ByronM - Frogdog, Mole Preacher, and Stone Building

 

Today I have a group of three submissions that are all vastly different.  Let's start out with my favourite and the oddest, most NSFW one, which of course means a Kingdom Death model.  This is one I have waited a while to get to and paint, the mighty Frogdog and her multitude of dogpoles. This is a huge model, being on a 100mm round base and towering a little over that in height.

This is one of the newer KD models and as is normal in KD, she is anything but normal.  This is a cross between what looks like a simian face and a frog/toad body.  To help add to the strangeness of the model, she has human breasts hanging underneath and 6 human faces on her back, each with a vagina for a mouth and is giving birth to more "dogpoles".  Only in the strange and inhuman world of Kingdom Death could this creature be a thing! 

In game, the monster likes hopping around the swamp from lily-pad to lily pad that it treats as trampolines, sending people flying through the air.  She also charges up her double sphincter before releasing the most noxious of farts (she even has a fart AI deck with various toxic odours ready to release) that cause you to pass out and potentially drown in the swamp.  All in all it sounds like a cool and different fight, which is what KD is all about (although definitely not for everyone!).

Next up I have a small addition for my Burrows & Badgers collection, a small mole preacher.  I call him Friar Tuck, since he reminds me of the outfit in the Disney Robin Hood animated movie, just not big enough or fat enough, but its all they have that is close in the line.  As with all my B&B stuff it is a pretty simple cartoony paint job, but looks good with all the other miniatures.

Lastly, I have a 3D printed stone house from the Greendale line that can be found on myminifactory (there is also an equivalent line called Grimdale that is the destroyed versions of each building).  I printed this on my Anycubic Kobra S1 that I got a few months back, and it did a great job for a filament printer.  

However it did really remind me why I HATE filament prints. The lines and textures are a pain in the ass to work with, and I would really rather have printed in in resin.  The only reason I didn't is that I have about 10 buildings to paint up in this line, and another 10 for the ruined versions, and filament costs about $5 a building to print while resin would be $30-$50 per building.  To be fair, once on the table and at arms reach you can not really see the lines, so while I hate dealing with them, its not really noticeable when you are playing a game with them. 

The building is 5.5" long, 3.5" wide, and 5" tall, making it fairly substantial.  I painted it a stone grey colour to start with, then went in with 5 different shades of tan and brown and started painting random stones different colours.  From there it was washed to mute the colours a bit and then onto the roof and all the details.  Honestly, it too WAY too long to paint and was not worth it in the challenge due to the huge time sink it was as I had to be careful to always wet-brush and not dry-brush for the print lines to show up.  It probably took me twice as long as the frogdog to paint!  I am still thinking of adding some flock and moss to the roof, but decided to leave it for now until all are painted and I decide if I am going to do snow or moss.

And providing a group shot with a standard space marine for scale.

 

Overall these models should give me a grand total of  45 points.  The Frogdog is equivalent to the King I posted earlier in the challenge and should count as a 40mm monster for 25 points.  The mole preacher is a 25mm model for 5 points. Lastly the building is equivalent to many others that I have awarded 15 points to, so am claiming the same for myself here. As always though, points don't really matter to me, I am happy to just be getting stuff done, so adjust as you see fit.

 

ByronM - Warhammer 40k Armigers and Trench Crusade

 Today I have a fully 3d printed submission for your enjoyment, all happening in Grim Dark Universes.  

First up we have my first group of Warhammer 40k Armigers, in for form of a cadre of 3 Armiger Helverins. I have wanted to do a new Warhammer army for a long time, specifically an Imperial Knight army as they have such a low model count, however the models are all the typical insane GW pricing.  However, I recently found some great 3d files for Armigers, so I could print my own rather than dealing the GW.  So, Away we go!!!  Expect more to follow.

I could not decide on a colour scheme for these, but found some colours a while ago from Scale75 that I fell in love with the shades and bought them with no real idea what I would ever use them for.  I randomly saw them when trying to figure out colours for these and decided now is the time, so from darkest to lightest I used Scale75 Anthracite Gray, Abyssal Blue, Caspian Blue (the main colour showing) and Bearing Blue.  All were airbrushed on after painting the chassis and seran(cling) wrapping the chassis to protect the paint job while allowing me to airbrush the carapace.

Once painted, I really wasn't sure what to do to base them, and then again stumbled across a set of wrecked concrete foundation pillars from Epic Basing and thought they would look good on the bases so printed up a bunch of them and away I went.  I think they add a bunch to the base and are something different.

