Kobolds, kobolds, kobolds!

On our adventures in these mysterious lands on one occasion we happened upon these strange mischievous creatures dwelling in a cave at the base of a dormant volcano. Possessing some form of intelligence, these small reptilian bipeds seemed to converse with each other in a language that sounded similar to the loud calls of the large flying, fire breathing reptiles that are so reminiscent of the dragons of our myths. Their intelligence became obvious when one of our local guides pointed out the intricate traps they had set up to defend their nests that included trip wires, falling boulders and even one instance of a rather extraordinary example of the shape shifting creature we had previously only heard about on our travels known to the locals as a mimic. This mimic had against all laws of nature, managed to manipulate its own hide and shape to that of a rather handsome looking armoire.

Their society seems to revolve around the worship of the aformentioned dragons. According to our guide, escalation in the ranks of the society relies mostly on an individual bearing the most "dragon-like" features. In fact the apparent leader of this group seemed to even have wings of her own. Whether they were practical in use, we were never able to find out. Our brief visit was cut short when the tribe discovered our party observing them and seemed to decide to attack for no reason. Despite being diminitive in nature, they made up for this in numbers and we were soon in danger of being overwhelmed unless we made a quick exit. Luckily it was still daylight outside as we left the caverns, the creatures were not keen on venturing out under the glaring sun. We lost only one of our local guides in this escapade, a Mr Jack Lightfoot, quite violently to the afforementioned armoire. 

 

Extract from "My extraordinary adventures in the otherworldly lands through the thaumaturgical portal." by Sir Frederick Hawkins, Naturalist and Gamehunter.

 

 

These kobolds are from Worlds in Miniature and were a free sample to review on my blog. They are 3D printed in resin and came with mdf bases.

 

 

 

They take paint really well, I undercoated by hand with a watered down white and it took just one coat. Some resin models don't take paint well until at least two coats even after a good scrubbing with soapy water. With these models, this was not the case.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At first I thought they wouldn't take me long to paint at all, but I ended up taking my time to really enjoy picking out the details. They are full of character and will make a great addition to my dungeon crawl monster collection.

 

I wanted to keep their look quite bright, so I avoided ink for the main body. Instead I painted a base orange colour and then just highlighted up through yellow and white. The only inking is reserved for the leather bindings on the ankles and wrists. I kept the bases simple as I will probably use them on dungeon tiles, so they would look weird with flock or tufts added.

I was looking at my website stats and realised I missed the three year mark on this blog. I started back in May 2018 and I'm still waffling on. Bizarrely some of you are still reading too. I'm sure the 1200 views from Sweden this week must be some kind of hacking attempt (or maybe its genuine, I mean I painted a Viking? Is there a mass need for the Swedes to see painted busts of vikings?) Overall though I'm chuffed to see that my blog gets readership and not just via my endless spamming on Facebook, some peeps even wander in via Bing. (Even Bing's bizarre search algorithms find me.) Obviously I'm still small fry in the world of wargame blogging, but hey who knows what may happen in another three years...

 

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Viking Commission

Well hello, long time no chat. How are you? All good? Great. Its been a while hasn't it? Let me fill you in. 

Just before lockdown I had a referral for a minor operation, nothing serious, but it needed doing. Well, with hospitals being busy and it not being life threatening, it got delayed until this year. So last month my local hospital got in touch, they could fit me in. A week of Covid test, followed by self isolation and then a day visit for the operation and I'm all fixed. This then did however mean a couple of weeks recuperation. No work I hear you cry, plenty of time for painting? Well, sadly no, I couldn't sit upright at a table at all, so no hobbying for yours truly. 

I am definitely recovered now though, so painting has resumed. My first post Op project to be finished is something I was asked to paint for someone else. Not my usual project, a slightly larger scale bust of a viking. This was again printed on an Elegoo Mars msla printer and is a pretty impressive print. The print came out in four parts, body, head, axe and pony tail. 

Previously I have been apprehensive about painting busts and larger scales, thinking I wouldn't know how to paint the larger expanses of colour without it looking dull, but actually there is enough detail in this that it isn't a problem. I mixed up techniques, drybrushing up to highlights only on the hair and beard, inking on the fur and skin. 

