Shearing some goats from the Chaos Beastmen

Some more thinning.  No, I'm not getting rid of all of them.  I'm keeping many and some of the more fragile stuff that I would hate to ship.  This is the second group that I plan on letting go of.

 This group has some more of the subtle conversions and then the added armor as well.  If you are interested in purchasing them click the following to Ebay:  Click this Link to Ebay Auction

 I took a bunch of the inspiration for the armor from Roman period and also from the artwork.

 This banner head is just really cool looking.  Fun to paint as well.

 Some of the cooler ungors that I have done, especially the guy with the big bone.

Thinning the Chaos Beastmen Herd

These are some of my original Old Skool Beastmen.  Love these guys, but I just don't use them much for anything anymore.  So thinning out the herd and selling a couple of groups of them.  Not one of them is the same as the other, with tons of conversion work done to them.

 So much like the Warhounds they are up for sale on ebay.  If you are interested follow the link:  Click this to the Ebay Auction

When I did these up they were very stylized.  Lots of bits of armor added to them.  Lots of subtle arm conversions.

The paint was all the so-called Non-metallic Metal or NMM, one of the dumb terms that miniature painters use to justify a paint style.

Good paint is good paint in my opinion, you don't need some stupid terminology to justify a style.  

More to follow....

Old Stuff Wednesday - December: Converted Centigors

Or should I say converted centaur centigors.  I've never really liked the GW centigors, so circa 2004, I decided to make some actual centaurs for my beastmen army.

These used the plastic gor torso and the GW plastic medieval horse.  That old horse body I believe is still available with the GW Pistoliers.  You do have to remove the saddle by simply shaving and sanding it smooth.

I previously made the armored centaurs that I called the Knightgors of Khorne, and so this was a much easier conversion than those.  I later made a third version of the centaurs using gors and wood elf horses, probably the best of the centaurs.

Paintwork was done in a very similar style as my gors, bestigors, and the afforementioned Knightgors.

I also carried the fur coming off the back of the gor onto the horse body.  These were a lot of fun to build, and below you can see some of the pre-paint shots of the builds.

I used the tabards to cover the front of the join between horse and torso.

Here you can see the sides of the horses and the areas where the saddles use to be.

 And below the backs.

So there you have it my Centaurs.

Old stuff Wednesday – October – The Chaos of Converting Gors

I’ve always had this fascination with orcs and beastmen for some reason since I was a kid. I don’t know if it was due to the influences of Greek Mythology and CS Lewis and Tolkien and RE Howard and Frank Frazetta’s imagery and Ray Harryhausen’s visions, but that stuff has always held my imagination. Way back in 2003 I became a convert to Warhammer’s Chaos realm, led astray by Mike “King of all things Nurgle” Butcher in to the Fantasy game from 40k and away from loyalist Space Marines. It was easy for me to latch onto the beastmen. Not only that, back then the book, Hordes of Chaos, allowed the mixing of beastmen with the barbaric looking warriors of chaos, and I’m an even bigger fan of barbarian types whether it be Conan or Death Dealer or Kull or Viking. So the goal back then was always to start with the beastmen and eventually end up with an entire army of Khorne across the board. Khorne was also easy as I hate magic and wizards. So, as promised from last month’s old stuff posting, I have returned to the gors: Ole three Horn: Love the dead rabbit. I started modeling the army with plastic beastmen, a kit I absolutely loved back then. The Gors would form the masses of the army. My vision of them would be that they would wear scraps of armor plate and chainmail and not all be completely naked.  Drummer using marauder arms (this was the very last model that I had made for the army)  Got to have extra weapons. My other goal (and still a goal of mine today when building non-regimental type armies) was to not have a single model in the army look alike, not a very easy task to accomplish. So I went about converting things. Also back then at this time my skills with green stuff were very basic, I was still learning a ton of different techniques and struggling with all of them. The overlapping plates, I literally did them as overlapping plates. I did go crazy with scraps of armor plating. I put them on thighs, shoulders, arms, chests, hooves, muzzles, you name it. The leather strap is holding down some chainmail I wish that I would have put more mail under the plate armor.   The chainmail, I had no idea how to do, so I did a bunch of poking with various tools back then. It turned okay, but is nowhere near as good as what I can do nowadays. So everything took so much time and effort. That red lettering actually says something in the dark tongue, something that is probably profane. One thing that people are often critical of is the converting of the arms. I have a lot of poses with the arms holding the weapons overhead. Now yes I know the shoulder joins in reality do not look like this, that there should be some sort of armpit showing up, but some sacrifices need to be made when you are converting 30 of these models, I did want to get them done sometime this decade. This is good example of what I was saying. The meat hooks from the Kroot, something I used on the minotaurs also.  The red hood is all GS, not my best work. The other thing very cool about the gor arms is that you can rotate the forearms and hands easily about the bracers that they have. Also added a strap holding a shield. I ran out of hands at one point, so just slap on a weapon. The painting has always led to some criticism. I chose to go down the path of the miniature painter’s so-called non-metallic metals or so-called NMM style of painting using yellows and grays for the metals. Some people like it, some dislike it with a passion. I did this in a very stylistic way, similar to how I draw metal in pen and ink, sort of an imitation of one of my favorite comicbook artists’ styles, Bart Sears. The best thing that came out of painting in this style is that I began to understand how to blend colors both in the palette and on the model, and also began to gain more control with the brush. I also began to understand how to highlight in a less stark manner as compared to my previous army that was all starkly highlighted. For the fur and skin, I went with a very non-uniform look. This was also where I began to develop my assembly line approach to painting, 10-15 models with 3-4 colors in a certain color range. When I did this I realized that there was speed in a such a methodical approach that looked good, much, much different than painting an individual display type model. I also added even more hair to many of the models, since they already a good base of hair I wanted more.  And some pouches, trophies, food, meat, etc.  Along with just a insane variety of poses and conversions. The one on the right has a horn strapped to his back, my musicians hack first. The howler on the left, the one with the severed hand, the one on the far right is one of my favorites. So there you have it, my old gors. I still have all of them from this army. I’m very fond of them in many ways, they bring back good memories, and show one of my many steps of evolution in the hobby. Yes, there are ungors in the army and I still have them also, but they just are not as good, and I did not spend anywhere near the time on them as I did the gors. And this is probably a good segue as I prepare for the blog crossover with James Craig’s Lost In the Warp blog and Mike Butcher’s Butcher’s Bill blog as beastmen and chaos are the theme of the upcoming crossover, so keep an eye out for what is in store.

Old Stuff Wednesday September.....GOR! GOR! GOR!

 Well way back in 2003 I created this Beastmen army.  I still own all of the Gors, they are very much special to me.  One thing I noticed as I was looking through these old photos, is that I really never took very good pictures of them.  So maybe next month I'll take some new pics of some more of these models. 

Every Gor in the army was converted in some sort of way.  Mostly it was the time that I was just learning how to sculpt armor plates and some other things. I seriously love the face of the model below.

 Below is one of the musicians.  The basing shared a theme that Mike Butcher and I used for a team up in Adepticon's Team Tourney in which he did some very evil wood elf Tree and Dryad army.  And the commonality between the two armies was that we used the same style on basing.  That is probably one of the few things that are alike in Mike and my paint styles, other than we used paint, brushes, and water; otherwise everything else is much different.

 And a horribly small group shot.  Next month I promise that we will revisit the beasts with the best of my Gors and new photos, not these from 2003.