Of skulls and blood - Battle Chaos Part 23

Just so you have a slight feeling of how I feel about what's following :

I don't especially love the song in itself, it's just it's the one which immediately makes me think about glorious success or great achievements. It's the sound of glory and victory... (plus it's glam rock which is always nice for a oldhammerer).

And why is it you have such a victorious feeling then? some of you may ask (and you'd be completely right to).

Well, I just put the last varnish spray and static grass touches on my Khorne champions. In Febuary, these guys were already standing on my painting table, waiting for some love. They've been a patient lot, I can tell you. Never eheard a complain, neverwhining like some... They stayed with just a layer of red on the table looking with a stiff upper lip and dignity in their eyes.

Well now it's over, here's the lot just for you :

Doing the details and special care on each of them may have taken me the same amount of time than doing the reds, blacks and metals on the lot.

I had to start doing them at once to have a good coherence. Then when the base colours were done, I moved to a semi-individual approach on them. Some of them whith little extra detail or few mutations got some freehand on either armour, shield or weapons. I also tried to give magic weapons to those with no special mutations.

I'll present them one or two at a time but the first one is a special one to me. It was a gift from my little brother who got it from someone who couldn't really appreciate its goodness.

It's the champion with a power mace and the strange mechanical parts. A champion who's quite loosely fantastic and could very well dwell in the 40k universe.

He in fact began his carreer as a berzerker in my 40k army before I decided to him justice and remove the ugly backpack to restore him to his former glory.

Chaos champion with mechanical parts and power mace

 As you can see, the mechanical limbs have received flame patterns to represent the fact they are valued gifts from Khrone and the source of his might. Not visible on the photos here, I added OSL on the heat tank on the top of his back (should have taken pics of that) and in in right eye. ONe silly detail too is the fact I painted his chin and head like he hasn't shaved in few days. I tend to hate perfectly bald characters when their baldness is not due to age. I just can't imagine space marines shaving their head delicately before each mission or chaos champions giving much attention to their outfit (with the exception of slaanesh worshippers of course). So 3 days beard and hair for him and the others.

The Khorne champion fighting against a Slaanesh foe (taken from the Lost and the Damned book)

I'm still working on a good way to take photos and those above are still not up to my expectations. I have to contnue working on this. Anyway I managed to take some better shots of the chicken knight with his lance built (just needs little greenstuff here and there) and with some extra plastic bits to give some more detail.

Next time, some more khorne devotion and anything fancy I can find.

"Cockadoodledoo My liege " - Battle Bretonnia Part 5

OK, I had some littel time and spent it mainly on advancing on the famous rooster knight.

 Some straps and a saddle, some feathers added here and there to make it look a bit ore realistic, a pair of mushroom just to practice my "yellow dots on green" skill.

"Me and my giant cock are sworn to serve any lady in need !"

Priming is not very far form here, I just have to convert some lance for him with a magnet and add some reins (already placed some wire in the beak)

By the way, here is the way the bird is gonna look like : red crest, white feathers and blue legs, that's pretty much the best cicken you can get in France and is very particular to my region. Tailfeathers are gonna be bigger on my rooster but hey, its fantasy time !

What a REAL rooster looks llike

The khorne champion are actually taking little more time than expected because I decided to blackilne some of them around the armour plates to give a clearer aspect. They're not far from the ned though and I also started working on Kaleb which will be shown in little time too.

Also coming soon, the full review of the eldar pirates and maybe some army lists for both RT and 6thed just to see where all of this is going (might even want to make a 2nd ed army list)

I just have to open my eldar army suitcase and count everything that I have so far. Here is just a tease with the photo of one of the 3 floors in my suitcase : 

Cocoricooo Messire ! (plus some other silly things) - Bretonnia Part 4

OK, last time I told you about the "knight project" I started on the oldhammer forum (no longer Blood forum) and told you to have a look at Axiom's very good blog and involvment in that project. I feel being the initiator of that projects implies I should not get too late on the others, it's why I tried to make some progress on this.

If you remember previous posts, I decided to mount my Knight on a rooster for it is the symbol of my Region on France (Bresse). I found a perfectly fitting model here and found out the scale was exactly what I was looking for. These are made in some kind of hard rubber or soft plastic with paint on top. 

I tried to remove the paint with a 3 weeks Dettol bathbut couldn't remove any paint from it. I decided to dip a part of it in acetone to see the result and the paint immediately began to fall off. It just took a few dips in acetone to remove the paint with a toothbrush (I would not recommend a long bath of acetone since it seems the rubber/plastic melts slowly in it).

Next step was to remove the silly details at the feet (this is mainly grass and branches sculpted next to the legs to make them more sturdy since the rubber is not rigid enough) removing these made the model fall apart so I just pinned in the legs and added some wire and now it stands proudly on its 2 feet. I will have to sculpt back the legs properly with GS but no big deal here.

The giant rooster waiting for a rider

 As you can see, the sculpt is quite good fro a rubber touy and I hope the paintjob will make it look convincing.

Now, for the rider part, I chose the easy way over the oldschool way and ordered a plastic pegasus knight to ride the bird. As the legs come in 2 parts , this enabled me to glue them a little wider than normal to fit exactly to the chicken body. The upper part of the model has then just been glued slightly orientated to the left and I put a "Louen Leoncoeur" on top of it. I'm considering adding magnets to the right arm to be able to choose from magic sword, lance or even the arm holding an eagle.

