Nostalgia

A long time ago I got into the hobby via the wonders of Advanced Heroquest, and its little add-on, the Advanced Heroquest paint set.  Included in this box was a sprue from the Warhammer Fantasy Regiments box set (a wonderful box including 60 plastic miniatures released for WFB 3rd edition).  For those who never got to see this motherlode of plastic, this sprue had a dwarf, a wood elf, a dark elf, a skaven, an Orc and a goblin, with shields and alternative heads and weapons.  The dwarf was the first miniature I ever painted, and soon after bought myself the Regiments box.  In honour of my introduction to the hobby all those years ago, I decided to paint up a sprue of these guys.

The forces of Evil

I tried to paint these guys in an "old school" style of painting - kind of like they used to do in 'Eavy Metal back in the day.  So as well as blending and layering there's some use of drybrushing too, particularly on the metalwork:

The skin on the Orc I'm particularly pleased with - a little darker than I would usually do for an Orc.  The worst thing is that I don't remember properly how I did it.  I know it's Orkhide Shade as a base, but then I can only guess that it's a wash of Devlan Mud followed by Orkhide Shade up through Gretchin Green?  The metal has some Bestial Brown daubed in before the highlights were drybrushed on, to make it look a little rusty.  

The forces of Good (and a Dark Elf...)

These three are some of my all time favourite miniatures, particularly the Dwarf (I should have filled the divots in his hammer before painting, but never mind).  The Wood Elf's face is still a pain to paint even now, but at least he gave me some good practice painting "difficult" eyes...

Put up against the latest Dark Elf Executioner, the Crossbowmen is about 2/3 the size, it surprised me how much they had grown over the years.  This Dark Elf was painted before the assassin, hence the use of the "turquoise abomination" - I don't want to repaint that now...

The Shields

My favourite parts of these models, they really are fun little things to paint.  The Dark Elf shield is a bit dull (do Dark Elf Crossbowmen have shields these days?), but the rest have some nice character to them, particularly the Orc and Goblin shields:

The Orc one is my favourite, I'm not sure if the moon is meant to be orange, but it felt like a "Late 1980s/WFB 3rd" colour so that's what I went with.

As always comments and criticism welcome!

In other news, it looks like Blogger had a bit of a problem this week - apologies to SAJ as I can't remember what he asked on my Pedro post, before some of the comments got deleted.

Getting ratty... (Part 1)

I'm going through an "irritable" stage at the moment, it doesn't take too much to annoy me, and there have been more than a  few days these last couple of weeks when I wish I'd never got out of bed.

Painting has been slow this last week or so, I've managed to complete two miniatures.

Just the two.  I've got into a painting rut again, the enthusiasm has died and I'm not sure how to regain it.  Nothing much appeals to me at the moment, and it's a bit worrying.  I'm tempted to just put everything to one side and start a new project, just to get the energies flowing again.

The next source of irritation is my lack of a decent photography set up - I need somewhere permanent, lord only knows where that will be though.

Anyway, just the one photo (i.e. the only one that came out OK in my last session):

Queek Headtaker

Pretty pleased with the paint job, hopefully some better photos should show him off better.  I went for metallic armour rather than red, as I didn't like the bright red armour on the GW paint job - this feels a bit more Chaos ratmen to me, although not quite so distinctive.  The warpstone pendant worked well too, might need a bit of work, but the OSL's not too bad.

The other miniature completed this week was a quick and dirty Warg rider for War of the Ring, 3 more of those to go...

What would people like to see me do next? I'm really open to ideas - my next post will be about an autumnal themed Eldar army that I have an idea for, but after that, who knows?

Why did I bother getting up this morning?

I've had one of those days.

Stupid slushy snow made the walk to work "interesting" this morning.  Work was decidedly uninspiring.  Walk back from work was cold and unpleasant.  This evening I watched the rather dull Liverpool v Tottenham game (2-0) rather than what appears to be the rather more exciting Aston Villa v Blackburn game (6-4).

So I decided to take some pictures of some of my latest work:

Huron Blackheart

These two (not great) pictures were taken before he fell off the desk and bounced off the floor, knocking off his backpack, bending the talons of his claw and chipping the paint off his head.

...and yes, I was a little upset...

He's now on the shelf awaiting me to get the motivation to repair and repaint.

Classic Skaven Sorceror

This is the only picture that came out well of this guy - I've put him in this post as it's my best attempt so far at Object Source Lighting (based loosely on the tutorial in a recent White Dwarf), and I needed a positive...

As always, comments and criticism welcome.