Broken Zealot Painting Blog

Mariner: done! I'm well ahead of schedule to make my showdown challenge for this month. Although now I probably jinxed myself. Anywho, here's the big guy, all ready to go. I painted him in a similar scheme to the Freebooter, but replaced the green with red to give some variety. Overall I'm very happy, especially with how the blending worked out on the large surfaces. Of course, it wasn't until I was done sealing it that I realized I hadn't fully finished the chest on the back. I spent a bunch of time experimenting with algae simulation and the battle damage. Some of it worked out well, and some not so great.

This is one of those evenings where I realize I've made a bunch of progress, but don't have pictures at the moment. So, before sleep overcomes me, I figured I'd check in. The Mariner is done except for sealing it. I may do some additional touch ups, but for now I'm feeling pretty good about it. Kraye and Stannis are both assembled, except for attaching them to the base. It took most of this evening, but the effort was well worth it. They seem like they will be very fun models to paint. Nothing much interesting to report on without pics though, so I'm going to sign off and get some sleep.

And finally I round out the Revenant Crew that I have been working on for so long. This one is a converted Press Ganger Pirate. I loved the model, but wanted to make him a Revenant instead and this worked out pretty well. Probably one of the more extensive conversions I've ever done, which is kinda sad for my conversion abilities. Anyway, no more Revenants until Rengrave managed to press a warcaster into service on the field of battle.

Quick note before sleep. Painting and assembly has come to a halt while I've been reading the Legends fiction. Plus I've got another book that I need to read before Monday as well, but that's another story.

I managed to get magnets attached to most of my trolls, but I ran into an interesting problem. The models that I did water bases for don't have the inset space for a magnet cause it was all carved out. I'm going to have to experiment with some other options, but I think this is solvable using lower profile large disc magnets and carve out a space of balsa wood from the bottom. However I'm leaving that for the weekend when I don't feel so rushed. Overall though, the magnets are working great. I have a removable tray from a metal toolbox that is working excellent.

Here's Revenant #10. This one is half Risen (bottom half) and half Revenant. It makes his torso seem a little extra long the way I assembled him, but I don't think it's terribly obvious. This is another fast tabletop quality paintjob. One last Revenant left on my desk at this point.

Well, I cheated on my challenge. I did the final pinning this morning because the snow was still drying last night when I got too tired to keep going. So this morning consisted of an hour or so of pinning, sealing, and attaching magnets. I think the snow turned out pretty good. The bases in general follow the Brushthralls Tutorial on making cork and snow bases. However for the snow, after trying a few things, I finally settled on making a runny paste of white glue, water and baking soda, which I then slathered randomly on the bases and then sprinkle more baking soda on top. I was terrified that sealing them would ruin the effect, and that the baking soda would just come off, but so far, both fears appear unjustified.

Bunch of random notes...

Picked up Legends last Wednesday. It's 100% awesome. I'm still reading through the fiction, but the Menoth stuff is rockin.

Played a 750pt game last Friday. I played eSeverius against eAsphyxious. I lost, but it was a valuable experience. eSevvy is pretty badass, even against non-living models where his abilities are rather nerfed. Highlights include putting his +2 DEF and no-spells/animii spell on the TFG and controlling an entire side of the table with them.

Watched a couple of painting videos posted on miniaturepeddler the other day. The first wasMatt DiPietro at GenCon which I found pretty interesting. The second was of Amy Brehm teaching a class on metalics which was ok, but rather hard to follow.

Ha ha... sorry, couldn't help it. I'm very nearly done with the Nyss hunters, but I probably won't have them sealed tonight. I lost a lot of time working on snow bases for them. My first experiments were pitiful and I had to scrap my prototype base entirely. However, they are all fully painted, and all that remains is to put the snow on the bases (which are otherwise done) and pin the Nyss to the bases and seal them. I'll be working on for another hour or so, but I'm gonna have to post pics tomorrow after I seal them.

