Hobbits done!

It's been a crazy few weeks. August Bank Holiday followed by a rather nasty bout of illness completely derailed my hobby plans, but I'm back now and I've even got a completed army to show for it!

It's a very strange feeling, having a fully painted army. I dont actually finish army projects very often, despite painting a hell of a lot. I have a tendency to ping pong between armies and game systems, so my progress tends to be very scattershot. 

The fact that this needed to be ready for the 11th September definitely helped me stay focused though. It's not a rush job either. I'm really quite happy with the quality of painting I've achieved, despite the tight deadline and the time out from hobby i had whilst I was ill.

 My hard work was rewarded richly too, with me netting best painted at the event!

That'll do quite nicely, I'd say. It feels pretty good. I've put a lot of effort into improving my painting over the past few years, so it's great to see some kind of tangible proof of that growth.

I can't rest on my laurels though, my backlog is still looming, so I've spent Sunday finishing up these:

 

That's a Hasharin for my Corsairs and the first model I've gotten done from the Beast Snaggas box I bought nearly two months ago! It might seem a bit of a random pairing, but they share a recipe on the blue and they were laying in front of me on my desk, so it went from there!

That'll do for today though. I need to sit down and have a think about what I want to do next, but I'm sure I'll be back soon. Until then, happy hobbying! 

Clearing the Decks.

After my last post, I'm looking seriously at how to organise and carry out my Inquisition project. Before I do that though I figured I should start clearing my desk of my current work in progress.

Naturally for me that includes a load of Middle Earth stuff, so I set to getting those done. 

I surprised even myself a little with how much I got done in a night though. Clearly all this government-mandated hobby time is making me more productive! 

Theoden and Merry here are just a couple of dismounts for my all-mounted Rohan force, hence why they've been unfinished for so long. They turned out pretty great considering they were only sprayed white when I started! 

 I'd say it took about 2-3 hours to get them polished off, not including basing, which is bloody good. Normally character pieces take me a week or so. 

Part of the reason I churned them out so quick is that I made a conscious decision to skip the normal blending and finicky details I normally pour into characters. Being dismounts, they won't even hit the board in most games I play with them, so I didn't want to overcomplicate the painting on them. Theoden will see use in my Helm's Deep list, but tbh he looks good enough to pass even then. 

The only thing that's bugging me is that I can't find Theoden's shield anywhere, so he'll have to make do without it until it turns up!

Next up was finishing off a few Elves which I had leftover from my event army a few months ago:

I started painting them back in December, but then my event list changed so they weren't needed and fell by the wayside. It's good to finally have them done. 

The mounted Ranger was a conversion I did for Battle Companies. Obviously that campaign has been delayed for a few months now, but it's a fun model which I'm looking forward to using at some point. It's just a shame I can't use it in regular games outside of a counts-as Mirkwood Cavalry model.

Finally I magnetised a trio of Blight Haulers for my Nurgle-loving friend:

It was a surprisingly lengthy process, as I had to use green stuff to line up the prongs of the guns with the sponson mounts. I didn't trust my ability to cut precise grooves to house the magnets, so I went for the GS route instead.

 It also had the advantage of breaking up the uniformity of the gun mounts by adding fleshy growths to hide the magnets. The lack of customisation on the newer chaos vehicles really bothers me, so that alleviated it a bit. 

I won't be painting these myself. My mate is going a little crazy in strict lockdown atm, so I said I'd run them over to him when I get a chance.

 It might be a while before he gets them, but he's in the vulnerable group, so he's most likely going to be cooped up far longer than I will. It'll give him something to take his mind off it for a while at least.

Now those bits are done and off my desk, I've just got a few more bits to do, then I'm fully ready to go hard on Inquisition. It's annoying having to do it this way, but general progress is being made at least, which can't be a bad thing! 

Stay safe guys. 

A Brace of Aragorns and a Gun Girl

That sounds like the setup to a bad joke, but it pretty accurately sums up my hobby progress over the last few days.

With GW and most other hobby outlets battening down the hatches for the time being, there's no better time to be making some headway on my pile of shame.

I've had two different versions of Aragorn sitting on my desk for ages. That might seem strange, but he's one of my favourite LOTR characters, plus I want to use him with different setups for different army lists I field him in. 

I'm not entirely happy with how the one on the right turned out, with the varnish killing the effect of the fine shading work I did on his hair. It'll do for now. Finishing these off gives me an appropriate Aragorn model for both my Helms Deep and Rangers lists.

I also painted up Haldir, again for my Helms Deep list:

He's probably going to sit unused for a while, as the Made to Order for his accompanying Elves has been delayed, but it was still fun to paint him up. 

