LOTR: Mounted Citadel Guard & Beregond

   I haven't felt that I have had any 'finished' things to show off for getting on for a year.  Even though I don't currently have any opponents for Lord of the Rings, my fondness for the game and its models has not abated.  Now that Games Workshop is Under New Management and has really made an effort to unite, balance and reinvigorate the Middle Earth range I have found the lure of it irresistible.  

  Unfortunately, there are still many, many gaps in the official model range, including discontinued and Out Of Print models, alongside ones that never got an official release to cover the options available in the rules.  3rd party suppliers have tried to fill the odd gap, with mixed results.  These three models are by Unreleased Miniatures, and were the very devil to put together, with big gaps needing lots of green stuff to fill in and smooth over.  They weren't cheap, either, but I am glad I've given them a go.

  The bases are from Dragon Forge, and I used brass rod to pin the pewter models to them.  There was an unfortunate incident involving the squished looking one on the right hand side, and eventually the back legs will tear / snap.  When that happens I'll have to re-pin and re-paint bits of it but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it!

  I used a Dheneb Stone equivalent from Instar paints for the stone of the base, washed it with Agrax Earthshade, then drybrushed Ulthuan Grey.  I tried various colours around the edge of the base to emphasise the pale stone but none of them worked so I just went right back to Chaos / Abaddon Black which I think works best.

  Next, I am going to work on the official GW models of these figures dismounted!

Warhammer 40k: Space Wolves Long Fang Pack

A fortnight later than intended, I have completed my first ever Warhammer 40k squad!

I learned a lot with these chaps and hopefully the next models in the army will go slightly quicker for me.  There's still things that I haven't quite got the hang of yet like painting certain jewels or the eyes of Space Marine helmets, but my edge highlighting and glazes and layering are all improving.

I built these years ago without thinking about the logistics of painting and getting my brush into corners etc.  So there was a lot of wasted and duplicated work on the chest / face / weapon as a result. The heavy weapons are worst, I think the others won't be as bad. I actually find the large, flat surfaces frustrating as I want to glaze them then highlight them.  In addition, free hand looks really awful unless it's perfect.  I gave up adding stuff to the purity seals as it looked amateurish and I redid the text on the leader's shoulder pad twice until the made up runes looked tidy enough.

I had some trouble learning how to do the Transfers as well.  Unfortunately, Forge World have stopped producing the large Space Wolves transfer sheet which has the full range of Great Company markings, so I have to be extra careful not to mess up these ones as I put them on.

Games Workshop currently produces a Transfer Sheet but it focuses on the three most well known Great Companies and doesn't have as much variety as the old Forge World one.  These folks have a mix of honour markings, runes on their knee pads and pack markings as I'm not going to be too concerned about creating perfect packs with matching symbols a I may need to swap around different weapons or change pack sizes.

These chaps are all from Gunnar Red Moon's Great Company.  The Space Wolves have 12 Great Companies, roughly equivalent in size to the standard Companies of normal Space Marine chapters.  Each is led by a Wolf Lord who picks his heraldry on ascending to the position.

 My rough idea, even years ago, was that I would like a Space Wolf army that suggests a mixture of different packs from different Great Companies, to allow different armour colourations and just generally to make it a more visually interesting army.  In the Codex, the Wolf Lords are described as having particular preferences for different units and tactics - Gunnar Red Moon favours Long Fangs, hence my decision to give them his symbol on their left shoulder pads.

Before I put on any transfers I used a Gloss Varnish to create a smooth surface on the area.  I used Games Workshop's "'Ardcoat" diluted with a little Lahmian Medium and that worked well enough.  I used Vallejo Decal Medium and Vallejo Decal Fix, but confusingly the official video tutorial from the Vallejo Youtube channel contradicts the FAQ PDF file on the Vallejo website.  One says to put the Fix on first, then the medium, and the other flatly says the opposite.  In the end I went with the water based fixer first, then used the alcohol based medium to soften the edges of the transfer once it was in place.  I used the medium several times and the edges of the transfers are much less noticeable now.

Another thing I had to learn to do was to get flat transfers to conform to curved surfaces.  This is a bit tricky and required something a lot sharper than my bog standard Citadel Hobby Knife.  This tutorial from the From The Warp blog was very helpful in explaining that it helps to, if possible, create relief cuts in the decal to allow it to conform to an uneven surface   My Dad gave me a spare scalpel he had with a fresh blade and I went about giving it a go.  The result isn't perfect but I am happy with it so far!

Perfect is the Enemy of Good

Sometimes I should just leave well enough alone.

A second attempt at spraying my LOTR chaps, this time with a pale grey, ended up with horrible "frosting" across much of them.  This was an attempt to "fix" the initial grey paint which I felt wouldn't stick as a primer.

So - a month of off and on paint stripping, regluing, rebasing etc. began.

However, whilst that's been going on, some packages have arrived and I have been busy prepping some new models.  A mix of Unreleased Miniatures models and Games Workshop ones now make up my army, with some bases from Dragon Forge and Micro Art Studios.  Now they are finally "ready", if unpainted, it feels good to say there is some visible progress!

I love the Kingdoms of Men generally and like the idea of allied forces from different regions. My main desire was for Fiefdoms with Minas Tirith allies. Frustratingly a lot of hero and even troop models are OOP so I've had to be patient on eBay.

