finally some real progress on dwarf units

As the headline says, I finally have some real progress on my dwarfs for Armies on Parade.

The event is on October 28th, so I have just about a month to finish up. After spending almost two years and not getting much finished (but a lot is partially painted), I have finally gotten some real progress.

Yesterday I finished painting the arms and weapons on my first 10 Longbeards. They will be the only Longbeards for the AoP board, but I will paint up 20 more in the future in the same way. It felt good gluing them together and seeing them as a unit for the first time. There are still a little work before they are 100% complete, but not much. 

I have some shoulder guards to glue on and paint, and the banner needs to be finished and glued to the arm of the banner bearer. 

I am still debating as to what color to use on the details of the banner, as there is a wide seam that should be in a contrasting color to the banner itself. The banner is purple, and I am thinking either silver or light gray for the seams, but I am not entirely sure yet. I will have to look in to it this afternoon.

Pictures will be posted when this work is done.

I have also done about 90% on my Miners unit. There are a few details that I need to paint on some of the Dwarfs, and they need a cleanup before they get a gentle wash. But I would have no problem bringing them to the tabletop for a game as they stand today.

Pictures of these will follow.

I am also working on a single model to be located at a special place on my AoP board, and that is the Grombrindal dressed as a Vampire slayer. He was sold with a one year subscription on White Dwarf some years back, and I now see real progress in the process of presenting him in the display.

The base is done, and all parts are assembled and primed.

I started this weekend by painting the skin on his face, but when he is standing up the brim of the hat hides most of it. I will paint his beard gray, as I did with my Longbeards, and his coat will be brown leather. Then I am trying to figure what colors I want to use for the smaller details. 

The base is a stone floor, and on top of that there is a table with a coffin on top. The table is falling apart and a goblet of wine is falling off it. In the coffin there is a Goblin vampire, and I am trying to find out what paint that is best to use to give him sort of a pale green skin.

The table and coffin is painted up and glued together, but I am missing some metal details on the coffin. And I have to paint the goblin inside it...

The next step now is to finish the units and character mentioned above to 100% and then take their pictures.

Then I will start this afternoon to prime the weapons of the next unit that needs finishing, as I have several Dwarf units that are waiting to have their arms and weapons primed and painted. I need to finish three units like this before the parade day, and I would also like to paint a fourth unit that is assembled in the time I have left. I also need to build and paint my board, and my gate and maybe some trees to go on top of it.

Progress on new units

I have gotten in some more painting time, and there are two units that are progessing nicely. 

They are: Dwarf Miners, 15 Dwarfs with musician and standard bearer. I'm not sure where I have them from, but I think they may have been bought on Ebay a long time ago.
My first unit of Miners that I painted many years ago got very dark, with the darkest of blue on their armor, so this time I wanted to do something a little lighter. I went for Death Guard Green, as it looks like a little muted color that I haven't used on any other dwarf units yet.
The chainmail is painted Leadbelcher instead of a more shiny metal color as the Miners wear their armor as much for protection in their daily work as for going to war. I hope to get some more painting done on them this weekend, as I am missing the hair, candles on top of their helmets (with flames on the candles) and some details (lanterns, leather pouches, golden medallions and so on).

The second unit I am working on is a unit I have started some time ago. That is my first unit of Longbeards, 10 Dwarfs with full command. The torsos have been "almost ready" for a while, but now I have primed the arms and heads and have started to paint the heads. My plan is to paint the beards before gluing the heads to the torsos so that I don't spill a lot of gray paint on to the already painted torsos. The arms and shoulderguards are being primed seperately, and I plan to keep them like that until they are painted and ready to be glued on to the torsos.
When this unit is done I can start to prime arms for my Thunderers as I don't have space for too many different small pieces on my table at the same time.

I also have an old metal Miner that I am painting up, and my plan is to have him standing by himself working on locating new oars to mine down in the lower level on my AoP board. The idea is to set him up so that he is visible from at least two sides when you look in to the board.
I think it's cool to see the difference between this old dwarf and the newer figures, as this metal figure has a much more outstanding nose that gives him a totally different character compared to the newer dwarfs that GW have produced. That is some of the beauty (hopefully people seeing my board will agree) of showing off models from different times and ages mixed up together. They are all legitimate GW figures, but some of them are just from a forgotten generation. I am sure the GW team will remember them, but not sure that the young people in the store have ever seen these old metal figures.

