Monster manual special : The Cockatrix !

OK, let me get this straight right away, this is going to be one of those stupid posts, just so you know. You don't have to say anything nice about it, I won't mind (much).

OK now James Holloway from Gonzo History has initiated a little contest to create new monsters like those you can see in the original monster manual.

You know, the kind of monsters when you have more imagination than money or models !

The first step being to find a cheap toy, I found exactly what I needed !

Trash Bash competition - The outpost

Brian Roe from Roebeast's magical house of sunshine has organised a new edition of the Trash Bash competition on the Facebook page.

I have to say trash bashing has never been my forte so I thought I'd use the occasion to take part and come up with something for once !

You can read the full rules on his blog but the main points were the following :

Contestants will construct and paint a vehicle or structure inspired by the terms ASSAULT/SIEGE. Concepts do not have to be military in nature and can embody any ideas that the entrant sees as viable.

The required bit is a medicine package. From pill bottles to blister packs, any bit that once held or dispensed some sort of medicine is valid

So I tried to look in my stash for suitable pieces I could repurpose and came up with those :

Silos for scenery - Thank you Morikun !

Some time ago, I entered an online challenge on Morikun's blog like I had done before.
I was quite lucky to get a couple of rewards for my entry and amongst them a very nice lasercut mdf kit from Systema gaming.

The deepest blues are black - Inquisition hunter force

Proper zenithal underlit and desaturated group pic

So here we are, end of yet another project (so far at least). After starting painting one model at a time and then painting two at once, I've upped the game and made it to 3 models at a time !

That's probably due to the project in itself being far more fun than I expected to be...

My entry for the Temple of Morikun Challenge !

"Why on earth are you showing us an empty base JB ? Are you that lazy you're not even painting your models now ?"

Pleaaaase, let me explain a bit.

You might remember in August 2015 I made a space ashigaru for an online competition to celebrate Morikun's 300000 viewer. Well this year, he's decided to celebrate his 600000th viewer (he isn't losing time as you can see) and he's therefore organised a new competition.

Since he's spent quite a lot of time and energy preparing something huge, I thought it was only natural to submit something this year, especially since I managed to grab something last time.

Rogue Quest level Seven : Mad Dog Finnegan the Barbarian

Level 7 of the Rogue Quest ! This time is my turn after Jon's brilliant bard and I decided to go into the heavy weight category this time. 

As you know, the barbarian is one iconic type of adventurers renowned for his delicacy and very refined approach of things...

Yeah OK, laugh all you want, wether you want it or not, the barbarian is the hero we all admire as kids because you can immediately understand what he's all about, generally one goal, and almost one way to achieve it : violence. When violence doesn't solve a problem for a barbarian, it basically just means he hasn't used enough of it yet.

Rogue Quest level Five : The paladin !

So here we are, time for level five of the Rogue Quest ! After my wizard and Axiom's Rogue, it's time to get on with some new characters !

This week's entry is special for me, I've always had a great fondness for Paladins as previously discussed. They are one of the most iconic and characterful classes you can have and because of the many rules and limitations for them, you have to be in tune with that sort of characters they are to fully enjoy them.

Interpretation by Olivier Ledroit, see how he's lawfully good AND gets the (dirty) work done ?

The ideal paladin is obviously a lawful good warrior that fights for the good of all, always puting his own safety and personal interest in second place. A good paladin will usually take the greatest care of his gear and body as they're his tools to do his duty. A paladin will usually have a great constitution along a high charisma. To represent that I knew I had to use a space marine but didn't which one to use. I've considered using a terminator at some point to represent their tanking role but that looked silly amongst very lightly armoured models so I opted for this one piece Space marine designed by Bob Naismith (IIRC). It had just the perfect heroic pose I was looking for !

Rogue Quest Level Three : The Wizard

First of all, let me suggest a suitable soundtrack for this post with either a classic :

OR a suitably grim dark tune :

So here we are, already at the third level of the Rogue Quest ! After starting with my fighter for level 1 and after Jon/Axiom's barbarian for level 2 here is my entry for level 3 : The wizard !

The obvious way to represent a wizard in warhammer 40k is probably to use a psyker of any sort so I decided to pick one of the few I have. I'm lucky to have a good load of eldar psykers of all sorts but I have relatively few human psykers and the only one I had which looked heroic enough was this charming psyker from Bob Olley.

As you may know, I've become very fond of his models over the years for they often prove to be unexpectedly pleasant to paint. When I say unexpectedly, I mean I often struggle to understand what's what when it's unpainted but I usually discover the model as I paint. This makes the process very organic and enjoyable, something I've one-sidedly decided to call the "Bob Olley effect". I'm pretty sure most people who are not keen on his sculpts would change their minds the minute they actually paint one.

Since this model is meant to represent my wizard in cyber dungeon crawling stories, I wanted him to look a little different from the usual imperial psykers.

