Future plans for the Chaos army

I have a lot of chaos warriors on my workbench, and I plan to do a solid production-line to finish a lot of units at the same time.

Earlier tonight I posted pics of my first twelve man unit of Slaanesh warriors, and I plan to add twelve more warriors to that unit.

I have decided that my chaos army will have elements of warriors not dedicated to any special chaos god, and they will be black like the more traditional chaos warriors. They will consist of warriors, chosen, knights and marauders (both on hoseback and on foot). I will probably use my chaos hounds with these units as well. I will use the Chaos Lord on Daemonic Mount as a leader for this warband.

I will then have units made to serve three of the four chaos gods. My Slaanesh are already on the way with the first unit painted. They still need their bases done, but I will wait a bit until I have a good idea that I can use for the entire army. These warriors will be joined by knights that will be painted up the same way.
I have assembled a unit of ten Daemonettes with full command, and I am currently assembling ten more to make this a unit of twenty. They will have pale skin and heads, and I will use black and purple on their skimpy clothing and purple wash in their hair and probably on the tails and scaled legs..

Khorne will have his followers as well. Two boxes of chaos warriors will make up a unit of twenty-eight (the newer boxes comes with sixteen warriors instead of twelve) warriors with full command.
This warband will also have forces from all the boxes of Bloodbound units that has come with the new Age of Sigmar release, and they will have Mighty Skullcrushers on Juggernauts as their cavalry.
I haven't decided completely on how I will paint these, but I am leaning towards painting them like I do with the black ones, but using red where I have used black before. I have not yet decided who will be the leader of this warband, but I am leaning towards the lord from the Age og Sigmar starter set as he really looks the part.

My Nurgle warband will consist of all the nurge models that I currently have, and two old boxes of warriors. The warriors will be painted up in a combination of the Khorne and Slaanesh models with armourplates of green, but also with some light and metal areas that will be drybrushed with green wash.
For the units showing skin, I plan to paint that Zandri dust and wash it with green wash. I've seen Mathias at GW in Oslo do this with an Ork and it is amazing how you can get the washes to give color variations. So by doing this I might be able to give the models the nurgly look without having too many different greens.
This part of the army will work together with the other half of my deamon army, my nurglings and plague drones.
The Nurgle warband will be lead by Bloab Rotspawned.

The big plan is to base spray and paint the deamons and deamonettes together as one batch, and as much of the chaos warriors as possible as one batch. I plan to assemble all the warriors I have in a way that makes painting as easy as possible. That means gluing them to their bases, gluing the torsos together and gluing on the arms that have weapons in them. Heads and shield-arms will be added later.

First unit of Ogres completely finished

This unit has been standing around for a very long time waiting to be based and washed.
I have always liked the look of the Ogres, but not really found out what to do with them. After I had painted this unit up, it took a long time figuring out what to do with the bases that could be done for the entire army, and then I spent a long time figuring out how to wash the skin to make it look good.

I had a little skin accident with one of my old metal ogryns for 40K, and I did not want the same spotted skin for these.

After a tip from Mats at Games Workshop, I decided to go ahead and try my luck, and I now have found a way to do wash on all future models with skin colors.

I ended up washing the skin with Reikland Fleshshade in a thin, even layer, and I think this worked out great.
For the metal I used Nuln Oil, and for all the others Agrax Earthshade.

The bases is made with almost white technical paint, and has been given a drybrush with white dry paint after the technical paint was completely dry.

Here is a picture of the entire unit lined up together.   

The first row with standard bearer, champion (Chrusher) and musician (Bellower).

The second row consisting of three regular Ogres.

It wasn't easy taking good pictures of the standard bearer, so I had to cheat a little. In the building instructions it said that the standard could either be a banner with a gnoblar in a little lookout box on top, or a pole with a scull on top. But I wanted to combine them so I glued the scull on to the front of the box and made something I felt looked a lot better.

