So anyway, to continue with a not-so-regular feature of WCF, this weeks WTF Wednesday picture was spotted on teh intehwebs by yours truly. It probably ranks in the top 2 for me. The fact that this had to be posted is a scary prospect, but, we’ve all been to that con, or store where there is a definite ‘cologne’ that you couldn’t tell whether it was bad meat or good cheese in there… gross.

For shame. Get some Old Spice maybe?

Love the small print…

I bought some aquarium plants from my FLPS (Friendly Local Pet Store), picking up 2 packs of plants which totalled less than $8.  I figured they may look cool as either jungle/oasis scenery, or maybe as some scenery for an exotic alien world. So, here goes…

Step one:
These suckas are all joined together, so you’ll want to take your scalpel to them to separate them up. (Remember to cut away from yourself, kiddies!)

You’ll want to try and hack them off the base too, much easier than it sounds… I had to get a heavy duty Stanley knife to this mofo. You should then be left with the foliage, thus:

I did leave a couple of pieces on the base, although I did reduce the size of the base. This will make for some slightly higher pieces of terrain.

Step two:
Now you’ll want to get some foam board that you’ll a) have lying around or b) will go and score from the craft store for about $3 a sheet, which will last you for ages. Cut out the size of base that you want your scenery piece to be, then shave the edges at an angle to make it look more natural when you put it on your gaming surface. Don’t worry, it does’t have to be perfect, you’ll see why soon.

Then, when you have your base, glue your foliage on! Again, don’t worry too much about the weird base bits, this will be taken care of.

Step three:
This is my favorite part, the messy bit. Get your spackle (or ‘filler’ as we Brits call it) and some pumice, which is essentially sand mixed into paint, which works just as well if you don’t have access to pumice. Now liberally slap on your spackle first. Build it up where you want, like around the base of the leaves etc. I had also grabbed a couple of rocks out of the garden which I included on there too, to include a more natural feel. I brought the filler all the way up to the rocks too, to make them look buried:

I added a layer of the pumice after the filler had dried, you can see I left a ‘pathway’ through the piece to make a bit of a feature of it, and added a couple of skulls from my bitz box in there too…

Here is an example of the other piece made a little higher, more like a small outcrop of foliage:

Step four:
Paint the bastid!

Basecoat is Graveyard Earth, washed with Devlan Mud, drybrushed with Graveyard Earth>Bleached Bone>little bit of Skull White

Mud trail was basecoat Scorched Brown>Devlan Mud wash>drybrushed Scorched Brown>Scorched Brown with Bleached Bone>little bit of Bleached Bone

Now with drybrushing, and some scenic odds and sods added:

Another shot:

“be vewwy vewwy qwiet, I’m huntin’ aweiens!”

And that, dear readers, is it! you should be looking at a lovely new piece or pieces of scenery! and all for under $12!

Stay frosty

H.

Crusader tearing it up at Glenwood Arts Festival

OK, i’ve been a bad blogger… but in my defense, work, school and prepping for a destination wedding have taken up my life. Things are levelling out a bit now, so I can get back to the blogosphere. I have lots of things to share with you all, but it’s going to take a few posts to bring it all up to speed, which I intend to do over the upcoming holiday weekend.

I would, however, like to bring your attention to my band, Crusader. We are currently starting work on recording our full length album ‘Onward To Battle’. Now, as most of you will realize, recording is a lengthy, and costly process. If I remember correctly, the final cost of recording/artwork/pressing our debut EP “Rise of the Templars” ended up being about $3000, and that was for four songs… so, needless to say a full length album may well be a tad more expensive.

This is where I humbly reach out to you, dear readers and fans of Crusader, to reach into your pocket and see if you have a little that you can donate to our Kickstarter fund to help us get this album done! We have been saving all our money from the shows we have played but have fallen short of the amount needed.

Dethtron, or Colin to those in the inner circle, has jumped through all the necessary legal hoops to get us our very own Kickstarter page, which can be found here: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1475857858/crusader-onward-to-battle

There are different tiers of contributions, and what you get for them. Donations start at a mere $2! I may even look into a WCF exclusive gift for those that donate as a result of this blog post…

So, for those that need a soundtrack to the 41st Millenium (Thunderkill?? Asgard’s Fire???) those who need a theme tune while you’re beating the piss out of a horde of greenskins or Eldar, please help out some fellow gamer metal heads… we will indeed salute you!

In battle there is no law…

Hoagy.

