For Gondor

Despite the absolutely tiny scale of these models I persevered and managed to finish twelve of them over the weekend, twice of what I need to play Battle Companies. I knew the miniatures were 25mm scale before I started but I am so used to the larger heroic 32mm of Games Workshops other models I really struggled to paint these. They aren't the most fantastically detailed sculpts, mainly being one piece. They are fun to do however and I discovered a few short cuts to make them much faster to paint, undercoating them grey was a big one. I also sneaked in Boromir with these. It's a quick paint job again but the objective of these is to get them onto the table for two weeks time and not spend an age painting them. I still feel like I did the model justice but I wasn't going to spend a whole day painting him. Two hours was long enough. now that my good warband is done I have to look to the Mines of Moria for my next! I have a bunch of the goblin models that I will be stripping paint off of tonight and then hopefully making quick progress on. They'll possible be my next update here but I have also been making slow progress on the Nighthaunts.

Gondor BattleCompany

What are these I hear you ask. Well they certainly aren't Nighthaunts. I picked up two cheap Lord of the Rings armies a while back and I decided to get some work done on a Gondorian Battle Company as a break from the Nighthaunts. I had thought that these would be fast to paint but even just getting the basecoats onto them took a lot longer than expected. These are still very much WIP but I'll hopefully rectify that over the weekend and continue to make progress with my Grimghast Reapers.

Ironjawz Brute

Even though I wasn't posting much on here over the last while I was still painting. In fact I managed to paint an entire 1500 point Ironjaw army for Age of Sigmar over the last year. I didn't like the yellow scheme that Games Workshop went for but I do like my Orruks in yellow as you will have seen with my 40k Orks. Inspired by them I kept the scheme going and embellished it just a little with some checks and flames. Even a little rust and scratches. These are now my regular army while I am painting up my Nighthaunt models and while the play style can be a little flat and boring I still enjoy charging these across the table and wrecking havoc.

Shardwrack Spines

I am trying to make a set of terrain specifically for Age of Sigmar based around the Runis of Fellan. This is an area of my own devising and is basically a once glorious city ruined at the outset of the Age of Chaos and now overgrown. To that end I picked up some Shardwrack Spines to add to the set so that I could replace my more mundane trees with something a little more fantastical. I wasn't entirely convinced when I got them out of the box that they would be nice. The garish paint scheme that these are shown in might suit a 40k deathworld but it didn't suit the vegetation that I was envisaging for my ruins. I decided to paint these in a more muted and natural scheme to enforce some more realism on what are very unrealistic plants. I think it worked out well.

These are base coated in Skavenblight Dinge (GW). Somehow I managed to pick up two pots of this and in an attempt to use it I've been painting a lot of things with it. Its a very dirty grey and this looks great for trees and plants. I lightly drybrushed this with Sea Grey (VJ) and washed it with Athonian Camoshade (GW). This green brown wash really brought the tree to life as it added a perfect narural bark colour to it. All I had to do then was pickout the pustules/fungi on the surface. These make the model a little too Nurgle looking but I think when they are painted rather more neutral they can look quite natural. Only the big ones ruin the effect I think. These I actually painted yellow and then highlighted them with Bleached Bone (VJ) to wash out the colour a little.

All in all I think the model came out great and I'll slowly be doing more of these over the coming weeks to replace the forest trees I have while I am waiting for the next round of Azyrite Ruins to be released.

WIP Guardian of Souls

I am still making progress on my Nighthaunt army despite a wicked bout of food poisoning. As I am still awaiting the arrival of a few regiments I have been focusing on characters. This lead me to clipping out the Guardian of Souls and making some progress on him over the weekend. He is a gorgeous model and fun to paint. I am almost there with him now just some of the finishing touches to do still. I kept him in the standard scheme of the rest of the army which in this case means no dark blue robe/cowl. I was tempted to do the fade from dark blue to white on his robe but as I have been experimenting and failing with this of late I decided not to. Its an interesting technique and one I will certainly use in the future but I really need to refine it and the glazes I use for it more before I do it on a character model.  I did try it here on the flames somewhat and it has come out a little stark. It's fine but would have been better if I had gone for a traditional blend. Though that would have taken far longer and the point of this army is to get them done quickly rather than expertly. There are currently a lot of projects calling to me to get done and well I can't do them until the Nighthaunt are at a point where I am happy. I don't think that will take too long. I have maybe three regiments to finish off to get me to a playable 2000 points and with one or two additions more I would have an army where I could mix and match to keep the games interesting.