And now for the Gun Girl:

This one surprised me a little. I was working on other stuff and happened to spot her on my desk. I bought her ages ago for use in Necromunda, but I never got around to finishing the model.

It's such a nice sculpt though that it seemed a shame not be using her in game, so I decided to give her a punky edge and make her part of my Inquisitor's Warband. 

It's certainly not the best paint job I've ever done, but I love how it turned out. 

Having finished her, I realised that I've really been neglecting my Inquisition forces. You might remember how psyched I was for them in the run up to the release of 8th edition, but the hack job which was done on their rules in the transition between editions really killed my enthusiasm for them. 

Being in lockdown though gives me the time to tackle long-neglected projects, so I'm thinking I might dig them out and try to get them repainted and ready to go for the current edition. 

 I've got so many other projects on the go though, I'll have to see what happens. It'll certainly be nice if I can. I'll have a look over the next few days and decide what I'm doing. 

That's all for today though, stay safe, wash your hands and see you next time! 

Battle Companies and Fell Beast

"I should be back to posting regularly soon".

Those words always seem to come back to haunt me, To be fair, posting about once a month is more regular than I've been at certain times in the past, but it's not quite what I had in mind.

Part of the reason of the slight lapse in posts has been down to the fact that although I've been managing to sit down and do some hobby fairly regularly, I haven't really been making much progress on anything. I've been 'picking' at projects. A little here, a little there, but nothing solid in any one direction. Minor progress on various stuff really doesn't make for interesting posts.

I've finally managed to get something finished though. Me and a couple of mates are starting a Battle Companies campaign, so I was able to focus my attention on something and get my starting companies ready.

We each had to pick a good and evil company to take, so I chose Minas Morgul and Mirkwood Elves as my two:

The Elves made sense to me for my good force, as I'm already working on a Mirkwood force. It'll also eventually give me the option to convert up some fun stuff which I normally wouldn't be able to take, such as putting my Ranger on a horse or Palace Guard with Glaive.

That'll come later though, for now here's the basic warband, Aleth's Watchers:

I didn't really do anything special modelling-wise with the basic crew, but it gave me a great chance to lavish the kind of care and attention onto them which I gave to my event army a while back. I'm really happy with how they turned out, especially the armoured guys. I'm actually a little relieved tbh, as they looked pretty terrible whilst I was painting them, right up to the final stages. If I can keep up this kind of standard across the entire army though, I'll be very happy indeed.

For my evil company, I chose Minas Morgul. This was mostly down the fact that I wanted to collect a non-human faction, but also because I love the theme which the rules designers put into the Company List. A couple of Black Numenoreans, their Orc minions, plus the option to recruit spirits ands gribbly things later seemed too much fun to pass up. The fact that I want my main Mordor force to also be themed around Minas Morgul was just the icing on the cake!

I've decided to name the company Elandur's Marauders, named for the Black Numenorean Knight who leads them. 

They were great fun to build and paint, even though the plastic Orc sculpts are showing their age a bit now, with a lot of softer details, especially around their shoulders. I managed to disguise this a bit though by sculpting extra cloth wraps onto a lot of them. A lot of people also go for a mishmash of colours on Orcs, but I opted for the more ominous look of having them all in blacks and greys. 

I feel this really helps sell the idea of them hailing from Minas Morgul. I remembered that the Morgul host is described as being 'all in sable' in the books and I think it'll look really great when applied to a larger army, especially when lead by the Witch King.

Talking of the Witch King, I picked up the plastic version of him on a Fell Beast from the Pelennor Fields box. I was going to wait a little while before grabbing him, but I had a Pokemon Regional cancelled on me due to Coronavirus-related reasons and I needed cheering up!

I've never liked the pose of the plastic Fell Beast, so I quickly set about creating something much nicer with the kit:

A fairly simple reposing, but it completely changes the feel of the model in my opinion, perching on a ruined pillar instead of balancing weirdly on a flying stand.

The trickiest part was cut and reposing the legs to sit naturally on the pillar, but it wasn't too hard. I also transplanted the armoured head into the dipping neck and took a hairdryer to the wings to give them a downward curve. All in all, I think the final result looks far more menacing that the original. 

All I have to do now is work out how to paint it (plus the two wraiths on top) and transport it to games! I'll work that out later though.

That's it for today though. I'm having a good go at clearing my backlog ready for some other projects atm, so I'll probably have some Nurgle-y stuff to show you next time. That's assuming I don't get distracted again. I wouldn't actually mind being forced into self-isolation right now, as it'll give me a chance to knock out some of my backlog!

