Reaper Elementals and a @&$% Scrap Launcher WiP

 The RPG adversaries menagerie has had some color added to it.  The Reaper Bones I Kickstarter, and Bones II when it ships, repopulated my Fantasy RPG collection.  It had languished for many years as I concentrated on Armies and Wargames instead of RPGs.

There is a certain relaxing effect to knocking out some individual miniatures.  By which I mean miniatures that do not require a lot of thought about how they will integrate into the rest of the army and how to make a new model fit into an old scheme or mesh with techniques that I'm not currently using.

 The woodland Spirit, and the Large Rock Elemental still need bases but I've misplaced my stash of plain 40mm squares.  In light of the trend towards round bases in the most recent batch of games maybe that's a good thing.  I'll probably do a batch of bases for these once I've got a good pile together.... darn it!  there I am thinking about a unified theme for bases again!

At any rate these were both knocked out in a very short time.  They are unprimed but scrubbed with dish soap, dried and painted straight on.  This time there do not appear to many adhesion issues other than a few high spots that seem to rub off easily when handled.

These were rapidly painted using basic color blocks followed by two layer dry brush a wash and and two layered highlights.  The Rock Elemental got multiple colors to emphasize that is an aggregate creature while the Woodland Spirit got  colorful emphasis on the fruits and mushrooms... a little bit of walking lunchbox there. There is a wicked mold line that I missed in clean up on the Woodland Spirit... good thing its not a competition piece!

Moving on the Ogre Kingdoms I swapped out the supplied base (actually swiped it to use on the FW Great Unclean One) for a Dead Land 50mmx100mm from Base of War.  It is base coated, 2 layer dry brush and a wash of Secret Weapon "Sewer Water" in this picture.  It gets worked up to be a lot more dry looking in the plates between the cracks as it goes along.

 Th rest of the Scrap Launcher is a nightmare. The construction requires more than two hands... I swear it!  after a few false starts... including one rather spectacular explosion I finally cobbled together the basic frame, although I'll still have to get the skis set to the right angle to make the whole thing settle into place.  Th whole thing looks very fiddly and fragile at this point... a design feature to be sure but it might make for interesting transportation issues.

 I spent a little time further experimenting with the GW technical paints for the rust and patina effects.  These are much more coarse and pronounced than my usual method but I think I like where they are going.

Typhus Corrosion creates a sandy, low grade, texture and the much more granular Ryza Rust builds on that.  The combination can give a really gnarly, rust rot, look.  Adding the Nihilakh Oxide as a targeted wash completes the effect.  With some practice I think it'll be a good addition to the toolkit.  not indispensable... but handy.

HUNGRY! Skrag the Slaughterer

 IN MAH BELLY!

Skrag continues the tidy up portion of my Ogre Kingdoms army.  By that I mean big monsters and character models are still turning up to be painted.

This guy is the metal casting and his way to heavy for comfort.  It had to be sealed several times during construction and remains difficult to move due to the fiddly gits hanging onto the pot.

Is it soup yet?





 I did have a lot of fun adding the blood effects!   Chop, Chop, Splatter, Splat!  Inna da pot it goes!



The weapon blade was stippled and I like the effect.  I recently met a fellow gamer that paints in a much more realistic style than I do and it has inspired me to work on adding some elements of that style in to my highly cartoon oriented approach... not that I intend to become a hyper realist!  I like my fantasy cartoons, especially since they show so well at typical table top ranges, but I might do an army project that is more realistic at close range while maintaining the long range visual appeal of the cartoons...  should be fun!

Greasus Goldtooth

 While moving boxes around the game room I located this Greasus Goldtooth model that I had been working on just prior to moving to Japan last year.  Moving does that yar!

I finished it up this evening.  It had really been quite close when the move hit so it wasn't that bad to knock out.

The worst part of this model is that it is metal.  The thing is so heavy that it was a challenge to handle it while painting and required a few intermediate coats of sealer during the course of the project.  I've been using Army Painter flat which goes on thin and seems to be fairly durable with minimal impact on color and texture.  The gems are spot varnished afterwards with Vallejo gloss.

I built the thing with the goblins in the reverse of their usual position.  I had thought of them as throwing the gold at a crowd in the fashion of monarchs impressing the little people.... on after I'd gone quite a ways down that road did I realize they were intended to be creating a gold carpet for Greasus to be paraded on!   oops.....

OGRE PANTS!

I started reviewing my Ogre Kingdoms Army so I can make some new additions in a similar style.

I realized that I'd actually done the army as an experiment.  Normally I paint with the idea that I want to minimize/eliminate brush strokes.  For this particular project I actually exaggerated the brush strokes to achieve texturing effects.  Additionally the Army has very little dry brushing although there are a few cases of heavy wet brushing where, again, the brush strokes are exaggerated for effect.  I painted this almost entirely at my local game shop and the cry OGRE PANTS! rang out often.. in part a reference to the pirate themed trousers sported by most of the army and in part just because it was fun (and very Ogre-ish) to bellow!

