Tom's Chaos Dwarfs - Intro

Greetings!

Big Hat Chaos Dwarfs:

As a kid I liked them from afar. They're just so... so... red!

Mind you, they probably came out towards the end of me drifting away from the hobby (i.e.: growing older and moving away from shops and into the sticks far from anywhere).

For this OWAC3 challenge I ummed and ahhed over either adding more regular dwarfs to the contingency I painted last year (yes, believe! I have still have plenty of the unpainted little fellas...), or starting a brand new army.

I pumped for the new army, but kept the dwarfish flavour.

Brace thyself: what I did last year, was sell all my 6th ed regular dwarfs.

You know - all the monopose metal hammerers, ironbreakers, slayers, anvil on wheels etc etc. They were packed up and shipped overseas to the USA, and essentially were replaced by Big Hats from Canada. Big shout out to Tim Wegner on the facebook trading page who sold me a large chunk of these models at a very reasonable price, considering that nowadays you have to re-mortgage in order to afford the front rank of any unit. And that's just for plastic monopose...

So, planning to paint pure Chaos Dwarfs - just units of blunderbusses and warriors.

There's a host of other things to paint if I need a break from them, but the overriding need is to paint Chaos Dwarfs, and create a strong core around extra fluffs can be added.

I'm aiming to paint these very similar to the GW scheme, so I'm afraid there'll be no outlandish, chaos tainted, multicoloured scaled armour - just the primary colours for that classic feel. Bases will be similar to the dwarfs I did for the OWAC2 - but maybe without the flowers. I think they would have withered and died in the presence of such twisted beings...

There are two main colour schemes for the Chaos Dwarfs.

Red armour, black beards.

Or

Black Armour, red beards, as made popular by Gareth Hamilton way back in White Dwarf 191

 when his award winning army was showcased.

I'm as yet undecided as to which one, but I guess I'll go for black beards for rank and file, and red beards for command? Hmm...

Either way, I'll be using GW Contrast paints. They're still relitively new to me, so the motivation for painting with them is still very high. I painted a CD Blood Bowl team as a 'practice' a while ago, and to my mind they came out very well.

Preliminary Pictures!

OoOoOo! Look at all that blacked out goodness.

That there black is covering up all the extra stuff I have, so that comes as sneaky surprise for you... Hopefully I'll be able to paint some of it up. My OWAC2 dwarf army had A LOT of models above and beyond what was actually needed to complete the 1000 points, so fingers crossed I can make a decent dent into this EXTRAS pile.

Anyhow, my starting off 1000points army list shapes up as this:

168 … 12 x blunderbusses

196 … 14 x blunderbusses

168 … 10 x chaos dwarf warriors ( inc standard and musician)

308 … 20 x chaos dwarf warriors (inc standard and musician)

160 … 1 x chaos dwarf general

1000 … TOTAL

Nice and flush! There's even an uncovered Death Rocket as a preliminary extra in the pic. Mostly as I'd feel sad to paint an army with no war machine.

My General model is none other than Astragoth, High Priest of Hashut. I've given him bog standard general points though, as it's pleasing to end on 1000 points exact :)

I hope to have scanned and printed banners for the standards and General, and as such, they should be relatively easy to do. There's a load of banners all on one page in the Chaos Dwarf Army book which makes things super simple.

Speaking of banners, I do have most of them - the poles that is. They're notorious for being broken, twisted and lost so I may have to improvise with a skull and some metal wire... I'll have to make bases for the war machines, but that's about it when it comes to decorative stuff. Some people have wonderful armies all on decorative bases, but this is not that army. I'm going for green edges, brown top, yellow rocks and some ill looking grass.  The green edge may well look a bit off, so maybe that'll change...

Ho hum, that's it I think for now. Here's some more pics of the 1000 points, all undercoated and fully ….primed... for JANUARY.

Cheers all!

Note from the Overlord : in case you haven't noticed, the third edition of the OWAC is underway!