An experiment with movement trays

Well, the Mad Scientist strikes again.

As you already know, I wanted to make some new units for the Tomb Kings.. a horde of Tomb Guard (who are actually guarding something!) and the big horsemen units.  It's hard to believe, but in all the previous posts about the Tomb Kings, almost none of them showed the movement trays... just the bases!  This is a little window into how I make those.

I wanted to see if I could create a multi-level movement tray which would also allow me to have some de-facto unit filler.  40-50 Tomb guard all jammed together is pretty darn boring from a visual standpoint, so I tried to come up with something more dramatic.

The idea is that the unit is guarding the Silver Sarcophagus of the Tainted Pharaoh.  I wanted this to be raised up, just like the Casket of Souls.  I started out making the tray in the usual method, starting out with a piece of scrap matboard cut to size.  I then cut out pieces of foam core to create the various levels.



After I had the pieces cut, I covered them with refrigerator magnets and magnet sheets.


I took my strips of matboard and glued those along the edges.  These help hold the figures in place, and will also give me the space to write some key inscriptions in hieroglyphs.  It will say: "With the help of the Great Winged God, I Psusenes, shall restore my Kingdom and all within it.  Those who have plundered my Tomb Cities will suffer a fate worse than Undeath."



Here is the other experiment.  It is the unit of 17 horsemen that will be delivering a Death mage up close and personal (hopefully).  Just like the Tomb Guard, it gets very redundant seeing horse after horse until they all blend together.  I wanted to be able to feature some of the sphinxes that you saw on the ground level, but this one will not be weathered.

The big experiment here involves replacing the usual cavalry base (or any base for that matter) with a piece of foam core cut to size.  It can be very difficult to get all my pieces of baked sculpey to line up properly.  All it takes is one to be glued to a plastic base just a fraction of an inch off, and it messes up the entire unit.  Not good when it involves this many figures on one tray!

So, I thought I would try these pieces of foam core.  I sure hope it works, since it would make big units like the Tomb Guard a whole lot easier to base!!

Step by step: color test for LOTR Galadhrim Knights of the Blood Rose

Well, today was just a weird day.  I spent several hours filing and shaving down mould lines, washing off Mould release from countless resin pieces, gluing sand and gravel on bases, painting on liquid green stuff, priming minis and other mind numbing tasks.  The whole day left me in a strange mood.

The cure for that (at least for me) is to restore some measure of sanity to the day the only way I know how.  Paint color test minis! :-)

This now determines how I will approach the painting of my LOTR (Good) army for Bilbo's Bash in November.  These guys are the Knights of the Blood Rose.  These are elves who have no intention of leaving Middle Earth to the child races, nor to their bitter enemies... the Easterling/Khandish alliance.

I decided to make this a step by step, since lots of people have been asking about my golds.  This is the latest version of how I paint them, using the fluorescent paints, etc.

So, here was the first step. Obviously using the shaded basecoat technique:


How do you like my fancy palette?  You can still see the primer and the liquid green stuff!
Covering every surface was important, and you can see that I started out lighter.  I also included the brush that I always use for these earlier stages, so you can get a better idea of its size.



At this stage, I began to introduce the cooler and deeper reds.  These will set off all the lighter colors.  I am also trying to establish some reflected colors in the golds, such as the burnt orange.



This image shows the figure right before starting the glazes.



OK, first layers of glazing and tinting complete.  Once I have gotten all the values as dark as I need them, I begin to clean up lines (harder to do on these less detailed LOTR minis, that's for sure), and think about reflected lights.



These are the images of the completed piece.  You can see that the face was finished off, and some very bright highlights added.  The bright fluorescent yellow was included in many of the mixes, both in the lighter and darker shades.  It makes the metals more luminous.





So, the first one is down!!  Lots more to come...

Lord of the Rings: Radagast the Brown

I tossed this guy into the Golden Demons Saturday.  He didn't win anything, but he has garnered some serious dread in his opponents on the tabletop!

I tried to work him into my Bilbo's Bash LOTR tournament army, but with only 600 points to work with, it left me with way too few bodies out there.  I ended up using a pair of Galadhrim stormcallers instead.  Those 2 guys combined are less points, and they let me have twice the chance of rolling some 6's to restore all my will points.  This will have to be tested several times, I suppose.

