Krombies are coming...

UsThis is one of my favourite units in the new Heretics and Renegades army list, they are great in large numbers and cheap as chips. They maybe poor stat wise, but wow 40 of them will give any unit a bad day.

Oh the other reason I love them, is the fact a regular opponent of mine is a Tau player who has a lot of Kroot. So this had to be done :)

Still a work in progress, but the skin tone is about right, again simple highlighted base coat, with an oil filter, this time I varied the filter a little to get the variance in the squad, and throughout the figure, blue browns and greens. Again anti-dry brushing was used to reveal the hifghlights.

Using oil filters and thinned paints allows the shades to show through, this can be seen on the quills.

Fo a simple head swap I'm very please with the outcome, and it fits with the no vanilla models in m army.

Oh ant you might be able to see the Dark Eldar helms I've added to the trophies, that's another dig at one of my regular opponents :) I love winding them up, lol.

In it for the Money...

Last year I posted a few picture if my Mauraders in their raw kit bashed forms, yesterday I revisited a squad of them, I have three. and started to give them some love and paint :)

The idea for them was to be very distinct from the rest of the army, they are after all hired guns, and not strictly part of the army. So they have a contrasting colour scheme. The actual colours came about organically, but the initial choice of orange was deliberate, as the Alphas have a turquoise theme.

Group Shot

These are obviously still very much WIP, but there are aspects of them that are near completion and that I'm very pleased with.

Squad Leader

Here is the squad leader, he like the rest of the marauder elites, is a meat slab job, of a runaway marine scout, they are bigger than the ordinary squads members. He's stollen some of his armour obviously :)

I am liking the weathering on the chainsword, the danger stripes were a challenge, but I think they are passable.

Snipers

The scouts of the squad. At the last minuet I decided to camo the cloaks, never attempted camo before, but I think it has turned out ok.

Brutes

These two are my brutes, two combat heavies for the squad. A common opponent for me is Tau, so this is just a little jibe at them, there are more, but that's for another post. Poor photo, but it just about shows the weathering, again this is oil washes, anti dry brushing. Then going back to apply worn areas.

 The rest of the squad, catch an base, mordheim and empire kit bashes. I silenced the barrels on the rifles, makes the look a bit more special forces. After the success with the camo cloaks I wanted to incorporate it in the ret of the squad.

Sisters getting ready for Battle.

 This is less of a tutorial more a diary of what I did to get to where I finished up. If you learn anything from this I would be surprised, but anything is possible.

Under-coated with a dark brown ink wash to bring out the details, and help create the shadows.

Faces.

Simple next stage, get all the flesh blocked in.

Clothes.

Again just simple blocking out of colours.

Armour.

A little more thought went into the painting of the armour, this is to be an off white when finished, so a dirty cream for a base block colour.

Armour skirts.

Soft shadows on the scale maile skirts, a mid grey ink wash, helps with the definition of the scales.

Hair.

I used a reference picture from the interwebs, to get the ratio of hair colours, I always struggle to know what colours to use for a unit and it then devolves into just one colour, usually brown...

I used thin paints and used multiple layers in smaller areas until the colour I desired was reached.

Accessories

Browns... lots of different shades of brown, with the new wet palette I was using, this was easy, keep the paint wet, allowing subtle changes almost constantly while painting all the figure in one go.

So a little jump from the last set to, this group, I have highlighted the scales just once up-to, white, washed the tunics in a turquoise blue. I've painted and highlighted the metallics, putting my first attempts of heat damage on these too.

The bases and boots have had the oil filter treatments, and I think this helps them gel quite well.

 Again all WIP and C&C welcome.

Big Heads...

Painting 1:18 scale or 100mm figures is a lot different to painting normal 30mm gaming figures, as you might have seen in the first post about this project, the techniques from smaller models don't translate well. So I did some research into different painting techniques, and here are my results, these figures are no where near finished and are definitely still WIPs.

This is my first attempt at a more realist method of painting skin tones, using colour i would not normally use on miniatures, but I think it has some pleasing effects, think it looks better than the previous attempt.

