5 Games In One Weekend

Nothing stacks up the fun like a spontaneous visit from a good friend and a full weekend of Warmachine. My buddy Mike came down and brought his Retribution and we managed to get in 5 games! Clearly I'm not going to do a battle report for each, but I'll summarize and hit some highlights. The majority of the games were experiments for both of us to figure out what works best.

The Battles:
The first 3 games I played all Madhammer, and Mike played Kaylyssa and Ravyn (I'm sure I spelled both of those wrong). We played 35 and 50 point games, and both armies tended to be pretty infantry heavy. These games were really helpful learning experiences for both of us. I was trying out all kinds of combinations of mercs with Madhammer to decide what best fit my play style.

The 4th game we played was actually a 2-on-1 game of Madhammer and Ravyn teaming up against Lance's Khador combination of eButcher and eSorcha list of 70pts. This was a seriously pounding battle. Madhammer got killed first, and then eButcher went down next. Then finally eSorcha went down with Ravyn pulling out the win.

The 5th game we played was Mike and I at the LGS, and I rolled out 35pts of Reznik goodness against Ravyn. In a brutal display of punishment for my tactical mistake, Mike nearly assassinated Reznik on the top of turn 2. Reznik was down to 5 damage remaining, and was set on fire! Due to extraordinary luck, he managed to survive and (as the picture above shows), the Avatar brought home the victory. Sorry Mike, but I couldn't help posting the shot of Ravyn trapped in the Avatar's Gaze.

The Highlights:
* The Mage Hunter Strike Force (with the UA) is just crazy awesome. When Ravyn snipes them, it's terrifying. Ignores LOS? Really?!?! Seriously, these guys were MVP's almost every game. Why would you ever not take them?

* Madhammer is super fun to play. I had a great time playing him. He's a toolbox of options and brings some good synergy with some of the other mercs I love to play. I think Mike would agree that putting Primed on Alexia and her Risen was pretty brutal.

* Pairing a Dawnguard Scyir and a light jack made for a pretty nasty flanking team.

* When the Ghordson Basher manages to pull off a slam, it rocks the house. Mine sent eSorcha's bonded Devastator hurtling 7" out of a control zone.

* Stormfall Archers behind a wall of Houseguard Halberdiers was pretty awesome, especially when sniped. I learned the hard way that Ranked Attack now allows anyone else in the army to see through that unit. Very cool stuff!

* No matter what you are, there's a magic threshold of DEF 15 that really improves survivability. Nyss and Gun Mages both tended to do very well for me for that very reason.

* In my book, Madhammer has 2 warcaster attachments: Dougal and Reinholdt. Both are pretty much auto-includes.

Lady Justice

After a long break from the Malifaux models, I have circled back on them. Lady J had been sitting on my desk, primed, for months now and I was feeling guilty for not having even put a spot of paint on her. True to my charter, I spent extra time working on her. She's got some mistakes and problems, but overall I think she turned out fine. I should note, I haven't played a game of Malifaux for quite some time now, but the models still hold my attention.

Also, while working on this model, I used a wet palette the whole time. I'd recently seen the tutorial on Jeremie's video about the wet palette and it gave me just enough extra information to try it out one more time. Rather than just use it for a couple things, I specifically used it for everything except when I needed to make the odd wash or glaze, for which I used the ceramic palette. Overall, I had a very positive experience of the wet palette. Enough to justify buying a better setup to use it more extensively.

What went well:
* Working one area at a time - For this model, I worked on logical section at a time to completion before moving on. For example, I did skin, then shirt, then pants, then hair, etc. This actually worked out quite well for me. The nice thing was seeing a section come to completion before moving on. The hard part was that until I was nearly done, it was hard to get a better sense of how the overall color balance would turn out.
* Wet Palette - This worked out great. Perfectly thinned paints and the ability to keep working with them and re-mixing as I went was super useful. I only wish P3's came in droppers bottles.
* Red Hair - Per my previous post about using Kuler to create swatches, I implemented that swatch in the process of painting the hair. It worked out quite well. I also implemented advice I had gotten from EricJ to "ignore the sculpting of the hair" to a fair degree. How that shook out is that I treated it as a textured surface, but did not use washes to shade it. Instead I used 2BB techniques to shade it as if it was a flat surface. Working over a white primer base and the thinning from the wet palette did the hard work of creating "texture" to it.

What could have been better:
* Chalky finishes - Some regions of the model have a sort of chalky finish to them. I'm starting to learn a bit of why this happens, but I'm still not great with avoiding and/or fixing it. More thin glazes are what I've heard, but I guess I didn't apply enough of them.
* Better use of complimentary colors - I should have thought out my color scheme a bit more ahead of time instead of just deciding as I went. I think the color balance is not all that great, and I did a poor job of using complimentary colors to shade with.
* Silver NMM - It's just not as good as it should have been. Probably needs darker shading.
* Fine details - I had some trouble with some of the fine details and picking them out properly. The belt is an example of where the belt loops and very top of her pants don't have enough distinction between each other for the eye to properly track.

Templar

Very quick post here for the Templar. This wraps up the plastic jack kit. This was most definitely a speed painting job. I have to admit that I really dislike painting these stocky Protectorate jacks. The lines and surfaces of the model are just frustrating and it is hard for me to really get at all excited about it. So, I muscled my way through this one and got it done. This model was definitely painted just for table play. I was going to snap additional pictures of the various configurations, but my camera's battery died and I didn't feel like waiting for it to charge back up.

As a side note of process, in order to paint the various magnetized bits, I put together these little holders. They're just wooden sticks with metal alligator clips on the end for them to stick to.

One last note before I go, there's a definitely one advantage to plastics. When I was getting ready to take it outside to seal it with gloss coat, I accidentally tripped and every part took a 4 foot header to the floor. Amazingly, no damage was incurred to the paint job!

Ok, now it's on to painting something a bit more inspiring to get me energized again.

