Scythean

Now this is what I call a beast! I can honestly say I had a great time painting the Scythean. With so much chiton, it afforded me lots of opportunity to put variations into the washing techniques that I use while not over-saturating the surfaces with paint. I threw in a variety of colors including dark greens, reds, blues and (of course) browns. I don't recall the exact order or colors unfortunately. However my general strategy was to give it a couple good washes of lighter browns (jack bone and bloodstone) and then throw in the dark primary color washes (red and green). Then I added some thinned blue and umber using 2BB to create more contrast at logical separations.

The rest of it was pretty straightforward. Underbelly blue and trollblood base are my 2 primary skin tones, and then I use flesh and sanguine tones to create more variation and shading. Once those two primary parts are done, the overall model just had little details left to do (spines, mouth, rune, claws, etc). I have to admit that the part that threw me off the most was doing the rune since I hadn't painted one in a very long time (August of 2009 in fact). It occurs to me now, looking back through my blog, that I totally failed to paint runes on the Seraph and Angelius. DOH! I may have to break my normal rule of not going back and touching up previous models and add runes in.

It's great to have this huge beastie done, especially since the Ravagore releases next week. I'm looking forward to painting another such monster.

On a side note, I picked up a Flip Video and have started experimenting with it a bit. If there's any interest out there in video samples of painting techniques (such as the 2-brush technique), I'd love to hear. It's just the sort of motivation I need to figure out this whole video posting thing. Until next time, paint like you have a pair!

From the Desk: Why I Love Painting Legion Beasts

Carving out time to paint with a six month old in the house has been a little challenging. However my desire to paint is strong, and I've managed to make it work pretty well so far. I spent a week getting a number of models assembled and primed, and now I'm finding that I'm making more progress than I expected. We'll see if it holds out. Here's a shot of the Scythean in progress. There's still a fair amount of detail work left, but the major areas are pretty much done. So far it has gone really fast, partly due to my Legion painting process. More on that down below.

Here's a shot of the other stuff that is started. I used some assembly line painting for the chiton on these guys while doing the Scythean to save me some time in the future, but set them aside so that I could focus on the big guy. The Teraph is where my eye is next since that model (along with the Raek) is what really lured me into starting Legion.

Now, as a quick aside, I want to reflect on why I personally really enjoy painting Legion. The models are striking to me personally, but that's not the main reason. It has to do with a combination of simplicity and opportunity.
The simplicity comes in the form of the sculpts. They have a simplicity in that they don't have a ton of little detailed items all over (unlike troll models I must say). Most of the beasts have 2-3 primary features (chiton, skin and armor) that covers 80% or more of the surface. What this means is that after doing the chiton and skin it feels like I've made a ton of progress. By coming up with a process that makes painting the chiton quick (washes over white primer), I can make large strides in a short amount of time.
The opportunity comes in the form of having a spacious "canvas" to work on. The larger muscled surfaces of the skin allow for me to experiment with shading and texturing surfaces. The chiton has plenty of detail to its surface which can be brought out using washes. Overall the sculpts create opportunities for me to practice new techniques and don't constraint what I "must" paint like other overly detailed sculpts do.
Well, that's enough of that prattle for tonight. Painting the Scythean definitely has me excited to paint the Ravagore once it releases!

Incubi, take 2

I'm not dead yet! Last night I managed to put the final work into this second set of Incubi and get them sealed. I've been working on them for a while now, but due to events in my life (described more below for those curious) I was unable to stay focused on them.



It is interesting to compare this set to the previous set. I think the bloodied flesh on the first ones came out better in color tone (although less smoothly blended), whereas the chiton on the heads definitely came out better on the new set. There are also some consistency differences between the two sets. I had forgotten how tedious these guys were to paint, with so many little details to work. If I wasn't painting a set of 5 at once, I could reasonable spend a lot of time on a single one.

On a side note, my recent lull in activity is due to other events in my life being pretty intense. My wife and I adopted a little boy which will likely prompt me to do a series of posts on making this hobby more kid safe. I'm actually pretty surprised that I was able to get any painting done given all the recent events in my life. Anyway, enough of that prattle. Today I need to run to my LGS to pick up more green stuff so that I can continue assembly of the Scythean.

