Nicolas' Daemon Legion of Khorne - Month 4 - Hero (0pts)

 Blood Thirster incoming!

He has arrived, the big, the strong, the magnificient one! So far in my life, I have completed only one other Bloodthirster. Something I can't really square in my head since I always played chaos and Khorne was regularly a go to. I remember as a 11 years old kid going back and forth through the book of armies from 4th edition... obsessing about the Bloodthirster and his "all 10 stat line".  Always refering to it, comparing what it would be against an elf, a goblin, a treeman, etc on the dice throw.  (Young me was not yet an engineer and statistics were like voodoo 🤣) Building army lists of all sort with miniatures I did not have and could not afford anyway, and lining up dominos to get a sence of that flying over ranked units would do. Now enough nostalgia, back to grown up hobby!   

Bloodthirster - 0 pts

At some point in the process of preparing for this month, I ended up with a real lead buffet. Both intimidating and very satisfying! I ended up going for that weird alien like head in the perspective matching the bloodletters, and it really works! 

Also, going through my bit box, I figured it would be a great time to use that extra Harry the Hammer metal base. A bit of realingment, pining, extra chains and skulls... with the idea of only partialy obstructing the Bloodthirster view from behind. The result is quite dynamic for such a stiff sculpt... and very heavy! I love it! 

...and just for the  kick of it, i found my first bloodthirster, painted with Testor enemal and stones built out of polistyren...  my methods have changed! 

Shadespyre's May Post - Leaders - Guardians of the Moonglade - 3rd Edition Wood Elves (+2604 points)

 OWAC VII - Leader Month - Guardians of the Moonglade

May

Month Five. Traditionally, for me, this is Leader month. Also the month where things finally all seem to hang together, maybe? Let's find out together!

Let's kick off with a tiny bit of lore. I say a tiny bit implying that there might be more later, but my track record suggests there will be just one tantalising morsel that I never come back to expanding.

In the depths of the great forest, far beyond the wanderings of woodcutters and rangers, where the trees are incredibly ancient and unbelievably huge, there is a vast green glade, in the shape of a crescent moon. In the centre of the glade is a large, still lake; it is also the shape of a crescent moon. And overlooking the lake is a long, green (you guessed it) crescent shaped mound.

At the highest point of this hill stands the largest of the trees, its canopy so wide that it shelters most of the Moonglade. Its huge branches are full of life - squirrels and owls and sprites and so on - but most importantly it is the home of an ancient and potent nature spirit. The spirit of the great forest, its Dryad Queen.

And her King? The Moonglade is home to a large community of Wood Elves, and the mightiest Prince amongst them is her consort. And so when anything threatens her forest, a force of Wood Elves will set forth, led by the mightiest Guardians of the Moonglade.

Or something like that. 

Moons, you see? Like the crescent shaped shields? It's a bit like I planned it...

Some Leader minis then? Here we go:

From left to right:

Autumn hero, Summer Prince, Dryad Queen, Spring Spellsinger, Summer hero

The Autumn hero will probably slot into the Autumn Guard unit (you may recall that I forgot to include a specific leader miniature in that unit). The Summer hero, by contrast, was ejected from one of my Oreon units after I picked up the official champion mini. But I like him so he got painted. The guy with the harp is obviously meant to be a musician but I like the idea of a bardic wizard for Wood Elves.

Here are bigger pictures of the main two - the Dryad Queen is obviously the C34 Life Elemental, not an elf but how could you not use this model? Unless you hate finding and painting all the tiny flowers, of course.

Her consort is the classic moon-helmed Elf captain with a falcon, except that I carefully removed most of the falcon and replaced it with a fancy owl. Because moons and owls, you see. This is the third owl so far, I think.

Oh, his name is Amarion the Evergreen, Prince of Eternal  Summer, Guardian of the Moonglade, and of course he is named to honour the true King of the Wood Elves, our very own Mariano. Thanks for the inspiration, sir! No fancy Forest NMM from me, just coloured washes over Chainmail, but still.