Well, I'm sorely behind schedule on my plan to finish the Nyss Hunters for August, but I've made important progress. I finished painting Cylena from the unit yesterday. She was my prototype for how I wanted to paint them, both in terms of technique and detail level. My goal, like with the Cryx, is to paint them quickly without sacrificing quality too much. I think this result is a pretty happy balance. It was about 5 hours or so of painting on this model, which counts some experimentation time. Now that I have the process worked out, the others should go quickly. Here's what I did:

Base: Cygnar Blue Base, wash black ink + flow aid, highlight Coal Black - This is done over a large portion of the model first, since most of the model is the black leather.
Fur: MWH, wash CXH, re-highlight MWH - This gets this part done very quickly and provides good constrast and a slightly gritty look
Cape: CXH, 2BB CXB, 2BB Black - I love 2BB; it gets the job done so fast now. Totally worth learning the technique despite all the initial frustration.
Scabbard straps: MWB, shade Rucksack Tan, highlight MWH - Pretty standard formula for cloth-style straps for me.
Flesh: Frostbite base (couple coats to make it smooth), wash blue+black ink + flow aid, minor highlights with Frostbite, hit eyes with MWH - I wasn't going to mess around with fancy flesh styles here. I wanted something striking, providing better constrast to the overall model, without having to do something complicated since the only skin these models really show is their hands and faces (and Cylena's belly). The hair got a cleanup afterwards of just a single coat of black paint (no highlighting action here).
Sword hilt: Bloodstone, Skorne Red highlights, wash Umbral Umber, minor shading with Armor Wash - Again, not looking for something elaborate, just fast.
Sword blade/etc: base Pig Iron, then Cold Steel highlights then Quick Silver, and then some thinned black to shade. For all the armor trim I just used Cold Steel.

The key here for me was to avoid mixing paints. Things go alot faster on squads if you can stick to out-of-the-pot colors.

My next big task (in addition to painting the other 9) is to get working on bases. I've never done snow bases and figured this is a good opportunity to try them out. Gonna have to pull out some of the tutorial links and read up.

On a different note, my niece's visit was a blast. We did a ton of stuff and I needed a huge nap after she left. Here's a quick list of the week:

Tons of shopping
Santa Cruz Boardwalk
The Dark Knight
SF Zoo
Fisherman's Warf
Cold Stone
Got sick with the flu (just me)
Had a late night code release at work (while still sick)
More Shopping
Bennihana
Walked the Golden Gate

Nothing fancy here, just trying to round out my Revenant Crew finally. 5 of them have been sitting on my desk for practically a month now with just skin and metals done, so I finally am getting these little buggers done. Just tabletop quality stuff here (barely).

These guys are some of the conversions I did for the remaining Revenant Crew members. I'm fixated on making sure all my Cryx unit models look different if at all possible and so these guys got a little work. Some of them have parts from my scap bin, and others were cobbled together from a combination of Revenants and Risen models.

This month is going to severely drop off in painting time. My niece is coming to visit for a week which will (justifiably) take up most of my time. This is probably a good thing since I'm riding a ragged edge of burnout in both painting and work, so a week of shopping and playing Mario Kart with my niece is probably just what the doctor ordered. In the mean time, along with cleaning and organizing my painting desk and doing some initial model assembly, here's an interesting update from the Bay Area:

Jeremie Bonamant recently visited the area for a 3 day teaching session at Endgame in Oakland. I was unfortunately unable to attend, but the local group that helped organize the event posted their notes about the event which I got to read through. It was fascinating. After reading through it, here's the quick summary of things I've decided I need to work on:

Zenithal highlighting - The idea here is to highlight the surface facing upwards according to the angle of incidence of the light source. Not ever edge needs a highlight.
Metalics - When doing true metalics (not NMM) it's important to make the shading very very dramatic. The more the better, and with smooth blending.
Highlighting - Highlights should be brought higher, with the highest highlights on the parts of the mini that I want the eyes drawn to.
Highlighting black - Black should be highlighted with light shades of colors being used elsewhere on the mini.
General color theory - I need to read a book for sure. Maybe take a night class.

