Warhammer Fantasy Revisited

Relax everyone – I promise these won’t be daily updates for the next month 😉

Thought it might be useful to track the time I actually spend (regardless of how efficient that time might have been) with regard to this project, to see how long an army actually takes me to get from assembled and primed to ‘tabletop ready’. Today’s efforts were a zenithal airbrushing of the GW Zandri Dust primed minis with a Coat of Desert Yellow Stynylrez primer, followed by a lighter zenithal highlight in white primer. Goal is to cheat somewhat and let the airbrush do most of the shading and the AP varnish at the end hide the rest of my sins.

And the black orcs who were previously primed in AP Plate Mail git hit with a coat of Vallejo Black Ink through the airbrush to sort their armour out.

Project time so far – 80 minutes.

I know, false advertising in the title…

So this is my quick and dirty/super lazy way of doing metallics on minis which have a lot of metal armour.

Step 1 is to prime the assembled minis with Army Painter Plate Mail spray. Most of my minis are picked up second hand and this still provides good coverage over underlying paint schemes even when I haven’t been able to strip the mini back fully. I’m pretty sure you all know how to work a rattle can so I won’t harp on about the basics here…

Step 2 is to pick your ink of choice and load into an airbrush. As the ink won’t bond particularly well to the metallic paint on the mini I try to avoid thinning down the ink too much (if at all). My airbrush is a super-cheap one and it clogs a little with some straight inks but even I can get away with about a 10:1 dilution with airbrush thinner. I set my PSI at about 20 and away we go. It usually takes 2 or 3 coats to build up enough ink on the mini to give a nice tone so be prepared to let a coat dry and come back later. Also make sure your airbrush is completely dry before you kick off – any water in the system form a previous cleaning will just bead on the metallic primer and mean you have to wait for it to dry before you can continue.

If you were feeling particularly fancy once you have a couple of coats on you could edge highlight the armour pieces and then either give another light coat with the airbrush or just brush on an ink wash to tint the edges back towards the original colour to bring in a bit of depth. I’ve done this for character minis but as I tend to hit multiple units at a go nowadays don’t know that I’d personally bother doing this en masse except maybe in really visible areas where you’d notice (maybe just helmets and pauldrons? Or the tops of shields?). As I tend to use AP varnish at the end I find that this knocks out any subtleties with blending done up to that point so I either don’t bother or go for less than subtle blending which then gets tinted and toned back to look a little more believable.

Step 3 is optional but one i’d highly recommend (I’m going to do this for all of mine moving forward) – hit the minis with a varnish to protect them from chipping or paint rubbing off as you continue to work on them. It’s frustratingly easy to damage the ink coverage when working on minis given how poorly the adherence between the metallic primer and the ink coats is, and it’s annoying to try and retouch accurately with a brush (you can make it less obvious but it’s still visible if you go looking).

A word on ink choices. I’ve only tried a couple of brands through the airbrush – Vallejo Game Colour and Army Painter Inks. The Vallejo seem to have much more pigment/richer colours but this vibrancy does make the colours seem a little more ‘comic book’ that the AP counterparts, which have a ‘grittier’ end look at the cost of requiring an additional coat (or 2) for a similar depth of colour. Both work well but It’s a bit like comparing a vibrant eye catching poster paint to an oil paint that requires a bit more prep – go for the one that will give you the result you are after. I imagine other inks would work as well and there are plenty to choose from, I just haven’t used this approach with any other brands as yet.

A bit of progress on a few fronts over the last couple of days. First point of note was a pleasant surprise in the post from Spain – Minis form the MOM Miniatures ‘Mercenaries’ KS. Outstanding quality and timely delivery – very happy and already plotting another order for more of them. In amongst the bundle of gorgeous goodness I found an orc warlord mini that I had included as an add-on on a whim. Perfect timing as he will be much more appropriate to lead the orc horde than the kitbashed orc I had, who has now been downgraded to unit champion. In amongst the rest of the minis I found the perfect sculpts for a Dogs of War paymaster and a Middenheim army Battle Standard Bearer, so once they are painted up I can call those armies complete (for a given definition of ‘complete’ at any rate…).