Here's another guy, not technically a Leader but if I don't post him this month I'll forget he exists. He's just an Elf in a wolfskin, but I'm going to call him a Shapechanger, just to include one in the army. That makes him my last (?) rank and file contribution.

Before we move on, I should probably mention basing! Yes, I did some! Yes, it's ridiculously elaborate and is taking ages! Yes, for some reason I have used between 15 and 20 different products to achieve this. So I hope you like it.

You'll note I've put the characters on a movement tray, just for display purposes. I will try to fill the back rank at some point. But this is an opportunity to explain my new basing technique, which is to apply all the basing materials with the minis in place on the movement tray - magnets are obviously key to that. This method is saving me on materials because each individual base doesn't recieve as much attention - the guys in the middle of middle ranks are almost untouched, because you don't see their bases much. 

To aid this approach, I've been applying PVA glue with more precision using a small disposable syringe. I'll leave you to imagine the mess I made perfecting that idea! But it means I can reach into a unit and leave a little blob of glue to stick grass to, or whatever.

So, that was all the Leaders. Or was it?

No, gentle reader, it was not...

Hidden Reserves

Who puts leader models in their optional extras? This guy does! To be honest it wasn't optional, I just wanted to keep it under wraps until it was done. Time to reveal Hidden Reserve No 2...

It's a chariot! A heavily customised chariot, in fact.

I've got one of those lovely MD4 Elven Attack Chariots stashed in a cupboard, but it's soooo fancy I thought it looked better as a High Elf option. I wanted something a bit more rustic, like the picture from the Warhammer Armies book:

And so I built this. The basis is still the chariot floor, pole and yoke from a second metal chariot kit (I found it on its own on eBay). Wheels are from my bits box, the horses are Elf cavalry horses. The large Celtic-styled shield at the front is a button! The body of the chariot is a home made concontion of 3d printed shapes and Milliput - it was a bit of a devil to do, and it's actually rather assymetrical, but I'm quite pleased with the finished model. 

Of the crew, the Archer is the only one who isn't converted. The driver is extensively reposed from an ordinary Elf warrior, his legs were cut off and cut apart and reassembled to get this uncomfortable looking pose.

The Wizard Battle Standard Bearer (yes, this is allowed!) started life as a simple standard bearer who for some reason has a scroll? Go figure. The tree motif (representing the Tree at the centre of the Moonglade) is a piece of cheap jewellery, and is the perch for a fourth owl.

Finally, the Prince of Golden Autumn is pretty vanilla except that I sculpted a moon onto his helmet to match the other Prince. I would have like a more exciting pose for him but I had to pick from what I had *and* make room for him in that tight squeeze.

And *that* concludes our Leaders.

Unless I paint a few more in June, no promises though.

Wow this Month's post is dragging on a bit? But to avoid Wild Card month being even worse, let's add even more stuff! More Hidden Reserves, this time No 4 and No5.

It's ZOAT ALLIES! I genuinely thought you might guess this, just based on the association with Wood Elves and the profile of the model on the end of the row. And then I remembered that I converted that model so there's no reason for it to be a familiar silhouette...!

Second unit first, because it's more photogenic. Notice the same Celtic knotwork as on the Chariot, and the (very basic, I know) heraldry featuring a moon on a green background. It's simple and it gets the job done and that is the point where we have got to. I'll be going back and adding it to other standards in the army.

Not a hugely original colour scheme. I took an olive green not used on the Elves and then graded it darker to brown-green on the backs and lighter with Zandri Dust on the fronts. Am I the only one who thinks the faces are a bit "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles"?

The magic spheres held by the leader of each unit (not technically wizards) are purple because of complementary colours - I'm trying to take this stuff on board a bit. 

A picture just to show how Zoats do not rank up! I used a staggered line, a slight rise in height, and also the rearing pose to make this happen. Sort of. You can probably guess that the minis and trays are labelled underneath because they only fit together in one combination.

The other unit. The standard completely messes up the look of it, but a second rearing standard bearer would have been boring, so I stand by it.

Zoats have to be led by a wizard, so here he is - a big purple extra-magical Zoat. He needs to lay off the purple orbs for a bit, maybe.

I should probably mention the conversions here. The rearing Zoats are made using the bottom halves of the "Zoat the Bibbisaur" star player model from Impact Miniatures. I bought a bunch of these and intended to use the top halves with metal bottom halves, too... but then I got bored of Zoats and passed them on.

Most of the Zoats are as-cast, just with the poses tweaked a little to allow even this level of ranking up. The wizard's club got reused to make a weapon for one of the standard bearers, in turn their weapon was used to top the wizard's staff (a previous owner had already removed the axe blades.) Finally, the standards are made from old plastic ones cut into new shapes to conceal their (evil?) origins.

Oh, if you ever fancy a laugh have a look at eBay and see how much people think Zoats are worth...

Okay, THAT IS IT for May. Back to painting.

Army List Additions:

Scores for May:       2604    points   22 models

1 x Autumn Hero - already accounted for                                                                          0 points

1 x Summer Hero (Level 15)      (Light Armour, Great Weapon, Longbow)             135 points        1 x Dryad Queen (Level 25 Wizard)                                                                                   418 points 

1 x Amarion (Level 25)                 (Heavy Armour, Great Weapon, Falconer)            215 points

1 x Spell Singer (Level 10 Wizard)                                                                                     118 points   

1 x Shapechanger (Giant Wolf)                                                                                           28 points

1 x Wain Lord Chariot                 (Shield, Longbow, Javelin)                                        144 points

1 x Autumn Prince (Level 20)                    (Heavy Armour, Shield, Longbow)           175 points 

1 x Battle Standard (Level 15 Wizard)     (Army Standard, Falconer)                         256 points                                             

Zoat Allies List:

1 x Zoat Leader (Level 15 Wizard)                                                                                       275 points

6 x Zoats                               (Standard, Great Weapon)                                                    420 points

6 x Zoats                               (Standard, Great Weapon)                                                    420 points         

               

Running Total:          6947  points  157  models

Note to self - with all these character additions, need to check the legality of the final army list!

Next Time:

The Wild Card. I'm sure I can still find something to post...

Shadespyre's May Post - Leader Month - (Something about White Dragons?) Dark Elves (2758 points)

OWAC VI - Leader Month - Laird of the White Wyrm

May

Resting on my laurels a bit this month. Most of the effort has gone into stuff for Wild Card month and getting my photography mojo back. Thanks to everyone who suggested I try a grey background as I seem to be getting better results again - well, you can judge for yourselves because here come the pictures!

Kicking off with the four different Wizard sculpts. There's plenty of choice for spellcasters in this range!

Here's a fifth Wizard option, but the only one available on a Cold One. He's joined by a second incarnation of the mounted musician / leader model - I've used the rearing Cold One models for characters and unit leaders, so this will distinguish him from the otherwise identical mini who acts as musician for the Helldrakes. He gives me the option to have a rampaging solo mounted character - unlike Wizards, the range doesn't cater so well for martial heroes in my opinion.

Which is why I've included this guy! NON-DARK ELF MODEL ALERT! But don't worry, he is still a pre-slotta Citadel miniature so my rules remain unbroken! 

He is actually Skarlos, the half-elven leader of the CP2 Bryan Ansell's Heroic Adventurers boxed set. I felt like a suitable paint job could sell him as a Dark Elf; I hope you agree?

The reason he got invited in is because I needed someone suitably badass to lead this little lot - 25 elite Blackguards, along with a musician and standard bearer borrowed from the Mengil Manhide regiment. To keep the Blackguards that little bit blacker, I used a smaller version of the White Dragon symbol on their shields.

The Blackguard didn't make it into the 3rd edition Warhammer Armies, but in 2nd edition they were +1 Elites armed with additional bows, and so they will stay. Maybe they should have gone into the Wild Card section, but I feel like Leader month is comfortable for them. Does anyone still care about that now it's May? 

Right then - onwards and upwards. Leaders with wings next!

If you've been around the hobby a while, you'll recognise this picture and have probably been expecting it to appear. This is Tony Ackland's War Eagle (with Dark Elf rider), TA5 from the Arcane Monstrosities range. In 1984 this was a pretty impressive size, and is one of the classics of the time I think. Though it should be noted that the Dark Elf rider was a horrible, dumpy and lumpen thing which you'd be as likely to think was a Dwarf as a Dark Elf! So I got an Eagle without the rider and made my own:

I've included a bunch of photos because I'm very happy with how this came out. To add a saddle to the mount, I made a mould from the Cold Ones so that I could make a copy of theirs and adapt it to suit. I added the harness to try and sell this better rather than just perch it on the Eagle's back. 

The rider himself is another version of the mounted musician figure. To make him fit, I cut away the armoured skirt behind his legs so that I could fold him into a kneeling pose (like the mounted crossbow ladies) and then resculpted mail over the gaps. I wanted to replace his measly sword with something more impressive, like the halberd / lance / pike thingy in the picture. Wandering through my bits collection unearthed the top end of this halberd which I then constructed for him - by incredible coincience, this part is the top of the weapon which the original rider model wields! No idea how I came to have it, but it makes me happy to have included it here.

The colour scheme is vaguely inspired by *tropical* Harpy Eagles, but at least the name makes sense for Dark Elves. I look at lots of arctic birds of prey but they tend to be a more speckly white which I thought would be hard to pull off effectively.

I'd be very pleased to have this model as the general of my army, but there's something else missing isn't there? Yup, a Dragon! Dragons are my first love and the chance to include an ancient classic here could not be missed But which one?

Well, it's Dark Elves, so that suggests a Black Dragon, and it happens that just in time for Christmas 1982 Citadel introduced this:

This beautiful beast is the FF61-2 Black Dragon (61-2 because it replaced an earlier Giant Wyvern model). Just look at those sleek lines and that highly sittable-on pose. Perfect. Less perfect is their incredible scarcity on eBay. Although as far as I know they remained in production alongside the only-slightly-later DRG / C11 Dragons, the other five of the set are easier to find and cheaper to buy. Eventually I found one with a damaged tail and no head (heads on this range are seperate and interchangeable anyway) at a bargain price, and the Black Dragon was ON.

However.

Attentive readers will have noted that the shield emblem carried by the entire army is a Dragon. A White Dragon. And yet, it was only when I picked up the model to paint it - it, the classic Black Dragon which I had carefully tracked down and repaired and made a rider for and then undercoated black - that I realised that I definitely had to paint the damned thing WHITE!!

Nuts.

Anyway - I re-primed it in white, started painting it, dropped it (snapping a wing and a very elaborate sword blade I had specially made), repaired it again and so eventually we got this:

You'll notice I remade the end of the tail in a different style, and selected a different head, adding a bigger tongue because I felt there was something missing. I've previously painted white dragons from a pale blue base, but in this case I wanted to avoid bringing in a new colour so I used the Dark Elf Highlight skin tone as my starting point and worked up to white from there. I'm quite happy with the shadowing I got while still having a dragon which reads as white rather than grey, I hope. I abandoned an ambitious idea of adding more colour with purple glazes because I feared I'd lose the white balance and wasn't sure how I'd put it right if it went wrong! Something to try out on a less important model.

For the rider, the same saddle method as for the Eagle rider, and a voluminous resculpting of his cloak. Then he took a dive and got his fancy sword replaced with a plain plastic one, and a slightly flat repair to his helmet crest. Everyone will be focussed on his mount anyway.

