Turning to the dark side!

Here is one of the wizards that I am converting. I am trying to keep it more in touch with the marauders so I am going for a shaman rather than a sorceror. I began with the Empire Wizards sprue and added a few other components. The chaos star worked well to give an instantly evil look. I have also decided that the wizards will all be blind.

The extra piece come from the wonderful flagellant sprue. There are lots of little bones, skulls and symbols that can be attached anywhere. The cloak I added so that he does not look too empire. The blind flagellant head hopefully keeps him evil looking too. While evil is not a theme I really wanted to convey I need some in there. I was imagining a viking shaman. I added the little runetones around the fur cloak to reinforce that image. They were easy enough to do so I will carry them in through the rest of the army in various forms. So less than two weeks to go and I am getting there. There is no chance the army will be painted, absolutely none! I am having to temporarily abandon my workspace and I don't really know if I will be getting much more access to it before I have to leave. Hopefully so as there are a lot more marauders that need some glue!

I am really struggling with my list at the moment. The competition in Gorey is going to be high. I want to power up the list without completely going to the Dark Side! How I am going to achieve this I don't know. I really like the Warriors of Chaos list but it suffers from being well balanced! When compared to other more powerful lists there is nothing that jumps out as being great. The magic is good but costs a lot to bring to a dominating power level. I will be taking three wizards as the fourth is too expensive. I am struggling with which lores to take. I want a Slaanesh army but the lore is not fantastic considering the two armies I will need to be able to beat are immune to two thirds of the spells. The Tzeentch lore is good, well fanatstic really. I don't want to rely on a single spell: Gateway, to win my games though. It is a rather poor spell when you consider the much easier to cast Flickering Fire. I will take a mix of lores and from the games see what actually works well!

In terms of regiments I should probably focus on very hard hitting cavalry and then some cheap distractions. I have a more balanced inclusion at the moment with four decent infantry regiments of 12+ each. These could be problematic as they will need a lot of space to move around comfortly. The Chaos Warriors are almost the same points as a regiment of Chaos Knights and I really don't think they can preform anywhere nearly as good. Still as the tournament will actually be my first chance t play these I will have to go with the expectation of not doing all that well but learning some valuable lessons!

The children are complete

I have finished the Children of the Bear. The cloaks are all done and the heads are finally in place. The most extensive conversion was on the champion. I wanted the image of a haughty warrior and I think I have managed to achieve that! The conversion was a lot more simple than I imagined. The resting hand on the weapon was made a lot easier by some delicate cutting of an existing hand and then replacing what was needed. The thumb around the back was the trickiest piece to do. The fingers might be a little long but I am happy with them so no changes!

The cloaks are getting a lot easier to do. It still takes a little under an hour to do the sculpting once the frame is prepared and dry. Only thirty more to do I believe! I put together a few more models from the army and I have deicided that the Chaos Knights can do with cloak too! At least the Warriors come with them already done. The cloaks do seem a little small on the marauders though. I think I was not generous enough while sculpting them. I should probably have extended them out to the sides more while sculpting. That would give them a much more voluminous appearance. Also the addition of some more folds lengthways would have helped. At least I know this now for the rest of them!

The bases are done on these too. I didn't put much thought into the placement of the elements on the bases sadly. It does mean that they are easir to rank up but it does not look as cohesive. The Warhounds below show how cohesive basing looks great across a regiment. As I have probably said I am simply going for a woodland type base. This means rocks and branches. I have used it before on my Circle or Orboros army and it worked well. They however don't need to rank up so placement of things was not too important. I think that a scattered placement here takes away from the regiment.

These are poor models. GW don't seem to be able to do dog like models. They are at least a step up from the Dire Wolves they produced. In this picture you can se what I mean by keeping the basing cohesive! I just need to figure out a way to do this for the static element of the army. The Chaos Warriors don't really give me much scope in their poses to have them stepping over things. I will figure out something... I would like to make a symbol of Slaanesh in rocks on the bases across the regiment and see if anyone ever notices! I doubt they would.

This is a shot of one of my next marauders. These are going to represent a Cult from the south. I am not sure exactly what more I am going to do with these just yet. The addition of a few Chaos like symbols gives a good hint at their alliegiance. I will put pictures of them up here once I think about them more and then start constructing!

Here is one of my giant knights. These guys are huge. They are also fantastic models. I do believe that there is a conspiracy by GW to not allow Chaos models to rank up. I have had to break apart each model a number of times to get him to fit with his bulky neighbours. They will be getting some greentuff treatment soon!

The tournament is now less than two weeks away as I have to leave early to get there! I at least made a provisional army out last night so I have an idea of what I am goig to take. I am finding it hard to get the army together as I don't really have a good idea of what I want. The characters are proving especially difficult. While I want a Slaanesh army I can't relly rely on their magic phase as at least two armies are completely immune to the effective spells on the list. Well I still have some time to think about it. Thats half the fun with Warhammer!

Less than three weeks!

Hmmm I have just realised that I have less than three weeks to go to the tournament where I am hoping to field my Warriors of Chaos. I currently have less than two hundred points worth assembled. I do have the bulk of the army done though with thirty eight models on their bases. Sadly that means fourteen hounds and twenty four marauders! Tomorrow I will have to sort out some characters to make sure I can meet the points. I have been looking to order a mounted Deamonette on all the online retailers but it seems that they are now out of production. I will have to head to the local games store in Hamburg 'Spieleland' which is fantatic! Failing that I will once again venture into GW in the hope that nobody speaks English so that they can't haunt me while in the shop.

