Chaos Snakemen - Chaos Battle Part 15

Good Morning everyone, 

Today's journey into the golden age will bring us to a forgotten race amongst those who never came back.

I don't know much about them but would definitely learn and read aboud them with pleasure; One thing is for sure, these are great minis.

I decided to base mine on 40 mm square bases because the minis are quite long and need room. It's also a trick to play them counting as ogres or anything else whose rules would fit.

This article was the occasion for me to experiment new photo techniques (and use the fading blue underground) but I still can't find a way to get rid of the shining aspect which ruins a part of the paintjob...

Chaos snakemen

There are only 5 different minis so I had to get my hands on an extra one and commit the unspeakable : cut in the lead...

Saranth Elf Mangler is my champion for this unit so I decided to use a colourful skin tone to show his rank compared to the more classic colours of his retinue. I also placed him volontarly at the limit of the base to make him stand form the rest of the unit and give the feeling the others are following him.

Saranth Elf Mangler

The second one is S'sirron Fangthrane and is my favourite of the 5. His noble stature and the overall look are a pure delight. He' also got the best sculpted scales imho. There are some kinds of tatoos on his left arm (invisible on the photos below) but I haven't treated them correctly and might have to get back to them with a bluish approach in a celtic way.

S'sirron Fangthrane

Third next is our dear Higgat Dwarf Slicer. Definitely not my favourite. The sculpt is to "flat" though the arlour is quite excellent. The broken shield is here to break the flatness of the mini and to link it with my brettonian army as well.

Higgat Dwarf Slicer

Fourth is S'Lon Life smasher, very sneaky or should I say snaky with his shoulders raised and the fact is seems to be going backwards. This one is the one who looks the nastiest to me. He looks like he's wainting for th eright time to stab the injured or the ones fleeing...

S'Lon Life smasher

 Fith and Sixth are S'Lararet Slintered Fang and S'Liip N'ot Bolt Thrower which are the same miniature, the latter having received a spear from a chaos marauder to make him look different from the former.

S'Lararet Slintered Fang

S'Liip N'ot Bolt Thrower

To finish this post, here is one of the only illustration of a snakeman I could find. It comes from the Slaves to Darkness tome of the Realm of Chaos books.

Chaos sorcerers - Chaos Battle Part 14

Hey lads, Here are some of the chaos sorcerers that got attention on my painting table last year :

The excellent Sli'ith Ironlung and Jazekal Ironface

Sli'ith Ironlung

 When I painted this Jack o'lantern familiar, I was close to painting it like The famous Pirate in the manga "One Piece" (I have to confess I'm a huge fan) :

I avoided the idea fo this time though I keep it in mind for my undead army if I happen to make a zombie pirates unit with a sartosan vampire. This time I might want to get my hands on another familiar like this and make him look like the future "king of pirates".

Sli'ith is a very nice mini to paint and it's cool to see the scratch parts used for other minis (the same body as for Darumog in this case)



Jazekal on another hand is a quite plain model but one of the too rare to show a sorcerer actually casting a spell (and a good one since he's using both hands...). I treated him with a dark green cloak but I sense there's something missing here... Still don't know what to add, freehands? chessboard edges? flames pattern? if you have any idea, fell free to help and Mr Jazekal here might make a comeback on the painting field...

Jazekal Ironface

 At last, here is an old conversion I had made a day I didi'nt want to paint rank and file but felt like hobbying... I love thses days, you just go in your bits box and you find pieces you had forgot. I might make a series on what comes out on these occasions. I believe that a lot of good ideas came out this way for the guys in the studio back in the day and I'm ceratin It's the way Pete Taylor's chaos spawns came out. Not intended but fiercefully characterful.
This one is clearly not at the level of Pete's stuff  and it only took a couple hours to build and the same to paint (low standards help) but at the end of the day I had a sorcerer on palaquin instead of champions bits and plastic leftovers... Please share if you happen to have minis that came out when they were not planned....

(Please be kind and try to forget the horrible "magic flames" attempt on the sword, it's wrong and ugly, I won't do it again I promise)

Cheers

Nurgle Warband - Chaos Battle Part13

Last time I introduced you to my latest Nurgle Warband inspired by the "lost and the damned" cover art and presented you its leader; th great champion on palanquin.

This time is the time to present a part of the retinue.

One of the champions I favor the most is the Halberd one. When I started painting these lads, I wanted to avoid Green as much as I could, but I finally failed and only avoided it on one of them (you'll have to wait to see which one avoided the terrible curse of the "green Nurgle mini".

Nurgle champion with Halberd

 I also wanted to show an older mini I realised a few years back and that got me the will to do Nurgle stuff (the Nurgle frenzy of the early 2000's was cooling down at the time). Pete Taylor fans will recognise the influence of his Tzeentch knight with a snail body. I Imagined mine as a knight turned into a sort of maggot and fly. I love the larva theme though it could have be done better. Anyway, I treated the armour completely rusted which gave the will to work on rusted armour for the years that followed. You can also notice at the time I had not yet decided to avoid the "clean greens" I despise now... The mini does not realy fit with the rest of the flock but it takes 2 places in the unit which helps finish the last rank in a unit and can count as a standard bearer...

The warband in itself is not truly complete since I have not ticked all the minis on the list.

Since I'd like to field Mutander Bubonicus as well, this warband is clearly not over, especially if I consider adding more exotic stuff such as beastmen, thugs or chaos dwarves...

Everybody deserves a second chance - 40K Chaos Part 4

Many people deserve a second chance and most minis do (even if there are eldar EPIC titans I still want to forget)...

As I'm building a chaos space marine force born little time after the Horus Heresy, I decided to be merciful to old lead friends from the 2nd edition since the force has stuff from the first to the last.

