Röknauts Revolution - Bikers and new units

 

Hey everyone, hope summer is going well (if a little warm for those in the northern hemisphere), I'm only just on holidays with house works stalling (including the long awaited gaming room) but I've had the delightful surprise to be offered a set of Ontos Röknauts after painting the first set a couple of years ago.

Space dwarves from Lafig miniatures

Hey everyone, A quickie today, I recently had the opportunity to paint some space dwarves from the ongoing Lafig Miniatures Kickstarter (check it HERE), Lafig Miniatures are creating a new set of oldschool models but with modern means.

Those were sculpted by Frank Adam in Green Stuff like any old school model is but they were then scanned and printed (with a little CAD to enhance them further) and then printed in the highest quality

Röknauts Space Dwarves

Hey everyone ! I was lucky to get my hands on a set of Ontos Games Röknauts lately as their Kickstarter is running ! The project has funded in 5 minutes without a surprise !
 

Now I have a fondness for all the fun niche bits of the 40k verse like every other fan and Curis has poured a tremendous amount of love into making some of these concepts tangible with his own take on the subject.

The models really capture what I like the most about dwarf models, they're small but BIG, if youv'e ever painted a dwarf model face, you know what I mean, dwarf weapons, dwarf beards are such funs, noone wants to paint knees or elbows, dwarves just keep all the good parts and make them bigger while getting rid of the lame ones.

Eric Raucher the squat - Old School miniatures

I suppose it's hard to let squats go so I recently got another one from Old School Miniatures. Now Jamie over at Oldschool Miniatures has commissioned the ever talented John Pickford to sculpt a model of the company's mascot Eric.

Space dwarves Kickstarter !

Great news ! I've recently painted a bunch of space dwarves a bit before their release. Well I'm glad to say  these are finally ready to get on your tabletop !

Uscarl Miniatures and Kev Adams have combined their talents to offer you these wonderful even if somehow smelly and grumpy fellows.

The link to the kickstarter is HERE !

Chaos Squats

Yes I know, squats again, well I guess it's a form of coming out I guess. I love stunties, there I said it ! Now I've been considering getting back on my chaos renegade army for some time but you know how things are right ? There's always a good excuse to do something else and as long as stuff gets done and painted, I don't mind much actually. Things, is though, there's been a combination of events lately that lead me to seriously consider what I'd do next for my chaos army.

There are new dwarves in spaaaace !

Long time no see heh ? Well I didn't want to spoil you so kept those little fellows secret until now... 

Now I suppose every self respecting oldschool enthusiast has a fondness for short hairy guys. Models. Short hairy guys models I mean.

Well lucky us, Uscarl Miniatures have decided to give us the possibility of getting our hands on brilliant space dwarves without having to sell a lung as well as plenty of other cool things !

The best part of it all ? Probably the fact those were sculpted by an oldschool legend : Kev Adams !

Flasher dwarf... or squat...

TADAM !

Ok, sorry for the lame introduction, and by introduction I don't mean... erm... nevermind. So, here's fun one. I've been lucky enough to get a flasher dwarf and I do have to say that although it would have never occured to me to look for it, I didn't say no when I got the chance to paint one.

Dorf civilians !

Alright folks, hope you're all doing well, here's a bunch of models I've just finished this morning and thought you might want to see. You might remember I painted some of Geoff's Evild dorfs earlier, well, I had the chance to get my hands on some new bits from Oakbound.
Those new models are actually a whole range of bits for you to assemble and make the dorfs of your choice !

Grudge Vs Hate - A 2nd edition Warhammer 40k battle report

For me, this hobby mostly consists in modelling toy soldiers and sharing it via blogging and forums and all and meeting nice people online is definitely one of the good parts. The best part of it all though is getting to meet those people for real. Yeah, like in the other real life, the one without a keyboard and all and with handshakes and drinks instead !

Well thanksto the Oldhammer groups on facebook (both french and English speaking) I was finally able to get to play with Goulven a proud defender of the 2nd edition of warhammer 40k (along his gaming partner Pestilus). For once I didn't have to go to Canada or England to get a game !

Being renowned for his Squat army and being the poor "chaotic-to-the-core" soul that I am, the choice of armies was very simple we just needed to agree on a given number of points.

I managed to come up with a 2000 points list using everything I had painted so far (and for which I had painted the terminators.

Facing the squats

The table was set in advance and looked suitably oldschool with the grass everywhere with great details and scenic elements like the windmill and the watch tower.

Like always Battle started before the first bullet was even shot...

Evil space dorfs - punkish squats for Rogue Trader

Xic, Cyke and ... Billy

They're as small as they're mean, their stench is as foul as the colours they wear hurt the eyes... Who are they ? The evil dorfs.

