Back in the Painting Saddle

Progress!
I have finally finished some more little pieces of lead! And when I say finished, I mean finished up to the final matt varnish application, hence the shiny gloss varish effect. There may also be some static grass to go on them too, only it's up in the loft and I'm down here. You'll get the idea though.

Skavenslave Standard Bearer

Back in the good old days a crappy skavenslave unit could expect to march into certain death  er, battle with a shiny banner to give them that +1 combat resolution that could get them to stick around for 2 entire combat rounds. Now they have to rely on steadfast whish is something I'm very skeptical about. The model is by Black Tree Designs, and not tooo bad. There is no banner per se as I intend to sculpt a couple of skinned cats to hang from the banner, thus giving the whole unit the fighting name 'The Cat Skinners'. I imagine I'll have that done sometime in 2017.

Clanrat with fat-tailed rat

 Next is an old Citadel Clanrat that I picked up off ebay for less than it's original cost (more or less) and not some grossly exaggerated price that some internet rip off merchant thinks he can get some poor saptitian to buy for £10 or some other farcical amount. I modeled a rat onto the base, you know the new kind with a huge fat tail that makes them ever so vicious (the rat not the Clanrat). All I have to do now is convince my opponents that an extra rat = an extra attack and  I'll be sculpting these things everywhere!

Packmaster with staff-whip

 What do you do when you buy 16 skaven standard bearers in a job lot of Stormvermin and Clanrats? Well this really, cut off the banner pole and make it into a whip. Voila! One less standard, one extra Packmaster. As I have way too many Clan Moulder gribblies in relation to their unpleasant overseers, I have managed to kill two birds with one stone. I sometimes even amaze myself!

Ratty Rat Quisher

As if painting up the 3000 or so unpainted figures I own isn't a difficult and time consuming enough task, why not make it harder by modeling rats onto various bases? This one had an annoying upturned left foot that was probably due to a miscast or me sitting on it. Either way rather than bend it back the simplest remedy was to model a slightly squashed rat on the base. A liberal application of Red Gore and Go Faster Red to the base and it look like he got caught trying to nab cheese from his bigger cousin! Not much else to say about the figure except it's probably my favourite from the late 80's range.

6 points of fodder

Three skavenslaves whose job is to die in a way that both amuses me and hopefully furthers the will of the Council of Thirteen. The first two are Citadel whilst the third is from Black Tree.

Clanrats A and B

Two Clanrats with their shields in their right paws. I like the thought of these guys deciding that swapping their shields to the other side improves their survivability (they are deployed on the right of the unit) whilst at the same time exposing the Clanrat to their immediate left in true Skaven fashion.

Gravestone shield

I suppose giving this Clanrat a name could make this paragraph more interesting but I'm not going to. Just one more body to add to the horde. He has a shield that was probably stolen from an undead army.

Man-thing  Axe-chop

Finally an old Citadel Zombie that is just going to be placed in my Skavenslave unit. Both arms have a few open wounds on them and hunched stance which suggests to me spending a long time in cramped tunnels getting bitten regularly by rats. Probably a captain from the Empire whose own unfortunate resilience and cunning has enabled him to survive in the hellish nightmare of a skaven lair.I have plans for about a dozen other non-skaven skavenslaves to go into the unit including a High Elf, a few goblins, a beastman and anything else I can chop up from my bits box.

So there you are, my first offering of the year to the paint gods, not overly spectacular but probably worth reading for the ridiculousness of me making up a back story for a skavenslave/zombie model. Who knows I might even write a short story about him.  

Somebody Punch the Sculptor!

Inept Sculpture
This is the worst figure in my collection, a truly dire dwarf adventurer I think. If there was an award for lazy talent less sculpting then this lead piece of cack surely must be a shoe in. I didn't intentionally  buy it, it was hidden in an old box of Heroquest that I bought in a car boot sale for about £2. Luckily for the old geezer that sold it to me, he was long gone before I found this epic fail of a miniature. On the plus side there was also another dozen lead figures in the box that didn't make me feel sick. Now don't get me wrong I am not a brilliant scupter, but I'd like to think I could do a better job with a size 4 desert spoon.

Dung in lead form

Maybe I can start a trend of blogs where talent less individuals post their pathetic attempts online to showcase their incompatibility with creativity. Oops, I've just realised that's what this blog is all about.
My Bad.

I'm Not Dead!

Despite 8 months of nothing on the blog, and before either of my two followers (I had 3 but he/she dumped me) fill in a missing persons report, I have gotten out of my painting hiatus and started messing up my figures again.

