What the future holds...

The time has come to look into the future.  The grim dark future, apparently, as we ponder what might be seen in a tournament room next April.

When I first started playing Demonhunters back in the days of 4th edition, I ended up with lots of Witchhunter figures as well.  Ever since, I had been working on some ideas for such an army.  I had the outline of a story written out, and had even started to come up with the imagery for it.

This character typifies what I was trying to do.  The army was called the Sisters of the Raven.

As you can see, lots of Celtic theme here.  I thought it would be a lot of fun to put this kind of iconography on the bases and cloaks!

Here are a few images that give you the gist of what I was doing...

In this year's Adepticon 40k Champs, I ended up playing 3 of 4 games against orks. Three Fighta Bommas almost every time, with a waagh, tossing 60 re-rollable ST6 shots every turn, killing every single space elf.

Nothing like going up against tons of orks sitting on objectives behind ADL's, backed up by 3 of those orky planes,etc.  That's one reason why I am doing I.G. As much anti plane stuff as I can muster, and dozens of cheap girls  to mob the enemy the way I got mobbed. That and bringing my own fort along. :-)

The story behind the army has been one of my favorites for a long time. This is a Celtic sort of world, mixing standing stones and hive cities. The warriors paint their faces with blue woad and have lots of tattoos.

Ork raids took place many times over the centuries on this world, especially in its pre-industrial state. The Orks figured it would be a pushover. However, the Inquisition noticed these incusrions, and sent its own warriors (disguised as locals) and weapons there as well. The orks would lose, and they could not figure out why.

They thought it might be the blue face paint, so they put blue face paint on themselves and sent more Orks. Same result. They became obsessed with the blue in the way that red and "Go Fastah" get most Orks going.
So, they painted everything blue, and so on.

The Sisters of Battle take a particular interest in this world, due to a high quality of fighting spirit among the women.  There is one character that stands out among all of them.   She is trained even more in secret by special Inquisition units to make her even more effective

Eventually, this character from this world becomes a living saint (like Celestine), as she leads victorious armies time and time again against the Orks.

This story was supposed to tie in my Orks and Sisters together.  In fact, I even painted several Orks in this blue color scheme.   As a result, I have plenty of Orks that I can use as "extras", like the cyberwolves for the DE. I will see if I can snag some of those starter set cultists to use as mutants and other crazy stuff running around in the underhive.

Raging Heroes has some Sister of Battle style figures that I will be using for this "command" element.  Just a handful.  I also plan to scratch build an Exorcist tank, which will be a blast!

Speaking of scratch building, the army board will be massive.  At least twice as high as this year's board.  As you can see by this quick sketch, it will be a cutaway view of a small hive city.  The Monastery and the villas will be on top, of course!

I also want to have a landing pad as part of it.  Each level will have all sorts of activities going on, each appropriate to the level of the city.  Since I will be using the Toughest Girls of the Galaxy miniatures from the upcoming Raging Heroes Kickstarter, I have lots of fun options.  They have optional gas masks on many of the figures, which means I can have loads of girls outside the city, wearing those masks against the ravages of the toxic atmosphere.

Here is a link to a Raging Heroes preview:

http://wappellious.blogspot.com/2013/03/coming-soon-raging-heroes-kickstarter.html

I have even tried to leave a space on the display board for the ADL and the Quad gun.

The inside of the Monastery will have plenty of statuary and murals on the walls.  My other hope is to do each level as a removable piece, for a few reasons.  First, it will be more practical to paint, and also transport.

Plus, each of those individual levels can be placed out on a table for a very fun game of fighting inside the hive city!  That will be a significant challenge to make a reality, but every army board I have tried was the same way. :-)

With the techniques I learned making the Dark Eldar board, I should be able to do this!

The last views of the crashed plane sculpture...

Since we drove past the "Crashed plane sculpture", as we like to call it, by Midway airport on our way to my sister's house, I just had to post this set of images. :-)

As some of you have heard me mention before, they put up this crazy stainless steel sculpture in front of the airport that looks like the tail of a crashed plane sticking out of the ground.  In an homage to that sculpture, I made this base for the Archon's Venom.

The gunner had a few Raging Heroes bits, while the 'passenger' is from the Bronze Age miniature line.

Asharah's venom...