Blighted Legionnaires

After being out of action for quite some time, I've finally managed to get back to the painting desk. The tournament 2 weeks ago got me juiced up to paint again. I was hesitant to get back into painting after a month long break by jumping into a 10-man squad. However, it worked out great and these guys were completely reasonable to do as a group of 10. In hindsight, I wish I had taken the time to do some conversion work in order to make them all different looking, or have gotten 2 boxes of 6, but I can always get more in the future. The picture quality here is unfortunately pretty sad since I didn't take the time to get my photo setup back to top quality.

I made heavy use of washes to speed these guys up. I painted the metals first which has become my standard method for any models with a fair amount of metal showing, and then moved on to the other more minimal areas.

Next up on the painting queue are my second set of Incubi. It was very entertaining to put 10 of them in my list at the tournament and I'm looking forward to doing that again in the upcoming Genesis event.

Testing New Toys

This post gets one of those obligatory "ignore this post" warnings. I'm experimenting with posting from my iPad. Also in the toy stack is having transferred the photo from my camera to the iPad using the new adapter, editing the photo using Photoshop.com mobile, and uploading it to a new Photoshop album.
This is a sample direct reference to an album photo.

This is a photo reference inserted into a lightbox link.

Bait and Switch

After being out of action for quite some time, I'm finally back to action. Yesterday I got to play in a local SR2010 tournament. It was originally supposed to be the Hordes Genesis event, but the LGS decided that due to the problems getting decks in, and the lack of books being out, they would delay the tournament until next month. So instead it got turned into a regular SR2010 event just a couple days beforehand.

Overall the tournament was very fun, but I'm going to skip details on most of it. I lost both games (due to sloppy playing) and got a by in the second round, so it wasn't very eventful. However, my first game deserves some highlighting...

An eButcher vs Thagrosh throwdown was just what I needed to get my enthusiasm back. This was an epic battle. eButcher busted his feat early on to rail into my army, but it didn't cut deep enough. I retaliated back, clearing out all his Doom Reavers and making a run on eButcher but coming up just short. In the picture above, you can see how the Carnivean came up about 1/2" short on his charge, and the Angelius made it there but couldn't finish the job on his own. In hindsight, I should have had the Angelius fly back and do a push power attack to give the Carnivean the necessary push to get there. eButcher retaliated and cut down both heavy beasts during his turn. After that, I made a run with Thagrosh but because I failed to measure my control area correctly during the charge, I left myself just out of Mutagenesis range of the War Dog, and left myself open. At the end we shook hands and both commented how it was one of the most fun games we'd played in a while.

Angelius

This one has been a long time coming. I can't believe KublaCon was almost a month ago. I just got my brush-on primer the other day and finished the last bits of work last night. The brush-on primer was something new for me and I have to say it exceeded my expectations. Certainly not something I plan to make a practice of using all the time, but definitely helpful. The particular kind I got was the Reaper Master Series, which of course only comes in white, although I can't honestly think of a time I'd want brush-on black primer.

Once I finished the prep work, the rest went quickly. The color matching on the repaired spots isn't perfect, but it's not obvious by any stretch. It was pretty easy to match since I've got a pretty set skin method for my Legion beasties now. I think the most annoying thing about finishing the cleanup work was that I didn't have the model stuck to a paint can for easy holding, so I had to actually hold the model itself in my hand which makes me a bit more nervous these days (I'm always worried about rubbing paint off). However, it went pretty smooth. The only real problem was cleaning up the bottom edge of the base where a bunch of paint had worn off.

Speaking of the base, I was a little shocked to discover that the 50mm metal base I purchased (from PP no less) isn't a full 50mm. I lined it up with a plastic large base and it's off by about 2-3mm. A little strange, but I'm not going to fret about it. All things considered, using the metal base helped a little more for stability of the model overall, which continues to please me.

Well, this will probably be the last post for a while. I've got some personal business outside the country for a couple weeks so it's unlikely that I'll be getting any painting done. Perhaps though I'll have some good reference photos once I get back.

Megalith

This model was a pretty significant departure from my normal line up of models to paint. Megalith has two predominant features, stone and wood, both of which are features I don't paint that much on such a larger scale. So, getting a chance to paint this one for my buddy Sean was an interesting challenge. I opted to use a combination of washes and 2BB for doing the stone, throwing in some additional reds and greens into the color to give it a little more lifelike feel. For the wood, I used a lot of controlled washes.

