Mollog

During the spring I went a bit nuts and bought a load of Underworlds warbands. I recently took stock of them, and noticed that I had seven boxes of unbuilt teams! Clearly I need to do something about the pile, and I started with one of the more novel warbands, Mollog’s Mob. In this post I’ll show you the titular, grumpy leader of the lot.

I’d normally paint the unit as a whole, but I’ve noticed that the summer months are usually spent working, travelling and with the wife, and if not, the weather’s often too hot to paint. So a bit strapped for hobby time.. But I wanted to enter something for Ann’s hobby challenge, Miniatures of Magnitude. Although the challenge ran for two months, I only had around three weeks to do my entry. Hence I decided to just paint Mollog, and leave the rest of the gang for another time. Fortunately all the models have somewhat different schemes, so batch painting wouldn’t necessarily have helped anyway.

For the paint scheme I mostly followed the box art and Duncan’s tutorial. I didn’t have all the paints used in the tutorial, but I thought that the scheme had a little to much purple in it anyway (the skin and the big mushrooms). My scheme ended up a bit more blue, and with more vibrant toadstools, a combination which I have to say I like more than the GW’s versions. I also took the highlighting a little further than Duncan did, as I’m trying to push the contrast on my models. Overall, I think this might be my best work so far, and it was a joy to paint!

There were a couple of new things that I tried on this model, and of which I’m really happy about. The first was that I used Pallid Wych Flesh for all (non-metal) final highlights, something that worked really well. It seems to pull all the colors together and of course makes those highlights pop. I also tried drying retarder for the first time, and did some rudimentary weblending on the toadstools and the blue mushroom. I think I didn’t yet get the right mix of paint and retarder, but I’ll surely keep practicing with it on future models.

And yeah, in addition to painting a big model for Ann’s challenge, there was an appropriate square in the hobby bingo as well: “paint a monster”. Done!

Termagant – Experimental Color Scheme

After the Khorne guys from last post I decide to go for another quick project, and one that I painted for my wife. It’s a single Termagant model, originally from the Battle for Macragge box.

Now, my wife isn’t interested in the Warhammer/miniature hobby at all, but on occasion courteously pays attention to what I’m painting. Some time ago she asked if I’d paint her something. “Of course”, I told her, as long as she’d come up with a scheme. I gave her a choice of some models and she picked an old Termagant, or “a tiny dinosaur”. Her thought process started from a Hello Kitty scheme, but as soon as she discovered someone had already stolen her idea (Hive Fleet Leviathan :D), she wanted a python pattern on the carapace.

Ok, something that I probably wouldn’t have tried myself, but as such a great challenge! I looked at some reference photos on Google, and it turns out that there’s quite a lot of different patterns on the snakes. What I ended up painting was more of an impression than a straight up replication. I think the pattern more or less works on the back carapace, but I messed it up on the head. I also don’t know how the scheme would translate for other (bigger) Tyranid models, but as this was a one-off I don’t really have to.

The painting process itself was almost as experimental as the scheme. I used three paints to lay down the base for the skin (Steel Legion Drab, Zandri Dust and Ushabti Bone), and then used washes and drybrushing to define the model further. The carapace bits got a bit more careful approach, with the pattern design and the striations. I used some new paints, or rather inks on this model, too! I recently bought some Daler Rowney FW Acrylic Inks, and I tried them out on this Termagant. I used black on the pattern design, white to highlight and burnt umber to outline some of the carapace panels. While all of them felt like great products, the white definitely takes the cake. I don’t think my pot of White Scar will see much action any more..

So yeah, another fun little project completed and new things were learned! And what did the missus think, I hear you ask? She seemed to like it!

Bloodstoker and Bloodsecrator

It has been quite a while since I last worked on my Age of Sigmar starter set, but I’ve now finished the two lesser Khorne characters – the Bloodstoker and the Bloodsecrator (don’t you just love GW’s naming conventions? :D).

To be honest, I didn’t really look forward to painting these Chaos models due to the insane amount of details. But the AoS starter set is sort of my testing ground for “tabletop standard” and “speed” painting, I set out to paint them quickly, to a decent standard and without too much pressure. As with the ‘reavers, the starting point was an article in White Dwarf Jan ’17. However, in the end I used very little of the tutorial as is, instead employing quick techniques I’ve picked out in the last couple of years and trying some new ones as well.

I think I achieved my goals with this small project pretty well. The pair has around a week of painting days on them, and hopefully they look like I’ve put some effort into them. Here are some of the techniques/steps that I used to speed up the process: the skin is just drybrushing and washes, and the basecoats for the blacks were done with Contrast black over gray basecoat (okay, this might’ve actually slowed me down a bit). The bone bits were layered by “overbrushing” rather than meticulously going over each and every detail. Highlights on the metallic parts are very rough, and on the whole I didn’t really go back to fix “mistakes” that much.

Khorgorath’s motivational buddy finally shows up

Below you can see my progress on the starter set so far. The two leaders are yet to be built, but otherwise all the models are there. It’s looking pretty good, with 36 models painted and 11 to go, but of course this has been a slow burn project. When I’ll get back to it, I think it’s the Stormcasts’ and the Lord Relictor’s turn.

I could also use these models to claim a square in the hobby bingo, this time “adding a model to army and painting it before using it in battle”. I don’t know if I’ll ever use them for a game, but by default they’ve been painted before playing, so should count.