There are a few Dark Eldar items that never got their 'finishing' photos.  The Archon's venom is one of those, so here are a few images!

I did a few blog posts showing the construction of the base and the venom itself.  I wish I could have entered this into the Crystal Brush, but all the figures I put into the case had to fit in a smaller box...

There is still a lot of work left to do on the Dark Eldar.  There is the Tantalus and the Reaper, some Hellions, my critters, many more Wyches, and a host of Kabal Warriors.  I also have some Archon's retinue figs and 5 more Incubi.  More to come!!!

Kentucky Derby... and PIE!

Time for some horse racin' today!  It was also time to prep more amazing Raging Heroes minis.  Here we have a bunch of Fantasy Blood Vestals.

This set just arrived Thursday.  Tree Warriors.  They will be perfect for the glazing videos.

Some shots of the preparation.  It is very straightforward, with the arms, torso, and head nicely sculpted and very solid.

They are incredibly easy to assemble.  You can also move the arms and other pieces a bit to make the poses a bit different.

Not long to get each one put together...

This picture shows a brief time lapse of one being assembled.

Ready for basing!!

OK, where's that guy with the chainsaw that thought he was so tough...

This is one of a few miniatures where the base will also be a big part of the demonstration.  I am sculpting some woodland bases for them right now!

As I sat down to prep these, I kept thinking about a peanut butter chocolate cheesecake which I had seen on facebook.  It was posted by a relative of Cathy's mom, who just happened to be in town!

I pointed to it, and said how tasty it looked, and that I wanted to make one.  Cathy's mom agreed, so we marched off to the store to get the ingredients.  About an hour later, we had it in the freezer!  Four hours after that, Cathy's dad and I cut out a few pieces to make sure that it did not taste horrible.

It almost took a diamond tipped saw to get through the crust (we used crushed chocolate Cheerios instead of rice crispy cereal), but it was a huge success!!!!

I am now calling our new invention Choc-crete.  Not only is it incredibly strong, it is delicious. :-)

The two 'sample' pieces...

And everyone joining in the next day.

Don't they make a nice couple?

And for the first time, both of the Fiends together!

Nasty buggers. :-)

Making the bases for these two was very fun.  I never had a chance to do grey marble like this.  I also came up with some new ways to do the casualties on the bases, etc.

Here's a new bird...

Well, not really a bird. :-)

While I was at Adepticon, I stopped by the CMON booth and picked up some of the Big Birds for the painting videos.  That's when I found out that one of the eagles has been discontinued.  This was the first Great Eagle that was produced.

So, the Osprey video will become the eagle video.  Many of you saw my Great eagle which I painted for my  LOTR Bilbo's Bash army.  That will be very nice.  As a substitute for the original eagle, I am doing my favorite of all, the Griffon.

I really like this guy!  Here are some images of the preparation.

First, the parts...

Using my usual glue / green stuff / glue technique, I put the body together

I used the same idea to glue the paws to the base.

I did a little green stuff work to clean up those joints.

Now for the wings.  Once again, glue /gs/ glue.  First wing in position.

The idea behind this technique is twofold.  First, it fills in some of the gaps that can happen in these kids of joints where pins are not always the best idea.  It also means that I don't have to sit there holding it in place as the glue sets!  You can see the bead of glue in this image, with the green stuff on the inner wing surface.

Wings attached, I did some more clean up work on the feather joint.

I needed a few 50mm square bases for these CMON birds, which meant I dug out some super thick plasticard which I got from Back 2 Base-ix.  I used the razor saw to slice through it...

And glued the base of the griffon to it once the burrs on the edges had been filed away.  I also used some Apoxy sculpt to increase the amount of base and be a little more decorative...

Another view of the extra material which I sculpted.  I added some fine and coarse gravel as well.

I had some of the brown craft paint mixed with black primer out on the palette, so I thought I would put a layer on the base when all the gravel and rocks dried.

I will do additional posts on the rider, and the painting of this beast!  Stay tuned!!!

Let's take it from the top...

Now for some top views to show the freehand a little better :-)

Just like the first Fiend, putting all these straight lines on such a curved surface was a challenge.  Somewhat easier the second time around, however.

If you wanted to see the bases, I suggest checking out the two posts that show how they were created.  Lots of images there! :-)

There could be some fun uses for the rest of the unused parts... especially all those giant metal tentacles!