I have also sorted all my Chaos models, and placed them in tubs after what chaos god they worship. I didn't think I had that many Chaos Warriors, but almost all the tubs have 20 or 30 warriors in them. But then again, they are the models that introduced me to the Warhammer hobby so they have a special place in my heart.

There are four gods, but I only have figures to follow three of them.
I have a large goup of Chaos warriors that follow Khorne, and that tub also includealmost all the new Blood-something releases that came with the Age of Sigmar starter set and after. There are also some heavy cavalry, represented by 6 Scullcrushers (and I think I have more somewhere else)
The Nurgle tub have the largest model in my army, the Maggoth Lord Bloab Rotspawned, along with several relatively new Nurgle models from the end times releases. Also there are some Plaguebearers, Plague Drones, two sorcerers and the big unit of Chaos Warriros.
The third tray is dedicated to Slaanesh, and here I have a big unit of Chaos Warriors (seeing a pattern yet?) a Sorcerer, and when I find the box he is currently in, I will move Sigvald the Magnifient over to this box. Along with this gang I can field my Daemonettes, and a chariot but they are not in this box.
The last box have the units that doesn't have a Chaos mark, what used to be known as Chaos Undivided. These are Chaos Warriors that will have black armor  and in this box I also have a large chunk of Warriors, some Chosen ones, some Knights in all stages from just awaiting to be based to just been taken off the sprues and a lot of hounds that is only missing their bases.
When my dwarf army is ready for AoS I will try and spend some time painting and basing my Chaos army alongside building other Age of Sigmar sets and 40K stuff.

Progress on the dwarfs

Yesterday I assembled a unit of Dwarf Irondrakes for my slowly growing Dwarf army (or Duardin or Dispossessed as Games Workshop calls them now). The unit has 10 Irondrakes, but I am already thinking of making it twice as big, as I have several boxes of these tough little warriors.
For my Armies on Parade (AoP) board I might settle for 10, but for all other purposes I think I need at least a 20 strong unit. I know Age of Sigmar is often played with smaller units than the old Warhammer FB editions, but still it looks very impressive on the table. I'll check with my local Dwarf expert at GW if he is at wok on Saturday...
Anoter solution for the AoP board is to have a unit of 10 on its way down in the mines, and a bigger unit (or at least a same size unit) marching towards the gate. I'll see how much time it takes to paint this first box to the standard I would like and decide after that.

The Ironbreaker box will either make 10 Ironbreakers or Irondrakes. The difference between them is that the Ironbreakers have axes or hammers and shields while the Irondrakes have special guns (almost like miniature cannons).
My plan originally was to have some Irondrakes and some Ironbreakers, so I think I bought 3 or 4 boxes of these minis. But when I opened the first box I found that they look very different from the original metal Ironbreakers so they will not look good being in the same unit. I think these boxes was the first ones I bought after Games Workshop came out with their new design for the dwarf models.
I remember I was a little disappointed that they had a new look at the time, but not anymore. The new design is good, it just doesn't blend seamlessly with the old one. So the solution is to keep the old ones as Ironbreakers and the new ones as Irondrakes. That way they will be separate units, and the different appearance does not matter anymore.

The next step with the Irondrakes now are priming and painting. As most of the miniature will be silver, I plan to spray them with black primer, and when that is dry I will spray with Leadbeltcher to get the metal on them. Then I think I will try and drybrush them to get a more shiny metal as I usually use silver colors on my dwarfs. My old Ironbreakers was painted with Mithril Silver, but that color is no longer available in the paint range. They have a new paint called Stormhost Silver and for the metal Ironbreakers that I have from the huge Dwarf lot I got, I think this will work well to get them looking the same. For the Irondrakes I think a drybrush with Necron Compound might do the trick, if not I will try some highlighting with Stormhost Silver on them as well.