I took them to my FLGS last night and put them up for sale in their cabinet for a modest $65 (only $5 more than buying a Chimera and a box of guard). I’ll leave them there for a month, and if they don’t sell, it’ll be off to Ebay with them. Is it sad that I got a little sentimental when I walked out of the store last night? I guess when you invest time, money and passion in something, you put a bit of yourself in what you produce, but it did feel like I was saying goodbye, lol!

Hopefully someone will be able to use them and give them a good home. Here are some pics I took last night before I took them to the game store:

Give ‘em hell, boys!

I’m very pleased with how they turned out! let me know what you think!

Flames of War… the 15mm wargame set in the World War 2 era. Dethtron started getting interested in this a while back, and his infectious enthusiasm was hard to ignore. He’d already decided on playing the (later war) German forces (Achtung!), and well, with me being a Brit, who else would I play? Of course! the Russians!

Only joking . I had to fly the flag for my country and opted to play the Tommys. I haven’t really had much time to get the ball rolling with this, although I have played a few games (playing the American forces) and it is super enjoyable. I have managed to knock out a bunch of rifle platoon stands, but I just finished the first of eight artillery pieces, which i’m quite pleased with.

To those of you who don’t know me outside of this ‘ere blog, I live in the US, but am a born and bred Limey. I am from Coventry, which has quite significant ties to the whole WW2 thing, in that our city had major factories that produced ordnance for the war effort for Allied forces and also produced tanks and armor at the Alvis factories that were based there. The Luftwaffe also managed to obliterate our medieval cathedral in an air raid (known as the Coventry Blitz). They were actually trying to get the aforementioned factories but missed… The walls of the old cathedral still stand, with the new one built next to it. It’s quite impressive to behold. As a side note, I’ll be getting married later this year about 30 feet away from the old part of Coventry Cathedral

Both of my Grandfathers served in the war, one in the Corps of Engineers, and the other a Sergeant in a regiment that served in North African Theater. I’ll be doing a bit of research on them for a later article

The satisfying thing about painting FoW, is that it happens so quickly. I basecoat everything and simply slap a wash over it, apply some matt varnish, and done! I’ve seen people really go to town highlighting 15mm minis, and while it’s an art unto itself, I feel it can sometimes ‘drown’ the miniature. Keep it simple, less is more.

Now that i’ve found a ‘groove’ with painting this stuff, I hope to be able to rattle out the rest in double quick time so I can keep those bleedin’ Germans occupied!

C+C always welcome!

I seem to have snapped out of the hobby funk I had been languishing in recently. Helped in part by our move from the desolate wastelands of the Southside suburbs back to the North of the city, and familiar territories. While it is only a temporary set up, a measure of inner peace has been restored, and with it, my painting mojo.

I am, and was, quite literally getting sick of looking at unpainted miniatures and decided I wanted to do something about it, so I set about working a test mini for a recipe to paint my Sons of Russ. Now I have been agonizing for months on what shade of grey to paint them.  I see a lot of the really dark grey, which is great, but actually is a color that was used by the Wolves pre-heresy. Now I like the dark grey, and don’t get me wrong, there are some super wicked paint jobs out there, like Space Wolves Grey  (one of my fave SW resources) but I feel I wanted to stray a bit from that, as the plastic the minis are made in are a dark grey too.

I was never a fan of the ‘uber blue-grey’ that seemed to dominate GW’s later paint jobs (you know, when they were painting practically everything red?). Some of you may (or may not) have seen the Terminator and Wolf Guard that I had already tried out. Well, I liked the color I had achieved here, but did not want to spend 8+ hours on each miniature.  I wanted to get a decent looking, fully painted force on the table, with as little painting time as is legally possible.

So, while on vacation over the Thanksgiving holiday, I thought ‘frack it’, sat down and just started painting to see what would happen…

I had picked up a can of the ‘Army Painter’ Wolf Grey Primer, which looked like a pretty sweet starting point. I had already sprayed a Rhino in it, and was pleased with the result, so I blasted a couple of primered figures with it too, to test it out. Now while with tanks, you can get away with weathering and not really doing anything to the base color, it’s not really the case (IMO) with troops. While I liked the color of the primer, I felt that highlighting up from that color would make them look to ‘bright’.

So, I slathered the minis in a head-to-toe wash of Devlan Mud (which I admit is my best friend in my paints). Then, for good measure, once this layer had dried, I went over them again with another wash, just to make sure that the Devlan Mud was EVERYWHERE.