How To: Using Kuler to Create Color Swatches

I'm starting to appreciate the "science" aspect to painting more and more, especially in regard to color. It's one thing to just slap a base coat down, throw a highlight on, and then wash it with a shading wash. It's another to paint in a way to represent reality. Don't get me wrong, I do my fair share of quick painting to get models on the table, particularly for models I'm primarily painting just to play. However for the last year I've been trying to train my eye to better understand the colors I'm seeing in the real world. It's actually quite fascinating once you stop and look closer. What follows is a new technique I've added to my toolbox to help in that regard. This was inspired by starting to work on the Lady Justice model, and her predominant feature: long flowing red hair. I've tried red hair before and had, at best, mediocre success. Time to step up my game!


The first step was to find a reference photo. A quick Google photo search turns up plenty of options. I scanned a few and settled on this one. I've included the link to the original site, which has nothing to do with painting of course. I won't elaborate too much on why I chose this photo too much. The key reasons are: 1) It matched the tone I was looking for, and 2) It was large enough to provide good detail so that when I load it into Kuler, it would be easy to pick out various color zones. That leads me on to the next step...





Enter the magic of Kuler! There's definitely other ways to accomplish this same goal, but I'm going to use Kuler because it's free and easy. Simply pop it open in a browser, hit "Create", and then "From an Image". Then you upload your reference photo. Kuler will automatically attempt to guess what colors you want for your theme, but that's not why we're here. You'll see that it gives you the image with 5 targets to move around. Simply move the targets around and they will display their target pixel's color at the bottom on the swatch. For this photo, I moved them all to various points of the red hair to get a sense of the color variation. If you want to create a Kuler account, you can save your swatches for future reference.

Something fascinating about red hair is that it isn't really all that "red" most of the time. It's more brown and orange than anything else. The swatch above shows that it's got a lot of flesh and tan tones to it. All of these colors have red components to them, but are not dominantly red.


Armed with my Kuler swatch, I now embark on trying to mimic those colors. I've got a bunch of plasticard pieces sitting around to create actual physical swatches with. As you can see here, what I've done is put down some paint that I think fairly matches the first color from the Kuler swatch. Unfortunately trying to photograph both my laptop screen and the swatch together doesn't do it justice. However, in this case I managed to match pretty closely using just P3 Umbral Umber. I then repeat this process for the other colors of the Kuler swatch until I've filled out my plasticard swatch.

And here's the finished plasticard swatch. I labeled the back for reference. This will definitely come in handy in the future. There's clearly plenty of ways to accomplish this same goal. For example, I've heard of other painters using notebooks to keep notes of particular color builds. For me, having swatch cards like this will come in very handy I think. This will also be useful as I start to work on Lady Justice's hair.

Vanguard

The Vanguard is an intriguing model to assemble and paint. It has sort of a hunched pose to it, with its legs bent down quite a lot. I'm not really a huge fan of the legs and considered trying to rebuild them, but in the end it seemed like too much trouble. I can always to a second one eventually if I get that motivated. Otherwise it's a pretty nice model. The shield afforded a nice opportunity to put some battle damage on it to represent its shield guard ability. I didn't want to overdo it, and I think I captured just the right amount of battle damage. Other than the right hand, I decided to avoid any battle damage anywhere else, to represent how it was doing its job using the shield and not its body.

Nothing much extra to say here. It's really another speed paint job, but I tried to put some decent zenithal highlighting practices to work on it.

Yay for Mercenaries!

Another slightly delayed and pictureless battle report. I got two games in the other day with my merc selection and these were two incredibly fun games. Here's the highlights...

Battle 1 - 35pts:
Me: Ashlynn, Vanguard, Nomad, 2 Forgeguard(6), Gun mages + UA, Herne & Jonne, Dougal, Bokur and Stannis.
Henry: eDoomshaper, Mulg, Axer, Mauler, Fennblades(10), Fell Caller, Chronicler, Swamp Gobbers.

This battle was actually more about testing out stuff than a serious throwdown. I won the initiative and used the opportunity to rush up towards the middle, putting Quicken on one unit of Forgeguard and Admonition on Ashlynn. The trolls likewise rushed forward and spread out, with the Chronicler putting that loathsome song on the Fennblades to knockdown enemies that kill them. Both of us had positioned troopers in the way of our heavy hitters. At this point I had a decision to make. Due to the positioning of my heavy hitters and the threat of Mulg and the Mauler, I decided to take a sort of balanced advance plan. Dougal used his mini-feat and then his action to boost up Jonne's gun. Herne and Jonne opened up, clearing out multiple Fennblades. Then the Gun mages opened up, killing some more Fennblades and also managing to push back the Mauler and Mulg by 3" with thunderbolt strikes. The Forgeguard then charged and eliminated all but 3 of the remaining Fennblades which failed their command check at that point. Stannis moved up as well taking a shot, and then the Bokur and Vanguard took up flanking defensive positions for Ashlynn who advanced and camped her 4 focus. I specifically move her up and told Henry to go for it with Mulg and see if he can kill her. Boy was that a mistake! Mulg was easily over 12" away, and probably more like 14-15". The Mauler advanced and 2-handed threw Stannis at the Vanguard, just barely catching Ashlynn and knocking her down. It was super borderline and probably a 50/50 roll, but I gave it to him to taunt him into committing Mulg. Then eDoomshaper put wild agression and rush on Mulg and feated. From there it was just a whirlwind of obscene abuse. Mulg charged in and started clobering his way through things, using overtake and goad to close in easily on Ashlynn with 4 fury remaining. At that point it was academic.

In review, I could have played this game much more conservatively and feated with Ashlynn and hung back, but it was an interesting test. Mulg is a serious beatstick, and even without eDoomshaper's feat Mulg's overtake would have gotten him there which is just frightening. The arguments about his being overcosted are now firmly in the realm of being ignored by me. Sure, eDoomshaper is a great combo for him, but the overtake was really the star of the show for him.

