut as well, and I've just taken a lot of pictures for Johan, so expect a whole bunch of pics of his Menoth army coming up soon.

I experimented with my new camera tonight, and while it can still be improved, this is probably the first time I've ever taken pictures of my minis, inside, at night time, using only the electric lights in my apartment - no fancy photolight, just some camera adjustments, and a 5$ IKEA white fabric box as a light box. I'm quite impressed by the quality of the photos, considering the weak light in my living room.

I've done some more work on the Daemon Host - he's almost finished, just need to greenstuff some shackles for the chains on his wrists, and some last detailing.

I've also started a Sister Repentia - she obviously needs another head, so this is just a placeholder, but I kinda like the agressive pose, and the completely over-the-top Eviscerator:

And lastly, another new character - Dmitrijs Interrogator-Acolyte, Herr Doktor Stefan Kraut (A small gesture to the always gentlemanly and nice mr. KrautScientist, of the Eternal Hunt blog):

(This head plus the Tomb Wraith combo is stolen off the incredible Jeff Vaders Convertorum blog - check it out. )