The larger scale is actually freeing because I can finally paint eyes without adapting the "stab and hope" technique that I adopt in 28mm scale. Instead I really enjoyed putting detail into the steely gaze and getting his pupils actually looking in a particular direction.

So there he is in all his grizzly, grim faced glory. I might look at painting something else in this scale, it makes a nice change to be able to paint details without having to squint. As the owner said, "It's amazing how much 'life' can be released from a simple lump of plastic...."

If you have got this far and enjoy reading my blog, why not let me know by making a small donation, you can buy me a coffee here. Thanks, it is very much appreciated. 

Another Space Marine, Dagnammit.

As I stated in my last post, I used to be a lazy painter. My days of playing warhammer was all about the game rather than the painting, so my armies didn't look that amazing on the table. I had a Skaven Army that included a massive slave unit of sixty models. All I had done to paint them was spray them brown, paint each nose black and the end of their spears silver. Oh and flock the bases, jobs a good'un. My first 40k army was actually Blood Angels. They were so badly painted I have actually overpainted or sold most of them, so apart from a terrible Mephiston Librarian on a Bike conversion I still have I technically don't have any Blood Angels.

I recently ventured into the town centre for a visit for the first time in a long while for my first Covid Vaccination (Yay!!) Whilst there I decided to get some hobby supplies. I still haven't touched my Stargrave plastics as I don't want to waste them, I am saving them as a treat. We have a small independent store in town that mostly sells airfix type kits so I picked up some Tamiya plastic cement from there. I have good memories of that brush on poly that GW had back in the nineties that just bonded the two surfaces together without getting any gloopiness everywhere. Apparently this stuff is just like that, so my Stargrave plastics will get the same VIP treatment. I really want to get these plastics right, almost to the point where I am scared to actually build them. Not having definitely decided on what any particular rule system I am using them for (I didn't actually buy the Stargrave book) I'm not sure what I'm going to arm each model with. Do I go for lots of variety for a skirmish type games or do I make whole units of models armed with similar weaponry? I also grabbed a few new texture paints to try out.

I also thought I would pop into my local GW store to get some paints and another painting handle. When I first saw these painting handles I thought they were a waste of money, but then I got one for my youngest as he was struggling when painting to hold the models. Then I'd actually started borrowing it myself and found it really useful so now we have one each. (Never too long in the beard to pick up new techniques.)

Whilst in there I showed the store manager a picture of my latest Space Marine paint job and he was impressed (I know, I know, it's his job to be nice.) and he asked what I was going to paint next. Well the store is having it's anniversary soon and they are having a couple of competitions including a conversion competition. GW only bits or green stuff allowed. So, I decided to go right back to the beginning and have a play with some green stuff. Could I make a new style Primaris Marine look like an old school Blood Angel. Well, I don't think it's gonna win the competition, but I had fun making him.

Oh and of course it had to have an old school green trim on the base, nothing else would do.

Paints used:

Coat D'arms. Blood Red, Bone, White, Grass Green, Ink Wash Armour

Citadel. Abaddon Black, Caliban Green, Eshin Grey, Retributor Armour, Grey Knights Steel, Steel Legion Drab, Flash Fitz Yellow, Baal Red Wash, Brown Ink

Painting Space Marines

So regular readers will know I'm no longer a GW fan, I am definitely not up to speed on the current rules, or background of their systems. I'm not anti-GW at all. I buy their paints and I will peruse their shelves to see if anything jumps out at me, although I'll be honest, a lot of the new style models with their insistence of using lots of negative space and delicately balanced "stringy" bits isn't to my taste. (just me, I know I have no reason not to like it, I just have no idea how anyone transports any of it safely!) 

There are a large number of people who look back on the nineties as the "Golden Age" of Warhammer, whole groups of people look back with tinted glasses on what was once my teenage years and the "best of times" rather than the "end of times". (Okay seriously, that is enough with the quotations.) There is an excellent fanzine out there here dedicated to those days of goblin green edged bases and cardboard standees for that larger model in your army you just can't afford. 

There is an argument to be said that us Longbeards need to let go, like the middle aged man with his car on his drive he had when he was a teenager, tinkering with it every weekend to keep it running because it is a classic. When in reality, it's just a piece of metal from the eighties. Things improve, technologies change. When I was a kid embracing the latest 40K rules coming out there were probably Longbeards at the time tutting and stroking their facial hair, lamenting the lost days of Rogue Trader. So, maybe things have improved?

