Brimstone Horrors

With the holiday weekend rolling by the Brimstone Horrors were added to the painted column. The basic paint scheme had already been worked out with the flames from the Blue Horrors earlier and I just tried to keep the overall humanoid shape visible through the flames.

Since they're made from living flame I decided to try to out some source lighting on the bases. After reading a couple of tutorials I dived in. I'll be honest I'm not entirely happy with the outcome but for a first try I guess it could have been worse. 

With 4 more models done for Silver Tower that brings us up to 16 of 51 models complete. The halfway point is coming into view!

The Brimstone Horror is a new addition to Tzeentch's daemon line up. Two combine to make a Blue Horror just as two Blue Horrors make a Pink. Of course in the game it usually happens the other way and you'll get a pair of Brimstones after destroying a Blue Horror. 

The Horrors, the Horrors ...

Next up in the painting queue for Silver Tower are a collection of Tzeentch horrors. I grabbed the 4 Blue Horrors to work on. One of the things to get used to with the box set is that it contains 2 big sprues of all of the bad guys so you end up with 2 of each figure. When I painted the cultists I only did half of what comes in the set, as painting 4 models at a time is kinda my limit.

Double the Horror!

 Normally my OCD would kick in and I'd convert the second set so I wouldn't have duplicate sculpts but I'd like to get the set painted and be able to play a game sometime in my lifetime so I needed to find a quicker way with the Horrors.  Since about 95% of each figure is their skin and I'm kinda limited by making them blue I settled on trying to paint one set dark blue in the center fading out lighter on the limbs and the other the opposite.

I wanted the fire to look unantural so I kinda skewed normal fire colors over into the more vibrant shades. I'll paint up the Brimstone Horrors the same way.

My wife has also been painting some of the figures and has finished off one of the Pink Horrors and the fishman familiar, Slop. I really like the way she did the familiar I'm hoping I can do as good a job on mine!

The Pink Horror comes in 2 pieces with the inside of the mouth attached to the body and the face on the other. Cleverly, she painted the mouth before gluing it together something that I wouldn't of thought of.

Hopefully Doomseeker Garin Grumblebeard will make it back to tavern to complain over another tankard of ale after accidentally wandering into the local daemon union meeting.

We have 12 of the 51 figures done so far. The Brimstone Horrors are currently on the paint table for me and the last of the Pink Horrors for her. Finishing off these daemons will put us well over a quarter of the way done. Maybe we'll even get a game in before the leaves fall!

Silver Tower Denizens Rebased

Quick post as I've painted up some bases and rebased my previous Silver Tower figures. I think the new bases work pretty well with the room tiles. I have two different tiles in the pictures.

I've also finished off some horrors and my wife has a couple of figures almost done as well. Just need to seal them and I should be able to show some pictures off.

Roads No Longer Taken

No, I'm not going to wax philosphical about changing lives and such. Instead this is about an experiment to make a flexible road for my alien world terrain. To fit in with the Big Stone Heads I wanted the road to look like ancient stone pavers that have been partially reclaimed by nature.

They won't break line of site or anything useful in a game of 40k but they help tell a story with the terrain setup and those really are my favorite type of pieces.

The basic plan is the same as all the rest of my flexible pieces with the addition of some stone slabs made out of pink foam. I wanted them to look weathered so they were sanded down then given a coat of wood putty. These were glued directly to the mesh base.

The roads are on the bottom right. The others are rough ground pieces that I worked on at the same time. 

The rest of the build was the usual except I've tried out some new material for longer grass. Going into the project I knew I didn't want to use my standard static grass or typical trees. I wanted to have a more alien looking flora. I have a plan for the trees which hopefully I'm finally getting close to starting but I was at a loss for grasses to match. Then while browsing through my flytying materials ( often raided for modelling) I found some crystal dubbing. I later bought several shades that I thought would work together and mixed up some grasses.