The runes turned out ok, but some of them could have definitely been better. I opted to paint the eyes like gems rather than glowing just because I thought it gave the runes a more specific theme to their purpose on the model. Overall I think the biggest struggle I had with this model was really more of a sense of mood since it's predominantly bright and doesn't have enough dark regions to create more contrast. Definitely one of those more holistic painting skills that I'm still working on.

From the Desk: More Megalith Progress

It's late, and I'm sleepy, so just a quick post of the progress on Megalith. The vines seemed to have worked out pretty well. I actually used the GW green wash as an intermediate step, and then used a light flesh tone (combined with olive green) to do the highlights. I'm pretty happy with how it's turning out so far, but there's still a long way to go.

Battle Report: 4 Player Madness

Better late than never! I finally got a chance to do this write up on the 4 player madness battle we played the other day.

The scenario was pretty crazy. Teams of 2 were randomly decided and each army's goal was to deliver a package to their team mate. The packages could only be carried by the warcasters' battlegroups, and could be handed off as a free action. Each player started on a different edge of the board with team mates being on opposite sides. We decided to go with a clockwise activation order rather than activating teams at a time. Little did we know the chaos this would end up causing.

I can't recall the details of the armies unfortunately, but here's a high-level summary. Team 1 was myself playing MacBain (!) and Aaron playing Stryker. Team 2 was Lance playing eAsphyxious and Henry playing Grissel. As it worked out, Aaron went first, followed by Lance, then myself, then Henry. The deployment was crazy, with people very close to each other right at the start of the game. More on that later.

This battle was crazy vicious. Cygnar and Cryx were mixing it up right on turn 1, with Satyxis boldly rushing in to cause chaos. MacBain used his feat on turn 1, and Stryker on turn 2 to avoid complete devastation. The terrain helped to funnel most things toward the middle as well, but with Cryx's speed, things tended to pour right into Cygnar's face. There was a crazy dual-caster-kill event that took place, with Stryker (actually the journeyman) killing eAsphyxious, and then a mob of Satyxis killing Stryker right afterwards.

In the end, MacBain was the last caster left on the table, but there were still random models running around (leftover Satyxis, a Brute Thrall, a Withershadow, a couple Troll Champs). We decided to play it out and in the end I just wasn't familiar enough with MacBain to get him loosened up and he went down. Total carnage!

All around, it was a seriously fun game. Afterwards we talked a bit about the scenario and came up with a couple ideas on how to alter it:
* Replace the "package" with an actual courier model who must be escorted. We had a lot of ideas on that as well, like giving him special actions he could use to increase his survivability.
* The clockwise turns worked out pretty well, but the deployment aspect was pretty vicious. It would definitely need some tweaking.

Anyway, good fun was had by all, and I'm definitely looking forward to tweaking and trying this again.

From the Desk: Getting Stoned with Megalith

More quick updates from the painting desk... I started painting Megalith for a friend last week. Unfortunately my work/life balance is pretty terrible, but I am making some progress. This is the first Wold I've painted, so it's a pretty significant amount of learning. I have to admit that stone isn't one of my best materials to simulate. We'll see how this guy turns out.

I also got to play in a 4 player game yesterday with an amusing scenario. I'll post pictures and a battle report tomorrow (hopefully) but here are a few quick highlights:

I played MacBain!

MacBain was the last caster alive!

The scenario was crazy fun!

Oh, and did I mention... I played MacBain!

Witch King

Just a quick post of a model I finished up for someone else. Nothing amazing here. I got some tips about painting black and did some experimentation with adding deeper shades of various colors to give it a little something more.

Battle Report: Here Comes The Train

Last night I played a game of Warmachine that was rather off the beaten path. My buddy Aaron and I put together a scenario to liven things up and the battle was a riot.

Scenario:
Here's how it worked. One player (chosen randomly) was designated the defender, and the other the attacker. 2" from the center line, on the defender's side of the board, we ran a road across the length of the board. This served to represent the train track. Starting on the attack's 2nd turn, the train enters. The goal for the attacker is, of course, to destroy the cargo car of the train. Here's the specifics:

The Locomotive was def 7, arm 21, 32 damage. The cargo car was def 7, arm 23, 50 damage. If the locomotive is boxed, it remains on the table, but the whole train becomes stationary. Other than the locomotive being boxed, the train cannot be made stationary. It is immune to knockdown, but can be affected by spells and effects and is considered a friendly faction model for the defender and an enemy model for the attacker. Both the locomotive and cargo cars can be repaired by mechanics.