The nice things with all the different dwarfs is that the arms blend seemlessly between the boxes for most of the units, so it is easy to make units look apart from each other.
An easy swap to make some difference is switching between different banners and poles. And it is also possible to swap hands between units if the dwarf you want to make different is holding one handed weapons or tools.

Space Marines from both sides... and a little dwarf update too

There has been a while (again) since my last update, but from now on there is no excuses for not working with miniatures and updating the blog regularly.
Since my last blogpost I have moved to another house, and even though I still have to find out the best way to organize myself around my workplace, I am up and running.
I have the same sideboard/desk that I had before, but my storage facilites are a little different at the new house, so I am trying to find the best way to set up how I want to have my desk organized regarding building new models and painting existing ones.

Since the last blogpost I have finished assembling all miniatures in the Dark Imperium Startbox.
When I bought the box I didn't really plan to ever field the Death Guard traitor Marines, but when I built them I really got a liking to them so I have decided to field them in my Chaos army. They will probably be their own command, as my original Chaos army is not tainted by any of the Chaos Gods. They will probably field as allies, but I am leaning towards painting them all the same, but add rust and Nurgle Rot to the Death Guard minis. The regular Chaos Space Marines have Chaos Cultists fighting alongside them, and they will also keep their distance to the Poxwalkers fighting alongside the Death Gruard. A possible back story can be that The Knights of Oblivion have been fighting in two different warzones for a very long time and one of the forces has been lured to join Nurgle. I think I can make that work when it comes to fluff, and this will also add a little more backstory to the Chaos Marines.

I have also painted up a smaller starter set called "First Strike". This is a start set with a lot less figures than the Dark Imperuim box, and because of this it is also a lot cheaper. The miniatues in this set can also be bought in four separate boxes, but then they cost a lot more. There are six Primaris Marines in the box. Three Intercessors (the Primaris version of Tactical Marines) and three Reivers (mix between scouts and Assault Marines without jump packs). The box also includes three Death Guard Plague Marines and six Poxwalkers. These models are designed to just snap-fit together, but I glued them anyway as I don't plan to take them apart and I don't want them to loose bodyparts on the battlefield or in transit.

These figures comes in colored plastic, and the Primaris Marines are blue and the traitors green. They still need a good priming and painting though...

The Gatekeepers have also gotten some heavy fire support with a Primaris Redemptor Dreadnought. This Dreadnought is a lot bigger than the classic ones, and was a fun but frustrating build. There are several parts that are supposed to be moveable. Some I understand, others are getting glued together later in the building process anyway... I built mine ending up with one arm that can't rotate, but apart from that all moveable parts work as intended.

I will now take a small break from my Marines to work on my Dwarfs for Armies on Parade.
I assembled two cannons and crew these last days, and I plan on building some scenery for them as part of the Armies on Parade (AoP) board. One cannon is an Organ gun, and the other is a regular cannon.
I had originally planned to field them on top of the wall I have, but they are so wide they will have to go on the ground instead, and I will use two other cannons on the wall.

I hope to find a good place to stand and prime my models in the near future, so I can get started on the painting.

8th edition is out

Saturday was the official release for the new edition of Warhammer 40.000. We have reached the 8th edition now, and the storyline has been moved forward a bit through the last releases in the 7th edition with the resurrection of Robute Guilliman, the fall of Cadia and all the other things that happened.

For the relase there was a new boxed set called Dark Imperium. With this box Games Worskhop have done many great moves.
- They have included the rulebok with all the rules you need to play 8th edition right in the box. -this means you can atually play after just buying the set, no hidden costs to start. They still want you to buy the codexes and other books though.
- The box is really beautifully packaged
- It introduces the Primaris Marines, a new type of super-Space Marines made to keep the Imperium safe and destroy the forces of Chaos.

I had to get this box, and spent the entire day yesterday at Games Worshop in Oslo building Primaris Marines and trying out the new rules in a game.

I hope I can prime my first models later today (weather permitting), so I can start painting them during the comming week. I plan to paint them up just like my other Gatekeepers. Since I started painting my Space Marines chapter many years ago, Games Workshop has replaced their paints a few times. But I am armed with the colors that will match the best to what I have used before.