After painting some of Diego's models, I felt like keeping on the community sculpts with these little guys. They are a sub-range of Oakbound miniatures and are designed with the supervision of Chico "not without my bacon" Danks from Oldhammer on a budget.

Together these 2 fellows have designed a growing range of space dwarves (or dorfs) which are evil but not in a chaotic way. This is a very intersting path to explore as chaotic dwarves, however cool they can ben are a known subject whereas mean and bad ones are far more exotic. These Evil dorfs are the kind to cross streets outside zebras, to add beer in their wine and to shoot in the privates.

The space white dwarf - Toruna Ironwind and acolyte

After painting some quite old references, here is a not too old model. The Space white dwarf was released in 2010 and available as a subscription gift.

My sources tell me that the sculpt is from Dave Thomas and I have to say it is one wonderful model to paint. I really had tremendous pleasure with it as it has that particular balance between detail and simple areas. It is not too full of insane details but the ones present are very fine and a treat to paint. Really a painter friendly model. Thanks Dave.

Tis really inspiring sculpt has really got me to up my game a bit and take a lite more time. You will spot some shortcuts here and there (especially in the metallics).
You also have to remember that for a time I struggled with finding what colour to paint the beard...

During good days, Toruna will be giving the thumb to most people...
during bad days, he'll more likely give people a taste of his dreadful powermace...

Rogue trader Squats - The return of the Heavy Industrialist Union

After their summer adventures in the foreign lands, the ranger squad of the Heavy Industrialist Union have finally got the last bits of paint and have even gained a friend in the process.

If you want to read their summer adventures, here they are :

Episode One

Episode Two

Episode Three

I hope you'll excuse me the poor photos but I haven't bought another camera and have to take my pics with my wife's phone for now (Christmas should hopefully solve that matter...)

Although it took me almost 3 months to complete this little war band, I had real fun with them. The aim behind building this gang was to have a team of scouts or rangers, the sort of squats you send on remote locations to explore hence the limited militaristic look of them and the fact that 2 of them don't even have weapons.

The finishing blow

This weekend I've been painting a lot. I mean something like 3 liters of paint must have gone of my brushes... to the wall of the bedroom...

OK, that's silly I know. Anyway, I also managed to take the time to actually finish some models too. One of which was started 3 years ago and whose paintjob was mostly done 10 months ago. The fact that it only took 10 minutes to actually finish it felt both good and ridiculous.

Hrothyogg is one model every one has painted or wishes to paint and one which nearly always comes out the same way :

You all know him because he's part of the picture of the monsters in both WHFRP and WHFB 3rd ed. He nearly always come out painted with a red ogryn face and trousers with blue and white stripes.

He's also very famous thanks to this brilliant drawing from John Blanche. 

As you will have noticed, no white and blue stripes here. After completing mostly everything but the trousers, I felt some mixed feelings between going the oldschool way or my own. I ended up taking none and giving him simply the best trousers ever. I'm sure you know what I'm talking about :

The guy doesn't often wear trousers, I'll give you that, but when he does, he wears some bad-ass yellow tartan device. And this is exactly what all my Jes Goodwin ogres are going to wear too.

I'm apologising in advance for anyone who think it's ridiculous and that I'm mixing all sorts of things meaninglessly. I am.

I've not completely mastered the tartan skill though and I hope it will turn out better on the others...

 

 

Things end and things start...

I recently launched an idea on the BLOOD forum and found with greta pleasure some people had been recptive to it. Please let me explain.

The idea was to emphasise the multicultural aspect of our community (the oldhammer community and even the hobby comunity in general) by producing themed models based on our culture.

The starting idea was to make "a knight" to embody what we are, where we come from and all of that. Chosing such a simple subject was to give the more freedom possible to interpretation.

You can join or see the how things go here.

I've considered several ideas for this project, all of them using the prejudices about french people which included a Nurgle knight on a giant snail with smelly cheeses haging all around his armour or even a slann knight riding a giant frog.

The one idea that caught my attention was the idea of a brettonian knight riding a giant rooster for the rooster is the symbol of France but moreover, the symmbol of my region (where roosters happen to be white with blue legs). You will see the WIP's of this project in posts to come but the main reasons I wanted to talk about this little project of mine were :

- I would love people to join

- I wanted to help launch Axiom's blog because I believe it is going to be a very great one from what I've seen of the lad on the Blood forum.