Battle 2 - 50pts:
Me: Fiona, Buccaneer, Vanguard, Alexia, Gun mages + UA, Mariner (marshalled by Gun mage officer), Aiyana & Holt, Dougal, Nyss Hunters (10), Bokur, Sea Dogs (6 + 3 riflemen).
Henry: eAsphyxious, Reaper, 2 Deathrippers, Wrathe, Soulhunters(5), Tartarus, Bane Knights(10), Withershadow, Skarlock, Gorman, and probably other stuff but I forget.

This battle turned into a mercenary toolbox display. Again I won the initiative (shocking), and rushed forward, putting Nanokian Brand on the Mariner, Teglesh Mark on the Buccaneer, and Roth's Mercy on the Nyss. The Cryx army moved into position, with the Soulhunters running to engage the Nyss, and Asphyxious throwing an AOE and killing Aiyana, Holt, and 3 gun mages. It was time to show what mercs can really do. The first challenge was clearing a bit more of a hole in the middle, so gun mages and sea dogs opened up with a hail of bullets and cleared out a couple key bane knights. Alexia also used the opportunity to command a Bane Knight to kill his buddy. Then the Buccaneer, fueled with 2 focus, attempts the assault charge on Asphyxious. This went wrong in a couple ways. First, Asphixious was sitting in a Gorman cloud and thus def 17, so the Buccaneer needed a 12 to hit, which he missed. Second, he ended up in melee range of a Bane Knight, thus negating his Teglesh Mark. Doh! Despite the failed attempt to knock down the enemy caster, the Mariner stands firm, takes aim, and fires a sniped shot. I'd like to point out that with Dougal's mini-feat and snipe from the Gun Mage marshalling, he's got a 20" range with that deck gun. He had to use his boost in order to hit, but BAM, he laid some damage on the caster, which is always good news. However, I now faced a dire situation. The Nyss managed to cut down a couple Soulhunters and keep the flank held but I was going to be in trouble the next round, so Fiona marched forward, camped on her 5 focus, and used her feat. The following Cryx round was hilarious. The -1 die prevented taking hardly any casualties, and forced the Cryx to try and tie up key things in melee. The poor Buccaneer got blinded by Gorman and then cut into little pieces by the Withershadow, which promptly re-assembled him into a bonejack, the first time I'd ever seen this happen. The Bane Knights ran up and engaged the Gun Mages in melee, and the remaining Soul Hunters engaged the remaining Nyss. Tartarus, in a rash display of anger, charged forward and threshered to kill half of Alexia's remaining risen. Asphyxious laid out some spell action through the arcnode, but failed to hit his target. Due to an unfortunate dice roll, the Reaper failed to hit the Mariner with his harpoon, and thus 2 more focus went to waste. All-in-all, Fiona's feat made the Cryx army cry trying to hit def 13-15 troops on a single die to hit. There was much smiling on the merc side of the table. At this point, I could see how things would eventually turn out: Cryx would grind me down. It was time to pull out all the stops. Fiona dropped all her upkeeps and held her 7 focus (no bonus due to poor positioning of sea dogs on my part). I had a narrow path down the middle that needed to be cleared for my master plan. The Nyss cut down a key Soulhunter to clear the left side of the lane. The sea dogs ganged up and cleared a key Bane Knight on the right side of the lane. Then Alexia slid to the side, sacked a risen to boost herself up, and commanded Tartarus to do the unthinkable: walk back and stab Asphyxious. Success! Tartarus turned around, walked forward, and brought his blade down on his master. At the command of his client Fiona, the Bokur then ran up the lane to 4" behind Tartarus and smiled with confusion as hit orders. Then Fiona steps up to the plate. She Teglesh Mark's the Bokur and promptly starts rolling out the Influences on Tartarus. Slash! Slash! And down goes the evil Asphyxious at the hand of his own minion!!

I can't express just how amusing this battle was. Henry was cracking up at the amusement that was my merc force. For me it was like one of those huge Christmases where you just keep opening presents with new surprises. The flexibility of Fiona continues to amuse me, and her feat doesn't pose the same logistical challenge to me that Ashlynn's does which makes her less difficult to plan around. The entire army brought such a toolbox of options for me that it would be hard to pick an MVP, but Alexia is definitely on the short list. I'm very excited about mercs and really feel like MK2 has brought them up to a respectable level of competitiveness.

Anyway, thanks for bearing with another long battle report. This weekend I'm hoping to get some serious painting time in, and perhaps even another battle.

Resurgence Recap

Resurgence has come and gone (a few days ago now), and the event was a blast! This is unfortunately a photo-free post of the event. All 3 of my games took the full time allowed and I didn't get a chance to wander around and take shots of the other games going on. Even my games were intense enough that I didn't remember to take pictures during
the battle. Overall that was a good thing though.

The Event:
This tournament was a hit. There were 14 players there, several of which I had never met before. In talking with some of them, there were a few that had played years before, but were just now getting back into it due to MK2. And despite opening it up to Hordes players as well, it was an entirely Warmachine event. I'm not positive on the exact breakdown, but there was pretty good representation for all the factions, looking roughly like this: Cygnar - 2, Protectorate - 2, Khador - 4, Cryx - 3, Retribution - 2, Mercs - 1. I have to give a shout out to my LGS as well. There's a different event organizer now and he had the tournament ready to go right on schedule. And other than a couple hiccups with assigning matches in rounds 2 and 3, everything went pretty well for being a new organizer.

My List:
25pts: Kreoss, Crusader, Devout, Zealots (10+UA), Choir (6), Knights Exemplar, Vassal, 3 Wracks
35pts: Kreoss -> eKreoss, + Avatar
50pts: Crusader -> Fire of Salvation, + Repenter, Hierophant, Orin Midwinter, Paladin, Covenant
I had a couple key goals to my list planning. First, I wanted to get the Avatar in as soon as possible, which meant I had to do some jiggery-pokery with swapping in eKreoss at the 35pt level. That also meant I needed to make sure the core of my list was already contained in the 25pt list, including the Vassal. Second, I wanted to have a serious Menoth knot, with an array of denial that would cause serious problems. It doesn't really come together until the 50pt level though, at which point the knot is in full swing with lots of spell denial, and knockdown protection.