Next up is the first part of a new project from a new game, Trench Crusade.  The art and lore of the game is brilliant and very Grim Dark (go figure since a lot of the crew is made up of ex-GW employees), but I am not really sure about the rules, seems a bit too simplistic.  However, a bunch of friends want to play, and since I subject them to random weirdness that may not be their cup-o-tea but they humour me, I figured I should humour them as well.  If anyone wants to checkout the rules, they are available here for free: Trench Crusade.

This post has the first 2 models that I 3D printed and started painting, only to find out that I am not likely to actually use them in my list, but oh well, they look cool!  I selected the Iron Sultanate as I felt like doing some Persian models and these are all based on Persian lore with the Jannisaries coming in a later entry.  These two though are the Assassin and the Bronze Bull.

The Bronze Bull is absolutely massive being based on a 50mm round and standing over 100mm tall and 150mm wide.  Being such a big chunky boy I am counting the Bronze Bull as my Gluttony model because at this size I am sure he eats a literal ton!

Since the world of Trench Crusade is an extremely grim dark war torn setting, I wanted to keep with a very dark look as well.  So the whole force is going to be painted in mainly bronzes and reds that are muted / muddied down for lower contrasts.

Here is an image to show just how big all of these models are, as the marine is a standard 40k marine on a 25mm base, the bull on a 50mm and the Armiger on a 100mm base.

ByronM - Turnip28 - Snob of the Radish's

 For my first entry of the year I decided to quickly finish up the leader for my Turnip28 force.  I painted up the rest of the force for last years challenge, but then left this guy sitting primed for a whole year as I wasn't sure I really liked the model, but it was what I had found for a mounted snob for T28.

A year later, I am still not sure I like him, and will probably replace him at some point, so I just slapped on some quick and dirty colours to have him playable.

The figure is super strange as it is a camel for a Napoleonic setting, which strikes me wrong, and then the poor animal is half given over to the root and badly infected.  His head has been mainly replaced by a festering root vegetable that I have painted as a turnip, his mane has been replaced with leaves, his tail is partially turned to roots as well, and the mighty snob riding on him is bringing more vegetables along with him on his pack. 

Overall just a very rough piece to get something done quickly, and get back to painting as I have not touched a brush since the last challenge ended.  At least I have gotten some new glasses and they seem to be doing the job, so I should be able to do some decent painting this year once I get back into the groove (so please don't judge me too poorly on this slapped together paint job!).  Plus I had to get first blood in before my son does (he joined the challenge for the first time this year - QuinnM), as he had to work today, so I had time to get an entry in before he did.

 

Painting Challenge 15 starts tomorrow!

Tomorrow the 15th annual Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge starts, and I am once again signed up.  For more info check it out here: Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge Rules.

This post is just to serve as a kind of list of what to expect, and to serve as a guide to keep me on track, for what I aim to get done this challenge.  Hopefully I don't squirrel too much and get at least 1/2 of this list done:

• Kingdom Death Models (ideally: Stone Eaters, Crimson Croc, The King, and Atlas)
• 40k Knight Army
• Burrows & Badgers (at least both core boxes, hopefully some extras)
• Hagglethorne Hollow terrain
• Napoleonic Unit
• Wild West - Miners and Civilians
• Bloodbowl Team
• Trench Crusade - Iron Sultanate
• Bolt Action Germans

I am sure more will pop up, but if I get at least 1/2 of those done, it should be a good challenge!

Make sure you follow along, here or over on the challenge page.

Byron

Steve: Cowboys at Church

  I have here a fist full of western gunslingers (mostly 3D prints from 3dbreed's  'Join or Die wanted collection'  along with a couple model finds from Thingaverse)  as well as a MDF model church from NorthernLightsTerrain which I had converted a bit by cladding it in stir-stick 'lumber' and cardboard 'shingles'. 

What I have painted up here are New Acquisitions because these are among the very newest additions to my pile of unpainted shame  potential....... representing a rare occurrence where my models are fully painted before receiving a layer of dust while awaiting the touch of a brush.  I'm happy to say it was only a mere few weeks between a conversation with ByronM about Western themed minis and games sparked getting these printed-up shortly before start of this year's challenge and posting them painted here now.

I'm not sure with what system these models will first give cause for me to roll some dice in a old west style  shooty-shooty-bang-bang skirmish game.  So in addition to these being among the quickest turnaround between acquired to painted in my collection, they are also the first set of models I completed painting before ever putting them into the field of play.

I learned a bit in this painting effort to push a the edges of my comfort zone, as this was the first time I used a variety of  Army Painter speed paints on models I finished, getting used to how each speed paint provided coverage and color, while also spending some time mixing speed paints for different shades of blues, browns and reds used here.  I don't think I figured out yet  how to best get speed from these speed paints, but they did boost my rate of progress to be a tick quicker than that of a tortoise on a tea break.  Also, this is first time I painted with white on modules and terrain to any significant degree of satisfaction where I decided it was good enough to game with and time to move on to the next  in my pile of unpainted.