A bit difficult to see from the pic, but the gnoblar can see between the horns and still keep lookout for the Ogres.

The next plan for the Ogres is to finish the unit of four Leadbelchers that are standing partially built on my shelves. Then there will be Ironguts, cavalry, characters and more. I will try to make one unit at the time, and make sure that I get the colours constant for all units. For a lot of the units I will also add some grass turfs that stick out of the snow.

Chaos is on the march

The forces of Chaos are rising again. This unit started out as The Shining, and the plan was to use them under the leadership of Lord Sigvald The Magnificent. Sigvald would lead warriors and knights that used to be noble warriors but for individual reasons had fallen to Chaos.

The plan is a little different now, as Sigvald seems to have disappeared with the new Chaos book that came out, or rather his name has been erased. The model is still in the game, but now it is just called Chaos Lord of Slaanesh. On the Games Workshop webpage though, he is still called Sigvald the Magnificent, so I will keep using that name for him in my army. He will be one of my four warlords, and the leader of the Slaanesh forces.  

This unit has been standing in my box for a long time waiting to be washed. So I have the leather and fur washed with Agrax Earthshade, weapons and chainmail with Nuln Oil and then all the armor plates got a purple wash to make the unit look Slaanesh.

Here is a picture of the entire unit together. I plan to add to this with twelve more warriors, so that the unit gets to be twenty-four strong. The entire unit is armed with swords and shields.

Every unit needs a leader, and this is the Champion with his sword raised, bellowing commands to move his warriors forward.

This pic is here to show that even the standardbearer has a shield. This is attached to the arm holding the banner.

The musician needs to have one arm free to blow the horn, so he carries his sword in a sheath on his back.

Finally I have added three pictures showing parts of the unit up closer than on the first pic in this blog.

Pictures of the female troopers

Thought I would share pictures of the two female Imperial Guard soldiers before I start painting them. Since the pictures were taken I have done one modification on the sergeant, and that is that I have glued a rifle on to her back as I felt she was missing something with only a chainsword and grenades.

Female guards, deamonettes and more

My first three Plage Drones are now completely built and waiting for warmer weather so I can prime them before painting. Before I start with the paintjob I will have a look at pictures of other peoples work to get some impressions of how I can paint them up. The minis need to look nicely painted but nurgly at the same time and that is a challenge I have not faced before. I have also found the second box of drones and will put that together in the near future so when I start to prime and paint there will be six drones to do as a batch job.

I have also assembled a unit of ten Deamonettes of Slaanesh with full command. I was not very happy with the musician, because the instument didn't stay in the air as I had planned. But that's what you get when you're not watchng the minis dry. I think it was quite fiddly to get the arms to sit right on the tiny sholuders, but apart from that it was a nice and fun little box to assemble. And I am quite sure that the unit will be expanded in the future. I have a few ideas about painting these, and I will go for purple and black clothes with gold details.

I have just made a conversion I've been wanting to do almost since I started with Imperial Guard, and that is to make female troopers. First time I thought about it was after seeing Starship Troopers. I've read the old fluff that says that only very few women join the Guard, but I feel some need to be represented. And with the spares from the Deamonettes box right in front of me I had the perfect start.
While assembling the Deamonettes I had this plan in my head, so I saved two heads that didn't look too deamony (is that even a word?) and today my first two female troopers were born. One of them is quite inspired by one of the characters in Tanya Huff's Confederation series. A non human with high purple hair (don't remember the name).
I might call her Sergeant Kerr in recognition of the series, as she will get a "normal" hair colour in my army.
The other female trooper have a pony tail of the hair she has left, and she is a regular trooper. I sort of figue most enlisted men to have very short hair, so in that way the deamonette heads with hair only in the middle of the head will fit nicely. You can't see that the enisted men have mohawk hair too, as they have kept their helemets on...
I had originally thought of using elf heads earlier, but on those heads the pointy ears were too visible.