My Matches:
My first match was against a pretty typical Deneghra list. This battle was actually pretty close, but my opponent played his army extremely well and with impeccable timing of his abilities. The match actually came very close to being won on scenerio by myself, but I ran out of time.
My second match was against the other Protectorate player who had brought a Testament list with lots of troops. Not surprisingly, we tarpitted in the middle and just kept punching each other in the face. I don't really feel like either of us had the upper hand during the match. Again, we ran out of time during my turn, but this time it would have been hard to actually clear the middle zone. In a longer time game I would have been able to grind it out pretty easily.
My third match was against Henry and his eSkarre list. We'd played almost this same exact battle previously. It really is a painful match because eSkarre's feat is just brutal, especially in a smaller model count battle. I ended up forfeiting a bit before time ran out because there was no way for me to really pull it out. The highlight of the battle though was when the Deathjack marches up, arm locks the Avatar (preventing both Enliven and the shield bonus), and the promptly attacks a zealot standing next to it which was Sancrosanct. Bam! Knocked down! There was much laughing at the moment as Henry realized his folly. Still though, a well played game.
Overall the frustrating thing about my first two matches was losing the initiative and then running out of time during my 3rd turn. In the case of the first match it probably made the difference between a win and a loss. The whole "dice down" thing really isn't my favorite thing. My biggest criticism of the event was that there could have been less time sorting out the pairings between rounds, and spend more time actually on the rounds.

The Results:
In the end it turned out that Retribution won the event. I was pretty shocked actually. The final match was a battle between Khador and Retribution. Unfortunately I was unable to get much more detail about the championship battle. I think that the specifics of the scenario caused a number of ties to take place, and I noticed that Retribution player was routinely done early with all his matches, which means it was likely that he was pulling off assassinations every time. I myself won the Protectorate coin, despite a pretty dismal record. I have to say, I really like the coins as rewards instead of the trophies from the SR4 tournaments.

The Community:
Overall I was pretty impressed with the players there. Everyone seemed to have a good time and I didn't see any serious rules debates. All 3 of my matches were quite civil and very enjoyable.
A shout out goes to Henry for being our Press Ganger lite, in the absence of our previous PG who has moved on to a different game now. *sigh*
One final note was that I got to be a part of a little community support behavior myself there. One of our Cygnar players had a Stormlance model that had broken right above the hoof. So I brought my trusty pinning kit (dremel, brass rod, glue, files, etc) and did a quick repair job for him.

Templar Kit Project - Part 2

Assembly:
There's a good guide in No Quarter #24 for assembling the Bastion kit which I made sure to refer to beforehand. Really there's nothing amazing to note except for using regular superglue instead of that nasty plastic-melting bonding agent that a lot of other kits need.

In terms of pinning, there wasn't much needed. Being lighter, the plastics are a lot more resilient to popping apart. However, being neurotic like I am, I decided to pin a couple spots. The dremel makes very quick work of this step so pinning effort is almost zero. The biggest risk is not accidentally drilling all the way through the piece since the plastic is so much softer.

For this kit, there are 3 heads. I thought briefly about magnetizing the heads so that I could swap them out, however that just sounded like way too much work for so little benefit. To that end, I opted to just use the Templar's head, since that's the model I bought the kit for. I think it is nice that they included all 3 heads.

Magnets:
Now it's time to talk about magnets. This was a pretty tricky proposition for me since I'd never magnetized parts of a model before so I knew this was going to be an adventure. I made sure to pick parts from the Crusader and Vanquisher to do first in case I trashed something in the process. Fortunately I already had some magnets left over from previous orders, so I got drill bits that matched the diameter of the magnets. Then I broke out the power drill. Not the dremel. The power drill. Talk about scary! I hand-drilled a pilot hole with my pin-vise drill and then proceeded to use the big drill. It worked out pretty well overall. In a couple situations I had to green-stuff things back together, but for the most part it worked well.

It took me a couple hours of messing around and carefully drilling and assembling, I got magnets into all the places I needed. Everything holds together quite well, especially since the magnets I used were probably more powerful than I really needed. There were a couple of key challenges:

First, the shield was a real pain in the ass to get on there. I ended up pinning paperclips into the hand (since they are ferrous) and then putting 2 magnets on the back of the shield. It sort of works, but the shield doesn't hold in an angle that looks good.

Second, the left arm (that holds the shield) has a tendency to swivel a bit. It's a result of the way the magnets are in place and their polarities.

So, given those two issues, I'm thinking that probably my solution will be to put a pin in to keep the pieces straight with just one end of the pin glued in.

Well, that's the progres so far. Here's a picture of the Templar configuration assembled. Next step will be to add those final stabilizing pins and then get him primed. He's definitely not going to be ready for the Resurgence tournament at my LGS this weekend. Overall I'm fairly happy with how the magnetizing is working out. I'd like the model pieces to fit together a little tighter, but given this was my first attempt at it I can't complain too much. If there are questions out there about the plastic kit in general feel free to post comments and I'll respond.

Templar Kit Project - Part 1

Ah... Sunday Afternoon! Time to sit down at the painting desk, put on a WM podcast episode, and start a new project. This last week I bought my first PP plastic kit: the Protectorate Heavy Warjack kit. There's a lot of controversy about PP going with plastics, and I figured I'd provide my own perspective by actually walking through my assembly and painting of this kit. My goal here is to review the benefits and drawbacks of plastics. I should note that long ago I played Warhammer 40k (15+ years ago), and so I'm familiar with old plastic kit bashing, so I'm not a neophyte in this arena. However I also have a certain preference for metal models.