During each player's maintenance phase, the train moves 8" along the track. It cannot have this movement modified by any means (feats, spells, etc) and always moves 8" provided the locomotive has not been boxed. If the train collides with a model during this movement, that model is slammed d6+2" and suffers a pow 20 hit, and then the train continues to move. Note that models could potentially be hit multiple times this way.

The defender sets up and goes first. The train enters the board at the start of the maintenance phase of the attacker's second turn.

The Lists:
me (defender): Amon, Reckoner, Castigator, Devout, Dervish, Choir(6), Deliverers(6), Vilmon, Paladin, Vassal, 3 Wracks
Aaron(attacker): eStryker, Ol Rowdy, Stormclad, Stormblades w/ UA, Longguners(6), Black 13th, Journeyman Warcaster, Stormsmith

Perhaps not an optimal choice for me, but I wanted the Castigator so that I could throw something in front of the speeding train. I hadn't played MKII Amon yet, so this was a golden opportunity to see how he played.

The Battle:
The first couple turns were as expected, with both of us making a mad rush to the middle and trying to secure a hold on the track zone. I scored first blood by launching my Dervish into the group of Stormblades and slashing through 3 of them. Things were looking good so far, but then, enter the train...

The train brought an interesting dynamic to the game. For one, it's big, blocks line of site, and is very dangerous. Plus, it distracts the attacker from wailing on the defender's forces. However, for me as the defender, it created a bit of a challenge. Either I hang back and have the train block off my ability to attack, or move forward and get trapped between the train and the attacking forces. I tried to find a bit of middle ground there, however I ended up having my forces get split up a bit, with my choir trapped on the other side of the train from my jacks. What follows is a series of pictures detailing the comedy that ensued from the battle.

Reckoner: "Uh oh... fence behind me... jacks in front of me... train to the left of me..."
This was a pretty bad situation for the Reckoner. Amazingly he managed to wriggle out of it without getting clobbered! The Castigator 2-handed threw the Stormclad in the way of the train, the Vassal ansilary-attacked the Reckoner to kill the Stormblade, and then the Reckoner sneaked out of the path of the oncomming locomotive. Unfortunately...

The Castigator didn't clear the path of the train and got slammed away, but not without earning his reward. The Stormclad was thrown into the front of the locomotive, and then during Aaron's maintenance phase, it was hit by the locomotive and slammed 3", and then slammed again another 7". Double slam baby! Aaron and I were both cracking up at the carnage of the locomotive.

This gives you a better view of the battlefield after the maintenance phase of Aaron's 3rd turn. My forces were split on either side of the train, and Ol Rowdy was well positioned to start wailing away. Despite my best effort to put some hurt on Stryker with the Devout and distract his forces, Aaron was not tricked. Ol Rowdy charged in and pounded on the locomotive... and pounded... and pounded... and pounded... and in the end...

... the brave locomotive engineer was slain, and the locomotive ground to a screeching halt! If it wasn't for this impressive display by Ol Rowdy, I think the scenario would have quickly gone downhill for Aaron, and although I loved the carnage, I believe we should all observe a moment of silence for the poor locomotive engineer.

[insert silence here]

At this point things started to go downhill for me quickly.

Vilmon was charged by 5 Longgunners who managed to beat him dead. Oh how sad! The Castigator got revenge by walking over and combusting on the Black 13th and Junior and burning them all to a crisp. In the end though, Stryker weeded out all of my remaining forces except for Amon and I sadly had to concede the game at that point. I should point out that both Aaron and I had some very comical dice rolling, with more double 1's coming up than I could believe.

Results:
The scenario was a blast! There's some refinements to make for sure, but overall it worked out quite well and we had a great time. Here's some thoughts on the scenario itself:

Changing the stats so that the Locomotive is a bit harder to kill and the cargo car is a bit easier seems appropriate. As it stands, the only viable strategy is to destroy the locomotive to buy enough time to actually destroy the cargo car.

Before the game we discussed the option of jacks going autonomous if warcasters are killed, just to keep the focus on the scenario instead of caster kills. It didn't come up, but I could see this being an important aspect to throw in.

We were both curious how it would have played out if I had thrown my forces across the tracks to block Aaron from getting to the locomotive. I suspect it could easily make the scenario much much harder for the attacker to win.