The Dark Imperium box includes two types of Marines. You have the noble Ultramarines with their new and improved Primaris Marines, and then you have the foul Deathguard with their Plague Marines and their minions and partners.

Today I assembled 13 of 22 Primaris Marines from the box.

I assembled 2 Space Marine Lieutenants. They are something new, as we only had Captains and Sergeants before. This has made me think that we will see Guilliman doing some exceptions from the Codex Astartes and that we will have chapters with more than 100 Space Marines soon. After all, what else would we need Lieutenants for?

The Captain I left for building the way I usually do (painting as I build), as he has a cape that needs to get special attention,

The Standard Bearer is a veteran Marine called an Ancient with some pretty nifty rules. He was the first Marine I assembled from the box. I had to glue his backpack twice to get it to sit tight, so hopefully there will be no future issues with it.

Then there are 2 5-man Intercessor squads, and I have assembled 1 of them. This is the equivalent of the regular Space Marine 10-man squad, and the basic troops of the Primaris Marines.

The box also contains a 3 man Inceptor squad and this is the buffed up version of the assault marines. I have not built these yet. This edition GW want the flying troops to be in the air, so they come with some new flying stems that makes it possible to field them in the air. I am not sure about how I like these compared to the old assault marines, as their weapons look  little weird with shields on their barrels. But I am sure I'll grow in to liking them as I build and paint them up.

Finally for the good guys the box contain a 5 man Hellblaster squad. This is four marines and a sergeant armed with plasma rifles. They will fill the role of the old devastators. They look mean, and pack a great punch. Only problem is that plasma might blow up in your face from overheating when firing it. In the game we played, my squad ended up in a firefight with a Helldrake, and I lost 2 men to overheating in my first round of shooting.

I have not started to look at the Deathguard models yet but they include 10 Marines, 20 humans and 1 mean looking drone.

I will put pictures up here as I get everything assembled and painted up. I plan to paint at least my good guys up alongside my other projects, so I can use them if GW Oslo holds some gaming events in the future where I can participate.

Long awaited update...

I'll start with a follow-up from the last blogpost. The test models of my Daemonettes are almost done. I have painted up two of them with the same colors used on different areas, and I need to decide who I like the best. The only thing that is 100% decided is that the skin will be Daemonette Hide, I mean if I don't use that for them then who should it be for... That means my Deamonettes will be a lot darker than what other people have painted, so I must find a good combination for my palette to brighten them up a bit.

I have done some more work on the Dwarfs too, but still not finished anything new. I've started to paint the hair and beards of my Imperial Dwarfs and also done some more work on the bodies of the Longbeards. The master plan is still to have a board with Dwarfs (or Duardin or Dispossessed as they are called in Age of Sigmar) for Armies on Parade 2017, and I still plan to do it mostly as described earlier in this blog.

This Saturday Games Workshop Oslo held a record attempt. They wanted to set a new record for most infantry models on a gaming table. The rules were simple, the models had to be playable for Warhammer 40K (or Horus Heresy/30K) and they had to have at least 3 different colors on them plus a finished base. These are the same rules as Games Workshop have for using models in tournaments held in their stores. 

They had the old record with about 1700 figures (set earlier this year), and their goal this time was 3000 (later they updated their goal to 4000). 

The new record for most infantry models on a gaming table is... *drumroll* 4422 figures. 

The average number of models that people brought was 220. I managed to scrape together 28 models in total, while the one who brought the most had 750 (among them two full companies of Dark Angels).

The good thing about participating in this record attempt was that I had to get some models based, as all my finished models with wash and bases are in cabinets at the summer house in Sweden.

So i grabbed all the 40K infantry models I had that was at least primed and put them in one of my Crusade cases and set off for the painting table at the store.

The first thing I finished was the Ork Mek that I started to paint in the color class at Games Workshop in January. I gave the base a good slab of Martian Ironearth and it was the first time I used the spatula to get it on the base and not a stiff brush. I think it worked out well, so I immediately started with the base of my Imperial Pilot (don't know the official Games Workshop name for this one). When he was done I used the same basing material for 14 Space Marines from my 2nd Company. They were not 100% finished as they needed some details fixed, but they had all their colors on. I also added a Space Marine captain (master of Relics) that I originally painted up for my Armies on Parade board for 2015, but I didn't find a place for him then so he's been standing among my "almost ready" models since that. 