Please note that I'll be writing these posts as I'm actually doing the steps I'm writing about, so it may be a little disjointed.

The Product:
My first impression of the kit is pretty favorable. It includes all the parts to build a Vanquisher, Crusader, or Templar. It also includes the cards for all three. The plastic parts are all in a series of connected plastic bags. Everything is packaged so that it's easy to review that all the parts are there. As you can see from the picture, it's mostly the same parts for all 3 jacks with the exception of the arms/hands and heads. It didn't take me more than about a minute to decide to magnetize the arms. It should be pretty easy to do it and it's a project I've wanted to try for quite a while now.

Detail-wise, I was a bit concerned about the pieces. I grabbed my Crusader and Vanquisher from the display case to compare parts. Overall, I can't say the detail level is noticeably lower. There's pieces that seem less detailed, and others that seem more detailed. The plastic pieces definitely have the option of sharper edges, whereas metals don't seem to support that. My impression on this kit is that any reduced detail level is more a reflection of the sculpting and not the material or casting method. I'll be curious to see other kits.

Trimming:
Trimming the plastic parts is pretty easy. As opposed to metals where I almost entirely use micro-files, for these I entirely used a hobby knife. In general these seem to be relatively few mold lines, but that's typical for a new kit. I definitely found that it was harder for my eye to pick out the mold lines on these plastic pieces, primarily due to it being a material I'm not used to. However the hobby knife definitely makes quick work of mold lines and trimming went pretty fast. I will say that the mess factor of plastics is different. With metals, there are lots of little flakes and filing which have their own challenge to clean up. Plastics tend to create little strips and being light, their static electricity makes them stick to things.

I also used this opportunity to try the hair-dryer trick. Sho'nuff, it works like a charm. I took the Vanquisher flail hand attachment and held the chain under a hair dryer. After a few seconds I could see it bend by gravity alone. At that point I turned off the hair dryer and held it in the position I wanted it to stay in. I blew lightly on it to cool it back down and viola! Very easy I must say.

Well, that's enough for today. Next time I'll cover the assembly, since that will turn into a pretty large step. I'm include the magnetizing as well most likely.

eKreoss vs eButcher = OUCH!

Last night I tested out my 35pt eKreoss list (with a couple modifications) against an eButcher list. Everything was going well until he feated. Then the wheels came off the bus and suddenly poor Kreoss was getting cut down by a Spriggan! It was relatively close, and some poor positioning on my part is what really enabled the situation, but still I have to give props to my opponent for really managing to wriggle out of a tight situation. I had the Avatar holding the center, barely still alive after the Butcher tore into him pretty good, locking most of the board down with his holy gaze. However it wasn't enough to hold off the assault.

I swapped in Eiryss into my list and I have to admit I wasn't super impressed with her as an addition to the list. I think there's still some refinement to go on my remaining 5 pts. Part of the challenge last night was that the Khador list didn't possess any of the elements that my list is good at negating (spells), and its strengths were in areas that I'm still somewhat weak in (hard targets).

Sorry for the terrible picture (unfortunately), but it's better than nothing I suppose. Next up I'll be doing a series of posts on the Templar kit. I picked one up (despite my concerns around plastic models) and will do a series of posts about my experience with it from start to finish.

Horgenhold Forge Guard

Just a quick post before sleep. Just finished sealing this band of little dudes tonight. They were a pretty serious speed paint job, but painting all 12 at once pretty much warrants a speed job. It will be handy to have two 6-man units rather than a single squad of 10. This made for a good test of using this sort of strategy. I may do this same thing with any Legion squads I pick up.

Resurgence Practice Throwdowns

The Resurgence tournament is coming up fast at my LGS (the 30th), so for Henry and I that means lots of practice games. And let me tell you, we're packing in the games. Last Wednesday we got 3 games in, and this afternoon we got 3 more games in. These games are fast and furious, and it's a lovely testing of lists under the new MKII rules. I have to say, I'm incredibly pleased with how the MKII rules shook out. Sure, there's some changes in models that make me sad, but there's plenty of improvements. For Protectorate, things are looking quite sassy indeed. But more importantly than the individual models is the overall rules set. We've taken the opportunity to double check a number of rules and in the vast majority of cases there's no ambiguity in situations.

I'm not going to go into detail of our lists for these games since there were many battles and we are trying to tune for the tournament. However I will say that there have been a number of No Quarter Challenge situations. The battle pictured above was a Goreshade vs Kreoss battle. In this situation Goreshade was just a touch short of taking out Kreoss by using Gorman to blind him and then charging in with full focus and just swinging like a madman.

The Resurgence format is pretty fascinating, and having to build on a list is a very cool feature. The scenario objectives are definitely creating an interesting dynamic to it, and we're finding that aggressive play is definitely favorable. I think that anyone not playing all out and charging to the middle is going to get owned on scenario points pretty fast. There's definitely an advantage to going first as well (obviously).

Overall the Protectorate feels pretty awesome. I'm extremely happy with how the Avatar plays on the table now. The Covenant is pretty much an auto-include now as well. Hopefully I'll remember to snap lots of photos at the Resurgence tournament. I think more important than the tournament is the effect MKII is having on the player base. We've lost a couple players (and in fact a press ganger) due to the rules changes, but there are several people saying they are going to start playing now. I think a lot of that is due to a fresh start to the rules, which are definitely more "newbie" friendly.

The Avatar of Menoth

I'm calling this one done. I did some final clean up work on various places where the blending was a extra rough, and some metal work had gotten away from me. To be blunt, it was hard to come back from a month away from painting and consider doing too much more work on it. The clean up work was plenty to tighten up some fine details though and overall I'm happy with the end result. After having this model in my backlog for so very long it feels great to wrap him up, and to finally close out my remaining unpainted Protectorate models.