In an effort to get some space on my paint bench I pushed through the two blocks of Slaanesh Chaos Warriors and got them up to the dip stage. Once dry I’ll hit up the bases, which will be a snow texture, which I’m hoping will work well enough as the minis have turned out much darker than my original ones (which were painted 20 years and two GW paint ranges ago…).

As for the orcs, hit all the skin areas with the GW contrast paint ‘Ork skin’. First try with the Contrast paints, nice and flowy and good coverage but didn’t seem to contrast as much as I had anticipated straight out of the pot. When I got to the Goblin Wolf riders I wanted a lighter tint to the skin so I mixed a few brush-loads of the Ork green contrast colour with a healthy dose of Liquitex Matt Medium which worked perfectly.

The Night Goblins had been prepped to that point earlier in the year and the Black Orcs skin I’ll paint up with conventional colours and then do a dark tone varnish at the end.

Time spent adding green skin to the horde was about 6 hours so sitting at 7 1/2 for the project thus far.

A bit more progress yesterday.

Tried the Abbadon Black contrast on the wolves for my goblin wolf riders – mixed down with matt medium in about a 50:50 ratio. Happy with the results, think it will work well after the apparently inevitable AP varnish…

Instead of pushing on with the Orcs promptly got distracted by the Night Goblins and spent about 4 1/2 hours getting the three units up to the varnish stage, which I spent an hour applying this morning. While doing that I checked the Slaanesh warriors, varnish has settled in OK on them so I’ll hopefully look to base next weekend (I dislike basing so any excuse to delay the inevitable seems OK to me 🙂 ).

Additionally got some other odds and ends assembled and primed. Well, round 1 included breaking parts, super gluing my thumb and index finger together and failing to get parts to adhere. So knowing that I had somehow drawn the ire of the fickle hobby gods I decided to leave well enough alone and left everything where it was. Came back a few hours later and met with more success. Additions for the Orctober project include a bolt thrower and three goblin crew, six night goblin fanatics, two goblin shamans (one night goblin and one vanilla goblin flavour) (All GW models), a goblin warlord (reaper) ,  and an orc warlord (MOM Miniatures). Also pictured are a paymaster for my Dogs of War force and a battle standard bearer for the Middenheim army (Both MOM) and at the back an elf wizard who looks the part for my Pirates force (Journeyman Wizard from Ex manus Studios). Not photographed were a few more chaos characters who I have primed and set aside for later. I mean, let’s be honest – Chaos armies are all about overpowered short tempered two dimensional villains leading a legion of faceless goons, so clearly the more the merrier. We’ve all seen Game of Thrones, we know that they will all play nice and get along together, focusing on a unified objective… Anyhow…

Project time to date (exclusive of getting things assembled and primed) about 13 hours.

And about another 10 hours progress this week on the Orctober project. So about 23 since priming cumulatively. I grabbed the Vallejo wood and leather paint set and started work on the cavalry and chariots. Then rotated through to the miscellaneous goblins and then on to the orc foot. Using ‘Yellow Ochre’ as a feature colour to try and tie the units together as a cohesive force, beyond that it’s just whatever I happen to have on my palette at the time. Current state of play as follows:

• 67 Night Goblins (3 units) completed up to the basing stage;
• 10 wolf riders painted and ready for varnish;
• 13 boar riders and 4 chariots and miscellaneous goblins about 2/3 of the way through painting;
• 71 orcs (3 archers and 2 foot units) about halfway through the painting stage;
• 40 orcs (2 units of foot at about 15% painted
• 10 black orcs and 3 orc characters yet to really be progressed beyond priming.

So a little behind where I’d like to be ideally given the month is nearly half over (more importantly 2 of the 4 available weekends have been utilised) but I’ll see where I end up.

I did get distracted today assembling more pirate units for the Sartosa force – a unit of ‘Grog Lubbers’ (molotov cocktail lobbing alcoholic pirates) a unit of ‘Powder Monkeys’ (black powder addicted gun nuts who I’m sure the hung-over grog lubbers find are a joy to be around and all the loud banging noises they make are just endearing) and a unit of Buccaneers plus a standard bearer. So once it’s all painted up I’ll have around 1,000 points worth of pirates (with a little room for upgrades or potentially a magic item). As I find assembly and conversion slow going I didn’t pick up a paint brush all day.