I started this painting effort on the first day of this year]s challenge, working them as a batch of somewhat related color schemes.  I'd like to say a combination of xmas holiday and familiy events kept me away from my paints to delay readiness for my first post until now,  but I confess it was more due me getting back into the painting groove, trying out new "speed" paints and more than a few rounds of paint correction due to  color experiments gone awry (and due to accidental pigment applications to unintended targets arising from unfortunate incidents of suboptimal brush control).  So now with my painting digits recalibrated, paint pots relocated, and ocular orbs re-sighted I aim to pick up the pace to stay on my total challenge points target, and prepare more models for future game tables.

ByronM - Horus Heresy in 15mm

 

Day 2 of the event and my second post.  I started these guys yesterday but had to finish the basing and clear coat off this morning before work.  Not that there is a lot to finish on them (let alone do at all) since they are pretty basic paint jobs.

A group of us in Winnipeg are doing Horus Heresy in 15mm, you will likely see Scott C and Steve A post some this Challenge, and a lot of armies were already selected and I have a TON of stuff to paint already this year.  I still wanted to get involved and play a few games though, so I started looking at what armies were out there and came across the Iron Warriors.  

 

 

Their paint scheme is silver, with black guns and black and yellow hazard stripes or chevrons on their shoulders and vehicles.  Sign me up!!!  I primed these silver after finding army painter silver primer, and then brush primed the bases black.  Once the challenge started all I had to do was paint the guns, shoulderpads, add some bronze accents and wash them with Agrax Earthshade (I put that sh*t on everything!), and they were done!  I should be able to get a whole army done in no time with these!

The Rhino was a little more problematic due to the yellow being hard to get coverage in a large area smoothly and evenly.  Trust me I tried, 4 or 5 times!!  In the end I said screw it, sanded it off, broke out the tape and masked around the areas I wanted yellow.  I then re-primed those areas white, then airbrushed yellow.  Perfect and simple, and nice and clean.

 

 

I then proceeded to ruin it with my unsteady hands trying to paint straight lines for the hazard lines.  Oh well its good enough!

For anyone interested these are the 6mm epic STL files from thingiverse and Cults3d and then scaled up about 260% to look correct against other 15mm figures.  While a little chunky looking, I think they look pretty good for Iron Warriors who are supposed to be staunch siege fighters.  

More on this project to come over the course of the challenge, as well as the rest of my 15mm Eldar from last year that got shelved over the summer.

ByronM - 10mm Kings of War Zombie Horde and Heroes

This week saw the completion of a few pieces that have been in progress for a little while.  They may not look like a lot, but painting that many individuals and trying to keep randomness to the colour patterns was a pain in the backside...

 First up is my promised Horde of Zombies for my 10mm Kings of War Undead project.  These are all once again 3D printed from the excellent sculpts from Forest Dragon, and I wanted to have enough of them to actually look like a horde.  In 28mm scale KoW it would only be 40 zombies on a base to makeup the "horde", to me that is just not enough... So, here is my 136 zombie horde!!!  20 of them are 1/2 zombies though (the tops crawling along) so I will count them as 126 models for points purposes later.  I don't know about you, but to me this actually looks like a horde of zombies.

Painting these was a major pain, as there are only so many colours to use, and I wanted it to look random, and at a small scale subtle colour differences just do not show up.  So I stuck with brown, tan, red, blue, green, and purple and went to town on them.  It took far longer than I expected though as keeping it random looking took a lot of going back and forth between models and strips.

Next up is the Heroes of the Undead army, a vampire count on foot, a mounted female vampire count, and two necromancers. While I would not necessarily call a vampire a hero, they are hero choices in the army list, so even though they are evil, I am claiming them as heroes for the space map Glorantha space, which is my fourth space on the outer ring, so time to move into the middle ring.

I decided to base these heroes on 25mm round bases even though KOW wants them on 20mm squares.  I did this as the placement of heroes in KOW is not super fiddly (essentially if they are beside a unit they are involved in the combat with the unit) and this way they are easy to spot on the table and it makes the army usable in other games like Warmaster or any of the derivatives from it (Hail Ceasar, Pike and Shotte, Black Powder, etc) so that if we ever decide to mod any of those games to a fantasy block based setting we can.

Overall this should count as 126 zombies and 4 characters and 20 bonus points for the planet Glorantha bonus, for a nice round 150 points.  Not a bad start to a Saturday.

ByronM - More 15mm Eldar

Continuing on with my 15mm (20mm) Warhammer 40k project, I have a few more pieces finished this week.