The Chaos Marines proved to looked good when equipped with more recent gear :

2nd edition Chaos space marines revisited

 The ones that actually gave me a tough but admirably grateful time were the raptors. Theses lads always looked awkward to me but this time I had the feeling I could do something. I wanted the unit but I didn't have too much money to spend on new plastics. I decided to spend little money on plastic bits to upgrade these and the result looks pretty convincing to me. (I admit I didn't manage to get rid of the weird body positions since I didn't touch the minis but only added fancy stuff to them) :

Nurgle Warband - Chaos Battle part 12

This time I finally managed to nail most of my nurgle Warband at once. I took a series of photos to field them at once on a table :

I'm gonna show them one after another so the first of the lot will obviously be the champion on his nurgling palanquin.

The warband in itself was designed to try a new approach (for me) as painting was concerned. I was trying to avoid the "clear greens with too good to be true stains" and got most my inspiration from the "lost and the damned" cover with the warriors clad in rusted armours and brown outfits.
A little detail is that these minis almost met their doom when I varnished them with an outside temperature of 2°C with my airbrush. The result was a perfect white layer making them useless and the guys at my local store saved them with a new layer of love and antishine spray (hence the weird brightness on some of them).

The result is far less readable than what I expected but gives the overall ascpect I wanted.

Nurgle Champion on Palanquin

Music lovers will have recognised "Fat Albert Rotunda" from Herbie Hancock below my champion but that was just to give a groovy tooch to the photo...

Old lead lovers will have noticed the lad lost a sword and gained an heretic plastic axe. Well I have to confess in the days of old when I got my young hands on this fellow, I had the most silly idea to give him a tech weapon in the form of a chainsword. 1 year ago when I finally decided to give the guy a good acetone bath to get him a good paintjob, I granted him the best I had which was this axe. Now it looks oversized to me but HEY how more EPIC 28mm can this be?

Humble people, an ode to peasants - Brettonia Battle Part 2

One of the aspects I love about Brettonians is the contrast between the kights and the peasants.

Surprisingly, I found myself enjoying a lot painting these lads :

The trebuchet is a cnetral piece in almost every Brettonian army, its why I added useless scenery to it, the dead cow being an obvious reference to the Monty Python's "holy grail" and to my being french.

Brettonian Trebuchet

Trebuchet crew

 The mounted squires sculpted by one of the Perry's (if not both, forgive me for the memory loss) are really nice and full of characters. They're the closer you can get in warhammer to realistic fighters. Since I had doubles, I exchanged some of the heads with plastic ones, allowing to link this unit with the rest.

Mounted squires

 For the rest of the peasants I will simply show you the command squad (photos of the overall unit shall come later). I painted the shields completely with a rusty effect and then added liquid latex mask in lines and then painted the cneter in blue with the white device. I believe this is a good tehcnique but in this case , I find the mask lines I made were not realistic and seem somewhat awkward, guess I'll do better next time...

You can note the jester armed with a shitbag attached to a club (a lethal weapon in these days...)

For the bowmen, I added the lepper and only added bow parts on his back pack. I like the idea of a lepper shooting arrows with bits of his rotten fingers at the ennemy, spreading diseases (sounds like a very nurglish way of fighting...). The rets is just normal bowmen and special charcaters made anonymous... (with a poor attempt at OSL on the standard bearer)

Chaos warrior - Battle chaos part 11

This one is one of my all-time favourites. A simple design but with plenty of character. You can sense his past as a normal human norse and how he has come to being a chaotic worshipper with his mask covering half of his face , a desperate attempt to hide his ugliness...

I tried to stick to the black and red colors used for the oethr warrior but I painted the two main shoulder pads completely rusted like if it was the remnants of his first armour, the rest being distorted by the chaotic powers. I like the belt looking out of place with the rest of the armour like it's an item stolen to a defeated foe.

Disciples of the red redemption - Battle Chaos Part 11

What's better than an Easter lunch with uncles, aunts and cousins? Doing the same and coming back home with pure lead gold in your pockets. Not only are those cousins responsible for my addiction to lead but 20 years after igniting such a passion, they keep it strong by offering me a full set of disciples of the red redemption from the vast collection of minis that is theirs.
 YES A COMPLETE SET ! Full Command + champion + enough soldiers to have a 12 strong unit. (I know I have to foind a way to make it 15...).

Disciples of the Red redmeption

Considering the pure awesomeness of these minis and the price they reach on Ebay, it's almost a miracle I got my hands on them...

The first thing I did when coming back was to strip them from the old paint and to my joy, I realised that  they were very brilliantly sculpted (Is it Jes' work?).
the link to their solegend page is here. The details are stunning considering their age and the cast was almost flawless (except 2 mould joints on 2 of them). The chain on the standard bearer is excessively thin and the face mask are perfect. At the time, minis had not reached yet the "Epic 28 mm" standard we've got now. Weapons and arms were smaller so they tend to look ridiculous but if you forget about now, there's a strong feeling coming from these minis and you don't get distracted by all the details but just by the pose and everything.
I'll have to give my best on these.
 Fluffwise, the story is pretty cool and reminds me somewhat of Lovecrraft's novel, a guy discovers an ancient temple and breaks mad..
The only thing twisting me is the fact I don't really want to paint them black, so I'll guess I'll use the "black with red edges" on some of them to remind the fluff and use alternative black/red devices on the others to make each mini stand from the others...

Now look at these babies and dare tell me their not brilliant :

Though I based them on 20mm bases (25mm bases looked kinda awkward to me) I think I might play them as simple Khornate marauders with weapon/shield and light armour. Maybe  some special rules to play them as flagelants.

More to come sooner, Since I am currently working on Jes' Khornate champions, I guess there will be a black-red and bronze spree for a moment...