I'm even too late to do an end-of-year review type thing to brag about how good I am at hobbying! Looking at a previous post I had the following in my figure cases awaiting pigmentation;

Telekinetic Wyrd
5 Attilan Roughriders
2 Orlock Juves
4 Mutants
Chaos beastmaster (converted)
Nurgle Sorceror
Eldar swooping Hawk Exarch
Astropath
Genestealer Hybrid
Beastmaster Wyrd
2 Ice Warriors of Valhalla
Catachan Luitenant
The Skaven Screaming Bell
Ratling Machine Gun
3 Jezzails
Deathmaster Snikch
Skaven Assasin
5 Wood Elf Archers
Necromancer
Gotrek & Felix
Mutant
Glam the Laughing Elf
Wood Elf Hero
4 Dwarf Ne'er Do Wells
Norse Warrior Woman 

Also in my previous years review, I had promised to finish these;

5 Marine Scouts
a 10 man Space Marine squad
Fabius Bile.

Of this long list of miniatures all I managed to complete was 5 Wood Elf scouts. Pathetic really.

I also didn't finish my four pieces of scenery, write any batreps or achieve ANY of the things I promised to do. So last year was a victory for apathy.

My inherent laziness 1 My Overoptimistic Ambition 0.

We'll  see who wins in 2013.

Why I didn't do shit since March!

Well I haven't done anything hobbywise in ages is a mixture of apathy and an attempt to prolong my life with exercise. This is taking the form of cycling a bit. now don't get me wrong, I'm not Mr 2hours exercise a day or anything like that, I'm just trying to offset the amount I stick in one hole by burning calories up so less comes out the other.

My lovely new Odometer

My lovely old bike.

So the plan is to try to live longer and better which should in turn mean I can finish painting up all my armies! See! There was a relevance to my gaming blog. Currently the odometer is on 54km so it will be interesting how many more I can put on by the end of the summer. Wish me luck!

Painting up Sacrificial Lambs

I've just finished painting up five Wood Elf archers. They are from an era long before Glade Guard, they are Marauder archers with plenty of character (I think so anyway). they were one of my long term half painted figures that always had enough paint on them to play with but not enough for them to look nice. So anyway, I have painted them up and now feel a wee bit sad as all the internet experts all say a unit of five scouts are there to be an annoyance to your enemy shortly before they are exterminated! This rankles a bit with me, not because I cherish every single model I paint, and definately not because I play in a protective style (indeed my Skaven army is used as a Kitcheneresque WWI attritional type of warfare). No the problem for me here is the ethos of the army, I simply can't see such a small population of elves glibly sacrificing themselves for the temporary gain of holding up a unit of bloodthirsty beastmen for a turn when they are so few. So what I intend to do with these guys is to use them in an aggressive forward manner but not with the intention of losing them in my opponents first magic phase. Of course how I achieve this is not yet worked out...

Suicide Squad?

Paintwise they came out ok, I sculpted a spite on the central archer who i will be using as a Lord's Bowman more often than not, I suppose in a vain attempt to provide an extra reason to keep them alive I may well throw a mage in the unit for mutual protection.

I also managed to get rid of some figures and CDs on ebay that amounted to €1.45 more than the price of Storm Of Magic, which basically means that my ebay wealth stayed in the Paypal account for approximately 45 minutes. Ah well, easy come, easy go!

Defeated by Saint Patrick!

Well due to a clerical error, Saint Patrick's day and the ensuing alcahol prevented me from playing a game of warhammer last weekend. All I did do was nearly finish my 5 Wood Elf Scouts, I say nearly but as I half made a woodland spite on the base of my would be champion he has probably got another week of work on him.My other significant hobby related acts were to sculpt a pair of balls on Red Maw the Chaos Hound and submerge my Sludge Jellies in Wooden Floor Varnish. Oh yeah, I downloaded Battle Chronicler to make super snazzy battle reports. By the way floor varnish is not a good idea, it eats milliput a bit!
No more Guiness for me until I make a dent in my painting list.

Preview of Wood Elves Vs Lizardmen at the weekend.

This Saturday me and Boy! are going to have another game of Warhammer. My wood Elves vs Lizardmen. I'm using (obviously) the old Wood Elf army book as there hasn't been a new one since 2005! The Lizardman army book is from 2003 so I'm not sure how under/over pointed it may be so to err on the safe side, Boy! is fielding 2750 points Vs my 2500. As this is his first attempt at writing an army list too I thought it might be fun to have uneven forces.
 After looking at the Lizardman book I'm not so sure it will be any fun as Scar Veterans are nasty, as are quite a lot of the army. As far as I can tell he will be using two blocks of 30 Saurus each, 20 Temple Guard and the rest made up of shooty Skinks and Salamanders.
 For me I will run will a fairly Glade Guardish force with 2 units of both Wardancers and Dryads. A Treeman, some Glade Riders and a hero on a Great Eagle. I'm trying to fit a second mage in the army as I know there is a Skink Priest in the list who will be used to cast spells through. I'm thinking of taking a Spellsinger with Calingor's Stave and hope to use the woods as a battering ram!
So I've got to go up into my Man Cave/attic and make sure all the Lizardmen are ready for some arras up their jacksies!