I loved this project, from start to finish. It was very enjoyable to take the time and think through what I wanted to do and really make this model my own rather than just accept what I felt was a sub-par sculpt. The painting portion was also enjoyable, and the end result really didn't feel like it came together until it was nearly done. The final shading and highlighting really put that slightly more dark gothic feel to the overall tone and brought it more to where I wanted.

If I was going to do this project over again, there a few things I might change. First, I think the base could have been tighted up a bit more. I still like the concept, but I could probably have executed it better. Also the rods between the waist and torso could use some change, but I still haven't figured out what would have been better. Also I think the fine inlaid details of the metal sections could have been made to pop a little bit more. Probably there's other details, but off the top of my head that's really the main points.

Having fielded this guy just the other night under MKII, I can honestly say that my favorite thing about having done this project is to bring his sword in line with the new rules, specifically making it obviously have REACH! I've always loved the concept, art, and (small) story pieces around the Avatar. When I first fielded him though I was always disappointed at his performance for the point cost. That made it really hard to get excited about assembling and painting him. Now in MKII, he's a big pile of iron awesome and I'm very much looking forward to fielding him a bunch.

An Unholy Alliance

Tonight I got to play in a 2-on-2 battle. It was 35 points per player, with 2 troll players versus my Protectorate and Lance's Cryx force. Don't ask how Protectorate and Cryx managed to form an alliance to team up against Cryx! There's no good reason. However the battle was very enjoyable, and in the end the unholy alliance came out victorious. I'm not going to do a normal battle report because, quite frankly, I can't recall everything that happened. However I'll give a rough summary.

The Troll force was lead by eDoomshaper and Borka, with a slew of beasts (Mulg, Mauler, Bouncer, Axer, 2 Impalers, and a Slag), along with Fennblades, Scattergunners, Long Riders, a Hero, a Fell Caller, a Chronicler, and Horthul (and probably something else I'm forgetting).

I brought Reznik, the Avatar, a Crusader, a Revenger, TFG (with attachment, Choir, Vassal, a Sunburst Crew, and the Covenant. My Cryx ally had Mortenebra, a Leviathan, a Reaper, a Stalker, Slaughterborn, 6 Mechanithralls with 3 Brutes, the Necrosurgeon, a Necrotech, and 10 Scrap Thralls.

The battle was an intriguing face off. The big focal point at the start was the potential face off between Mulg and the Avatar. Reznik putting Iron Aggression on the Avatar was pretty sweet I must say. Mulg ended up going down to a well placed Reaper drag and then a swarm of Mechanithralls and the Avatar. On the flip side, later in the game Borka single handedly took out the Avatar on a charge. Honestly this was a pretty close game up until a failed counter-attack by the Mauler on Reznik. Reznik's 14 def saved the day for him with the Mauler getting a number of unfortunate dice rolls. On average, I think the Mauler would have probably just barely killed him.

I have to say that I am seriously loving MKII. Protectorate is almost like a whole new army for me again, and I'm really looking forward to playing them more. The refined rules make the game smoother to play and easier to learn. LOS and formation are good examples of that. I'll definitely be happy when the card decks for Warmachine come out though because I am sick of using these print outs!

War Wolf

Very quick post. I finished up this War Wolf today. Relatively speed painted, but it did give me some additional (much needed) practice at painting fur. I'm still not completely happy with how it turned out, but it's fine for the time I put into it. The armor pieces worked out pretty well though. With the blue being a part of the overall palette of the model, it helped tie the whole piece together a bit.

Random Stuff

Now that I'm back, I'm trying to get into the swing of painting again. I've had a bunch of models on my desk to paint for a couple other people for a while and figured this would be a good chance to get my chops back. Nothing spectacular here. Everything was speed painted so it's barely tabletop quality.


On a side note, I happened to go to the alternate LGS and they had a bunch of random WM/H stuff for 20% off. So much for my "buy as I'm ready to paint" philosophy! I picked up a Vanguard, 2 boxes of Forge Guard, a Seether, and Incubi. It was all stuff I was kicking around whether to get or not, and at 20% off I figured I might as well.

2010 New Year's Resolutions...

[Disclaimer: This post contains fluffy, introspective nonsense.]

Well, it's time again for me to reflect on last year and look forward to this year. Last time I did this I was actually quite shocked at how much I had painted, and set for myself some reasonable (but important) goals for the year.

Last years goals:

Close out my unpainted models down to 2 factions at a time - Check! Actually what happened was I closed out all unpainted stuff with the exception of the Avatar and a handful of Wyrd models (which is a separate game). I'm actually pretty happy to be in a place again where I'm buying stuff shortly before painting it.

Start a Legion army - Check! Not only did I start a Legion army, I've got over a 1000 points painted and played it in tournaments.

Enter KublaCon again with entries I feel even better about than last year - Check! Last year for KublaCon was very exciting for me. I felt very good about my entries (especially eSkarre) and also entered the LGS' painting competition.

Models painted last year:
This year I didn't paint quite as many models as last year. Last year I really hammered through a lot of units which bolstered my numbers. This year I had more focus on single models and especially more time spent on quality. The total comes in at 66. Here's the breakdown:
Legion: 36
Menoth: 7
Trolls: 4
Cryx: 11
Malifaux: 7
Other: 1

Goals for next year:
This year may turn out to be a poor year for painting. There's a number of big things queued up in my life that will undoubtedly impact my painting time such as starting a family and a likely work promotion. However, I still feel it's important to set some goals for myself...
1) Again, focus on a KublaCon painting entry that I am really proud of.
2) Close out my unpainted Malifaux backlog.
3) Refine my own "style" of painting. This is a little more vague, but basically I want to spend some time understanding what my "style" is and focus on the strengths and weaknesses of it are.

Well, that's enough of that nonsense. I've got a few days of vacation left before it's back to the grind, so time to put brush to paint and remember how this painting thing works. Happy New Year to all you fellow painters out there!