The wizard in a group is often stereotyped and amongst all the usually associated images, this kind of fellow was something I wanted to suggest in a discrete way :

Aenuroid - The sword of grim darkness

Aenuroid, the cyber assassin

And here's another model done for a little group challenge ! This time there was no choice for me but to participate since I'm partly responsible for it taking place !
I've had an Aenur model for ages like many of us who once bought the WD that had him in it and like many people, I've never had a go at him because I simply didn't really know what to do with it...
That was until I bought the Adeptus mechanicus Skitari box and decided to try the simplest of conversions on him : a head swap.

For some reason I really liked the idea of making the conversion as simple as possible and the fact I've been playing Dishonored a lot may have been an influence...

The Space Hobbo - Oldhammer Legacy Warband 2015

OK so it's the time of year when I wake up and try and fulfill my promises. One of my commitment was to model something for the Oldhammer 2015 legacy warband. After painting my transgender Asgard barbarian last year for the 2014 warband (see this and this if you don't get the meaning of it), I had to paint a turquoise pirate for Rogue trader.

I knew I wanted my pirate to be immediately recognisable as coming from Rogue trader so after some thoughts, I went for a plastic marine body from the RTB01box.

Since none of the heads were looking like I wanted, I opted for a plastic modern Space Wolf head (kindly donated by a generous belgian member) and opted for the full 80's way with the help of some putty. I wanted my Space pirate to be a mixture of all those icons below (I hope I'm not teaching you who they are) :

Lemmy Kilmister

Speed painting a cyber samourai

Tuise Crom, the last samourai (of his village)

As ever weak, I've decided to dive in the popular practice of speed painting... You can see many examples from the Oldhammer community HERE and I have to say that it really terrified me to think I could only have one hour to paint a model even without basing it...  (the fact my friend Crooks did it the very same day motivated me to have a go myself though).

Hearing most people had learnt something in the process, I decided I wasn't worse than anyone and could try it myself. Trying to think out of the box and painting out of the comfort zone is always a good way to progress.

The plan I set during the minutes before the attempt were those :

- I took out all the paints I would be using and placed them in groups for each part
- I plugged the hairdryer in the bathroom in case I'd need to speed drying times for washes or anything
- I went to the toilets before (you do not want to urinate yourself just because you're almost done with your last details

and then at 19:59 I took the photo of the primed model and started when the 20:00 signal appeared...

That's the point where you know the beginning but not the end...

A Christmas Tale - Dadhammer episode 3

 This time of year again...

The everlasting battle between chaos and law, evil and good is finding another battleground on this holy day....

"Come on Vixen ! I'm telling you that awful thing with Prancer and Comet was just an accident ! Look, I brought you a present, now come here will ya?"

"Do you think I'm a newborn Claus? You think I didn't see how you got rid of Cupid and Dasher? I know you mean to sell these sacred woods, why would you need them when you've already fired most of the elves"

Stranger in a strange land - The give-away prize

Please let me suggest you some music to go with the post to come :

You're fine? Good, let's begin then.

You may remember, I organized a little give-away to celebrate my 100th follower?, Well you may also remember that Warlord Paul won it. The little challenge associated with this event was really simple, everyone who felt like participating only had to pick one model amongst those I submitted and give 2 flavours to go along.

And here is the result !

Give-away results

OK there's been time enough for all the people who wanted to enter the competition to do so. Now is the time to decide who is winning the most sought after reward of all : an unloved model modelled and painted by no other than me with the winner's touch.

Having received nuemrous propositions, I've decided to list them in an Excel Sheet. Why would I do that?, well I'm a engineer during daytime so numbers the lies you can get out of them is part of my job and skills so I guess it came as the way to go for me. That and it is very convenient to actually draw a winner from the list.

Sooooo, here are the entries and their associated propositions :

Looking at the Charts you probably realise that some models inspired the contestants more than the others : 

 But let me show you in a more graphic fashion :

Everybody loves a good pie chart right? No? Ah OK, guess my love of numbers is not shared by all...

Funny to see Aenur and the imperial preacher were the 2 most wanted models with the Slaanesh Daemonette a close 3rd.

So maybe you'll like how I chose a winner ?

Oh yes you're right, with Excel's random command (that's the french version but I'm pretty sure the english one has it too :D)

 Just add a little database search in here...

And we're good to announce the winner! (simple as that).

All it took was a lunchbreak of typing and a few formulas here and there, why give the task to an anonymous online random generator! 

I have to say if I had a D25 I would have obviously opted for it but I'm pretty sure you'd have missed the pie chart even though you won't admit it.

Well you must have understood by the heavy Spoilers in the pictures above who the winner is . I am very happy that Mr Gates via his microsoft software decided to award Warlord Paul of this random because though I've had very friendly contact with most people on the list above, he's been a very enjoyable person to deal with via all this blog/forum/facebook/interwebz thing. (that and his proposition is one of the rare I can actually achieve in a reasonable amount of time...). 

I'm also very happy that the model to get some love is one of those which would have been the least likely to get some attention from me so it's actually a triple win !!!

Now I have to find a way to tie this :

This...

And this :

 You can see there is already a little idea spawning here...

I've actually strated prepping and basing the model and there should be just some little conversion job to make this one look good...

Next post will probably be about another Rogue Trader adventurer OR maybe about the Grey Sensei I'm building for BOYL2014... Only time will tell...