Some decoration wil come after that in the form of a blanket and some treasures in his back. I will also add a saddle with leather straps to attach it to the chicken. Maybe some decoration in the feathers could do the thing but I will sort that out as it takes shape.

Oh and the total cost for the parts is 3.5£ for the rooster, 2.5£ for the knight parts and 0.5£ for the base which mlake it a very cheap project for once ;).

So here is the Rooster knight for the time being...

Another thing that got my attention recently was the stripping and basing of some old eldar pirates. A few Ebay purchases here and there, got me to get some of the models I didn't already have.

Amongst them is the eldar captain with a demon mask. This is one very interesting model. It's actually built from the more classic captain you can see on the left in the picture below. But if you look at the cpatain on the right carefully you can actually see that all the details have been added on top of the other details. You can see the soulstone under the left horn and you can even see the remnants of the left holster under the bag with a face. Seeing models with common parts is no surprise in these ranges but I was more used to seeing parts used for several models. This time it's just the same model but with lots of things on top (plus an arm swap).

 

 

Rogue trader eldar Captain (sculpted then converted by Jes Goodwin)

 

But what to do with that particular model. For some reason I want this army to be compatible with both Rogue trader rules and 6th ed and I wanted a normal leader. This means an autarch for the 6th ed rules. I remembered reading about autarchs in the compilation book so I gave a quick look yesterday but couldn't find anything. It does say some exarchs can change aspects and wear gear from multiple aspects but I couldn't find the actual word "autarch" in the book. Maybe I dreamt of it, I'll have another look. If any of you know if it's actually really in there, please tell me. Another things is I want to equip the guy as the model is but couldn't understand the true advantage of an autarch in 6th ed (if anybody knows please tell me, what's a good use for an autarch equipped like this guy?).

If I don't find a use for him as an autarch he will make a perfect dire avenger exarch.

Anyway, I decided to put this little fella on a nice base with some shale I looted from my hollidays hunt (remember this post). These shale pieces proved worthy since you can easily break them with bare hands to the shape you want and they can be drilled with no effort. I even believe drilling is essential because I think just gluing them means it'll break in no time.

BUT, pinning a mini to its base means cutting off its tab and You know this is 1st class heresy right?

Eldar captain on base

 I found a way to concile both the hobbyist and the archiver in me : I just cut the tab off but glued it under the base to keep it as a souvenir :

Now I still have the model and its tab to remember this model is just 6 years younger than myself...

On the painting range, the Khornish boys are very close to being finished, the final details awaiting a bit because I decided unexpectedly to add freehand on some of them to make them more sexy. Here's the bunch as they were yesterday night and next time you're seeing them , it's gonna be party time with varnish and complete basing !

Things end and things start...

I recently launched an idea on the BLOOD forum and found with greta pleasure some people had been recptive to it. Please let me explain.

The idea was to emphasise the multicultural aspect of our community (the oldhammer community and even the hobby comunity in general) by producing themed models based on our culture.

The starting idea was to make "a knight" to embody what we are, where we come from and all of that. Chosing such a simple subject was to give the more freedom possible to interpretation.

You can join or see the how things go here.

I've considered several ideas for this project, all of them using the prejudices about french people which included a Nurgle knight on a giant snail with smelly cheeses haging all around his armour or even a slann knight riding a giant frog.

The one idea that caught my attention was the idea of a brettonian knight riding a giant rooster for the rooster is the symbol of France but moreover, the symmbol of my region (where roosters happen to be white with blue legs). You will see the WIP's of this project in posts to come but the main reasons I wanted to talk about this little project of mine were :

- I would love people to join

- I wanted to help launch Axiom's blog because I believe it is going to be a very great one from what I've seen of the lad on the Blood forum.

On top of that, that fellow got me to get my hands on an incredible zoat helping an eldar, which will join my eldar army in the xenos force (understand a slann contingent with the help of the zoat fighting alongside my eldars against chaos, necrons or whatever nasty/mean/ugly foe)

Zoat hero helping an injured eldar

 So please join his blog, trust me on this one, you won't be disappointed, and if you don't trust me, go have a look on his Bratt confrontation gang and you'll see what I'm talking about.

This little side project is another nail in my achievement's coffin. I can almost hear the countless number of models waiting for final touch and varnish on the table, all screaming : "STOP IT, DON'T START ANYTHING NEW DUMBASS !  FINISH US OR KILL US"

It's why with a little feeling of guilt, I tried to spend the one hour I had free on trying to make a banner for my squat leader. The photo is unfair on the brilliant blending I achieved here (hum hum), and I don't even know if the banner looks chaotic enough. 

My goal was to paint something which meant "chaos is what puts the world into motion and we chaos squats are the gears which make it so..." (as written in tiny in red ) or something like this. I don't know if it's what comes out when you see it. 

I kept the banner grey because I wanted grey to be my contrast colour, which means all the banners and all the clothing (apart from champion's) will be grey too with slight touches of red here and there to warm up everything.

Please be honest and tell me what you think of all this.

 Anyway, next week and others are dedicated to getting rid of all "nearly finished" models on the table to start things properly on other projects.