One last side note: In my quest to experiment with other paint/ink lines, I've been trying out a couple of the Vallejo Game Ink line and I am quickly falling in love with it. It has great flow, great coverage, and doesn't seem to break down as much when thinned. I'm going to pick up the entire line very soon I suspect.

He's done! And what a joy he was to paint. Seriously, this was a very fun model. A good level of detail for a large model, with surfaces allowing for some experimentation.

I've noticed that more dramatic highlights and shadows can really help a model pop. There's definately a fine line on what's good and what's overdone though. I'm still too conservative in my contrast level I think, but maybe that's just me. I experimented a bit more with higher levels of contrast between the shadows and the highlights and I think it paid off well, especially on the leathers.

Two-brush blending is really useful in small areas. Now that I've gotten more used to the mechanics of it, I'm starting to use this technique more automatically. Even on fairly small areas (like Gnarly's righteous six-pack stomach muscles) it works quite well.

Tattoos are fun. They were intimidating when I was first learning how to do them, but later on now they are becoming a blast. Fixing mistakes on tattoos is a little painful, but the process is pretty easy. I found that sketching on a piece of paper ahead of time is vital, along with using just a touch of flow aid, but thinning paints with water is not very helpful.

Painting the fur was an odd thing. Normally I work based on the texture, but the sculpting of the fur doesn't provide a good clean cutoff for where the fur ends. I had to "improvise" a little in how I did it. This time, it worked out much much better than the warpwolf I did before.

Overall, I'm quite happy with how this turned out. Some of the blending/shading on the skin could have been better. On the flipside, the horns worked out great. Using multiple washes and careful drybrushing really brought them to life. It helped that they are sculpted so beautifully.

Well, enough rambling. Once again, it was a pleasure to paint another circle warbeast as a break from my usual stuff. I might post this one on CMON just to see how it rates since I haven't posted one there in quite some time.

This latest battle was a rather interesting twist. Lance and I played a 750 point battle where each army had to contain 15 vps of warbeasts or warjacks. I can honestly say it was quite entertaining. Probably the best part was the very high level of discussion around various points in the battle where there were opportunities for assassination runs. [Warning: There's some proxy action in the pics, since some of the models being used are on my desk still being converted/painted]

The Lists:
Lance: Epic Morghoul, 2 Cannoneers, Bronzeback, 2 Kreas, Drake, Paingivers (6), Agonizer, Feralgeist, Swamp Gobbers, Midwinter
Me: Epic Feora, Guardian, Reckoner, Crusader, Devout, Revenger, Redeemer, Chior (6), Vassal, 2 Wracks, Gorman, Midwinter

I chose eFeora primarily for the bonus movement she gives to her battlegroup. The jacks were mostly just an assortment of things I felt like playing. Including Midwinter was primarily for testing him out. I was pretty undecided about him before.

Highlights:
* eMorghoul's feat is still very nasty. I hates it! The fact that he can charge into the middle of my army, blind everything, and then teleport back to safety just makes it ridiculously frustrating.
* Marching in a jackwall worked really well. With the choir to prevent shooting at the jacks, it really put a pinch on Lance's list.
* Midwinter was awesome, on both sides of the table. For Lance, he prevented a fairly certain assassination run by me on eMorghoul. For me, he launched a lovely chain lightning into a Cannoneer which then bounced and hit a paingiver and the feralgeist, killing both.
* The Agonizer was again a real pain in the butt. Between the Agonizer and Midwinter, it creates a very heavy suppression against jacks and casters.
* The bonded Redeemer was awesome. It set many things on fire, doing bonus damage to eMorghoul, Midwinter, the Gobbers, and several paingivers. I'm totally sold on the Redeemer being standard equipment with eFeora at this point.