Return From Vacation

Well, I just rolled in from a 4 week vacation. I'm dying to pick up the brush again. The only gaming stuff I did during the entire time was to read up on the MKII stuff that I hadn't caught up on. Of course, the first thing I saw on my desk when I got in was the nearly-completed Avatar staring angrily at me! I'm glad I have the rest of this week off to start getting my painting chops back.

Avatar Nearing Completion

My painting, playing and posting have all taken a serious hit lately unfortunately. Primarily due to holiday stuff, work stuff, and general life stuff. I got some painting done though, and the Avatar is pretty much wrapped up. It's not the most crisp paint job though, and honestly I'm thinking of continuing to work on it. However that's for another day, perhaps after returning from my Christmas vacation (for four weeks). Anyway, pics below, and constructive feedback appreciated about whether I should continue or not.

Seraph

Just under the wire! I've got a tournament at the LGS today and getting the Seraph painted was my goal so that I could once again be fully painted. I've been getting a lot friendly flack about having won the last tournament because of my one unpainted model, so this is my chance to show them that bare metal does not win tournaments. However, I have to admit, I'm fully expecting to get smoted this time around.

This guy was a bit of a rush job unfortunately, but also not quite as much fun to paint as I was hoping for. There are some subtle things about the sculpt that make it a little strange to paint. For example, the tips of the wings obviously want to be painted as claws (and are in the studio scheme), however the wing membrane is attached to said claws. I could have improvised something there, but in an effort to be done by today, I opted to just pass. I can always paint another one if I so desire.

What went well:
* The wings (aside from the membrane thing mentioned above) went much better than on eThagrosh. I'm actually pretty pleased with them overall.
* Skin shading worked out good again, with using the stark shading of Sanguine Base. I really like the look it creates.

What could have been better:
* Carapace just didn't work out. It's predominantly smooth, with little to no sculpted detail unfortunately.
* Mold lines on the head managed to escape my attention, so there's a couple of stupid spots as a result.

Hopefully this nasty cheating bugger helps bring me victory today! If nothing else, I'll feel less cheesy fielding him now that he's painted.

Retribution Prototype Paint Scheme

Recently a friend of mine said he was starting a Retribution force and was trying to work out a paint scheme. We were kicking around ideas and I volunteered to paint up a prototype for him. What follows is an overview of the process of painting this prototype. First though, I want to clarify the goals:
* The scheme should be darker, ideally incorporating the Cryx Bane Base.
* The scheme should be fast to paint.
* Purple was the alternate color to offset the CXB.
With that said, here's what I did.

Step one is to prime in white and then base coat the parts that will be metal with black. The white primer base makes it faster to lay down base coats. The black however is to help the metals pop better.

The next step is to base coat everything. For this scheme I used P3 Wurm green for all the armored parts, P3 Cygnar Blue Highlight for the cloth parts, and GW Boltgun Metal for, well, the metal parts. For the P3 paints I thinned them just a bit (about 2:1 paint:water) but the metal I took straight from the pot.

Next I do the first round of washes. The green gets a thick wash of CXB (about 1:1). The blue gets a thick wash of P3 Beaten Purple (again, about 1:1), although I found that it took a couple coats of this wash to get the desired effect. The metals get a healthy dose of GW Badab Black wash. I've become very fond of this wash lately for doing "clean" metals. There's a lot of buzz about Devlun Mud, but I really like the Badab Black to create a cleaner metal look.

I've included a picture of the back here to better show the effect of the purple wash over the blue. I like the effect that this method creates because the purple ends up with a cooler tone rather than a warmer reddish tone.

Unfortunately for the next step I didn't break the pictures down much, so I'll roll this up. First, I made a thin wash of VGC Black (about 1:8 paint:water) and washed both the armor and cloth parts with it. I did a small bit of sponging to make sure things didn't get too dark or pool too much. Next, I drybrushed the metal parts with GW Mithril Silver to work the metals back up quickly. At the same time I quickly painted all the "bumps" that pop out on the armor with the same silver. And finally I also made a thick wash of P3 Arcane Blue and P3 Turquoise Ink (about 2:1:3 paint:ink:water) to add the turquoise glow to the metals. Mixing in the ink wasn't necessary, but an added bit of punch to the color. For the bumps on the sword I painted them with straight P3 Arcane Blue.

Ugh, more blurred pics. Sorry! Anyway, for the final steps I highlighted the bumps on the sword with P3 Frostbite, and I also did just a bit of highlighting with P3 Wurm Green on the upper armor plates to bring the color back up just a bit.

And that's it! Grand total it took about 2 hours or so. The scheme worked out fairly well. I think a lighter green tone might be better, but this made a good prototype model at least.
The scheme is also very quick to paint, and could easily be put to an assembly line system to roll out a painted army fairly quickly I suspect. It's certainly not a show piece, but it gets paint on a model quickly and when facing the prospect of painting a whole army on a limited time budget, wash techniques can really help do that.

Progress is progress

I'm only really posting this to keep myself motivated. Yesterday I kept staring at all the black primer and it was driving me nuts. So, I went ahead and did the base coating of white. This is always the big debate in my mind when painting Menoth, especially jacks. It goes something like this:

MeOne: "I'm going to paint this Menoth model with the traditional white/red scheme."
MeTwo: "Then why don't you prime in white?"
MeOne: "Well, painting metals over white is terrible. I'd have to base coat black for those areas first."
MeTwo: "So prime in black?"
MeOne: "Yeah, but then it takes forever to basecoat all the white areas."
MeTwo: "So go with a black/red scheme instead?"
MeOne: "I thought about that, but warjacks should stand out on the battlefield."
MeTwo: "So just suck it up and do it."
MeOne: "First I want to whine about it though."
MeTwo: "Screw this. I'm going to get a beer."
MeOne: "...."
[and then the model sits on my desk for a week before progress gets made]

Why the Avatar is SPD 4...