In further news, looks like I’ll also be needing to learn to play the LOTR SBG – there is no way this will end without me building an Osgiliath tabletop, mark my words…

Well that was a thing…

OK, other than the general and a block of 10 Black Orcs I have the entire Orctober project progressed to the AP varnish stage. I’ll try and do that tomorrow so that I can then hit with a matt spray varnish on Monday and then start working on the bases for these guys, plus the 3 other units night goblins and 2 blocks of Slaanesh Chaos Knights in the production line. Yep, basing 250 minis at once is bound to take me to my happy place…

I estimate about another 25 hours spent since the last update (48 cumulative total), just putting paint on the palette and chain painting my way through every mini once or twice each evening. Used the Vallejo Wood & Leather set, plus Ivory, Leather Brown, Yellow Ochre and Oily Steel. In the GW Contrast range I used (now with their correct names…) Black Templar, Ork Flesh, Snakebite Leather, Nazderg Yellow and Gore Grunta Fur.

Kind of glad to have progressed as far as I have as I need to spend some time trying to reshape my Sharp Practice Napoleonic forces into Black powder scale armies for a game mid-week. I suspect this may involve a lot of primed only minis…

Short update – just spent another 3 hours (51 total) affixing chariot riders and getting the varnish on everything. Orcs got an AP strong tone and goblins a soft tone. Will give it until tomorrow evening to settle and then matt varnish everything. Also primed the pirates I assembled last week.

Still no further progressed on the Napoleonics…

Short update today. A bit more base work on everybody just to tidy things up and finished off and varnished the Black Orcs and Warlord. Tomorrow its bases for them, a matt spray fixing up the Battle Standard Bearer and we’re done 🙂

Recipe was an AP plate mail undercoat, Vallejo black ink airbrush and then brushed with AP Bright Gold and monster Brown, and from Vallejo Ivory, Yellow Ochre, Oily Steel, German Cam. Dark Green, Leather Brown and Dark Green. Then the ubiquitous AP dip (although these guys got Dark tone unlike the rest of the forces).

OK, so made it across the line with three days to spare in Orctober. bad planning on my part, should have added in a giant or two 😉 Calling this lot done for now. 2 forces tabletop ready. The Goblins (green bases) will get added in to my existing Goblin horde whereas the Orcs (desert/badlands bases) will form a new army.

Combining preshading and Contrast paint worked well. Mixing down Contrast paint with matt medium also worked well. Combining the Contrast paint effect with AP soft tone varnish gave satisfactory results, with Strong Tone or Dark Tone it seemed to overwrite the underlying contrast. Combining contrast and regular paints on the minis gave interesting results but if doing a large project in such a short time frame again I think I’d either go for preshading/contrast paints exclusively/targeted ink washes or shading/regular paint/AP varnish. Having said that, I do think preshading/contrast/thinned down AP Soft Tone would work well if staring down an impending tournament deadline or similar. Anyhow…

Apologies, the group shot is a little out of focus but couldn’t get the depth to work for all the minis (231 by my count) in the one shot…

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Got in a game of 6th ed last night. Funny how recollection of different versions of the core rules start to bleed into one another but I think we ended up getting most things right.  My Empire were soundly thrashed by the green horde, as befitting a capstone game for Orctober. MVP of the match was the snotling pump wagon who trounced two detachments of halberdiers, the mortar and half of the block of spearmen, capturing a standard in the process. Great fun 🙂

Am apparently feeling a little burned out with regard to painting after the push in Orctober but still keen to keep the momentum going. Plan is to knock off my current ‘in progress’ (or at least the stuff that’s presently looking at me…) warhammer fantasy projects by the end of the calendar year so I can then mix things up a bit with historicals and some other stuff I want to progress (LoTR, Frostgrave etc). So, broad overview in approximate order of priority is as follows:

Pirates – 3 blocks of 10 foot in progress, plus a captain, caster and standard bearer. 33 minis total. Need to do the metals, ivory, hair colouring then ready to varnish and finish.