Well, I hope you've enjoyed this rather lengthy battle report. I'd love to hear from folks out there if they've done similar scenarios before!

Kommander Strakhov

This is now the second Khador model I've painted. Strakhov was interesting to me for a couple reasons. I really like the skhulpt of his gun and his, uh, skhirt. Overall the skhulpt is nice: it has plenty of details without being overly khomplicated. The details are spread out enough so that the eyes khan read them properly. There's even a nice detail on his face of a skhar that adds even more expression to him.

The biggest thing I'm disappointed with on this model is aktually the basing. I used the GF9 snow basing material and it just didn't kheep it's whiteness. I think my original formulation of snow would have workhed better. In any case, this badass is ready for deployment in my buddy's armies now.

From the Desk: Starting Strakhov

Now that Kubla is done, my goal is to get into a happier place with my painting queue. Part of that is catching up on models I promised to paint for other people. The first in that line is Strakhov. I really dig this model, so getting a chance to paint it for my buddy Sean was a no brainer. This post is more of a teaser for him than anything else. I just finished the basic work on the reds. I decided to go with a bit more of the orange-ish tone to reflect his demeanor. I'm planning to paint the armor plates in a blue-ish white tone, and the trim as a black leather color. Unlike most of my projects, I decided to attach him to the base first to make things a bit quicker.

From the Desk: Angelius Repairs

I'm still wrapping up the Angelius, and in fact ended up using him for the 15pt Mangled Metal tournament at KublaCon despite it not being finished and sealed. Amazingly, he came through completely unscathed and didn't tip over once! That later point is something I'm very happy about from a usability point of view. However, he still had a structural weakness at the join between the upper body and the tail that connects to the pillar. So, in order to address the issue, I decided to bite the bullet and re-work it.

The structural weakness was specifically between the main body part and the small piece that I kept from the original sculpt. The join between that piece and the body extension that I sculpted is rock solid, and continues to stay joined securely to the pillar. The first step was to drill a second hole for another pin to more secure the two pieces. Next, the original join was a little gnarly with green stuff and it removed the illusion of a nice smooth flying snake, so I filed that down smooth. There was also a couple places where the sculpting of the body extension wasn't smooth, so I carved those down smooth. Lastly, there was some roughness to a portion of the sculpted body next to the pillar (probably due to glue issues) so I carved those down smooth as well. Now, once my paint-on primer order arrives, I'll go about repairing the paint job.

This is the first time I've done a major amount of repair work on a model that was practically finished. It was a little terrifying to start carving, but once I got started I realized that I wasn't hacking up anything that would be overly hard to fix. And in fact, I think this will be a good exercise for me to try color matching on the pieces that need to be repainted.

Pandora Avatar

After much struggling and a very long time, I finished Pandora in time for the KublaCon painting competition. I've got a lot of comments on this model so I'm going to diverge from my normal format a bit.

Feedback:
All along the way of working on this model I was soliciting feedback from a number of people and got lots of useful perspective. It was definitely a change from my normal method. Since this model was just for fun (there's no rules for her currently), I felt fine taking my time to get her done. It was definitely worth it. I feel like the additional time was well spent, even though there are still things I wish I could have done better.

Challenging Sculpt:
This sculpt presented a real challenge to my skills, and admittedly I think it was above my skill level to paint. The biggest problem is there's a lot of negative space in the lower half of the model. This worked against me heavily when trying to create a better overall composition of the piece. Try as I might, I just didn't pull it together entirely.

Competition:
This model was admittedly planned as my secondary entry for the competition (behind the Lady Justice crew), but I ended up treating it like a primary entry. It won a gold in the open judging which I am completely stoked about. In addition to the award, I got a chance to speak with one of the judges (Jody) who I respect very much. He's given me good feedback before and it was great to get his thoughts...

Judge's Feedback:
* The face, although a good attempt, doesn't read well enough. I knew this was a problem, and he said he was impressed with the attempt, but it's a challenging effect to pull off for even a master painter.
* The OSL needed to be more aggressive. This was something I suspected, but Jody's input put it into better perspective. Muting the rest of the color scheme would have helped exaggerate the light sources as well, and that would have helped the overall mood.
* The blue cloth is another cool color which competes with the cool green. This was a huge revelation. The greens and blues are both relatively cool colors in comparison to the reds of her skin and hair. It didn't even occur to me that the greens were primarily cool colors. Using a warmer color in place of the blue may have created a better overall color balance.

