24 years and counting – Spring cleaning challenge

After loosing the original miniatures some time ago i decided to pick up some of the reaper Miniatures monsters.

they are very cool models but i did not like the fact they were single pose, so i delved into my bits box and started hacking and sticking and green stuffing and came up with these dudes.

Im quite pleased with how the goblins with bows turned out especially there big yellow hats.

Mainly used base paints with an agrax earth shade wash followed by a few highlights.

the bowstrings were a pain but i am pleased with how they turned out.

Next in my list of things to paint are the small flappy and nibbly beasts.

im missing one bat and one rat but im sure that wont be too much of a problem in game.

the rats are from the superb reaper bones range the gw rats were cool but prefer these as they have multiple poses and are on cool bases that are more stable, plus my fiance says they look super cute.

the rest of the beastys are the origional gw models.

i have used contrast paints for the spiders rats and bats, im really enjoying how much faster it is to paint with contrast paints and the different effects you can achieve just by changing the under coat colour and or the consistency of the contrast colour with the contrast medium.

im definately going to invest in more contrast colours in the future.

The goblin bows are covered in super glue so whilst they dry i wanted to see how fast i can paint all 12 skaven.

they were already undercoated and based which was a good start, i then painted the fur snake bite leather and the rags with black templar contrast paints.

i have only just started to play with contrast paints they are great as they speed up my painting a lot.

then i painted the metal parts silver painted some white and red on the sheilds.

once that was all dry i mixed equal parts of rhinox hide and german grey together and lightly sponged the white and metal areas to make them look dirty.

the whole model was then washed with vallejo umber wash that was watered down with contrast medium this toned down the lighter colours to make them look more skaveny and grubby as befits a rat man thst spends most of its time in the sewer looking for warp stone.

The game contains six goblins with spears  but as i had 12 in my box thought i would do them all to future proof myself. I think i swapped the old goblins from the game with a mate for the newer night goblins quite a while ago.

looks like i had started them by painting them a very dark grey with green skin then gave up , i thought i would try the contrast black templar over the top. I gave it a bit of a water down with contrast medium  and i am quite pleased with the result.

To brighten them up as they were looking a bit dull i gave them bright yellow moons on the sheilds.

Thats the arrow boys completed. I painted them in the same colour scheme as the choppy boyz. The dude with the blue face is from a previous attempt to paint the set so thought i would leave him as is.

Stupidly i thought that the best way to celebrate my 40th birthday this evening would be to try and make tiny bow strings with cotten.

It seamed like a good idea at the time, to keep the strings in place i cut a little notch in the bows to hold the cotten then wrapped it around till it looked cool then tied it in place and covered the knot in super glue to keep it in place.

I think it came out pretty well then remembered about the 12 goblins in the box they are even smaller, i may leave them for a bit whilst i still hold on to a shred of sanity.

It turns out i did paint some of the models, im pretty pleased with how they look i may add a flesh wash to the barbarian and maybe rebase the models with floor tile bases to match the monsters. At the moment they are based with gravel that i liberated from my dads train set back in the day

Thought I would start this project by finishing the Orc warriors, they are not the single pose dudes that came from the set.

I had previously got as far as undercoating them and making putty stone slabs for the bases, rather than stripping the paint and starting again I gave them a good dust and just carried on painting them from where I left off.

I am painting these green fellows as a homage to my first space ork army that used to loot and pillage the universe in their fine yellow trousers and red shirts with bright goblin green skin. 90s colour schemes were cool if a little on the bright  side.

I gave contrast paint for the leather boots and pouches it makes things a lot faster. They are not lying when they say one thick coat you can splash it on and it highlights its self.