I have also made snow bases for the entire six man unit of Ogres, and I will use some time later today or tomorrow to drybtush the technical paint with white to make it look even more like snow. On other bases, like cavalry and monsters I will try and add some grass turfs to break up the monotony of the white, but I don't think I will do that on these bases.

I also assembled Cypher - The Fallen Angel yesterday for my Chaos Space Marines warband. He is a metal mini but still quite nice with some nice details. This will give me a choice to field my Chaos Marines as fallen Dark Angels if I like, or if I choose to have my own chapter Cypher can have joined them for a duration as he is known to do such things according to the official fluff. This also says he attract fallen Dark Angels, so we'll see what I end up with in the future. But since all my Chaos Space Marines will be Dark Angls Green, then they might be fallen angels...

Merry Christmas to all...

I didn't get any Warhammer related stuff for Christmas, but I had not expected to get any either. I have so many kits on the shelves already, waiting for some tender love, glue and paint.
I did however participate in a Secret Santa event at Games Workshop, so yesterday I was in the store and got a present from another participant.
Everyone that wanted to participate bought a set from any of the modelranges. The price should be 250NOK or more. For about 250-280 NOK you get boxes with troops and units for most of the armies, so that is a good price. Then the staff members wrap the presents, and yesterday we were allowed to choose one present each.
I got a box of Plage Drones in my present. They are from the Chaos Deamons range, and can be used with the same bases both for Age of Sigmar and Warhammer 40.000. In the earlier days you had to mount the flying stems on square bases for Fantasy, but now I can just use the flyer bases on them for both systems. The box came with enough stems to make both kind of bases though, so it was not much job to use them for both system earlier either.
Now I have three flying stems that I can use with my future plans for my Dwarf airforce. I have been inspired to make a few balloons to use as observation platforms as well as the Badyear Blimp.

I built the three Plage Drones as a command unit, and then I will build three more as regular Plage Drones to make up a unit of six. If I happen to come across a single model in the future, I will add it to the unit as seven is a more Nurgly number, but I'm not buying a box just to build one of three. If they work great on the battlefile though, I might add more units, and then one box can provide the seventh drone for three separate units. Only the future knows what will come...

A little time ago I bought the Games Workshop backpack (known as the Munitoruim Battlepack Case Harness), and this can be used as a regular backpack, or you can open it to hold either one crusade case, two battle cases or three skirmish cases in a harness behind the rooms of the pack itself. I bought it as a bundle, and saved some money getting the Crusade case at the same time. This can carry a lot of models, so I felt it was stupid to just carry three ork Killa Kans and a Cannon. So I went down in my hobbyroom and found a lot of other projects that needed some love and care and brought them along as well. Now I have them in the case, so I plan to finish them all (not a lot of work left for many of the units) and get them ready for the display shelves and for future battles.

So the plan for the next few days is:

- Wash the unit of six Ogres that has been standing ready for the final touch for a long time. I see that I spilled some paint on a couple of pants, so I will need to repaint those. But apart from that it is a matter of washing the models. I have put this out because I've been a little worried about how the skin will turn out, but I think I am ready to give it a shot now. I also got some wash advice from the GW staff yesterday...

- Wash the unit of Slaanesh Chaos Warriors (The Shining ones). This is fairly easy as they all just need a thin coat of Nuln oil to make them look a little bit dirty, but not too much. I might also use a little drybrushing on the armourplates to make them shiny again. After all, the unit is called The Shining...
Then some time in the future I will paint up Sigvald to lead them. And right now I am also putting together a unit of ten Daemonettes of Slaanesh to fight alongside them on the battlefield...

- Wash and drybrush a unit of Dwarf Ironbreakers. They need the same care as the Chaos warriors above.