Final Thoughts:
Overall, I'm still pretty stoked. This was a challenging piece and I learned a lot (and I really do mean A LOT). I am especially thankful to all the people that gave me input on this model as I worked on it. I've posted it on CMON to see how it ends up getting rated, so feel free to cruise on over and vote!

KublaCon 2010 Update (part 2)

Kubla has come to a close for me. I'm pretty exhausted today, so here's a quick summary of the entire weekend...

Warmachine: In addition to the win in the Mangled Metal tournament on Friday, my teammate Aaron and I pulled out a win in the 2-on-2 multi-player event on Sunday. He was playing eStryker and I was playing Harbinger and we had some really good games.

Random: There were some amusing things going on, but the coolest new thing I saw was the remote control tank tournament, where each team got a random amount of time to move on their turn.

Classes: I managed to catch Lazlo's painting class. He spent a good hour demonstrating how to paint black and it was rather helpful. In addition he did demos of cloth texture and eyes. I think the take-aways for me were actually that having more paints in dropper bottles would really help my control of color, and some very valuable advice about how to avoid chalkiness that I need to try out.

Painting: Results for the painting competition were awesome. I only entered the open level (since last year I didn't get any golds). I got a silver for Typhon and golds for Pandora and the Lady Justice Guild crew. Afterwards I got to chat with one of the judges as well to get some feedback about Pandora and that was extremely helpful. I'll post that info when I get pics up of Pandora.

KublaCon 2010 Update

KublaCon is in full swing here, and yesterday I got to play in a 15pt mangled metal tournament. Kubla is a nice break from my normal hectic lifestyle these days, but I'm actually taking a break from it for today to get caught up on life. Tomorrow I'm planning to play in a special multi-player Warmachine event. However, for now, here's a summary of the 15pt tournament from yesterday...

Format:
The format was 15pts, warcaster/warlock and jacks only (standard Mangled Metal). 40 minute rounds with no timed turns. The mission was Killbox, but I don't think anyone ever lost to the scenario, although I heard a couple stories of people nearly screwing up by moving out of it. It turned out we had 16 people for the tournament as well.

My List:
Thagrosh, Carnivean, Angelius. I opted for Thagrosh because, well, his feat is pretty broken at this point level. I chose the Angelius for its speed and armor piercing hitting power. The Carnivean was because it's just plain awesome all around, but especially because its animus is awesome in this format. My intention going into the tournament was to use the Carnivean boldly and be ready to bring him back with the feat after I lost him.

Round 1: Loss
Karchev, Juggernaut, 2x Berserker - This was a really close game. It was a back and forth trading of heavies, with me starting the assault with an Angelius alpha strike under Draconic Blessing. Even a Khador jack cries under the pain of an armor piercing P+S 16 attack. I ended up using Thagrosh's feat to bring the Angelius back for a second round of it as well. In the end, I got a run on Karchev, but he was camping 5 focus and my dice rolls were just low enough that I failed to take him down by a few points and then he clobbered me. Incidentally, when he did swing and connect with the first hit (that I couldn't transfer either), he rolled triple sixes. Ouch!

Round 2: Win
Goreshade, Leviathan, 2x Slayer - I sort of deserved to face Goreshade. His feat is nasty in this format, just like Thagrosh's. This battle was swift. I put Thagrosh out there and alpha striked with the Angelius again. Goreshade rushed up, cast Mage Blight, feated, and dropped 3 Bane Thralls on Thagrosh. Then, in a moment if sheer luck, I walked the heavy wounded Carnivean out of melee with a Bane Thrall and survived the free strike without losing an aspect and proceeded to spray down all the Bane Thralls on Thagrosh. Thagrosh then charged in and cut Goreshade to ribbons.

Round 3: Win
eDoomshaper, Mauler, Axer, Slag - Unfortunately I lost the initiative in this battle, so I had to stall a bit before rushing in. My opponent made some errors in distance judgement and I managed to capitalize. Again, the Angelius alpha strike was devastating, crippling the Mauler but amazingly not killing it. However the next round was pretty crushing, leaving only eDoomshaper alive in the troll force. He made a desperate run on Thagrosh but at that point it was too late and the poor elder troll was cut down.