Anyway, until next time, stay safe and happy gaming! 

"Build me a board worthy of Mordor"

I've been away from this blog again for a while. Summer at work and rapid fire Pokemon Regionals  in September have basically meant that I've had to choose between blogging and actually getting hobby done. I'm sure you'll forgive me for choosing the latter!

What have I been working on, I hear you ask? Well, considering the fuss I've been making recently about being organised and getting stuff done, you'd think that I'd not be buying anything new for a while.

So did I. Then a deal came along which I couldn't really say no to.

You see, GW released Warcry recently and it looks pretty snazzy:

Don't worry, I haven't gone out and bought yet another game (Well, technically I have, but hear me out...). What I was really interested in from the set was the terrain:

The moment I saw that photo, I thought "that looks like it would make a great Mordor Fortress". I've been playing a LOT of Middle Earth recently, but I don't actually own a whole lot of terrain suitable for playing it on at home, so this seemed like a solid place to start building up my collection.

What really sealed the deal though was the fact that I had two seperate friends who wanted the Warbands but not the rest of the box, making buying the box just for the terrain a very affordable proposition.

So I dived in and got to work. After a few hours of clipping and building, I ended up with this:

Not a bad start I think. The trick was working out how I could make it look good, but also making it easy to play on, especially as LOTR involves a lot of fiddly positioning.

In the end I decided to make several smaller pieces rather than making one or two large buildings, so I have maximum flexibility to change things up between games. This ran into the slight problem of there not being a whole lot of height to them though. I think I can solve this later, when I start adding extra elements beyond Warcry stuff. For now I feel it's a fairly solid core of buildings to work from.

Next came painting. I didn't want to go to nuts with the paint scheme, but I had a pretty clear idea for what I wanted. Most of GW's Middle Earth ruin terrain is painted to look like white stone, obviously going for the look of Osgliliath, or a recently captured settlement. I wanted mine to have been occupied for longer, so I wanted it to look like the filth and darkness of Mordor has really taken hold.

I decided that Cirith Ungol from Return of the King would be my best reference point, as that was built by the men of Gondor, then corrupted by Orcs.

With that in mind I started to experiment with various sprays:

This was done with Chaos Black as a base, a fairly heavy layer of Mechanicum Standard Grey sprayed on the top, followed by a light Corax White, a Nuln Oil Wash, then a light drybrush with Mechancium Grey again.

Not a bad result I reckon and it was pretty quick to do too, only taking about three hours from start to finish, including building the rest of the set at the same time. The only change I made from my first piece to my second was swapping the drybrush colour from Mechicum Standard Grey to Dawnstone:

I think that simple swap just makes the whole thing 'pop' a little more, whilst keeping the dark and dingy feel I was after.

I want to go back later to add some more browns and blacks to the deepest crevasses to get some real filth in there, but I think it looks good enough for now.

The wood was just several layers of Seraphim Sepia over Corax White. It's a ridiculously simple method, even if building up the layers takes a little while. Definitely one I need to remember in future projects.

So that's mostly what I've been working away at. Nothing too massive, but now that things have quietened down elsewhere in my life, it'll hopefully mean that I can find the time to get some projects finished.

I've currently got the next couple of terrain pieces, some Corsairs, plus a few other characters on my painting desk, so I should be able to get those done pretty soon. Hopefully you can expect slightly more regular updates coming up. Hopefully.

Army in a week and other projects.

I've had a weird and crazy couple of weeks. I've gone from being super productive, to being pretty ill, then came a ridiculous heatwave which meant that I struggled to find the motivation to hobby. Now that's eased off I'm finding that after really having to work hard in order to get back into swing of painting, I'm back in a super productive mood.

The big thing which I've gotten done was painting pretty much the entire Fellowship of the Ring in the space of a week:

My motivation for this was the monthly Middle Earth night at my local gaming shop. Five days before the latest one, I decided that I wanted to field something a bit different to my Rohan and Army of the Dead, so I had a look atwhat I had to hand which I could get done in time. The only member I had painted prior to this was Aragorn (who I want to repaint at some point), but I had the models for all the Fellowship knocking about, so I thought "why not" and went from there.

I surprised myself a little with how well they turned out, considering that they were more or less a speed paint. I obviously want to go back at some point and spruce them up a bit, but on the whole, I'm pretty chuffed with them.

I even managed to get a few pics of the game itself. I got smashed after a few bad tactical decisions, but it was good fun.

The best moment was easily when Merry and Sam managed to drive back the Balrog all by themselves, after reinforcements didn't arrive and the Balrog fluffed his rolls!

"You shall not pass!"