Outcome:
There were several points at which assassinations almost happened, mostly notably the end where eFeora made a mad dash, teleported into melee with eMorghoul, and unfortunately just missed by 1 attack on killing him. Then it was a simple matter to finish her off.

Next time:
I'm really looking forward to fielding Midwinter with Aiyana in the same list. I'm betting that it will make for a very ridiculous suppression field.

Time to base old Gnarly.

Here are the steps to making this base.

1) Cut out a hole for the water. I drill an outline of holes in the base to make it easier to cut. Once cut, I put angled cuts around the edge so that it sloped downwards.

2) Cut out a piece of balsa wood to form a floor of the water pool.

3) Mix up some green stuff and fill in the pool. I basically rolled it into a snake and outlined the bottom of the hole, then squished the balsa wood onto the bottom. Then using color shapers, smoothed the green stuff in the hole to sloping edges.

4) With the leftover green stuff, I created a couple mushrooms. I just roll bits into cones, then stick a piece of brass rod into the bottom of the mushroom cap, then use color shapers and smooth out the fingerprint lines from the green stuff. [insert time while green stuff dries]

5) Cover base with white glue and lay down a layer of fine sand. Squish it down real good, then tap away excess. [insert more drying time]

6) Once dried, the sand was base coated with Battlefield Brown, then a heavy drybrush of Beast Hide, then a light drybrush of Rucksack Tan. I also painted the side of the pool Cygnar Blue Highlight to represent the outward facing water, and did a light drybrush of Wurm Green on the sand where the pool forms to give it a mossy sort of look.

7) I picked out a couple sufficiently rock-shaped pieces of bark from my basing bits and base coated them Bastion Grey. Then I white glued them to the base, shaded with a controlled wash of Armor Wash, and did highlights with drybrushing of Trollblood Highlight, and then lightly with Underbelly Blue.

8) Next I filled in the water. To do this, I mixed up a small amount of EnviroTex Lite. It's a 2-part resin mix that makes great simulated water. I added just a very tiny touch of Turquoise Ink. They key here is adding very very very tiny amounts at a time and mixing to get a sense of the opacity before adding more. Then I carefully poured it into the pond basin, using a small wooden stick to spread it to the appropriate places. I left it for about 10 minutes (enough time to update this entry) and then exhaled gently onto it to remove the bubbles. [again, insert more drying time, for the last time]

9) At this point I departed a bit from my usual techniques and did a thin red ink wash on the sand of the base to give it a slightly more earthy tone. In hindsight, I should have started with Bloodstone probably.

10) I white glued down a bit of simulated moss I've had for a while. I got this stuff from the model trains section of some hobby store long ago. I "drybrushed" this with Ember Orange to give it a more fall look. This stuff is pretty soft and delicate, so I had to just pat it down rather than the typical vigorous drybrushing technique. I gave it an extra and lighter pat down with Cygnus Yellow.

11) I white glued down some green flock to simulate moss. Mainly I did this so that when I pin the Gnarlhorn to the base, there won't be an unsightly gap between his feet and the sand.

12) I made painted the mushrooms. I started with a base coat of Skorne Red, then two-brush blended Murderous Magenta, then Beaten Purple. Then I used Trollblood Base to paint some spots and the stems. Then a simple matter of pinning them to the base.

13) I painted the edge of the base black to tidy it up.

And there you have it... 13 "simple" steps later and bam! The only real concern I have about this base is the purple mushrooms might create a bad visual dynamic for the Gnarlhorn once he's on it. We'll see. From just holding it up in front of him it doesn't seem too bad. I'm waiting until tomorrow though since I'm going to give it a final look over with Lance before sealing and pinning him to the base. Important tip here, if you use water effects, such as EnviroTex, DO NOT seal with matte coat over it. It will totally ruin the effect. I discovered this the hard way when I did the Totem Hunter.

