Salute!

There seems to be something of a trend amongst us sad old bloggers that we need to declare we're going to Salute, display a picture so other bloggers will recognise us and then list the things we're really excited about.  I'm fully embracing the herd mentality and doing my bit.  :)

Here is the obligatory mugshot:

This is my happy face

Yes, my glasses are wonky.  Now you've all come out from behind your desk chair/sofa, here's my list of things that are getting me excited:

• GCT Studios/Bushido - I'm going to get the rest of the Prefecture models to complete my warband.  The rest of the Ancible team have known these chaps for ages, so we'll probably be there for a while.
• Hasslefree - Barbarians and loads of other cool stuff, definite purchases from here
• Heresy - As for Hasslefree
• Maxmini - Polish resin stuff that's good for conversions, hopefully the Kromlech stuff will be there too
• Microart - As for Maxmini
• Privateer - Warmachine stuff, probably some Hordes stuff too

Let's face it I'm going to be excited about a lot of stuff, I'll be roaming the halls with the rest of the Ancible team, trying to keep a lid on my spending and failing miserably.  I need to fill this:

ThinkGeek's "Bag of Holding"

...and all my pockets.

Mercs, you can't trust them...

Not done a huge amount of painting this week so far, what with work, and finally getting round to playing Munchkin Quest, which the wife and I have been learning to play.  I've got a little done on the Guild Guard Captain and I'm working on my second warband for "Get the Girl, Kill the Baddies" - the Shadow Company Mercenaries.  I'm still fleshing out the background, but there's some (i.e. a lot of) bad blood between the mercenaries and Brevik's Marauders due to some (literal) backstabbing of Brevik and Ifil's previous comrades, the Greywolves.

First up is the leader of the Shadow Company, Albrecht Von Krull:

The wolf pelt he wears was formerly in the possession of Fenrir Greywolf before Albrecht betrayed him at the siege of Belloch - he wears it only to taunt the Marauders, hoping that some day it will enrage Brevik enough to confront him.  He wears the signature black armour of the Shadow Company, and wields the formidable war hammer known as "Skullcrusher".  He calls himself a noble, but no-one knows his origins, and no king in the land claims him as family.

The black armour is painted using built up greys and a Badab Black wash (see the boots on the Seneschal last post), and the boots are done in a similar way, just using a Charadon Granite base.

The second member of the Shadow Company completed is Murtz the Brazen Eagle:

The "Brazen Eagles" were a mercenary company from the far west of which Murtz is the last survivor, some say because he turned tail and ran while his comrades stood and fought at the massacre at Sil Valley.

But they never say it to his face... 

Murtz is scum, pure and simple, delighting in causing pain to others and completely untrustworthy.

The eagle head on the shield was Tin Bitz, highlighted with Burnished Gold, and then washed with Badab Black.  The grass is from Gale Force 9, but I can't remember the exact name for it - I used this as just another little way of distinguishing them from the Marauders.

Drago and a halberdier named Boris are up next for the Shadow Company, while I finish the Malifaux Guard Captain and work on the Freebooter Assassin, plus whatever I pick up from Salute...

As always, comments and criticism welcome!

Rogue Trader Character 1

Back to a little 40K this post, but a slightly different slant.  The gaming group I belong to (consisting entirely of Ancible team members) have been rolling up characters for the Rogue Trader RPG from Fantasy Flight games.  Now I know RPGs don't tend to need miniatures, but I thought it would be fun to paint up some miniatures to represent each of us.  First up (as it was the one miniature I had which could be painted up straight away), is the Seneschal, the Rogue Trader's Diplomat/Merchant/Agent type character.

According to the rulebook, he's supposed to swan about in robes, but the person playing this role is a bit more, shall we say, "militaristic" in nature, so I went for a model in a uniform - you may recognise him as the fleet officer from the Imperial Guard Regimental Advisors blister.  I went for a grey undercoat again - I have a feeling this will be taking over from black for the majority of my miniatures from now on.  You will probably have guessed that it's my usual way of doing yellow, so I won't go into that here, but if I'd done it again, I may have highlighted up further, and used the new GW Lamenter's Yellow glaze to finish it off.