The Ninja Maneater shows these  exaggerated brush strokes clearly on the skin which was built up stroke by stroke from a base color called Stein Grun which is a mossy green.  The layered effect makes the whole skin seem exceptionally dirty and greasy without losing definition or illumination.

The Gnoblar contingents are swathed in a truly ridiculous quantity of bandages... the price the pay for being in close quarters with the Ogres... and with the other Gnoblars!

 Since the whole project was silly for the sake of being silly I added an Ogre Champion from the old Battle Masters game as a Maneater.  Hes a little more broad that the regular ogres but sits in the Army nicely. The belly plate shows that brush work again as do the skin and metals of these variously equipped Bulls.

 Everybody conga!  Indeed it is a good thing that most armies don't include a lot of Gorgers just because the very dynamic pose of these metal monstrosities is tricky to modify and thus we have the Gorger Chorus Line.  On the bright side the pale, streaky, layered, skin looks convincingly translucent.

 The Hunter was fun and I really enjoyed the cats.  I took a sort of part hyena.. part Jaguar approach and was happy with the result although.. as pat of the experiment they are a FAIL! since they are a smooth work up without the crazy brush thing.  Thats all right though I still like 'em!

 OGRE PANTS!  Here is a great example of the pirated trousers!  Even though all the trousers are individuals the colors are from a defined palette so they look like they belong together even though they are all different.  These are by design VERY cartoony and the Ogres seem to keep their trousers meticulously cleaned even though none of their other equipment/belongings are afforded the same care! 
There must be a powerful contingent of laundry Gnoblars working feverishly to keep up!

 The standard bearers clearly show the brush layers on their skin.  The pattern on the backs developed over the course of time and as it evolved it improved.  Some of the early efforts produced effects that were clearly ill defined brush marks but when I got it right the striping looked a lot less like a brush marks and more like low contrast zebra or tiger stripes.

 The standard bearer on the right with the purple and yellow trousers shows the evolving stripes.

 Boss!  This is the Bruiser from the Boxed Army and stands in as my generic tyrant if none of the Big Names are available to rumble.  Gotta be secure in yer manhood to wear those trousers!  Wood grain on the various weapon hand grips was painted in the same fashion as the skin except that more of an effort to look like wood grains was made!

 Matronly Maneater!  here the wet brush was used on the rolling pin which looks sort of moldy or slimy... disgusting!

Finally the Yhetees!  More competitors for "So You Think You can Dance"  still better than the Gorgers!

Thanks for bearing with the review!  I'm now in the right frame of mind to attack the new models.  I think I can work out something that gets the best parts of this effect with less time investment.

More Ork status marker mayhem and Greasus Goldtooth WiP

Work is progressing on the Dark Eldar Reaper.  I've added some new paints (P3 Menoth White Base, Menoth White Highlight, and Bone Jack) to my inventory and am still getting used to the way they work.  So far I really like the consistency and flow.

I should have some WiP of the Reaper up this weekend as well as some views of resumed work on Greasus Goldtooth and some other odds and ends.

Here is some more of the Ork status marker mayhem!  I decided to stick with the yellow text for adverse effects and go with white for positive effects 

The release of the Ogre Kingdoms has motivated me to finish up my small backlog of Ogre Kingdoms models with a view to adding a couple of the new kits to the pile.  The new kits are as stunning as they are spendy so I'm waiting to pick them up until I really take a look at the Army Book... which I'll get to as soon as I finish reading a borrowed copy of the Malifaux Rising Powers book.



I've been resisting Malifaux since I really don't need to add another game to my stable at the moment but the models are so cool and you don't really require many of them to play casually... 

Famous last words...

Progress

Nothing is quite finished yet but there are some updates as I have been working!

I've had three projects make good progress:

An update to a Gobsmasha...  I've had this Epicast piece kicking around since second edition and It was painted in one of the very bright cartoon Ork schemes that were popular at the time.  Here I've simply dirtied it up and distressed it a bit to make it better able to blend with my current grubby Ork scheme.

Updated old Gobsmasha

 

Continuing in the red theme there is a new Tyranid Hive Guard.  I love these guys and the strongly remind me of the old Zoat!  I may actually use some Zoats in this capacity for a lark... I'm liking the fleshy look of the cannon and am working on a second one of these.  This guy is essentially done except for the base.  I do a paper mache treatment for the Tyranid bases so like to do them in batches.  This guy is waiting on his sibling and a Venomthrope that is being worked along with it so they can benefit from the same base materials batch.

Finally there is Old Greasus...  I really hate this guy!  He is a huge figure and has been the reason why the update has taken so long.  I actually like big projects but this figure just takes a lot of work! He's only about 40% at the moment.  I hope to finish him up by ... Wednesday..ish... before I get to work on Project Thunderhawk!

So there are the active projects for this week.  Next week sees Project Thunderhawk enter phase II, work on the display base for the Runtbot, and work resumes on Campaign based fiction. Worky worky!