Now, earlier in the day, I had been at my FLGS and picked up a pot of Vallejo Blue Grey paint, which is nearly a perfect match to the primer coat. So, over the primer/Devlan Mud base I simply painted over the armor plates, leaving the darker base in all the cracks and nooks. The pigment in the Vallejo paint was incredible, and took in one (thinned) coat. Already I was beginning to like how this was coming together.  I decided I was only going to do a harsh line-edge highlight, completely stepping away from my usual 3 or 4 layer blending I normally do. So I took Space Wolves Grey (GW), which is almost a grey/white and used that to highlight armor plates. POW!

I was really pleasantly surprised at the results, and that was when I knew I had found my groove with my new fledgling army.

The beauty about this way of doing the armor is that if you get some paint where it shouldn’t be, it takes literally seconds to correct it, as you’re not having to re-blend etc etc.

Other areas were a snap too. For the flesh, I simply painted a basecoat of Tallarn Flesh, followed by a wash of Gryphonne Sepia, then Ogryn Flesh. When that had dried, I washed Devlan Mud into the eyes and mouth areas to add deeper shading. Paint the teeth with a touch of Bleached Bone and you’re done. That is IT!

Metal areas were base coated with Boltgun Metal, and washed with a coat or two of Devlan Mud (see how this keeps popping up?) then rough highlights on the edges with Boltgun Metal to look like actual wear and not just a pretty sheen on the armor plating.

Gold/Brass areas were painted with a 1-1 base of Scorched Brown and Shining Gold, followed by a wash of –yep, you guessed it- Devlan Mud, then highlighted with one layer of Shining Gold.

Bone/tooth fetishes – base coat of Snakebite Leather, wash of Devlan Mud, then add Bleached Bone to the base color for highlighting.

Runestones – Base coat of Graveyard Earth, washed with Devlan Mud, then a quick highlight with the base color mixed with Skull White.

Furry bits – Choose whatever brown, or grey you want, base coat, wash with DM, then add white to your base for highlights…

You’ll see that I do little more than one highlight after the base color and then the wash. This is the point of this article, to get your army painted, and quickly. Golden Demon winners these ain’t, but with a little TLC, your force will look very nice on the table, and hopefully garner you a few compliments.

I have’nt added the shoulder pad detail yet, as I wanted to do sqauds of them at a time, and also will be having combinations of the different ‘clans’ in my army. Down the road I may add weathering to the armor, but at the moment, I want the armor painted…

Hopefully this will inspire some of you to whip up those undercoated minis and get them on the table…

FOR RUSS! FOR THE WOLFTIME!!!

I got together with my cohort Matty in the UK, via email, to put together a buddy project. As this will be a pseudo series over the next couple of weeks, I started it’s own page over there ===========> Or, if you’re too lazy to look, you could always teleport there using this nifty link: http://whencannonsfade.com/the-bro-project-or-i-can-get-by-with-a-little-help-from-my-friends/

So, go check it out, go on!

Although I haven’t been committing brush to miniature, I have been constructing. I based up a bunch of my Flames of War chaps on some sweet scenic bases that Gale Force 9 recently put out. I also assembled my Wolf Priest for my fledgling Space Wolves force and I also picked up the Finecast Emperors Champion, which I felt needed a little extra ‘something’.

I lucked out again, as it seems that this mini had no issues in the quality control area, so assembly was a snap (and thankfully nothing snapped). I decided to put him on a scenic base, rather than a standard one and add sand. I dug around in my bits drawer and found a MicroArt Studios base which I thought would do the trick nicely. I pinned him to the base, putting a little hint of an angle in there to hopefully give the image of movement. He is stepping forward and I wanted it to look as though he was going to step over the piece of ruin on the base.

Given the medieval feel of the Black Templars, and especially this miniature, I felt that he was missing something. I find it hard to believe that this guy would just march out into a battlefield without some other form of protection other than his battle plate. So, I gave him a shield. This was from the Scibor range of 40K friendly accoutrements. It’s big, and it fits the image perfectly, so, I cut off his hand and repositioned it, then added the shield. I made a green stuff handle as well, to make it look like he’s actually holding it:

I know it’s not a game legal piece of kit, but for decorate purposes I think it looks bad ass. I’m hoping to make a start on him this weekend, but we’ll see…

Ta ta(s) for now!

Anyhoo, onto the mini:

I just realized I need to tidy up the blue wash on that blade a little…

The fact that this dude is made up of swarming bugs appealed to me. He sort of epitomizes the essence of what got me into fantasy gaming when I was younger.

I like the contrasts of the darker blue of the scarab carapaces and the light blue of the tilework on his gear.

I love the posing, like he’s about to grab some poor bastard before sending their soul to the Usirian depths…

While painting Tomb Kings, I find it helps to listen to these chaps: