Merijn's League of Legendary Liches in April (176 pts)

"Connect ogre femur A to crossbeam C and you're ready for reanimation" Harold mumbled under his breath as he read the instructions on the piece of parchment he taped to the mouldering construction in front of him. The instructions were of little use and the little diagram Ignatio had drawn only added to the confusion.

He took a step back to admire his handiwork. With a sinking feeling, Harold realised something looked off. The ranks of skeletons stood in silent judgement. "You connected ogre femur A to crossbeam B" a ghoul helpfully pointed out. Hissing in frustration Harold kicked the contraption which promptly collapsed, sending one of it's wheels rolling down the hill towards the distant village of Beeckerhoven. 

Gloomily Harold stared at the ghastly mob of onlookers as the affable ghoul slunk back into their ranks. At least the horrors had worked out great. Haunted by the ghouls and ghosts, the peasants of Beeckerhoven suffered dark dreams and restless nights. Feeding off their night terrors, the ranks of the horrors had more than doubled.

This month was spend bulking out the night horrors. With a lot of help from the nice folks in the Oldhammer Trading Company on Facebook I managed to get their numbers up to 20. They're starting to look like a proper regiment.

I'm not much of a painter but I think the simple paint jobs and group effect really works. I've noticed that as I get older and my eyes get worse, my paint jobs get brighter and brighter.

A mob of night horrors

From up above

It's been a pleasure painting a regiment where every model is unique. Not a single one of these guys feels generic. The wraiths, for instance, are entirely ethereal, no skulls, not even hands to hold their weapons. Just a shapeless cloak.

I find ethereal creatures surprisingly difficult to paint well. Not a fan of GW's glowy green.

This devil might be my favourite out of the bunch

This miniature is labelled as a ghost in the catalogue but he gives me a strong insane hermit vibe

Werewolves seem surprisingly rare in Warhammer's lore. I always wondered why.

Utini!

Big fan of the candy coloured wraiths that were prominent during the 90s.

Tried to go for a Japanese Oni kind of demon

Love the cliche of a vampire rising from a pool of blood

All in all I added 12 night horrors to the roster. As mentioned before, the night horrors will be used as ghouls. To make up the extra points, I also added a screaming skull catapult.

Most embarrassingly, I managed to assemble the darn thing wrong and it took me far too long to realise what the problem is. On the upside, metal mini's disassemble easily. So no harm done.

The knee bone connects to the... uhm

Add caption

That puts this months points at:

96 pts (12 x 8) worth of ghouls

76 pts (1 x 76) screaming skull catapult

Total: 172 points

Overall total: 564

Those of you keeping track will have noticed that I'm consistently short on points. Well, that changes next month as it's time for me to get to work on some characters. Those Liche's don't come cheap.

Lissanne's Chaos Demons- the Flesh Failures (261 points)

Until a few years back, figures truly worthy of Slaanesh were hard to come by.  Now there is an abundance of truly outre chaos to choose from.  The downside is they are usually plastic.  The upside is there are so many and so extreme, it is fairly easy to find a good match for your forces, no matter how depraved, violent or putrid.

The source for the Flesh Failures are Sloth abominations from 'The Others'.  The Dogs are Void Hounds from 'Shadows of Brimstone'.    I am a sucker for good sculpts, and the tongues are what attracted me.

 The Flesh Failures

3 mighty chaos warriors, their names and race forgotten.  What is remembered is that they were blessed together, fought together, swore allegiance to Ignatz together...and well, devolved together.  What do you expect when mortals join a group of Demons?  Now they are Chaos Spawn.  But on the bright side they still fight together.

And three little puppies, I mean Chaos Hounds.  They seem to look an awful lot like Magnolia the Dragon Ogre...naughty Magnolia, what have you been doing?  You go girl!  Chaos Hounds are supposed to have a handler, but in a force of demons it seems unnecessary.  So here they are, part of the clean up crew, like the Flesh Failures.

3 Chaos Spawn (225 pts)

3 Chaos Hounds (36 pts)

And since they weren't part of my original unprimed pic, here they are unpainted.

So, this gives me a month and a half to work on my Demon Lord Ignatz.  Wish me luck! I have my work AND a mural to do next month.  Will I finish or mulligan in May...hmmm.

This is how far I have gotten.  What do you think?

Tom's Dwarfs - Month four (385 points)

Well, this month has seen me not being as productive as in the past, but the mighty surge in painting at the start of the challenge is still paying dividends!

Anyhow - WARRIORS!

Lots of them....

I see that I've neglected to fully paint the dwarf on the far rights helmet. Maybe that'll be a job for next month...

The guy with the chainmail faceguard was my favourite to paint - mostly because he's sporting a lovely cape which I  painted red. Reminded me a bit of Superman

The command. King Gorrin is another model from the 'Lords of Legend' set. Maybe I can complete the set before the end of the Challenge? 

I painted some blood on Gorrin's sword - I'm not really sure why, but it doesn't look too bad. I used a dab of superglue, and maybe many dabs of PVA to create the slight drip.

I love the guy wearing the orc head. Lovely pose.

And the group shot:

Here's a non-cropped photo. You can see it's pretty blue looking and a bit washed out. I admit, I played around with some settings on my phone to get the cropped picture, but the colours are a lot nearer to how they appear in real life

Following this, I also painted another unit of warriors.

I wanted this unit to be a bit of a mix 'n' match, representing the homestead dwarfs rather than the crusading ones. I should have painted them non-uniformly, but I got carried away with the lure of huge regiments, so blue and white it was. I can add them to any other unit to bolster their numbers without them looking out of place. Good times.

A dwarf adventurer on the left, Gimli from the LotR range taking center, and then- unfortunately, what I can only assume to be a recast of a lovely model. It has four mould lines bisecting it.

Left: a stalwart chunk

Center: Sly Stallone's Rambo. Maybe y'all guessed from the sign off last week? Anyway, he's part of the Chaos Dwarf range, but he has a lovely charm, and who wouldn't want Rambo on their side? He joins the unit.

Right: A model that's duplicated later. Not my favourite, I might add.

Some classic models here. I was lucky to pick up the bomber in a batch buy (thank you if you're the seller and reading this!). Center is a hero. Right is a prelude (or so I've heard) to the monopose-like dwarf hammerers of 6th ed.

The duplicate there on the right, a lovely halberd dwarf in center, and a mahoosive axe guy on the end.

I think the guy in the center is slightly later than the two either side - he's a bit more chunky. 

Gotta love a grappling hook too though :)

A group shot (including the standard, musician and the dwarf on the far right whos pictures I've -ahem- forgotten to take...)

That's kinda it for April - full steam ahead for Mays effort.

The war machine crew still haunt me.

The General is looking at me.

Some extras need to be done.

Talking of extras, here's a pic of some more extras that I might do at some point next month (or the one after)

Notable for this dwarf - lovingly painted by some ebay guy. Red eyes! He'll be in Dettol by the end of the week. We'll see how the base he's on fares with that!

The very sketchy plan is to paint up the Imperials to join the larger group of homestead dwarfs. The rest of the Lords of Legend are there just in case!

Here's an extras model I painted up for this month:

He's a pre-slotta Cleric, mashed onto the base with the help of a little milliput :)

I also painted this Imperial, with the aim of replaceing either the musician or standard, if I blend two units together:

And, that just about wraps everything up!

January:

130...Crossbowmen

54...Bolt Thrower

33...Warriors

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February

202...Slayers

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March

143...Warriors

110...Cannon

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April

176...Warriors

209...Warriors

Total this month is an intimidating 385 points!

Total for the challenge so far is 1057!!

Yaaasss :)

Anyhow, until next month: Cheers!

Sean's Undead - Zombies and Skeleton Archers (208 points)

Hi All,

Well those figures I just couldn't seem to finish in March are seeing the light of day in April. I hope they were worth the wait.

A total of 30 figures. 10 Skeletons and 20 Zombies.

The Skeleton archers (120 points) are from Skull and Crown Miniatures Triumph of Death. I had a hell of a time getting the giant arrows to stay solidly glued into their hands. I painted them separately and then glued them in, that may have been my mistake.

Next are the multipart plastic zombies everybody loves to hate or hates to love. There may be more than one way to rank them up correctly, this is not one of them. Zombies come in at a whopping 4 points per model, so these 20 with the Standard Bearer and Musician come in at only 88 points. Although these models were also a pain I am glad to have this instantly recognizable GW unit in my army.

To finish of the post I'd like to give a closeup of the banner bearer and his banner. I didn't pull it off 100%, but I am fairly pleased with the end result. I have a cheat, which of course actually involves a lot of extra work, to make banners like this. I'll probably do a tutorial on my blog.

Thanks for looking, and points to you if you recognize the face in the banner. I thought it was fairly obvious, but I'm a dork.

Challenge mid-point

With March done, the challenge is half-over!!! Congratulations to those still standing!

On to April!

Jeff's March Picks (257 pts)

I started this group of figures in February. I knew I would take my Mulligan in Feb or March due to other wargaming commitments. Getting my convention games together ate up Feb, so that was my Mulligan. It felt great to finish this group of figures. I've been staring at them for 2 months.

For March I added 10 Witch Elves and the Cauldron of Blood. I'm very happy the way they came out. If I had more time I would have done some more shading and highlighting, but that is one of the great things about this challenge. Instead of endless fretting about how/what to paint, you just paint. Hard deadlines work for me at least. 

Witch Elves 132 Pts

Cauldron of Blood 125 Pts

March entry   257pts

 I love these crazy ladies. The leader is the Marauder version.

 I converted one of them to standard bearer. Clipped off a sword and drilled out the hand.

 I was very happy with the way the hair came out.

The Cauldron of blood. There is an amazing amount of detail on this model. I bought this in a lot, and it was put together already. I tried to paint it as is, but I could not reach everything. So I had to gently put pressure on some pieces till the old super glue snapped. After I did, I found out you can freeze it to make it more brittle.

I like my war machines on bases. So I got a Chariot base. All my models have a metal base stand glued to the bottom. I put 2 neodymium magnets under the chariot base. and now the 2 models stay on the base or can be removed.

I was almost done when I noticed the figure on the Cauldron had a heart in her hand. I painted it red then covered it with the specialist paint "Blood for the Blood God". Makes a really fresh blood effect. 

Well that's it for March. Next up will be The Black Guard and a Sorcerer.

Jeff

Nathan's Well I made it - just (213 points)

The headline says it all - like a number of challengers I struggled painting figures in March. Well to be honest I struggled painting hobgoblins - I got distracted by other figures on my desk and ended up finishing a few of them. But thankfully I got back on track and managed to paint the required 200 points for the month. This is what I managed:

- contingent standard bearer 82 points

- temple dog (Contingent commander rider to follow later on) 85 points

- 3 hobyars 30 points

- 2 mourngul renegades 16 points

For a grand total of 213 points. Here they are:

But I must say it feels like I cheated - yes I got 200 points painted up but it is only 6 figures. I will fix that in April as I have a number of rank and file that I’ve been working on and which I will be able to finish in the month as Easter provides me with heaps of painting time!