One more update. Done painting. Just need to work on the base. Here's the notes:

Leathers: highlight Rucksack Tan plus Bloodstone, further highlight Rucksack Tan, careful Armor Wash shading in the recesses

Loincloth: base coat Meredius Blue, wash Coal Black, highlight Meredius Blue, shade further Coal Black, shade further straight black.

Eyes/Gem: base coat Coal Black, highlight Meredius Blue, further highlight Arcane Blue. For the gem I added a tiny dot of MWH.

Not a great photo, but I was rather pressed for time this evening.

This is long overdue. I read this tutorial a couple months ago. It's a phenomenal tutorial, and hopefully will remain there for the foreseeable future. Anyway, I've transitioned over to using Picasa, and it has definitely helped. That coupled with using the lightbox image display has really felt like a significant upgrade to the picture aspect to my blog. I've definitely discovered that lighting is 50% of the challenge to taking good photos of miniatures. I'm still working on refining my setup. Once I get something I'm happy with, I'll post again. Until then, happy painting!

Taking a page from the JIG site (a favorite distraction of mine), I'm doing a quick link dump, and minor project update.

These Bane Thralls were posted on the Privateer forums by Dead Dogg (of Brushthrall fame) and are seriously making me want to paint my own Bane Thralls, which are sitting in the drawer next to my desk.

I came across this basing tutorial the other day which is wicked cool. Lots of basic to mid-level information, but covers a wide variety of basing options in a single place.

I'm currently wrapping up painting the Gnarlhorn, slowly poking away at my 5 Revenants, and tortuously getting the Nyss assembled for this month's showdown challenge. The Nyss are an enormous pain to assemble cause of the many tiny parts. However, they are very cool models and highly configurable, so I'm not going to be doing any conversion work to make them all look different like I did with the Revenants.

That's all for today. Hopefully tonight will be highly productive.

Quick battle report from last night. No pics unfortunately. 750 points of Skorne vs Menoth action. Here's the line ups:

Me: Testament, Reckoner, Guardian, Devout, Vassal, Choir(6), 2 Seneschals, 2 units Knights, Rupert, Aiyana&Holt, Gorman.
Lance: eMorghoul, Cannoneer, 2 Kreas, Drake, 2 Savages, Brute, Paingivers (6), Bongrinders (6), Gobbers, Totem Hunter

I won the right to go first and boy am I glad I did. I ran right towards the center of the table with my jack wall, put Knights on either side, and braced for the Skorne advance. The game quickly turned into a battle for the center of the table, with my jack wall amped up on spells and effects. In the end we had to call the game on time: I had destroyed a significant portion of Lance's force with minimal casualties and had eMorghoul on the run, but just couldn't leverage enough attacks at the top of round 4 to kill him. On the other hand, my positioning had prevented any sort of counter-attack from eMorghoul of any significant strength.

Some highlights:

eMorghoul's feat is (still) bad business. Again he caught large swaths of my force, dramatically limiting my options. This time he caught my caster, which made things really nasty.
The Cyclops Brute is a huge pain in the butt to take down. He's got enough def, arm and damage that it requires some significant slugging to finally bring him down. Last night it took Holt (boosted from Aiyana being in melee as well), a Seneschal (who missed his second attack), and 2 charging Knights (getting attacks from the back to bypass the shield).
Soulstorm didn't even get used this battle, although the Testament's Dust-to-Dust spell is pretty awesome. It's also nice to note that Ashen Veil stacks with Choking Veil from the Reckoner.
The real stars of the show for me were the Knights. 2 units of these guys means no lost love when a couple go down. There was also some chiorboy abuse by the Testament, since he gets soul tokens no matter who destroys a protectorate model.