Miscellaneous characters – A Middenheim BSB; mostly done, need to do another coat of white on the banner detail then a targeted wash, varnish and base. Bretonnian character, just need to paint the horse then varnish and base. Dogs of war Paymaster. Only primed so far… 3 minis total.

Chaos – Slaanesh I have 2 blocks of foot ready to base, need to finish the character (base colours are started) and 20 daemonettes (Skin tone airbrushed on). Khorne 2 blocks of 15 foot, 2 chariots and a character. Tzeentch 2 blocks of 15 foot and a block of 5 knights (don’t know if I’ll get to any more Tzeentch characters). Nurgle 2 blocks of foot (one of 15 and one of 16 which is just messing with my head…), 2 characters on foot and 5 knights. Other than the Slaanesh models everything is primed and has the armour main colour airbrushed on.

So if I draw a line there we have 162 minis to finish, excluding the Slaanesh foot that are already up to the basing stage. I’ll try to do the chaos bases all in one go. I’ll also try to paint all the horses at once to make the process a little more efficient. If I can get the horses out of the way and finish the pirates and miscellaneous characters then working on all the chaos at once should be fairly quick due to the consistency of some of the detail colours. Will see how we go anyhow 🙂

A quick bit of painting, varnishing and detail and I have the remaining pirates finished. I’ll concede that the battle standard may be a just a little on the large side but I guess it will be easy to differentiate form the normal unit standards. Was a printed design with aluminium foil glued within for structure and wrapped around a metal spear as I trust the metal ones to not snap during normal gameplay.

Also finished off my Middenheim BSB and Dogs of war Paymaster, so rounding out three forces this weekend. Now just need to knock over the rest of the Chaos…

Have been listening to an incredible band called SKYND for the last couple of months. The aesthetic of their video clips (probably NSFW, very very dark, they are basically a true crime version of Sabbaton so insert all applicable trigger warnings etc here…) has inspired me to get the Daemonettes finished. Anyhow, check them out if you want to get an idea on the direction I want to take these minis in.

Skin tone got a Vallejo Violet ink wash thinned down heavily with airbrush flow improver. The blue streak on the hair was a large quantity of Liquitex Matt Medium combined with GW Contrast Ultramarines Blue. The Magenta on the hair, eyes, lips, claws, feet and tails was again the matt medium, a drop of each of Vallejo’s Red and Violet inks and a few drops of the GW Contrast Darkoath Flesh for warmth.

Also painted up an Avatars of War mini to act as a hero/leader for the force. Lighting looks a little stark on her in the photo. Was going to post a close-up but she is probably a little bit too ‘sexy time’ to show on a public forum.

Plan from here is to do the metals in gold and the cloth in white as I like the idea of them wearing something akin to a mockery of sacred robes. And if I can find a fine enough brush, get my hands steady enough and summon up the courage, eyes in gloss black and maybe a touch of color shift paint over the top…

Shifting back to more of a conventional approach on the daemonettes, which has slowed my progress somewhat. Still, happy with the way they are coming along. In somewhat related news, I worked out that the brushes I’ve been using are now all about 3 years old. Have switched to a new one with a point – did you know more of the paint goes where you want it to and less of it to where you don’t when your brush has a point on it? I know, right?…

A coat of Vallejo Brass down on the metal areas of what we are going to call the clothing as I find it gives better coverage and more warmth than gold) , and a coat o Vallejo Deck Tan on the cloth to later be worked up to an Ivory. Then just some targeted washes on the brass, a possible edge highlight with gold and a complimentary shade on the claws and bone protrusions and I can shuffle this lot across to the ‘ready to base’ pile.

Have taken the block of daemonettes about as far as I want to. Actually quite happy with the way that they have turned out and I don’t want to risk doing too much more to them at this point in case I screw them up. So they are parked until I can get a matt coat over them all then I will do the gold jewelery on the character (I’m thinking any oopsies will be easier to correct if done on top of the matt varnish…) and then I’ll base with the 2 blocks of Slaanesh chaos warriors. Better photos thereafter – the below is the least out-of-focus one I took apparently…

Additionally got the Bretonnian characters horse painted (a couple of thin coats of AP Oak brown) and got an AP strong tone varnish coated on him. Not sure what happened with the varnish but it went on much darker than usual (perhaps I hadn’t mixed thoroughly enough?…), so got an old brush and some mineral turpentine and brushed the raised areas back to where I was happy with. Also got a base coat down on the 10 Chaos cav and 2 chariot beasties (basecoat Vallejo German cam Black Brown, first highlight AP Dirt Splatter, 2nd highlight AP Werewolf Fur).