On top of that, that fellow got me to get my hands on an incredible zoat helping an eldar, which will join my eldar army in the xenos force (understand a slann contingent with the help of the zoat fighting alongside my eldars against chaos, necrons or whatever nasty/mean/ugly foe)

Zoat hero helping an injured eldar

 So please join his blog, trust me on this one, you won't be disappointed, and if you don't trust me, go have a look on his Bratt confrontation gang and you'll see what I'm talking about.

This little side project is another nail in my achievement's coffin. I can almost hear the countless number of models waiting for final touch and varnish on the table, all screaming : "STOP IT, DON'T START ANYTHING NEW DUMBASS !  FINISH US OR KILL US"

It's why with a little feeling of guilt, I tried to spend the one hour I had free on trying to make a banner for my squat leader. The photo is unfair on the brilliant blending I achieved here (hum hum), and I don't even know if the banner looks chaotic enough. 

My goal was to paint something which meant "chaos is what puts the world into motion and we chaos squats are the gears which make it so..." (as written in tiny in red ) or something like this. I don't know if it's what comes out when you see it. 

I kept the banner grey because I wanted grey to be my contrast colour, which means all the banners and all the clothing (apart from champion's) will be grey too with slight touches of red here and there to warm up everything.

Please be honest and tell me what you think of all this.

 Anyway, next week and others are dedicated to getting rid of all "nearly finished" models on the table to start things properly on other projects.

Kaleb's on his way - battle chaos part 22

OK, this is the end of the first step. Modelling and building are complete., There may remain a single detail being the helmet. I believe a skull would be more than appropriate instead of the sun on his forehead? I've been thinking about it since I wanted to paint the sun as a wind rose with black and white halves.

The helmet is made of an elf shadow warrior helmet with wings taken form a bat I git with the Avatars of War female vampire (very good mini BTW). I've been a total douche by not anticipating the issue of the big shoulder pad which makes the helmet hard to place. If I had thought of that before, I would have placed the bat wings slightly more on top of the helmet and it would have been perfect. In real life he would be unable to turn his head or to ben it on the sides.

If you compare this version with the previous one, you can see I changed the shield to have a big demonic skull instead of the multiple eyes, this will allow me to add Malal's design more easily and it reminds in a distant way of the original concept for the shield.

You can see I finished the awe by adding some teeth on the lower jaw to close the mouth.

The base has benefited form addings in the form of shell pieces and sculpted mushrooms. I wanted to give a less regular look and more twisted feeling to the base. I want this one to truly look like he's in the middle of the chaos wastes looking for champions to slay.

The on foot version is pretty much the same as before, the only difference being I added a malestone eye like on the original concept.

And here's the undead version of him, he has lost some hair and his rotting skin makes his face look bigger (the first case I see where an old model has a bigger scale than a recent one...)

As you may have started to realize, I always feel compelled to working on a ridiculous amount of minis at the same time. As I found some parts in the dettol box, I found an old friend of mine n the form of a power armoured chaos squat. The lad had been cut in two and the upper part is not usable anymore. I took the lower half and decided to cast ressurect on it. Here is what came out of it :

It may be hard to see but the helmet is a space marine one glued to a dwarf head for the beard. The torso is a chaos space marine but backwards (up is down and front is back). The problem is the arms are far too long for this lil'chap. I may consider something else but I don't know what for the time being... I really like his mechanical torso (the back for the marine coming in the rhino sprue)

To finish this on a happy note, the khorne champions are nearly on their way and should be finished soon. Her's a pic of the most advanced one, he just needs some freehand to make him a little bit more vibrant/funky and he's good to go.

We can do it anywhere ! (At last some real pics of actual minis) - part 2

Summer is a hard thing you know...

I'm not talking about these insanely high temperatures but about these hard hobby times holidays are... Hard to get the time to paint, when you do, you find yourself lacking time, material or simply energy to do it...

I feel like a goldfish in its aquarium... I don't even have Kendo to get all this energy out since the dojo is closed during summer. Hard times, I told you.

BUT, now I'm lying on my towel at the beach, burning under the mildly hot sun of the Normandy coast. Can I still get something done? The answer (and you knew it already) is YES.

First of all, I managed to bring with me a few paint cans and some brushes to finish my entries for the painting challenge on the Blood Forum. 

First model is the dread with my first attempt at OSL on the plasma cannon, I'm not sure if painting the lenses red was such a rilliant idea and I still consider erasing all of this with pure black to give a more sinister feeling. The terminotor lord is quite to my taste even if the OSL on the power claws is weird and the face is totally messed up...

The jezzail Champion is my favourite so far in this army, I tried for the first time a "sort of Blanchistu" style with bright red and chessboard patterns (I find it almost insulting to sum up John Blanche's style to just that but you get the idea). This one is quite probably leading my cultists once they're painted.