More updates since yesterday. Getting close to done now. Here's what I did:

Armor: Shading with Molten Bronze, highlights with Quick Silver, additional shading with straight Armor Wash

Hair: Base coat Ironhull Grey, drybrush Bastion Grey, drybrush Trollblood Highlight, drybrush Frostbite, wash black

Leathers: base coat Bloodstone + red ink, wash umbral umber,

Tattoos: Exile Blue + Armor Wash, very very thin wash Midlund Flesh to "bury" it

Next things to do are highlight the leathers, then I've got the gem, eyes, and loincloth. I should also start thinking about how to base it.

Made quite a bit of progress in the last few days. Here's the notes on what I did:

Horns: Thick wash of Jack Bone, thin wash Gun Corp Brown, drybrush MWB, light drybrush MWH, very thin wash umbral umber, highlights with MWH.

Armor: Base coat Cold Steel (over the black), thin wash green ink + flow medium (to darken the insets of the plates, Solid Gold base over the Cold Steel, medium wash turquoise ink + armor wash.

Chainmail: Drybrush cold steel, wash armor wash.

Next things to do include highlighting and shading the metals, and replicating the process from the horns on the hooves.

Well, due to my abysmal failure in the previous showdown challenge I set for myself, I've decided to take on something a little more reasonable. I'm not giving up on Cryx, just setting it aside for the time being. Instead, I'm going to focus on my mercs for the next 4 months. Now, obviously there's some serious cheating in this showdown challenge as I already have a fair amount of painted mercs. My goal here is to bring my Highborn contract of mercs up to a legitimate 1000 point fighting force, rather than the ragtag collection I have currently. This will both give me a solid merc army, and provide enough extra bandwidth to finish up some other projects I've been wanting to do.

For August, I'm aiming to paint up 10 Nyss Hunters, to give me the this starting 350 point force:

Fiona the Black
Gudrun the Wanderer
Aiyana and Holt
Rupert Carvolo
6 Sea Dog Cultists
10 Nyss Hunters

If I get really ambitious, I might pick up 6 extra Sea Dogs and paint them up specifically as themed cultists for Fiona, but that's optional. As of right now, the Nyss are sitting on my desk, still in the blister packs. They are quite configurable little models which is both exciting and terrifying at the same time.

Last night I played in an epic battle against Lance. This was, once again, a ridiculously fun game. Here's the line up:

Lance: eMorghoul (freshly acquired from Comic-con), Gladiator, Cannoneer, Rhinodon, Cyclops Savage, Drake, Krea, Paingivers (6), Bonegrinders (6), Gobbers, Feralgeist

Me: Madrak, Champs, Krielstone Bearers (6), Stone Scribe, Blitzer, 2 Imaplers, Axer, Totem Hunter, Fell Caller, Gobbers, Alten Ashley

Basically, in the words of Podthrall Shane recently, we met in the middle, and punched each other in the face until it was done. It was a serious scrum in the middle of the table. I have to admit that I very much enjoyed the brutality of it. Here are some highlights:

The Totem Hunter charges the Drake, kills it (gaining a totem), the Feralgeist jumps into the Drake, and the Totem Hunter uses his remaining buckler attack to kill the undead Drake (gaining a second totem).
Impalers once again bend the rules of probability and score 2 out of 2 crit slam hits, keeping the Gladiator out of action the whole game.
The Rhinodon pasted the Blitzer in a single activation, with fury to spare, creating an unfortunate vessel for the Feralgeist.
eMorghoul charges the front line of champs, teleports behind them, feats (catching half my army), and manages to survive the counter-attack after that. His feat is nasty nasty nasty!
A solid NQ Challenge plan was foiled by a sub-par initial dice roll on the Axer's attempt to slam eMorghoul. In hindsight, I should have slammed one of my own guys into eMorghoul rather than slamming him directly. If the slam had succeeded (needed 13 on 4 dice to hit), the Totem Hunter would have been gaining a 3rd (and very impressive) totem.