Round 4: Win
Amon, Devout, 4x Dervish - This could have been an amazing battle. It could have been full of crazy and kickass. It could have been a truck load of fun. However, my opponent's dice were just cursed. 3 times he charged in needing small numbers (5's and 6's) to hit, and all 3 times he rolled 3. After that, it all feel apart like a house of cards. I honestly felt bad, and would love to get in a rematch with this guy at some point.

Round 5: Tie
Asphyxious, Deathjack, Nightwretch, Cankerworm - Stupid casters running stupid away. If we hadn't run out of time, I'd have won this one. As it stood, I nearly pulled it off, but to the credit of my opponent, he managed to position his Nightwretch just right at the end to prevent me from getting the charge I needed on Asphyxious. So very very close. It was a pretty tight battle actually, with the DJ nearly coming back from only 2 boxes remaining to ruin my day. However he missed with all his attacks and after that it was short order to finish him off. Parasite was the bane of my existence in this game. If only we'd had another round to play.

Round 6: Win
Karchev, Behemoth, Juggernaut - Another close game. My opponent pulled the Karchev slingshot trick, dropping the Juggernaut on Thagrosh and the Behemoth on the Carnivean. However, my transfers kept me alive and then the Angelius was free to charge Karchev in the back and skewer him. Even if I had rolled average on the Angelius' damages and not killed Karchev there, Thagrosh was still rockin around and could have finished the job. Proof once again why I like Warlocks over Warcasters.

Results:
Don't ask me how it worked out, but apparently due to strength of schedule... I won! I was more than a little shocked actually. I though I was in contention for maybe 3rd place, but amazingly I came out on top. More than that though, I had a really kick ass time. Here's my bullet-point highlight reel:

Everyone I played was super awesome fun. Not a single bit of jerk around. And it was pretty much all people outside of my LGS area.

The format was a blast. I love the small point battles like this. I mean seriously, we played 6 rounds in about 6 hours!

It was amazing how often I forgot about Thagrosh's Death Shroud. I'm not sure it would have made a difference in most cases, but I need to remember it.

The Angelius is super awesome. Love it on the battle field!

I got a ton of comments about my Angelius conversion and my painting in general. It was also very cool to see almost every army be fully painted, and even those that weren't fully painted were mostly painted.

From the Desk: Seeking Critiques

Well, this is yet another work-in-progress shot of Pandora. I'm near completion, but I'm trying out something new. In addition to my normal "things left to do" list that I'm keeping, I decided to take photos and examine the photos for detail work that needs to be cleaned up. I think many people have the challenge with models looking better in person than in photos. I was thinking about this and figured I could use that to my advantage. So, here they are! Also, as a part of a community experiment, this is an open invitation for feedback comments on what needs to be improved. Constructive criticism is very much welcome. Part of the challenge for me is that I've been staring at this model for weeks now, so it's easy to just miss something obvious. Here are some of my own notes:

Things to do/finish:
* The base - You can't see it here obviously, but it isn't done still.
* Coat - I want to put some freehand on the back of her coat. I still haven't decided what yet, but it definitely needs a little something. My first thought was glowing runes, but I may steer away from that.

Things to improve:
* Mouth - It isn't as crisp as it should be.
* Boots - The shading has some oddities to it that need to be resolved. I also think more color would be useful, but just don't know where to go with it yet.
* Cuffs - The coat cuffs already got reworked once, but they need more effort I think. I don't want to overdo them because it will throw off the overall focus balance of the model, but they need something.
* Skin - Her mid-section could use some improvement. I need some reference photos to help out here though.
* Belt - Now that I look at the photo, the belt isn't as crisp as it should be. Go photo reference experiment!

Things I'm resigned to not being happy with:
* Box - The NMM on the box is terrible, and I don't see it getting any better. It's awkward to get to in the first place, but the tiny fidgety surfaces are nearly impossible for me to work with effectively.
* Greens - The glowing green streaks are not as smooth as I would like them to be. I'm not sure it's feasible to fix them at this point without a major amount of work. Ironically I think that problem is more obvious in person than in the photo.
* Fingers - The sculpt just had a problem here that I couldn't correct. Specifically her left hand (right side of photo). There's not much I can really do at this point to smooth things out with cutting off and resculpting it entirely. In hindsight, I should have found appropriate hands from another model and replaced these hands.