Second and third attempts, these are a little better in my opinion, but still need some practice on this method to get it looking right, but I do like the dirty street urchin feel these future wasteland warriors are developing.

Armour is also coming along well, i like the dirty grubby feel these figures have, yet at the same time i think the flesh tones are looking soft.

Group shot!!!

Not quite ready for the poster but not long now I hope :)

And a change of scale...

First bit of work for the challenge in 1:18 scale.

Only blocked in a few basic colours and started to get some tones on the skin.

These guys are gonna be a challenge in and of themselves, the sheer amount of paint and work to get her to here was daunting, will have to work on softening those face lines, looking a bit cell shaded at the moment.

She and her 19 siblings are gonna kill me, so any tips from the bloggers out there on getting better tones on such a large scale, never done this scale before.

Busy Week, but still grinding away.

It has been a struggle this week to get much time to blog about my progress, it was blog or do, so I chose to do instead :)

Reawakening the painter inside me, been asleep a long time, but he's started to rouse. Tried some blending and rewoking some of the harsher tones in all this weeks set.

So fist up we have my Command Platoon HQ, with the advisers attached to it.
(I thought after my initial splurge on some disciples I should start to form this army up, and get it some way organised, so starting at the top)

Command Group: Commander, Rifleman, Grenadier, and Heavy Weapons Team, I know they aren't on a single base, but I hate them being on one base,  I think it looks weird.

Enforcers: These wont actually be in the unit, but are attached and will be placed in the other militia, they are for those not in the know a little like heretical commissars.

Additional Advisers, Psychic and the Apostate Preacher. Yup the psycher is big, but then again this is the nurgle psycher in an army that is supposed to look very chaos.

And the other side.... of the psycher, not sure why I didn't turn the preacher.

So that's my update so far this week...but there's more...

Squad One Day 2 6MMRPC...almost there

I know I haven't based them yet, but I don't know what terrain the field of battle will be yet, I suspect snow... but I'm waiting on conformation.

Anyhow, here is Squad One finished to my standard table top.

I'll get the hang of this camering thing... one day

The squat mechanic is my favourite, think I'll look for more... after this challenge obviously o.O

Pleased :) now on to the second squad :)

Squad One Update - 6MMRPC

Here is a quick update for tonight, this is the state of squad one so far... getting there.

Squad One lots to go...

Squad one, they are Disciples of Xaphan, 2 melta guns, one plasma gun, and an Autocannon. This is the first of 3 disciple squads, they are all conversions, a bit of kist bashing from some old mutant chronicles figures.

Undercoated, never all that bothered about the colour of undercoat, as a great figure painter and friend, Matt Curier once taught me, it sets the tone for the figure, and as I want these dirty looking, a brown or grey will do.

Blocking in the base colours.

Apologies for the rubbish phone pics, I will get better pics for the final finished shots.

Getting a Handle on my challenge...

I've accepted the 6MMR Challenge, so I ventured into my man cave to see exactly what I have let myself into.
Well first up is my Renegades and Heretics army that I have been building for about forever, as you can see some of it is base coated, most under coated and a couple are near completion, but here are a few group shots to give an idea of the first part of the challenge.

1500pt Tau army,

Renergades and Heretics, psykers and stuff,

Heretics and my forgefiends,

More Heretics and disciples,

Heretics and Space Marine Renegades

The Space Marine Renegades, they are true scale

Box of 80 imperial guard types, 

This will be the first squad I tackle, once I dig them out of my desk.

Last count there were over 140 imperial guard types plus marines and others.

These are from a home-brew game, that myself and a few friends have been working on and playing for a very long time, but more recently we decided to take it up a notch and go to 100mm scale...

(said some of my experiments could do with a doctor :) )

Scratch building a 1:18 scale mech... yeah ill keep taking the pills :)

First of two mounts, the other is still in the box...

That dog looks huge, it really isn't that big...honest

First 3 100mm Teutonic Post Apocalyptic squads.

I will be tackling the 40k stuff squad by squad, the 1:18 (100mm) stuff will be on a figure by figure basis. And Im no golden demon painter, but I like to keep my table top stuff looking nice.

So that is the broad strokes of my challenge, lets see what I can do.