The boots and other black bits were done slightly differently than normal - and it's a method I've seen across many blogs recently, so apologies if I don't give credit where it's due, as I can't remember where I learned it from.  A base coat of Vallejo German Grey is highlighted with Adeptus Battlegrey, Codex Grey and then Astronomicon Grey.  The whole lot is then washed with Badab Black, which tones everything down.  At the other extreme, the white elements are a base of Khemri Brown, shaded with Gryphonne Sepia, highlighted with Dheneb Stone and then pure white.

The red (which I'm particularly pleased with) is a base coat of Mechrite Red, shaded with Devlan Mud.  In some places this still came out a little too maroon for my tastes, so a glaze/wash of Gryphonne Sepia, brough it back to the warmer red I was looking for.  This was then highlighted by mixing Blood Red into the base coat through to pure Blood Red, and then some Solar Macharius Orange mixed in for the final highlights.    The red really stands out on the miniature, and I think it works really well with the more muted yellow.  

The hair was done in a similar way to the black leather, just with the highlights of Adeptus Battlegrey and Codex Grey added back in after the black wash, to give him that "slightly older" look (I'm going to get such a kicking on Saturday for that...).  The gold is a base coat of Scorched Brown, highlighted with Burnished  Gold and a 1:1 mix of the gold and Mithril Silver.  The skin was Tallarn Flesh washed with Ogryn Flesh then highlighted with Tallarn Flesh and P3 Ryn Flesh, trying to keep a ruddy complexion.  

The base is another of my favourite parts of the model - I wanted it to look like the paved garden of a rich trading house.  It's nothing complicated, just squares of plastic sheet cut into 5mm squares glued to the base.  The squares were painted Dheneb Stone and Scaly Green (a paint defunct even before the current new paint range) and washed with Devlan Mud.  The light stones were highlighted with Dheneb Stone and then a Stone and white mix, and the green stones were highlighted with Scaly Green and then a Green and Rotting Flesh mix.  The model was then sprayed with Humbrol matt varnish and some seriously old school GW flock (I'm talking 20 year old stuff) was glued on to look like weeds growing between the paving slabs.  This was finished off with another spray of varnish and he was finished!

I love this miniature, he was an absolute blast to paint, and it was nice to do something brightly coloured.    The base probably clashes with the miniature a little, but I can live with that.  The rest of the characters in our motley band are the Rogue Trader himself (opium smoking hedonist apparently), a Missionary (ecclesiastical nut job), an Explorator (a tech priest) and my character, the Arch Militant (a hellgun armed combat specialist).  I'm also going to do the Astropath model to represent the GM (or he'll feel left out).  Most of these will be small conversions of existing GW models, so hopefully they should get done over the next couple of months.

At the moment, our ship will be named the "Siegfried and Roy" - I'm hoping this will change...

Of course this Saturday is Salute 2012, where I'm going to do some shopping, some gawking and hopefully meet a few people (including some fellow bloggers).  If you see a fairly tall, dark haired, bespectacled, bedraggled, young(ish) man with a grey "Bag of Holding" over his shoulder, talking like a west country farmer, please feel free to say hello and offer him food if he looks hungry (he's usually hungry...).

As always, comments and criticism welcome!

Next in line...

Quick post - I love the Easter weekend, a 4 day weekend with not much going on - plenty of time to relax and do some painting...

As you can see, Smerc the thief is finished, I won't go into too many details as he's painted in exactly the same way as the rest of the warband (see previous posts) - another quick and dirty paint job, but he does the trick.  Having searched through the Stuff of Legends website (for ages), I've found out that he was originally a "Tomb Robber" (bottom group on that page).  You'll notice that Ifil Ironwolf from a previous post is entitled "Judicial Champion".