Anyway, back to the Brown guy...

Back to our regularly scheduled programming: Extra weapons for the Nurgle Decimator

I think there was some sort of event that we did this weekend, but I can't seem to recall it.  The memories are very fuzzy.  Cathy insists that we were in Rosemont yesterday...

The attempt to catch up on a year's worth of sleep deprivation was only partially successful.  Today is mostly a cleaning day, since I completely destroyed the house in the process.  At least the Gatorade bottles have been tossed away that were rolling around where my feet are supposed to be!

Among the things I have had to reorganize are all my projects.  Those had gotten shoved further and further back on shelves and such as the craziness rose to an all time high.  I am finding all sorts of neat stuff!

I already have 3 vats of Fabuloso filled with Forgeworld parts.  I need to get some more, since I have 3X that much resin to soak this week.

The Dark Eldar and Chaos Dwarfs are coming out of their hiding places, and the LOTR armies are also being organized into 600 point forces.

With Jon kindly donating a new 6th edition rulebook to Wappelville, it means Cathy and I have to see what's going on there.  Eventually I will create a page where people can leave thoughts and advice about an army comprising of massed amount of Reaver Jetbikes and grotesques. :-)  Not sure how that would work yet.

Anyway, here are some final images of the Decimator.  At least this Decimator, since I will be making one for each Chaos God.  Can you imagine what will be sculpted onto a Slaneesh version? Censored.





Here we have the additional weapon arms:

Games Day comes to an end... but does the story?

Well, Games Day has come and gone, and I am still (mostly) alive!  There was some doubt that would be the case, let me tell ya...

Anyway, same bad news to deliver about Armies on Parade, as there is no Joy in Wappelville.  I came in 2nd place.  It was a frustrating experience for a few reasons, but I really don't want to get into that here.  I would be insulting your collective intelligence to say that I was not very bummed about the result.

However, what was truly amazing was the Parade of loyal Wappellians who came up to us all day long inundating me with super positive vibes!  I lost count of how many people took the time to say hi, and let me know that they enter this particular insane asylum on a daily basis (it starts to show after a while, you know).

It was entirely unexpected, and it was stunning.  It felt like each person was walking up to me and handing me a trophy or something.  Fantastic.

A project of the scale of the Tomb Kings is a massive exercise in self absorption.  All you are thinking about is how to finish "my" army to win "my trophy" and so on.  After today, and hearing from so many of you, I felt a lot less guilty that this silly blog was giving other people something cool to look forward to each day (kinda like finding a new package of miniatures in your mailbox!).

I really thought you guys might be bored with it, and say "Enough with the dried out raisin dudes already!"

So, since you are gluttons for punishment, here is what is coming your way...

More Tomb Kings.  Yup, you heard that right.  Since this is my new army, I need a bigger variety of units to select from.  I also have to rework the army so that it is more tournament playable (right now it is completely unplayable!)  Finally, I have some really cool new ideas that I am compelled to create.

Dark Eldar.  This is my Adepticon 40k tournament army.  I found out today that the rather strange army build that I have for them may have gotten a whole lot better in 6th edition.  Yea!  Plus, did I mention a Tantalus?

Chaos Dwarfs.  I will be continuing the Civil War Dwarfs, but there will also be more traditional stuff, like all the cool Forgeworld stuff that Jon has kindly set in front of me!  In the end, there could be as much as 3K of the little guys...

Not one, but TWO Lord of the Rings armies, each one with a 3D display board.  They are for Bilbo's bash in November.  Think Fortress: Rivendell (Elves/Army of the Dead) vs. Genghis Khan (Easterlings/Khand)

WFB Empire.  Lots of swordsmen, handgunners, etc., with a bunch of Forgeworld pieces.  It will be fun!

Several metric tons of 40k Forgeworld stuff.  Terminators, vehicles, you name it.  Brace yourselves is all I can say.

A Legion of Everblight army.  I need lots of warbeasts, and I have lots of Apoxy sculpt.  I think you guys know what that means...

Blood bowl teams... quantity unknown as of right now.