Then I have a cannon with crew that needs washing, and I need to finish painting (and then wash) my Grudge ponies. I wanted to put them on bases, and with the help of Mats at Games Workshop we decided that the square bases that came with the Plage Drones are perfect for this task. Since I have two boxes of Drones I have enough bases for all the ponies, so I will try and make these bases look like a trail of some sort, and add some turf and some technical paint to them as I do get a little room on each side of the ponies to work with. If this works out nice, I will use some of them on my Armies On Parade board next year...

-Finish paining my Killa Kans, the Kustom Mega-kannon with crew and a lot of Boyz for my 40K Ork army. I had not primed the Killa kans, so I gave them all a good dash of red paint to use as a base. The plan was to paint them up in the store yesterday to use them in a game at noon, but I ended up building Plage Drones instead.
The Killa Kans will be red with yellow details, just like my Battlewagon, and the Kannon will be yellow like my Trukk with both red and black details. I will paint the crew so that they can be used on other wehicles as well. There are five crew to each cannon, and I have four of them, so I thought I migh use some of the crew for other projects, as all grot helpers can be switched betwewn sets, and it will give a bit more life to the army to have a little variation. Besides, all of the different cannons won't need five crew to operate. And I might need one or two crewmembers on my Stompas.

Pictures of the finished projects will be shared here as units are done.

Unboxing the Relicos Militarum set

I thought I would try something I haven't done before, and that is a picture presentation of the unboxing of a set. I have made a new tag for this, simply called "unboxing". I will not do this for regular small sets, but I will do it for sets that I feel deserve it either because of their size or because they are special in some way.

First out is the quite large scenery set called the "Relicos Militarum". This deserves an unboxing post because it is the biggest senery set in the Games Workshop scenery range (at least so far), and it is combined from parts from many other existing sets (I'll come back to that further down in the post).

The set is a big sacred building that has been bombed and damaged by war, but it still holds some secrets. It comes with its own rules for use in games.
I plan to use this as a center piece for games or displays, so I could wish it came with better assembly instructions or at least better pics of what the designers have used where...

This is the front and back of the box. The back is the only place that really show how everything is supposed to look when built, so do not throw the box away until you're done building...

This is what meets you when the lid is taken off. Lots of sprues with lots of parts...

One sprue contains a broken Aquila and some rubble. This is half the set that is sold as the "Honoured Imperium". The parts that are missing, are the ones you use to build the statue of a Space Marine.

There are four sprues with the walls with the eagle heads. These are some of my favorite wallsections for Warhammer 40K scenery, and I look forward to combining them with regular wall sections unlike how it is done in the Shrine of the Aquila box where these walls originate from.

Here are the last parts for the walls above, the two head parts of the eagle and the stairs. There are also two tall ruined wall sections on each sprue, one large an one small. Four sprues in total. These are also the same sprues that are used in the Shrine of the Aquila box.

Then we have four whole cathedral walls. Two sprues with two walls on each, the total of four walls. Just like the two previous sprues, they come from the Shrine of the Aqila box.

There are four sprues with floors. These are standard floor secctions that comes with all the existing buildings. If I like to use more than there are in this set, I can always borrow some from some of the other scenery sets I have.

There are also four sprues of these wall setions with nice support collumns. These are the nicest collumns of all the existing scenery sets, and these sprues comes from the Basilica Administratum set. The wall sectons here are very detailed, with lots of sculls and other little details that needs extra attention when painting it up.

And Finally there are two sprues of double doors and wall sections from the Santcum Imperialis set. These are also nice walls, but their details are not so complicted to paint as the ones above.
The support collumns on these sprues have been used in different places on my buildings before, both as collumns and as wall decor. I also love the lamps on these sprues, and I might add some from my spares to use on this building as this will certainly be a center piece.

I don't have very high hopes for a quick assembly and paint process for this set. I will need a lot of space and a lot of time to get this done to the high standard it deserves and demands. As a center piece I really feel I should put an extra effort in to all the little details, and give this set the tender love and care that it needs to be the best I can make it. I will need to prime it, and that might have to wait for some warmer weather.