Spending the weekend helping reonvate a house by the sea didn't give me much time to construct more little grey men this weekend. I spent all of Sunday asaulting an unruly hedge with a chainsaw. The novelty of a heavy spinning blade wears off rather quickly. My arms are broken in pieces. I have muscles now I didn't realise I had! Stevens Eriksson's books have also proved a distraction. I am currently enjoying the seventh book Reaper's Gale. Thankfully I have spotted a few retailers of english books as I doubt if I will ever have enough mastery of german to manage a novel of that complexity! I do have to get my 'Krieger des Chaos' tomorrow to figure out what I will bring to the tournament.

The upcoming tournament is being hosted by theNorth Wexford Gamers. I guess it will be a complete cheesefest as it is the first Irish ranking tournament. I don't think I will manage to core too highly, especially as my army won't even be painted. I would like to get a feel for how my regiments are doing though so I can be prepared for the next ranking tournament, which was just announced today, the Resurgence 2009. It is being held in Ballymena, Northern Ireland by the Northern Wasters. I hope it lives up to its previous incarnations as Bloodstorm. The last one was 2004 I believe. They were great fun!

I am still waiting on getting into some gaming fun here in Hamburg. Once I get more boot on bases I will organise some games properly. I am really looking forward to seeing how Warhammer is played here!

Some real progress

Finally I am managing to make some real progress on the Sons of the Bear. Whilst hiding from the horror of the real world yesterday I managed to get into a nice sculpting rhythm. This resulted in the Maruders now being offically half done, well half constructed I suppose. The cloaks take a long while to sculpt and it is getting hard to justify doing them for what amounts to a five point model. At least the next regiment of Marauders won't have them as I am basing them on a more cultist feel. I am assuming I will have only one large regiment of Marauders of 18+. They will be a pain to put cloaks on! The mounted ones will also have a cloak so I will be at fur by the time I am finished.

The shot here shows a work in progress on the cloaks still left to do. I begin with a small sheet of green stuff attached to the back of the model in a vague cloak shape. Then once that has cured overnight I reinforce it by putting more green stuff over the shoulders. I do this because the first one I tried broke in the middle of sculpting because it was not attached strongly enough. Once all this has cured I begin to sculpt around the shoulders and chest. This gives a further reinforcement for the cloak which is always good. This is the stage I am at with the ones in the photograph. That again has tocure overnight. Then you can finish the cloak with one further sheet of green stuff pressed onto the unsculpted area and then starting to form the strands of fur.

As I am going for woodland bases I don't really want to undercoat these guys white. Painting the bases after undercoating white is annoying epecially when i comes to returning the side to black! I have found recently that undercoating in white is saving me a lot of time painting. The thing is I can water my basecoat down and put it on carefully. Generally the watered paint needs two coats over the white. If applied carefully you already have a highlighted colour as the watered paint naturally collects in the recesses. A light wash (not using the Citadel Washes) then gives some stronger definition. This is a really great technique for annoying areas that don't deserve much attention. The more prominent and important areas tend to get the traditional blended and layered highlights. Anyway more about painting once I get to doing it!
I had to find some cork tiles to make the rocks for the bases. These are wonderful for simulating rocks as they are so finely textured. After scouring the supermarket and attempting and failing to explain in german what I needed I found them. They were tucked away with the lunch boxes. When the only word you can be sure of in a sentence explaining what you want is Mug then you are probably on the wrong track! I am going for a woodland base so I have been busy collecting fallen twigs. Thankfully it is autumn so they are plentiful. Seemingly Hamburg is the 'greenest' european city so trees are everywhere. I have noticed the the leaf litter you can buy from gaming shops is pretty plentiful here too! It comes from the seeds of Elm trees and gathers nicely in little piles on the street. There must be some enterprising chap going around collecting and bagging them!

Sons of the Bear

Well I have arrived. I have simply managed to swap the wasps for mosquitoes however. I am much less merciful with these as after the feasting of the first night here. I am still covered five days later with painful bites. I have been assured that they are relatively rare but every night I have found at leat one hovering about the room!

The work I have been attempting to get done has involved doing some marauders. I saw amongst the many Warriors of Chaos Blogs someone who had made marauders with double handed weapons. I really liked the way they looked so I have copied them. The conversions are simple. The Marauders come with flails so it is just a matter of carefully removing the chain and then adding a different weapon head. As the axe blades on the sprue are already quite large, even though they are supposed to represent hand weapons, I used them as the blades for the double handed weapons. I am happy with them. The less adorned axe heads are the nicest.

I wasn't just going to leave them like that however! At the moment I am busy sculpting fur cloaks for each of the twelve models in the small regiment. I had done this before for my Ogre army and it came out quite well. It is a different matter entirely to do the same on the much smaller marauders. The level of detail in the cloak has to be much higher. Making the frame on which to build the fur is also difficult. So far the work has gone well though the learning curve has been steep. Hopefully by the end of this regiment I should have relearned the technique I used before and hopefully manage to get a sufficent level of detail.