At last I decided to get my Sorcerer lord in line to be painted with the others and I'm glad he's done. He will remain the benchmark for the whole army since it was meant to be built around him.

Chaos marines champions and dreadnaught

The squats next, they obviously need some sort of banner but I still don't know what to give them...

I've already painted the beards with brown and white vertical lines but I don't fancy it much, maybe it will come back on the painting range...

Chaos squats on power armor (Rogue trader era)

I maintained a very limited black pattern all across the army on purpose because I wanted to give them the most sinister look I could. This lead me to changing my basing habits. I usually drybrush brown, flesh and bleached bone to get some sort of dirty limestone ground effect but this being a 40k army I wanted to change things a bit. I also discoverd much to my surprise that Dark flesh + Bleached bone gives an unexpected purple-ish affect... I considered erasing it but then found myself enjoying this old school touch. I also decided to paint the edges in grey to enhance the black of the marines.

As I was getting hot at painting energy coming out of weapons I also painted some effect on the power gloves in the unit (in fact they look better than on their terminator captain).

Chaos traitor marines (Rogue trader era)

 (Sorry for the low quality here, it's just smartphone photos on the kitchen table...)

I said finished but I meant sort of finished, I could declare them done and field them shamelessly but I want to add a few things here and there beforehand.

Here is the start of my upgrading for this army :

The banner is a test for now (hence the pigeon looking eagle), I used it to have something to field and to try Orlygg's tutorial for banners which proved really useful. It's given me the will to try some new things...

The black spots you can see on some of the bases are meant to be some sort of oil leaks or equivalent and will be glossed once everything is varnished.

I'll update all of this once it is to my taste (a few touches here and there and varnish on top of that and then I'll give you good photos so you can judge the result).

Now, this was the start of what I could do during nap time for babies, but then I had to get all the family to the beach and everything : I took the time to go treasure hunting after getting inspiration from Don Hans.

I found a whole lot of broken seashells which should help me add some sort of organic feeling to the bases for my champions or stand alone minis. I don't intend to copy exactly Don Hans' bases but I love the idea of giving some bit of mutated look to the ground to represent chaos wastes.

 A mixture of all sorts of pebbles and small rocks for big bases and terrain :

And I decided to put my everyday morning tea to full use and dry the used tea leaves. This brand is quite good actually (don't know what it is since I'm at my wife's parent's) and is already cut in small pieces.

I have particularly great expectations of these tea leaves with my recent collection of birch seeds to make lovely autumn bases for my fantasy adventurers.

So that's all for now, I'll be visiting Southern UK for a week and won't get anywhere near a computer for that time. Once I get back from Holidays, prepare yourself for some Khorne champions and the finished Rogue trader Renegades (first wave at least).

Cheers.

Rogue trader army WIP - 40k Chaos Part 5

I'm currently participating in a painting challenge with other members of the oldhammer forum :

I've decided to enter the challenge with the RT core of my chaos army :

So far, I've only managed to spray them all grey after the black prime to give a first zenithal lighting and give some of them some highlights :

First step : black prime

 2nd step : Zenithal grey spray (I may have been heavy handed on these) :

 3rd step : highlights (11 minis out of 18)

The result is a bit bluish which gives a sort of surreal vibe about them. I hope the black wash will be enough to get them from the "grey" zone to the "light black" one. What I was told to use is a mix of black with matt medium (50% of each) thined with water. This proved to work great for him so I'm keeping the same recipe here.

I have to confess that first time I painted those some 17 years ago, I didn't enjoy the experience much. Details were not clear enough for me and since we were in the midle of the "red era" they appeared weak to me.
This time I actually took the time to outline the details by highlighting everything and though I still hate edgelining, I hav eto confess it's a real pleasure to give them a more subtle approach. I understand now why these looked great in the photos and not in my hand, they are demanding minis but the time spent is well worth it for they have this really stange and dark feeling. one of the best examples came out yesterday, check out Don Hans' version, it looks like Giger himself bent over Hans to guide him...

I apologise for the new backpacks but the old ones I have are coverd in paint and varnish and I still can't get my hands on Dettol in France (I may have a way of getting some from canada though). Chloroxylenol is hard to find here...

Anyway, progression so far :

- basing and priming : 100%
- Zenithal grey spray : 100%
- First highlights : 61 %

What to do next (until end of July):

- finish highlights on everyone
- dip everyone in black+ matt medium + water mix to darken everything
- special parts (flesh, bone, fur,...)
- metals
- details
- varnish


PS : oh and don't forget Round 2 is out for the selection of the best Khorne champion : http://bestminiever.blogspot.fr/

Cheers everyone