In the end, eMorghoul made a valiant assassination run on Madrak, but he needed just a tiny bit more oomph to make it. After using 1 fury to shutdown transfers and tough, he had 2 remaining fury to make 3 attacks with, needing 6's to hit and doing an average of 12 damage per hit. True to statistics, he hit 2 out of 3, did 12 damage on the first hit, and Madrak had the scroll to ignore the second hit. We called the game at that point as it had become academic.

Playing Trolls again after so long was a lot of fun. Remembering the fury mechanic was not as hard as I expected, probably from playing against Skorne so much. Madrak with Champs and Krielstones is always entertaining too, watching my opponent try to sort out how to actually hit and kill them.

I started working on the Gnarlhorn for Sean yesterday and figured I'd snap a pic of the progress, along with the particulars of how I did what I did (not that it's really that spectacular).

First, I primed in white. It was just easier. I've still got mixed feelings about using white instead of black on this model, but it's clearly too late now. It has helped for doing the flesh, but has introduced an additional step for doing the armor.

For the skin, i decided to go with more of a human tone rather than a darker leathered tone. Primarily because it gives me more contrast range to work with, without having to go super dark, and I also feel it will make a better match with the more beaten tarnished gold color I plan to aim for on the armor plates. The skin so far is the following steps:

Base coat Midlund Flesh.
Add some lines of MWH. The idea here was from Matt DiPietro's post on the Ask the Studio thread about how he added texture to the skin and horns.
Medium-thick wash of Bootstrap leather.
Some two-brush blending of Battlefield Brown on the lower regions of the muscles.
Thin wash of Ironhull Grey and Umbral Umber.
...next steps are to add some highlights to the upper regions of the muscles, and then some additional shading work.

The armor is pretty basic so far. Fill in the recesses with Necrotite Green, then a wash of Iosan Green, then another wash of Gnarls Green. Both washes have a touch of flow medium in them to hep them flow into the recesses. Then I carefully went over all the raised portions (the parts to become gold) with slightly thinned black. The black is to help with the metals once I start them. I'm still thinking I might do an ink wash on them, but it's undecided at this point.

Please note, this pic is my first attempt at moving towards using Google's Picasa and Picasaweb for my photos. I'm still working out the kinks, along with the lightbox image display kinks. If you encounter problems, please leave me a comment so that I know.

Life has really hit me like an avalanche lately. I was clearly unable to keep up with my Showdown challenge, plus I'm experiencing a bit of burnout now. So, I've decided to at least take July off from the challenge. I may take next month off as well, and resume in September. For this month, my goal is to get the Gnarlhorn painted for my friend Sean, and do some maintenance stuff on the blog. Specifically I need up refine my photo setup, switch to using Google's Picasa, and create a handful of reference pages on this blog. I've also been backfilling posts that were overdue, namely the Harrower and the Pistol Wraith. Speaking of pictures, here's a (not so great) group shot of the Cryx models for the first month's challenge.

Last night Lance and I battled and it was, well, rather lopsided. I decided to give my new Cryx a break this time and try out an experiment with my mercs. I had listened to a recent Podthralls episode (#146) where they ranked Merc casters and it got me interested in trying out Fiona again. Here's the lineup:

Me: Fiona, Nyss Hunters (10), Sea Dogs (6), Aiyana & Holt, Rupert, and Gudrun
Lance: Hexeris, Bronzeback, Arcuarii (6), and the Totem Hunter

Early on, Hexeris presented himself as a target, but I was unable to capitalize due to some extraordinarily bad dice rolling. However later, I made 6 out of 9 tough rolls which was also a freak of statistics. Overall though, it felt like Fiona was keeping things under control most of the game. It was really a poor matchup between the lists due to 1) Hordes really doesn't work well until the 500pt level, and 2) Fiona's discord spell made for bad business against those Arcuarii that are weapon masters with reach.

The key features of my army were using Nanokian Brand on the Nyss to let them shoot through intervening models (making them lovely little assassins), and using Teglesh Mark on Gudrun to turn him into a fairly indestructable arcnode.