The last time I played Warhammer 40K the rules were in the midst of a trend that bigger is better. Apocalypse was the trend so all games had to be bring everything you have to the table. I had a Space Marine army and so had increased it to the size of an entire company and then some. I had a lot of Space Marines, mostly painted as quickly as possible to get them on the table. The game took all day for us to play, turns would last for up to two hours, the rules were basically skewed towards whatever the latest new models were, so my Space Marine army suffered horribly. I packed my lads away carefully in their foam trays and I was done with them.

More recently GW did one of those magazine runs where part one is £1.99 to entice you in and the first issue came with three new style Space Marines, a brush and three pots of paint. As one of those colours was black and paint costs more than that per pot in store, I proceeded to buy three copies just for the paint. The Marines were packed away for a rainy day.

This week I decided it's been long enough and to see if I could paint Space Marines any better, also to see if it the models are any better. My painting style has changed over the years so I thought it would be an interesting experiment. I also read somewhere recently where someone suggested that we should try not to compare our painted models to others across the internet but rather our own earlier attempts. That way you can see your own improvement. So, here they are.

I've gone for an Ultramarines colour scheme for a mass appeal so I can use them to show my painting ability. It's amazing how many paints you actually use though for what initially seems a simple colour scheme. As an exercise I took note for once in the actual paints I used:

Undercoat: Coat D'arms white

Main armour blue: Citadel Macragge Blue, Citadel Blue wash (if you don't happen to have a twenty year old pot of this Coat D'arms do a similar ink blue wash), highlight with Citadel Russ Grey.

Helmets: Coat D'arms white with a wash of Coat D'arms light brown super shader, Citadel Eshin grey for the eyes.

Sergeant head: Coat D'arms horse tone brown, then drybrushed with Citadel Cadian Fleshtone. Hair is Citadel Sunburst yellow with a glaze of Coat D'arms Golden Yellow.

Boltguns: Coat D'arms gun metal and horse tone brown with respective washes of Coat D'arms ink armour wash and Citadel Brown ink. Citadel Abaddon Black for the middle body.

Brass trimmings: Citadel Retributor Armour with Citadel Gryphonne Sepia.

Purity seals: Coat D'arms Blood Red and Bone. Washed with the same Gryphonne Sepia.

Base: Vallejo thick Mud.

There you go, 19 pots of paint for a "simple" paint scheme. I think I've come a long way since I first started painting Space Marines.

What do I think of the models? Well they are a lot less fiddly to put together than they used to be, this might be partly due to the fact they are bigger but that is explained by the fact that apparantly they are a new strain of superior advanced Space Marine. I due wonder if the larger sculpts came first then the backstory was invented as an excuse. They do feel more like the genetically superior beings that I always imagined when reading the novels though. The original guys never seemed to tower over their guardsman counterparts.

I fished out a couple of my old guys to do the comparison. 

Well, they are clearly a lot taller, but these are Primaris Marines, an improvement on the original geneseed. Maybe the larger model came before the story, maybe not, who knows. I actually kinda like them. Has my painting improved? I'd like to think so, mainly not due to any increase in skill but in care and attention. I spent probably ten times as long on each model as I would have back the first time. I certainly couldn't paint another full company of Marines at this rate, not if I didn't want to go crazy. Nevertheless I don't think I'm going to go out and buy the latest 40K rules and get playing again, but to be honest, when I first painted Space Marines I think 90% of my hobby time was about the game, the painting was a means to an ends, these days, this old Grognard likes to take his time painting a model, if I get to roll some dice now and then that's just a bonus.

Talking of bonus content, those of you who did the maths, will know that if I bought three copies of the magazine I would have nine marines, well I first painted up just a five man squad, then I thought I would have a little play with a tiny conversion by fishing out an old power fist from my bits box. (Yep, I never throw any spare bits out.) I think it fits quite well, in fact in the old marine models I felt the power fist looked too big, here it looks pretty good.