This model is taking me forever to paint. I keep getting distracted with other projects. The Seraph got bumped in my painting queue due to the upcoming Steamroller 4 tournament at the LGS on the 14th, and I feel obligated to at least make an honest attempt at getting back to fully painted. Anyway, I'm tinkering with the Avatar at the same time. The photo this time is better, but the lighting on my desk just exacerbates the challenge of photographing a model that was primed black on a bright background. However, as you can see, I've got the golds and silvers mostly done except for final highlighting. I've base coated the cloth bits at this point and plan to do them next. I always prefer to leave whites until last only because of my tendency to splatter onto them. Hopefully this weekend will provide for a bit more painting time on this big boy.

eThagrosh vs Stryker

Last night I played a wicked fun game against our local Cygnar player at the LGS. Right up front, let me apologize for the photo quality, as I am still getting used to the new camera and need to figure out the many settings. However, despite the terrible photos, the game itself was ridiculously fun, and not just because I won either. My opponent was very gracious, and this battle was actually the result of the two of us not getting a chance to play against each other in the Flash Point tournament. As a result we brought our lists from that tournament in order to see how things would go, but we also turned off the "tournament mode" and returned to friendly gamer mode.

The Lists:
Me: eThagrosh, Typhon, Carnivean, Seraph, Shredder, Incubi, Striders+UA, Deathstalker, Forsaken, Totem Hunter, Swamp Gobbers
Aaron: Stryker, Ol Rowdy, Thorn, 4 Storm Lances, Trenchers (9 + Grenade Porter), Laddermore, Squire, Journeyman Warcaster, Black 13th, Gorman

The Mission:
Assassination, plain and simple.

The Throwdown:
This was a fun battle. I don't have a lot of experience playing against Stryker, so naturally he caught me numerous times with earthquake, especially the poor Seraph which, despite being a flying creature, got knocked down with alarming frequency. Gorman was also highly effective at tossing black oil on the Carnivean just when I didn't want him to. However, on the flipside, the Striders did a great job of thinning and eventually wiping out the Trenchers before they could do too much damage. And the good thing about the Seraph is he can still use slipstream and give Typhon a bit of a movement boost by sacrificing his attack. In fact, the Seraph never took a shot the whole game. Thagrosh and Stryker were both commanding their armies from the back, waiting for the right opportunity to strike. Due to some unfortunateness with Laddermore's arcing lightning, the gobbers met an early end which sort of forced Thagrosh's hand though. Fortunately the consummate rockstar Typhon was able to deliver some serious disruption to the front line of the battle.

The Endgame:
Again, Typhon is a rockstar. With the benefit of Dragon's Blood and Spiny Growth he managed to get stuck in well and then the Seraph was able to slipstream him into position to start trashing Stryker. Unfortunately, it was on Stryker's feat round, so the trashing was kept to around 10 points of damage. And then Stryker retaliated with earthquake and fleeing and surrounding the Carnivean with stuff to stick him in. However, Stryker couldn't get enough damage leveraged to take anything in particular out. Despite getting Typhon knocked down, the Seraph was able to slipstream Typhon up enough so that he could stand and hose down Stryker with 3 sprays and finish the job of the previous round.

The Highlights:
Typhon continues to be a slippery little devil, and the Seraph just makes him that much more amazing. Those two make a duo that presents a lot of disruption potential to enemy plans. In Aaron's own words, he was trying to get in position to pull off an assassination, but my army was just too fast and tough. The overall synergy of the army continues to be flexible and fun. It's hard to point at any piece of it and say it's the single most effective or useless piece of the army.
On the Cygnar side, I have to admit that the Storm Lances were very good at blocking lanes and tying things up. And Ol Rowdy was certainly a nasty little beatstick. Stryker himself too is a very effective toolbox. It was definitely a fun challenge to play against this Cygnar force.

The Reflection:
It's odd for me to think that I'm likely to keep playing this same list for a while. Certainly there's the limitation that I need new models to really change it up much. However ignoring that, I really love playing eThagrosh. eLylyth is even sitting in my cabinet fully painted and never played because I find eThagrosh so entertaining. This last game I even managed to use more of his spell list as I found a good opportunity (although failed the roll). Anyway, it's late and I desire to dream yet further of the great avatar of Everblight marching across the plains toward victory.

Minotaur Side Project

This side project has been sitting on my desk for months now, and I finally got around to finishing it. It originally started as just a distraction model to practice blending and fine details on when I was doing squads or speed painting other stuff (essentially to have an OCD outlet). However recently I decided to just get it finished up. It's really one of a very few display-only pieces I've done ironically. My normal display case doesn't actually have any display-only pieces in it so this is sort of a first for my own collection.

What went well:
* Skin - Although it isn't "beastly" or "dirty", it was good practice for me. I put more time into zenithal highlighting and feel like it helped a lot. There are definitely places where the blending is not very smooth, but overall I feel pretty good about the use of color.
* Axe runes - More on that later.
* Horns/Hooves - These turned out pretty good. I didn't do a wash over them in the end, which I think could have smoothed them out.
* Metals - I like how well these pop. I really put more effort into this because the metals are such a prevalent portion of the model. Honestly, I feel like I learned a bit more on how to work with just silver metals.

What could have been better:
* Leathers - They just didn't turn out the way I wanted. Not sure how to explain it, but they just don't look right.
* Hair - Blah... what more to say. I tried out a bit of a new technique which I think will work better in the long term, but after reading some tips from EricJ, I'm totally disillusioned about sculpted hair and how to paint it now.

Ok, one specific thing to focus on for this model. The runes on the axe head are something I tried different than usual. I wanted to make them appear somewhat glowing, but I opted for a different style. Here I used a technique called stippling (lots of dots basically) rather than trying to blend, and the end result is sort of a "star field glow" sort of effect. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

Well, that's it for now. My painting desk is now back down to a single active project (the Avatar), and I recently finished building a new paint rack so I suspect my painting frequency should climb back up to a respectable level again.