On top of that admitedly decent amount of progress, I also got a couple of Rangers of the North painted up for my Grey Company list:

These are more of a side project than anything. I figure that I already have Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli for my Fellowship and Return of the King forces, so I might as well paint a couple of Rangers so I could field the Grey Company if I wanted to.

These were nothing fancy, just a single night's work plus a few minutes doing their bases, but they've turned out pretty well. I've got another half a dozen or so to finish up, plus Halbarad and a Mounted Aragorn to make my fifth Middle Earth army. That's kind of ridiculous when you consider that I only picked up the game in February!

I've noticed that the nature of LOTR, with various heroes available in multiple army lists, makes it almost far too easy to just stray into another army project without even thinking about it. I'm already thinking that I should pick up some Hobbits, as I've already to a decent amount of heroes who could lead them. This rabbit hole just keeps getting deeper and deeper!

On top of all that, I even made little more progress on my friend's Nurgle stuff:

Not as much as I wanted, but luckily he's not too bothered on how long it takes to get them done. I wanted to have at least the Plaguebearers and Nurglings ready for the game we had a few weeks ago, but real life interfered on that one. I'm going to see if I can finish them in the next couple of weeks though. All I really need to do is pick out some details using 'standard' painting techniques, then finish the bases and I'll have a good chunk of them done. Then I can work on some of his characters, which should be a bit more fun.

I'm loving how the green turned out and it was wonderfully simple to do. It was just two/three layers of Waywatcher Green on a Corax White undercoat, followed by a 2:3 mix of Contrast Medium and Militarum Green. I certainly like the result a lot better than my previous experiments without Medium. There's a good amount of the Waywatcher showing through, really pushing the highlights which Contrast is meant to create anyway.

This is turning into quite a long post, but there is one final thing which I've gotten finished.  If you remember last post, I talked about using Trello to organise my hobby progress. Well it actually paid off:

All that needed doing to my second Sonic Dreadnought was attaching the missile arm, but I've been forgetting all about it for about 18 months now. There's always been something more interesting to distract me, especially as I took a long break from playing 40k last year.

I decided to give it a bit of a spruce up whilst I was there and pick out a few extra highlights and details. Nothing fancy, but just making it 'pop' a bit more. Completing it means I've only got a couple more models to paint and and I'll have 2000 points of painted Emperor's Children ready to go, which is one of my goals for this year. It also proves my new organisational system works, which is rather nice to know.

That's all for now, but you can see I've been pretty busy, despite my motivation taking a nosedive for a while. It was only when I was writing this post that I realised just how much I've managed to bounce back. I didn't realise just how much I'd gotten through until I was writing it all down!

Hopefully this productive streak continues. I've got some something in the works which should occupy me for a little while. I'm pretty excited about it, so that'll probably be going into my next post. Getting back into a hobby groove again has also fired up my enthusiasm for blogging again, so that should be pretty quick in coming.

Until then: happy hobbying!

The way is shut...

I've been a bit quiet on here recently. Not because I've had nothing to show you, but more because I've been too busy to find time to update the blog! The last month has been a bit of a wild ride, trying to stop my painting points getting completely out of control. Not only are the new Chaos releases beautiful and tempting, but I've also picked up an entirely new game:

Yup, I've started Lord of the Rings. Being a massive Tolkien nerd, I've wanted to play it ever since it came out in the early 2000's, but noone in my circle of gaming friends played it, so I've never really had the chance. That changed a few months back when a group at my local gaming shop started a monthly meet up for it. It really didn't take much to suck me in. I had a test game of Rohan vs Uruk Hai and I was hooked. Two days later I went halves on the Pelannor Fields boxed set with someone and started trawling ebay for various metal characters.

Whilst I want Rohan to be my main force, I decided to start simple and paint the Army of the Dead from the starter box. They really didn't take long to get finished. I just did a few green washes, followed by a Hellion Green drybrush. Whilst they won't be winning any painting awards, I think they turned out looking great and it give me a solid 400 points to start playing with.

My next step will be painting the Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas models which I nabbed from Ebay so I can field the Return of the King Legendary Legion and take me to 600 or 700 points. Not bad considering I only started the game at the end of February!

Whilst learning the game, I've been a little surprised at how popular and robust the fan community for it still is. The Middle Earth SBG fanbase have really kept themselves to themselves over the years, especially compared to the 40k and AoS fandom, but it's still a massive community. The level of dedication and hobby love out there for the game really is amazing and that makes me even more excited to finally be able to join in!

On top of all this, I've also been working my way through the Shadowspear box for 40k, but I'll show you that next post. I'm hoping to try to up my frequency of posting too, so that shouldn't be too long in coming.