I think that's enough excitement for one month? We need to save some fun things for June, when we'll have some wild things for my Wild Card month.

Army List Additions:

I'm not going to fully spec out all the characters with magic items and things, but I may as well assign some levels to start getting a feel for what a full army list might look like:

Scores for May:         2758  points   33 models

2 x Wizard (level 10)                                                                                                            236 points

1 x Wizard (level 20)                                                                                                            303 points

1 x Wizard (level 25)                                                                                                             418 points

1 x Wizard (level 15, Cold One)                                                                                          225 points 

1 x Hero (level 20, Heavy Armour, Shield, Cold One)                                                 194 points  

1 x Hero (level 15, Light Armour, Great Weapon)                                                        132 points

24 x Black Guards (+1 Elites, Bow, Light Armour, Shield, Standard, Musician)   364 points

1 x Hero (level 20, Heavy Armour, Shield, Lance, Giant Eagle (Griffon))               374 points

1 x Hero (level 25, Heavy Armour, Great Weapon, Winged Dragon level 1)            512 points

Running Total:          5771  points  188  models

Coming Next:

Wild Card month!

Lissanne's Rainbow Warriors- Three is the Magic Number (200 pts) Leader month

 

 

This month, I decided to do my command figures, in order to get some sort of buffer back.  THEN I got a great opportunity to have a solo gallery show in a widely seen gallery.  The condition being it is open when I sit there.  Fortunately, despite a heavy workload, my plans didn't completely fall apart.  And as there can't be really extravagant basing either, since these are for Space Hulk, that helped too.

In my initial blog post, I pointed out I am working from a very specific list of terminators for a series of Space Hulk games.  In the list, there are 2 different command figures, a Librarian and a Chaplain., These figures don't pair to make a command squad in 3rd, but I decided to do them both in my command month. In addition, I decided to do a (non-list) Hero, Rainbow Dash.  Gotta have Rainbow Dash!

Years ago, dissatisfied with the tiny terminators,  I sculpted my own body for my Khorne terminators.  Terminators were supposed to be midway between Marines and Dreadnoughts, and the wearer sits inside them.  So large.   I used doggie juggernaut heads for Khorne, and they look wonderful and scary. So scary, that when I fielded them, even the Space Wolves found something else to do on the far side of the board.  Ah well...

But I have a few bodies I cast still laying about. So, proud hero Rainbow Dash.  I had a spare pair of Exarch wings I bought off the bits man many moons ago, perfect for this!  Add a unicorn head, and a bolter I cast from an unreleased metal giant bolter I got from GW, & here is my scratchbuilt offering of the month.

More Rainbow Dash

 The chaplain and the librarian are conversions so they have sister heads and weapons proper to that aforementioned Space Hulk list.  Also, I was given a bunch of weird paints for Xmas, one was called Mirror Black. So I decided to try for a mirror black chaplain.  I like to use my presents!  
So,Aspect of Luna unicorn of Death-Chaplain Midnight Strike.  

As for Mirror Black, read shiny shiny black.  And stinky.---meaning I turned out to be allergic to the paint.  So it took more time than I would have liked.  It looks nice, but I won't be using that paint again.
 
Lastly, Aspect of Celestia unicorn of Life-Librarian Dawn Wings.  I had decided to do this one in a NMchrome last year, as I have done 2d chrome many a time and wanted the practice on 3d objects.

 Well, I should have looked more closely at the figure, as not only is it heavily converted to fit my army list, but less than half of the fig is armor, and a lot of that is in shadow.  Still, I like the way it came out.

So....
Rainbow Dash hero
Chaplain Midnight Strike
Librarian Dawn Wings
 
Since they are individual command figures rather than a command squad, I'll just take the 200 pts for leader month and call it done.

Not sure if I will do my 4th Rank and File or Wild Card extravagance next month.  I have 3 terminators already done for R&F, but the rest of April is busy.  We will see.