I'm really happy that I've found a use for these old miniatures - they would have stayed in a box unpainted, and that would have been a real shame, The next four are shown here ready for priming:

From left to right:

• Halnir, the final member of Brevik's Marauders for now, a swordsman wearing a wolf skin 
• Albrecht von Krull, mercenary captain, leader of the Shadow Company mercenaries (I reckon this miniature was the inspiration for the Knights of the White Wolf).  He has history with the Marauders and will provide plenty of plot hooks.
• Drago, Albrecht's right hand man
• The Necromancer - heart of darkness, soul of evil, he's going to be a classic necromancer in every way (more undead on the way too).

Also, I've put together my next Malifaux miniature, the Guild Guard Captain, mounted on another Malcontent base:

The colours will match the lawyer from the previous post.  There's also a load more on the go too, which I need to crack on with, as it's only 2 weeks until the Ancible team invade Salute 2012!

As always, comments and criticism welcome!

Legal Issues

Something a bit different this time, I finally got myself around to painting some Malifaux.  I bought the Lucius box about 7 months ago, but so many other projects, plus DIY, plus work had meant that I'd not even got round to examining the miniatures!

First up is the lawyer:

To be honest, of all the crew, he is the least interesting model, but his simplicity meant that it was easy to test the paint scheme I wanted to use.

I wanted a deep red for the trousers, so Scorched Brown for the base coat, washed with Devlan Mud, then highlighted with Blood Red and then Red Gore.  The boots were based in Vallejo German Grey, highlighted with Adeptus Battlegrey and Codex Grey and then washed with Badab Black.

I wanted the coats to be different from the standard grey-black, and I make no apologies for using Charadon Granite - I haven't checked yet, but I really hope they've got an equivalent in GW's new paint line, as I don't have a huge amount of it left...

The coat was washed with Badab Black, and highlighted up through Charadon Granite and Dheneb Stone.  The liner of the coat was a mix of Khemri Brown and Charadon Granite, washed with Devlan Mud and then highlighted with Khemri Brown and then a little Dheneb Stone mixed in.  The gold trim to the coat is P3 Blighted Gold, shaded with Devlan Mud and then highlighted with the Gold and some Mithril Silver.

I wanted the hair to stand out a bit as the rest of the model is quite dark - so a base of Snakebite Leather was shaded with Gryphonne Sepia, and then highlighted with Snakebite Leather and Bleached Bone (I'm going to miss those two paint names when they go).  The shirt was Dheneb Stone shaded with Gryphonne Sepia and highlighted with Dheneb Stone and Skull White.

The skin was my normal method at the moment - Tallarn Flesh, shaded with Ogryn Flesh (which gives a nicer colour than Gryphonne Sepia) and highlighted with Tallarn Flesh and P3 Ryn Flesh.  The teeth were then shaded with Devlan Mud and picked out with white.  The face mask was based in Astronomican Grey and highlighted with white.

The base is another from The Dark Templar, which I can't recommend highly enough (no, I'm not on commission, just a big fan!).  On the metal parts, a base coat of Tin Bitz and some spots of diluted Bestial Brown was washed with Devlan Mud, then lightly dry-brushed with Boltgun Metal and Chainmail.  The stone was a lot of grey washed with Devlan Mud and dry-brushed again.

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Other News!

Andy Hoare has released the next preview version of his skirmish rules "Get the Girl, Kill the Baddies" (Download here), now with points costs! and he's hoping for people to play-test.  I'm starting on my second warband, the Shadow Company mercenaries (the third warband is in the pipeline too), so may get around to putting up a battle report in the coming weeks.

Smerc the thief is almost done, but "The Great Shazam the Sorceror" will be on hold as only evil warbands get sorcerers (I probably should have checked that).  It might be time to look through my collection of old miniatures again...

As always, comments and criticism welcome!