First up is a unit of Fire Dragons, again these are 6mm models scaled up and printed as roughly 20mm scale (25mm to the top of the crests) from the excellent Lord Chronos on Cults. Even though these were meant to be 6mm scale, so much detail is there that I am pretty sure they would look ok even is scaled up to 28mm (they would be missing some detail, but still very usable).

The unit is made up of 9 Fire Dragons and the Excarch.  Once again I kept the character on a different style base so that they are easy to spot at table distance in 15mm.  They are all painted in the traditional very bright yellow and orange paint scheme.

Next up is the transport to go along with them, again a 6mm model scaled up and printed to be huge.  This is done in the same turquise type colour as the other 2 and features twin link bright lances to keep with the Fire Dragon theme of being able to kill any vehicle or monster type unit dead with heavy firepower.

As per the last submission of these models I am claiming the 10 figures as 4 points each and the tank at 15 points due to pure size and scale of this beast (just as big as most 28mm tanks).  That should put it at 55 points, but Millsy, please feel free to adjust or change at your discretion though as I really could care less about the overall points...

ByronM - Kings of War Undead Army in 10mm - Part 1 (212 Points)

 

I used to love Warmaster and Fantasy Battle, but over time got tired of the look of Warmaster being 2 thin rows of models or removing individual models in Fantasy Battle. So, I went looking for something else and came across Kings of War.  Its an awesome simple and fast fantasy mass battle game that focuses more on units and positioning rather than individual heroes.  It's a fun game but at 28mm it just always looked wrong to me, as it is almost impossible to get the look of a mass battle game in 28mm on a 6x4 or even 8x4 table.  So, a couple friends and I decided, why not do it in 10mm, its cheap (as you can 3d print everything), super fast to paint (to a simple tabletop standard), and looks great ranked up!

I have to start by saying sorry for the image quality on these, I just for the life of me could not get good pictures of these. The camera just wouldn't focus correctly on them and kept washing out all the colours, and Photoshop decided to blow up on me as well, so until I sort that out I had no way to correct the colours or clean them up.

 

All of these models are from the excellent collection offered by Forest Dragon, and the detail is amazing! All the bases are from my company (Northern Lights Terrain) and are the standard Kings of War base sizes as if the units were standard 28mm scale.  I chose to do this as it allowed the game to play exactly the same as if it was being played with 28mm figures, and allowed a lot of space to pack on models to a base.

First up is the really cool looking Vampire Count on Undead Dragon.  He will obviously be my army commander.

 

 

 

Next up, a unit of Vampire Knights.  This is a hard hitting but small unit, only counting as a troop sized unit in KoW.  There are 40 heavily armoured Vampires packed onto that 100mm x 40mm base.

 

 

Next is a big regiment of Skeletons.  While I painted up a ton for the base (64 of them on there!), once I started ranking them up I realized I could have done another 20 or so to completely pack the base, but it still looks good with so many ranks and a bit of space at the front, so I left it.

 

Then come the wraiths, which I tried to paint up as eerie glowing green ghosts.  Not sure it worked, but I am OK with them as they offer a bit of a counter point to the purple I chose for the main colour of the rest of the army.  This is a regiment sized unit of them (100mm x 80mm) and has 60 of them on the base. 

 

As a side note, while printing 10mm strips is cheap and effective, re-basing them once done is NOT.  I learned that leason the hard way.  I had done a unit of these wraiths as a test unit over the summer for this project, and I had wanted to base everything green to blend with many of my play mats.  It looked horrible with green ghosts on a green base, so I figured no problem, pop them off and re-base to grey when I got to the army in the painting challenge... NOPE, every single strip broke when trying to get them off the old base (weapons broke, wraiths broke of the strip, and the strip broke in multiple places)... So had to print and paint all new models...   Oh well at least they paint fast.

Lastly, a unit of Black Coaches, which I based up on a 125mm x 100mm Cavalry Regiment size base and am using them as Revenant Cavalry since Black Coaches do not exist in KoW but I still wanted to use them.  Initially the horses were just painted as undead horses but the models lacked enough contrast, so I switched them over spectral horses to add some more colour.  I think it worked out ok.

As for points, these add up pretty damn fast, which I honestly didn't expect given how fast they paint up.  But there are 164 infantry models for 164 points, then the dragon and rider for 4, and 4 Black Coaches at 6 points each for a total of 24.

I am also claiming these as my entry for the Babylon 5 planet as "low budget fun" as doing an army this way is super cheap and a ton of fun to paint as it is so quick.  So that adds 20 more points to the total, for a grand total of 212 points!

Lastly, this is my second different theme, so my second point in the Squirrel side contest.