And finally, my goal for the next few weeks is to get the below painted up to the AP dip stage, dip and matt varnish and then base everything that I have queued up. So painting 10 cav, 2 chariots, 90+foot and baseing same and another 50 infantry. If I can do that, I’ll have painted over 1,000 fantasy minis in this calendar year, or 12 forces worth in 12 months. Will be a wee bit of a push but let’s see where we land 😉

Brief addendum as I’ll forget the recipe if I don’t jot it down now…

Daemonettes got  a targeted thin glaze/wash of purple ink to the recesses, edges & shadows on their skin tones. Metal areas were Vallejo Brass. Cloth was a base of Vallejo Deck Tan, both cloth and metal then shaded with a targeted hit of homemade black wash. Cloth subsequently highlighted in Vallejo Ivory (could afford a retouch of the Deck Tan next time to soften the contrast post-wash). Bone protrusions coloured with AP Skeleton Bone.

This week I hooked in and got the base colours down on all the remaining models for the Khorne, Tzeentch and Nurgle models. I have just one more mini to finish, the Slaanesh champion, and then I’ll have hit my goal. I had intended to get all the in progress minis hit with an AP Strong Tone varnish this weekend, but there is too much smoke outside presently (horrendous bushfire season) so I’ll wait for the air to clear a little (possibly Friday according to the current forecast) and then get that done. Then after 24 hours for it to settle it will be a matt varnish and then batch basing everything. Have I mentioned basing is not my favorite thing… Possibly once or twice 😛

Colours used – Army Painter Skeleton Bone on the horns and skulls (always best to carry a few spare skulls into battle in case somebody cracks yours open with a hammer and you need to replace it quickly… Note: Not an actual doctor here, just wanted to clarify that in case there was any confusion…) and cloak highlights, AP Barbarian Flesh on the skin tone for the Khorne Champion that I painted up as a Nurgle Champion and ended up looking like the Angry Conflicted Christmas Champion…), Vallejo Model Colour German Cam Beige WW2 for the base layer on the cloaks and cloth and highlights on flags, VMC Cavalry Brown on the Nurgle gloves and boots, VMC Oily Steel on all the metals, VMC Brass on the gold bits as it saves doing multiple coats as I would have had to have done with gold (Time Saving FTW), VMC Leather Brown on the belts and straps, VMC English Uniform WW2 on the banners and cloak fur, VMC Black Green on the Nurgle cloaks (Think I used AP Angel Green on the original batch but this is what I had on hand and it looks like a pretty close match) and VMC Russian Uniform WW2 on the Nurgle cloak fur.

Bit of a gap in the smoke coverage so spent a couple of hours and got the Army Painter strong tone brushed on to about 2/3 of the force – will probably need a retouch here and there but that’s all manageable. If I can find a gap this week after work to varnish the rest then I can hit with a matt coat and perhaps start basing this weekend.

500 point game of 6th ed lined up for Thursday – thinking of giving Brets a go…

It’s about at this time in a project that I lose the will to hobby… close to 2 1/2 hours just to paint a plain white on all the bases… I shall endeavour to get a white paint/PVA mix on this evening and sprinkle on some model snow. Then a couple of tufts here and there, painting the base edges as appropriate for each flavour of chaos god, a bit of a tidy up on some of the more excessive varnish pooling and we’re good.

Got in a couple of 500 point games of 6th edition WHFB last night. My first run with the Bretonnians. They got badly mauled when the big block of Orcs made contact so I learned to avoid that uit in game 2. The Bret archers were surprisingly effective, and possibly undercosted given they roll out with longbows and defensive stakes. The men at arms were quite terrible though so I guess that balances thing out a little…