Gorram’s Grand Army Project

The time difference for the rally this weekend means that stages aren’t starting until 10.30pm and then run until 7am. I’ve not watched all the way through Thursday or Friday but I have stayed up until after 2am (which is late for me.. I’m one of those sad early to bed weirdos). There’s something really nice about very late night painting sessions, a level of guilt-free enjoyment. You can’t do anything else without disturbing other people so just sit for hours and enjoy yourself.

Friday night got the five fanatics painted (I still haven’t found the sixth one). These are very delicate miniatures. I managed to break one within the first five minutes. I really would rather have the old metal fanatics but they’ve been ridiculously priced every time I’ve looked on eBay so these are what I have.

These are going to be a bugger to base – even being plastic models, they are going to need heavy weighting on their final bases.

I also got through the two squig herders done. This leaves me just ten squig hoppers left to paint on the final night of the rally. I’m writing this during the first stage and there’s already been a big drama moment so who knows how much sleep/painting I’ll get done!!

Feeling like I’m on a bit of a roll, I decided to stick with my gobbos and build everything I have in the stash before the weather makes priming impossible the rest of the week. Over a few evenings I got glued together 10 squigs, 2 herders, 10 squig hoppers and six fanatics. When I went to prime everything I realised I’ve lost a fanatic somehow, damn impetuous movement! 

The final rally of the WRC season was this weekend in Japan. That means late nights at the painting desk; plenty of painting and poor photography. 

First up, squigs. I don’t think the exact paints really matter here, I went with three red tones with a mixture of dry brush and more detailed highlighting. Details are pretty minimal and I just went with basic paint jobs across the board.

These were delightful to paint up but I didn’t do the elements that will tie into the basing; I want to wait until I’m doing the final basing across everything before deciding on the colours for the various fungi all over the place.

I’ve been playing a lot of World of Warcraft since the new expac came out and it’s put me in the mood for some silly fantasy. Looking at what I had in the stash that would scratch the itch I found a load of Night Goblins.

Being slightly older GW sculpts, the models are a delight to put together and pretty fun to paint.

1. Black prime so that a quick paint job that misses any bits won’t be as noticeable
2. Heavy dry brush, almost an over brush Vallejo Royal Purple
3. At this point I tried a couple of different highlight colours but went with Alien Purple from the Army Painter Fanatics range in the end. The basing for these is going to be very warm tonally so keeping the models a little cooler should hopefully meant they don’t get lost amongst the basing material.
4. Time for skin tones. Like with my Mantic orcs, I wanted two different ones, split roughly 50/50
   1. Base colour AP Fanatics Greenskin, first highlight Greenskin and Fanatic Rainforest mixed in a 1/1 ratio, final highlight pure Rainforest. Wash with Agrax Earthshade
   2. Base colour Citadel Warboss Green and highlighted with Skarsnik Green. Wash with Agrax Earthshade
5. Metal details are just Citadel Leadbelcher base coat, wash with Agrax Earthshade
6. Wood details are Fanatic Onyx Skin base coat, wash with Agrax Earthshade
7. Ropes are Fanatic Ancient Stone base coat, wash with Agrax Earthshade
8. Shields have their shield detail in Fanatic Demonic Yellow, the base was left the black from the prime. Wash with Agrax Earthshade.

Everyone is on temporary bases for painting right now but over the course of ten days or so, forty were done. I’ll base them all at the same time.

One of our local gaming groups is a splinter from an RPG group that runs indie games. The idea was, initially at least, that the Wargames would be the same. However most of the chat revolves around playing “dead” GW games as several of them get that misty eyed nostalgia when words like Battlefleet Gothic and Necromunda are mentioned. I’m known to like painting small minis which is why I got added to a group chat for a slow grow Warmaster project (do not call it a league!!!) that will start mid to late summer and run for a few months.

I have easily 2000 points of metal dwarves painted. For some reason, lost to the depths of time (or the first lockdown as it is recorded in the history books), I re-based them all onto 40x40s, complete with Milliput to level them all out. Safe to say I’m not going to tear all that to pieces.

In the darkest corner of The Stash, I have some 10/12mm ratmen too but not enough for a full army and there’s certain units not represented that would be essentials. While hunting for options online, I can’t across a fairly local business that does 3d printing for you.

They had a 2k dark elves army for £75. All thoughts of ratmen vanished.

But wait a minute Gorram, I hear you type. Don’t you have a 3d printer already? Yes, yes I do. Having experimented with different scales though, it isn’t high res enough for 10mm in a way I’m happy with. I also looked into the cost of the stls and honestly, it was going to cost me more than the £75 to get them all, let alone buy resin, run the electricity etc

Eight days later, an army arrived in the post.

We’re aiming for our first games at the end of July so this will be another “get it done quickly” army. It seems to be turning into a bit of a theme for me this year. This is the first test base and I’m happy with the levels of contrast at 3ft.