While its made of a similar material as normal static grass it's a bit shinier and sparklier. It's also a bit longer and more curled so I had to cut it up into shorter lengths. I'm not entirely convinced with the effect but I think it might look better once I have more pieces complete.

Silver Tower Doomseeker

I finished up the Dwarf from the Silver Tower set. I've always had a fondness for GW dwarf miniatures but never really collected an army of them. I like this new take on the slayers with gold runes hammered into their flesh and even bigger  hair! They kind of remind me of even more over the top Hawkmen from the Flash Gordon movie. Not sure even Brian Blessed could of pulled off this look though.

I also picked up the new Shattered Dominion bases this past weekend. The first thing I noticed is that they are really thick. Not only are they thicker than a normal plastic base but they're nearly solid plastic making for a pretty hefty base. I painted mine up in a gold and blue-green scheme to try to match the most common floor tiles in the game.

While down at my local game store the wife and I also joined in on a Age of Sigmar event game. She joined the forces of chaos trying to sail their ragtag navy to attack a city, while I was part of the Stormcast team trying to stop them.

We both had fun and I won the raffle for the new General's Handbook which lays out some point values for models and different campaign rules. We've been talking about picking up some models that could be used in both AoS and for Silver Tower as well. So you might be seeing more dwarves in the future.

Silver Tower Cultists

My wife and I are trying to get our set of Warhammer Quest painted up. My next step was half of the cultists. I tried painting them up with pale muted skin fading out into their mutated bird like feet. I went with both pink and blue feet both because that's the colors of Tzeentch Horrors and also since it matches Red and  Blue footed Boobies. The feet were done by applying washes over the fleshtone. I think the pink came out a little better than the blue overall.

I still left their bases blank but I've noticed that GW put out a set of Age of Sigmar bases that look baroque enough they should fit in with the Silver Tower rooms. I'll try to pick up a set and rebase everyone.

Worshipping Dark Gods must be a full body workout! Check out that muscle tone. 

We're starting to make some progress but there's still a way to go before we have enough done to play.  I'm probably going to try to get the dwarf done next to keep with the muscley guys theme.

Tau Firewarrior and Pal

In the background of my other projects for the past couple of months I've been trying to work out a paint scheme for the new additions to my Tau force. This hasn't exactly gone smoothly but I finally figured out something that I like.

I painted up my original Tau force when they first came out back in 2001 ( I think, I tried to look it up online) I actually painted the entire army in about a month and a half to meet a deadline of playing a local Rogue Trader Tournament. The downside is that I completely burned myself out on painting them and never painted another Tau figure. Till now.

My concept for my new additions is that they would be a unit of specialized recon/assault unit tasked with tracking local Tyranid splinter forces. My original army would fill the role of the hapless local planetary defense forces explaining why they have some out of date equipment in their ranks ( the first release models some of which have now been updated by GW).

With that idea in mind I wanted to have a camo scheme but one that doesn't really look like a typical modern pattern. After some web browsing I picked out some ideas to try out.

The first was a German WW1 helmet pattern. I liked the heavy black lines between the different colors, not something you see anymore in modern camo schemes.

Image courtesy of the Imperial War Museum http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/30091482

I also wanted to go with a modern dazzle scheme that you sometimes see on warships and planes. Here I was strongly influenced by the figure made by Fichten Foo who's work is always just amazing. I highly recommend checking out his blog at this link.

This is Fichten Foo's K-H.O.L.E. Gunner. I really like the way he did the camo pattern.

So with those ideas in mind I tried a couple of different schemes. I didn't finish any of the figures off as I was just trying to get the camo to look right. There was also usually a couple of weeks between each figure as I pondered other approaches.

These were done left to right. The final pattern took parts of each.

In the end I was happy with my fourth attempt which I tried out on a drone first as I was running out of pre-assembled Firewarriors. The last firewarrior I assembled just for the project so he was armed with a pulse carbine to fit in with the close quarters role I planned for the detachment.

Next up for the Tau project: Stealth Suits.