Chainghasts

Progress is still being made on my Nighthaunts. I finally got around to finishing these two models: the Chainghasts. Again this is a sped painting project for me. I want to get the army to the tabletop within a reasonable time frame rather than slogging through these to only give up halfway through like so many other armies. The Chainghasts are a rather vital part of the army extending the buffing range of my Spirit Torment character by 12". This allows re-rolls on all 1's to wound which can be quite significant when you see how I roll dice. Also these are the only shooting troops in the army and so they will also be used for opportunistic character sniping if I can get them into the right position. Sadly the unit isn't finished as I want it to have four models, the maximum. This boosts their survivability and shooting so it's an investment worth making.

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.

The Shysh Reaper

Swinging into action comes the third of the Endless spells. This one is specific to the Nighthaunt unlike the previous two. I picked up the box for completions sake to be honest as I don't rate any of the spells in it that highly. They are good, don't get me wrong, but I think they are currently out competed by the standard spells from Malign Sorcery. This model is pretty cool though so as a distraction from the Chainrasps I painted it. I wasn't happy with how the Aethervoid Pendulum came out and this is essentially version two. I made the highlighting more extreme and I think this captures the jade colour I was going for better. As for the metal pieces and the wood I didn't want these to be in natural colous so I kept them within the scheme. The metal is mainly blue with some stippled silver to give a metallic impression rather than just being straight up mettalic. My method for doing this could be a little better but as I've only begun experimenting with the technique recently it came out well enough. The flames were another experiment. I have been doing them mainly blue and for this I changed that to green. I think its actually better for magical flames but I am not sure that it would look as good on the ghost models. They definitely look better with a more blue shade, probably as this ties in well with the cowls they have. Next up I'll be painting the Grimghast Reapers and Spirit Torment.

Tomb Banshee - The Lady of Laments

You might have seen her before but now she is actually finished. When I started painting her I had no idea how I wanted to do the base. Now that I've made the decision its time for her and the Knight of Shrouds to finally get done. As her base is pretty large and fairly empty I made sure to add a good section of cobblestones/flagstones. I could have added a few more decorative elements to make it look a little more interesting but as these take a lot of time to do and I only have ten spearheads left to use I thought I'd reserve the railings at least for some of the characters or on bases that are smaller so I don't need to use so much. I think the dark grey stone contrasts well enough with the lighter models on top and also doesn't distract from them. A lot of basing schemes at the moment go for very high contrast and I often find myself looking at the bases more than the models. If anyone has a few spare spear tips from the Freeguild box I'd take them off you.

Chainrasp Horde

Disappointingly it seems I will have a lot more chainrasps to do in the near future. Now that the book has been released I've seen the battalions and the most interesting ones are comprised mainly of chainrasps. I knew I'd have to paint more but as these do take quite a while to paint I had hoped forty would be close enough to suffice. That would fill the minimum requirement of the battalions but to be effective I think I would have to go for two units of forty. Hopefully we will get a good multi-part kits for these that has a little more variance than the ones from the boxed set. at least that would make the painting a little less tedious.

Having complained a lot I'll switch gear and show you the current status of the twenty models from the starter box. These are just about done. Most of the work left are little details and the bases. I got a good bit of time over the weekend to paint which helped me to progress with these nicely. The cloaks could probably do with one more highlight but I don't have a colour suitable for this at the moment so I have to search a little further. I don't want the hassle of mixing any paints for these. As far as is possible I want to go with readily available paints. The cloak is Incubi Darkness, washed with Nuln Oil and then highlighted with Incubi darkness and Stegadon scale green. The quality of the photograph here makes it impossible to really see much of the paintwork. Still the highlights are subtle, the way I like them, but they are just not visible enough. I'll spend a few moments on the GW website later in the day and see what paint might fit with the ideas I've got.

After the Chainrasps are done I want to start with the Glaivewraith Stalkers. I haven't as yet taken any off the sprue but as these are larger models hopefully they will be easier to put together and possibly quicker to paint. It is easy to forget that the larger surface area of a model can take a lot longer to paint than something smaller. The endless Spells for example take an age to paint simply because the surface areas are massive.... maybe I need a bigger brush? Anyway more on them towards the end of the week.

More work on the Chainrasps

Progress continues apace with my Chainrasps. I definitely think that batch painting 22 models wasn't the best decision but at least I still feel like I am making some progress. I've done the basic washes on them all now and tonight I'll be hitting them with a special Coelia Greenshade mix to create a greater depth on the white robes they have. That shouldn't take long but so far that prediction has been wrong at every step. After that wash is dry I can apply some more localised washes of Waywatcher Green to create some variance in the colours. It's totally unnecessary but breaks up what could be a rather monotonous scheme. If all goes well I can even start the highlighting stage. The target is to have these done by the end of the weekend. I don't know if that will include the bases but it would be nice if it did.

Chainrasps and a few others

Work has started on my Nighthaunts. I picked up everything last week and then promptly got distracted by a Purple Sun. Somehow I had the idea that it would be quick to paint. It wasn't but its nearly done now, more to follow on that during the week. As for the Nighthaunts the models are lovely but rather flimsy. It takes a while to get them off the sprue and once you've come to the point of putting them together you will discover a lot of gaps that need filling. They are great, don't get me wrong but one of the limitations of push-fit models is gaps in bad places. I tried to fill them with some gloss varnish and it worked for some. Though I noticed that if you aren't careful in applying it you will actually exacerbate the problem by creating two ridges that run parallel to the gap you need to fill. people have recommended GW's 'Ardcoat for the job and that might be better. I was using Vajello gloss Varnish.
Anyway I have managed to get two of the three colours on these guys that constitutes their base coat, Ulthuan Grey and Incubi Darkness. The third is for the metals and is Leadbelcher. Once that's on tonight I can start washing the models and hopefully I will make rather rapid progress from there. I have pre-mixed both a blue and a dark green wash so I don't have to worry about getting ratios correct each time. The only wash I'll still mix by hand is Waywatcher Green as I use it very sparingly over the models.
If all goes to plan I'll be able to post updates each day this week and by the end of it I'll have the bulk of the Starter Box done. That's the plan anyway.

Mordheim Witch

It seems I’m on a roll with blogging having had more than one post in the last month. Let’s see if I can keep it up.... I doubt it. Anyway painting has continued and this time I’m back to Age of Sigmar via Mordheim. I picked up this fantastic model when specialist game were producing some really characterful models back in the day. I never played with the Mordheim Witch as by the time I bought her the Mordheim craze had passed our group by. I did use her as a Necromancer in my Warhammer Fantasy Army but she was painted really poorly. In anticipation of having another Undead army soon but having no models to paint I decided I could redo her and test some freehand designs. I’m happy with the result and once I come to base the army she’ll get the same treatment.

Zombie Swordsmen

Once upon a time I had an Undead army. It was my most succesful army winning my first tournament in Dublin. Suprisingly I had it based on Zombies. I had about 180 models painted up and converted. The army was based on the undead/empire switch that was prety popular around 2003 when I started them. When the new book came out in 2008 I dropped them pretty quickly. Zombies were far from useful and so if I wanted to compete I would have needed to add a lot more varied troops. I spent 2009 travelling 'round the world and Warhammer was for a long while forgotten. When I arrived home I picked out some of my poorly painted undead and revisited them. These were the first I finished, a regiment of Undead Swordsmen. I never really did anything more with the army though. Some more zombies got painted and some ghouls and that was pretty much it.