• Prime Wraithbone
• Black Legion over the chainmail and boots
• Mournfang Brown on the spear hafts
• Gunmetal over all the remaining armour, the spear tip and a slight drybrush on the chainmail
• Retributor Gold on the front helmet detail and shield details
• Mephiston Red on the armour trim
• Two coats of Magos Purple on the shields and the cloth
• Coat of Marine Juice (Sledgehammer Studio’s recipe) over everything except the Magos Purple
• Based with some texture paint; flock choice still to be made

The last few weeks have been a little more scattershot in terms of what I’ve been working on. I have a secret project that’s taking most of my hobby time but it is feeling a bit sluggish at the moment. With a four day weekend, I finally managed to get my first game of Epic booked in so to shake things up a bit, I thought I’d try and get through the rest of my army.

The small second wave of models and the first book expansion were released in February so managed to get two boxes of space marine support units to add in. I also still had a whole bunch of vehicles to paint up so I spent Friday getting everything primed and ready to go.

One of the few benefits to crippling social anxiety that I have been developing for the last few years is that the night before I know I’m going into a scary social situation, I don’t sleep. Sunday for example I was going into a new space, to meet new people, play a new opponent and a new game. Saturday night I got two hours of sleep. I did manage to paint the remaining 11 vehicles, 8 Tarantulas, 8 dreadnoughts, two Rapiers and finish six more Rhinos I needed to field a fully painted army though. Well except the decals… they didn’t seem like a great idea while sleep deprived!

My first game (and my opponent’s third) took place at one of the local club’s Sunday afternoon sessions. I haven’t been to the club since pre-Covid but given how close it is to home, I really should make more of an effort. It was a lot friendlier than I remembered from 2018/19 and there were four women in the room which I think might be the first time I’ve not been alone on that front. That might not seem like much to most people here but it genuinely made a difference to me. We also managed to find an original Titanicus box in the terrain pile with cardboard and the polystyrene buildings in it.

As to the game – it was a mess. Weirdly for a GW game, not really because of the rules, I just couldn’t keep any of it in my head and the page flipping was constant and exhausting. 24 hours later, the rulebook is still an awful mess – I don’t understand how in this day and age companies still suck at putting sections of rulebooks in a sensible order – but the game itself doesn’t feel bad. With some work on my part to remember basic traits (or create a decent cheat sheet for myself), I think it could be a lot of fun. The combat is fast and models die quickly so it feels like a heavy attrition battle. I’ll give myself a couple of weeks to read the rules and then I’ll try to get another game in. I don’t think I scared my opponent off with my incompetence…

The main other takeaway for me is that I want to get working on terrain for this scale. The club is mostly historical so there wasn’t a great selection for our purposes. I’d also like to get a table together for my own flat. I have a box of the Warcradle plastic stuff they just released but after looking at it in depth, it will actually be more expensive to fill a table with than the GW stuff. I have some resin stuff in a box somewhere that will do the job for the flat but I don’t fancy carting all of that along the road to the club (I don’t drive so my back is pretty much my only mode of transport for it). Time to go throw some more money at the Goblin of Gaming.

Quick update. Not had much painting time but that’s another batch finished up. I’m not super happy with the original basing I did so I’ve stopped at the texture paint stage and I’ll come back once I’ve had time to think/experiment with other flocks.

I need a bit of a break from painting Orcs and Epic so I’m going back to something I started a few months ago. Back in Gnomevember 2023, I printed out a bunch of the fantastic gnomes from Warp Miniatures. Over three months, Alex sculpted a whole army as goblin proxies. Like everything he sculpts, they are so full of character but importantly for me, they are also easy and fun to paint.

Sunday was my only day off this week so I only managed to get the base coats down. The batch was 19 spearmen plus a wizard which might have been a bit much (though I might also just have been tired and grumpy… emotions are weird).

Base coats:

• Robes – Vallejo Prussian blue
• Hat & mushroom shields – Citadel Mephiston Red
• Skin – Citadel Kislev flesh
• Beards – Citadel White Scar (also used for mushroom spots)
• Weapons – Citadel Doombull Brown and Army Painter Gunmetal
• Shoes – Vallejo US Field Drab
• Wizard robes and hat – Vallejo Royal Purple
• Wizard shoes – Citadel Retributor Armour
• Wizard staff – Citadel XV-88
• Wizard’s bag – Vallejo Prussian Blue
• Magic mushroom – Citadel Mephiston Red, White Scar for the cap and Contrast Hexwraith Flame for the smoke

At this point I spilt half the pot of Hexwraith Flame when my hand forgot what holding onto a thing was. Why do you never drop the thick paints that wouldn’t go everywhere?

The final part of my basing came in today, a whole load of tufts from Tajima 1 Miniatures. For this scheme, I used a mixture of sizes of brown grass tufts and it just finishes these bases wonderfully.

The base rims were finished with Vallejo Chocolate Brown and, other than a varnish once the weather clears up a bit, I’m very content to say they are done.