And finally for the Space Marines they got joined by a Dark Angels Interrogator-Chaplain that had all his basic colors done but was missing some highlighting.

When this was done, there were a little time left, so I based my Imperial Guard squad with two females in it. This time I used Astrogranite as basing material. My idea is that the Guard will be more in to the urban fighting, so this woud look better for them. Some of my Guard units will be based on the sculpted Sector Imperialis bases, and I think the grey Astrogranite goes best with this. 

This unit is not done by far, but they had 4 colours on them (black primer, Mechanicus Standard Grey, Administratum Grey and Bugmans Glow) and I managed to add Castellan Green to the canteen covers, grenades and a few other parts.

With all models that could be present for the record attempt placed in their appropriate places on the table, I still wanted to paint more. So, I started to work on my Ork Boyz. After using Naggaroth Night on my Mek I got a liking for that color, so I gave a handful of Boyz dark purple clothing and helmets. Among them were two heavy weapon Boyz armed with heavy stubbers.

I also sat for a few hours at home on Sunday working more on the Boyz, so the result now is that I have several Boyz just missing the final wash and their bases before they are ready to join the comming Waaagh. One carrying a mine (not sure if he really is part of the Boyz or some sort of speciaist) one with shoota and choppa, two with heavy stubbers and one with grenades. I also have one with a chainblade that is washed and just waiting for a base. There are several Boyz in my Crusade case just waiting for some attention, and when I get back home from a short spring holliday I will try and do both Dwarfs and Boyz. 

General update

Since the last post I have had a period where I haven't done much building and painting, but now I am at it again.

Since last time I have done a little work on the two Dwarf units that I have started on. My first unit of Longbeards have their armor painted now, and after their boots are painted, I will go on to paint heads and arms before glueing it on. This is a unit of ten figures, but I will paint up my other Longbeards in the same way, and will probably end with two units of fifteen with full command, or if I want smaller units, three units of ten where only two have full command. These warriors are quite different from previous Dwarf minis, so it will not be natural to mix them with older versions.

I'm also almost done painting the torsos of my oldest set of Dwarf warriors, the unit I have decided to call my Imperial Dwarfs as they have gone to live in the city amongst the humans, but come back to the keep to fight with their brothers in the upcomming battle that they are all mustering for. I will start shortly to prime and paint their arms and heads.

I have also come quite far in painting a unit of regular Warriros, and have started to paint and assemble my first Gyrocopter. The Gyrocopter will take some time still, as I have to prime all small parts manually since I neeed to paint the insiode of the Gyrocopter during assembly. 

Since my last update, I have gotten hold of some Genestealers for Warhammer 40.000 and so far I have assembled a Goliath Rockgrinder (a truck with a huge shield with a huge shield with rotating saws that grinds up rocks), a box called Broodcoven (sort of the 3 leaders of the clan with two small accolytes), and I am in the process of thinking out what colors to use on their skin to make them look almost human while still having a hint of alien on them (so far I am leaning towards Cadian Fleshtone with a purplish wash). 

The Rockgrinder will be painted in light gray (Celestra Gray) with an orange stripe down the front. The orange will be the same as in the uniforms of the troops to match it together.

The regular Genestealers will have orange uniform jackets (Jokaero Orange) with dark grey (Mechanicus Standard Grey) pants, black boots and light grey (Celestra Grey) armor. This will be the same for both miners and soldiers, but with the changes needed to make it work. The Genestealers in other clothing will probably get some sort of red or yellow clothing to fit in but still look different enough that they stand out on the battlefield. 

I have also started on a few test models from my Daemonettes of Slaanesh and so far it seems they will be a little darker and a lot more purple than the ones in the regular art from Games Workshop. I mean when they have a paint called Deamonette Hide, isn't that the natural color to use on their hide? I'll drop by Games Workshop later today and see if they can help me with a color to use on the hair.

Pictures of the things mentioned in this post will be shown as soon as I have anything worth showing.