And a whole bunch of other stuff  which will come up here and there.  The plan is to present all this stuff in a "story format" as I have with the Tomb Kings.  I hope that it will be as much fun as the TK have been!

Sorry to drag on here, but I almost forgot.  I did not go home empty handed today!

I had 6 entries in various categories.  I managed to take home a few Silver Demons in:
Warhammer Fantasy Monster with Loq-qar the Terrible


And another with a squad of Sanguinary guard.




Also, John Shaeffer (sorry if I misspelled that!) was kind enough to give me some
'make up" Demons which I had been waiting for since 2009.  This was the year of the big cheating scandal, which affected seven categories, two of which were mine.  I had a Bronze go to Silver, and a 4th place bump up to a Bronze.

This made Babo very happy!!!!!


Once again, I can't say enough thank yous to everyone who spoke with us today.  I will do my best to keep things interesting, and be the poster child for obsessive compulsive!

One more thing for Armies on Parade

Here is one last item I wanted to make for the Tomb Kings army.  The idea came to me the day of the qualifier.  Nearly everyone who looked at it assumed that all the glyphs on the back wall were just photocopied images of regular hieroglyphs.

Thast was kind of a bummer, so I thought about ways the get people to not only notice the designs, but understand what they were.  I figured this was a funnier way of getting people to do just that!



Well, it's all packed now, so we shall see what happens...

Gearing up for the big day! Forces arrayed in the Tomb

OK!  Here we go!  I am still making final adjustments and touches to the army, but here is how it stood as of 4am this morning.



I tried a bunch of shots with the flash this time, since there was some success the last time around.  We have images from a variety of areas, starting with the whole board...







Here's an unusual angle:


Now for some close ups...








Here we have some interior shots.  Some with flash, but a few without, so you ca get a feel for how the interior lights really create a wild effect...













And then some additional shots of the ground level...









If anyone is still actually looking at this post by now, I do want to pass along a bunch of thank yous.

First, to Cathy, who has put up with this (and me!) for 14 very long months, which have all been pretty difficult.  Thank you for your patience, and I love you! :-)

To Jon Minard and Marty Gaska, for contributing mass amounts of raw materials for this project.  This thing does not even get off the ground unless Jon's got my back!

To Rich Circo and his son AJ, who kept my gaming interest alive after some ugly tournament experiences.  You guys made me see the fun in this, and then got me into LOTR!  Cool!  Many thanks.

Everyone at the Bunker... Larry, Phil, Chris, Kevin, Rob, Dean, Mike, Katie, Chad, John, Joe and so on, who would always have a kind word to say about the blog, and the army as it went along.

The guys at the Tomb Kings Khemri forum, who have encouraged the heck out of me and kept me going on Tomb Kings, even when the results on the table were a complete disaster! :-)

To my family, who put me through art school only to see it twisted into something as crazy as this!  Oh my!  The law of unintended consequences...

And finally, to all of you, who have kept coming into the insane asylum which is this blog.

I am not expecting to win anything at this point, although it would sure be fantastic if the Tainted Pharaoh pulled off the miracle! 

The story does not end, here, however. In fact, I have to rework the entire army for Adepticon.  So you will see plenty more Tomb Kings!!!!

Necrosphinx! Another monster for Armies on Parade

Well, time is just about up.  One more very very long day coming tomorrow!



At this point, I will be focusing more on tidying up various things like the display board, and some of the miniatures.



This guy was a major challenge, since I wanted to have all the variations in color.  It would have been a lot simpler to do a standard scheme as opposed to the rainbow effect of Tzeentch! :-)



I attempted to have at least some gold remain.  That goes with the whole tainted process, where it may not have taken full effect...






There were so many crazy little surfaces on this thing!  Every time I turned around, there was another area I had missed!





I was not able to do a "step by step" on this piece, but here are a few WIP images I took during the process of painting...






I put this big guy on the army board and shot a bunch of images.  I am off to process those now!  One last big post tomorrow...

As I write this, it is once again very late.  For anyone who is going to see this in person, I hope that all this work over the last 14 months shows!  It might be more difficult when it is all jammed together on the board, as opposed to these individual profiles.  It is my hope, however, that people take the time to really look at what's there!   Oh yeah, and read the fluff as well.