CAUTION: The Magnets discussed in this post are NOT child-safe!

A little something simple from the painting desk. I've seen alot of discussion on the PP forums about using magnets to secure models into metal cases rather than using foam trays. I was at first skeptical, but I decided that given the pile of magnets I now had in my drawer from the failed Egregore experiment, I'd give it a try with this Cryx army. This tip is, to say the least, suprisingly good. I've added magnets to the undersides of the bases using just glue (no greenstuff) and then I have a small piece of sheet metal that I plop them on. It works great. As long as I don't jostle it too abruptly, they hold perfectly still and can even be suspended sideways and upsidedown without a problem. Below is a quick pic of one of the Witch Coven and the Harrower bases with magnets on them. Notice that the Harrower has a single magnet, and yes, it's strong enough to hold the model to the sheet metal upsidedown. I'm totally a believer and will be ordering more magnets.

For reference, the magnets I got are Neodynium Rare Earth magnets, 1/16" thick, 3/16" diameter. The magnet on the Harrower was a sample that the place I ordered from threw in for free which is 1/8" thick and worked perfectly for the large base. I haven't tested on medium bases.

I was working on this one in parallel with the Harrower and managed to finish him up a day later. I got some good inspiration on him from the PP forums. The glow effect worked out pretty well I think. I liked the overall effect, and this model is really a majestic one to paint.

Wrapped this bad boy up finally. Behind schedule, and the last item to fill out the 350 point Cryx challenge. All the practice with washes really helped accelerate getting this one done. It took alot less time that heavy jacks normally take me. It's not a great paint job, but I'm happy with its table presence. Something to note though, this one was a real pain to assemble.

It's amazing how some things seem to just linger and not get finished in a timely manner. I just finally wrapped this group up. The witches have been done for probably 3 weeks now, but it took me a while to get them based and then the Egregore was a whole mis-adventure. I had a grand scheme of using magnets to make the Egregore float, but that didn't pan out. It was just too much weight and required too many magnets to make it feasible. In the end I had to strip all the magnets back out of the core and then start over. I probably wasted 10+ hours messing around with it but I'm glad I did. I'd have been kicking myself later if I hadn't at least tried.

The bases added a fair amount of work as well. Huge thanks go out to BobbyBrady from the PPS forums for the help and advice on how to make this style of bases. I spent a fair amount of time experimenting to find a good reproducable method of making these without spending too much time. In the end I'm very happy with how they are turning out.

These models are a huge departure for me in my normal style. I did alot of "NMM" type of work here, some of which is arguably metalic looking. Great learning experience, even if it didn't end up looking very metalic. The blades at least look metal. All around, I had a good time painting these models, and feel like they are up to the quality I'm trying to reach in my showdown painting push.

Group shot:

Egregore:

Witch 1:

Witch 2:

Witch 3:

Terrible pictures. Just terrible. It's a shame too, cause the model really is decent. I'm thinking that in the near future I'm going to have to completely alter my photo setup to a more static location instead of just setting it up as needed on my desk. I'll probably convert to using picasa at the same time. Anywho...

This model was very fun to paint. I did alot of washes (per my Cryx theme) which made it go fast. I even included a little OSL work around the swirling soul trail which worked out better than I expected. The basing was a new project for me, making lava bases. Again, too bad the pics are so terrible. I should really get around to dealing with that soon.

Well, my painting showdown for June has ended in a partial failure. I got 10 of the 13 models finished, but ran out of time. I'm hopeful that I'll be close to finished by the end of the week. However, not to be disenchanted with the showdown concept, I'm going to press ahead and begin my July target anyway and try to get caught up. In addition to finishing up my June work, I'm going to add the following models for July:

Terminus

Cephalyx Slavers (Slaver + 9 Drudges)

Pistol Wraith

Revenant Pirates (4 more to round out the squad)

This actually puts me above 500pts by giving me 3 extra pirates for when Rengrave presses dudes into service.

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