Dwarven Blacksmith

I was lucky enough that a friend of mine with a 3D printer kindly produced the free sample from Loot Studios for me of a Dwarven Blacksmith. It comes in 32mm and 75mm scale and he generously printed both for me. I have finally got round to painting one of them. Printed on an Elegoo Mars msla printer it comes out as a nice sculpt. It printed out in four parts, base, body, one hand with hammer and finally anvil, sword and hand combined. Some of the detail is lost in the smaller print so I decided to paint the larger print.

I don't have much experience of 3D printing other than some scatter terrain crates I bought at a show a couple of years ago. Those had obvious layering in them from the print process (I suspect they were printed at a quickest rate possible) so as soon as I started drybrushing them the lines came out. I was therefore intrigued to see where printing has evolved to now. 

I must say I am very much impressed, the dwarf itself has no print lines. 

I initially finished painting the model with the sword being just plain metal, then realised that if he was working the metal it would be glowing hot. Luckily there is a wealth of videos on YouTube of people showing you how they paint glowy metal, so out came the paints again and I'm quite pleased with the result. 

Finally a bit of underlighting makes it look like the sword is the source of light and we get an awesome dramatic shot.

To think my first thought was I might paint it all grey as a statue and stick a bit of moss on it.

I think 3D printing is a really interesting new technology and has lots of great potential. I've yet to play with one myself but from what I understand it takes some work to get them to produce results. I think unless you get to the point where they are almost "plug and play" like a traditional paper printer they will never replace traditional techniques but nonetheless the technology is rapidly improving as we speak. I don't think we'll ever be buying a licence from GW to print out the latest 40k army in time for Christmas for the kids but I can see it becoming more popular.

No Salute Today

It should have been Salute today. So, a second year running I am missing you all, with you backpacks and your trolley suitcases. Getting up at a ridiculous time in the morning to catch two trains, then a walk across London, a tube, the DLR then a final walk to join the massive queue. The annual game of look at the other passengers on the DLR and guess whether they are a wargamer or a marathon runner, all good fun. To think that last year I genuinely was keeping my fingers crossed that this would all blow over by April so Salute would still go ahead, never mind still be going on a year later. On the plus side, start putting a tenner a week to one side for spending budget for Salute and you'll be drowning in lead by the end of the day by the time you get to the Excel.

So, what have I been painting this week? Well, one of the joys of blogging is you have a date record of when you obtain some items. So I know I got these models in June 2018. Painted in less than two years, that isn't too bad for a grumpy Longbeard wargamer. 

With the imminent arrival of Stargrave and Xenos Rampant, I thought I might have a little flutter with a bit of Sci-fi. 

These are Grenadier "Troopers with heavy weapons". They have a definite Aliens feel to them with what look like Pulse rifles and flak armour. I might even see if I can find some suitable Xenos for them to be swarmed by.

Bad Squiddo Special

So I was lucky enough to have a small parcel sent to me by Bad Squiddo games of master casts of just two of their new upcoming WW2 Soviets. Squiddo already have an excellent range available here, the new additions are in winter kit. 

For those not aware of the company, Bad Squiddo do not do gimicky female versions of historical uniforms, these are researched, genuine historical looks. 

As always, the models were well cast with no flash and took very little prep work before I painted. I have just treated myself to some brand new brushes from Black Hat miniatures so I had a dream painting these. All done with GW and Coat D'arms paints. The khaki colour was my own mix of GW death guard green and Zandra dust. Coat D'arms dark brown super shader did all the magic afterwards. (including turning what started out a redhead into a blonde.)

I wanted to do something different than my normal basing, so in front of the models you can see the test base that worked so well I had to put it in the shot. I used Vallejo Thick Mud acrylic, a pure white drybrush on top, then some light flocking followed by more white drybrushing. Hopefully that gives that frosty ground look.

The Kickstarter goes live this Wednesday and only runs for a week so look up Bad Squiddo on your usual Social Media for the links on Wednesday to get hold of these Soviets.

And in between painting these two (at what I might add a super quick pace for me.) you have to have something to do while the inks and glues dry. So I thought I should finish this mounted Freyja that has been sat half done on the painting tray since Christmas. 

I have recently learnt that this style of having a solid green trim on bases is a 90's style and not the done thing anymore. I couldn't for the life of me think of what people were doing now, so I had to actually look through instagram at some models to see what people are doing. Turns out, leave it black or paint it dark brown now is the done thing. It may be garish to some, but I think I'm going to keep with the green.