I am hoping that with Games Workshop re-investing in Middle Earth as a setting in 2018 there will be opportunities for new models or re-releases of older ones as time goes on.

Autumn Beckons

Summer ended, not with a bang, but with a whimper!
 
I just realised that I haven't posted in a couple of months - mostly because I have ground to a halt, hobby-wise!  I got most of the way through an Empire Knight unit for Warmaster and thought it looked superb.  Here's the finished test strip with a coin for scale.

Alas, I burned myself out and felt I must do something different, having spent so long doing nothing but Warmaster.

Then an unfortunate thing happened - I got excited about another army and game system!

So I have been on eBay and on the GW webstore and have some lovely Lord of the Rings armies of Good - namely "Fiefdoms" and Gondor.  Essentially, Fiefdoms is a catch all for allies of Gondor - including all the things mentioned in the books that didn't even get a nod from Peter Jackson in the films.

I love the idea of having a pool of troops to make a small army or warband in a similar scale to a SAGA battle but with fantasy elements.  LOTR focuses less on units but rather each individual model and it's placement and luck in combat is important, with different elements able to support one another.

I splashed out on nice resin bases from Mico Art Studios and faffed about basing them and prepping them, then the first thing I did was make a huge cock up!

I went to undercoat them with this grey spray paint I got from GW.

Well, apparently, the non black and white colours that GW have are not actually primers like the ones from rival companies are.

They are still meant to be sprayed over primer.

So now I have 10 infantry and 6 cavalry which look OK to the naked eye but I'm googling and getting mixed answers from people who say it will peel and others saying it's fine.  After leaving it for a day the paint did not scrape off even when scratching my nail across it.  My current thinking is that - I can't be bothered properly stripping all these fellas, so I'll only strip the metal models as metal chips so easily.

Then I'm going to buy an Army Painter white and blast them all with that.  When I finish painting models I always paint on Vallejo Matt Varnish in a few coats, so I'm hoping that will be good enough to secure against my indiscretion.

Always read the fine print, kids!

Blood Bowl: Orc Blitzer

  Games Workshop, despite it's flaws, seems to have turned a corner lately.

  They have finally begun a kind of community engagement; launching a new website, using Youtube and facebook more and overall becoming less of a Fortress of Solitude.

  Far more importantly for a contrarian such as myself; they've fired up a new Specialist Games division, which means they are revisiting some of the "greatest hits" from the past, and the first to reappear is BLOOD BOWL!

Blood Bowl is one of the many, many games that appeared in White Dwarf that I would fantasise about playing even though my budget / attention span would not cover it.  I used to pretend to play it or Dungeonbowl using the Heroquest set as a kid, without really knowing the rules!

Now I finally get to be one of the cool kids and have a go, myself!  The base game contains two teams; humans and orcs.   I have plumped to paint them in the suggested colours for the sake of simplicity and am mostly following the official guide in the rulebook.

I want them to look good but I also want to be playing sooner rather than later so am hoping not to fall down the rabbit hole of spending too long on each model!  This is the first finished model, an Orc Blitzer, who I believe only really wants to break the limbs of his opponents, rather than do anything with the ball.

  Over the years when Blood Bowl was not supported by Games Workshop, the fans built up rules and fan sites to keep the game alive.  I was searching online and one thing that they do is to colour code the bases of the models.

This is very similar to how I colour code my SAGA bases to show the quality of the troops.  For Blood Bowl teams, red is the colour of blitzers.

  There's a little hole on the bases for these models - it's a new 32mm base which lets you put a little plastic ball marker in to show who has possession of it during a game.  It's a very little addition and shows the thought that's been put into this new version of the game!

Frostgrave Game Day

I game at MADgamers most Friday nights:

http://madgamers.co.uk/

We're small in number but big in spirit and I have met some great people that way.  Over the years we have occasionally set up a small "Game Day" where we pick the current "Flavour of the Month" game that has been popular and most people play and set up to have a few of us spend a Saturday or Sunday morning and afternoon playing a couple of games.  Either in a tournament style or just for fun.  It's all good fun and we all chuck in a fiver to keep the Club piggy bank in good health!

We also do a memorial game to honour members no longer with us who have passed on.  Previous games have included Warmaster and SAGA.

This Sunday just passed (9th October 2016) we held a little Frostgrave game day; two games from the Thaw of the Lich Lord expansion book which is a series of linked scenarios.

We managed to get just two games in but that with with five players each time sizing each other up!  The games were quite lengthy, with monsters summoned every time we rolled a 1.  I didn't do a blow by blow because that would have taken page after page, but I took a few action shots just to give a nice overview:

Mark's forces move forward to steal the loot!

 The fluffy cotton balls are an easy way to show snow drifts as terrain, and the cardboard cut outs are ship wreckes in a frozen river.  A human servant of the Lich King is about to awake and two of my friends' warbands are bracing to take him down and steal his loot!

A wider shot showing the first scenario where an eclipse lowered visibility for models but allowed a single turn of huge bonuses for mages and their apprentices.

I am especially fond of this model, which my friend, Russ, modelled to show the "two fingered salute" of an archer, viz. Agincourt.

We're hoping to do a Warmaster game day at some point and I look forward to it!  I have quite a bit of terrain for it now and would be happy to make more.  Also, I have two armies painted now, so would be able to loan one!  I hope to have more painted in the coming months, as well.