Necro Knights!!!

Time for the Necropolis knights to get the new photo treatment.

It was by far the toughest unit to paint.  There were lots of crazy little details.  I also had to continue the blue color, as I had been doing on all the constructs.

I had a lot of fun with the basing!  Here's a link to the painting of the bases:

http://wappellious.blogspot.com/2012/07/sneaky-snakes-painting-bases-for.html

It was all very fun to paint!

The swirling snake bodies on both the bases and the figures themselves presented quite a sight!

Like everything else, they died all too easily.

I would have liked to have one more in the unit, but the points were just not there...

Comin' at ya!

More coming up!

Who rode in the boat...

Ok... here we reveal who went cruising around in that raider.  Yes indeed... a batch of Grotesques!

They were supposed to be more of a tank killing unit, where the vehicle would fly up to the rear of an unsuspecting vehicle... have these guys jump out, and hit it with a million attacks.

Since they would probably have the second pain token by then, they would have enhanced strength as well!  The rear armor of just about anything short of a Land Raider would be pretty squishy.

This did work out a few times, but the lack of terrain to hide behind usually spelled doom on turn 1.

I have no idea how the 7th edition rules would effect all this, between the psychic stuff and the altered vehicle damage chart, etc.

At least they look kinda scary hopping out of this!

Now for the other backdrop...

From above, which shows you the matching bases...

I was bummed that none of the combinations I tried to create for this army had any kind of real effectiveness.  Probably another reason for my building dismay with the direction of 40K.

About to take flight...

Here are some new images of my Gwahir eagle for my Lord of the Rings army.

He was actually quite effective in the field, working with the Galadrhrim Cavalry to wipe out enemy units at a distance, or in combination with the Stormcallers.

The idea was to do the knockdown spell on the enemy unit, and then fly him over the top of the pile to hit them from the other side.  This would boost the fight skill even more, but also provide that high strength needed to get through the tougher enemy.

The fresh Easterling kill was placed on the base to add to the theme of the army, since my Evil army was the Easterling/Khand alliance.

These were the two armies that I brought to my one and only LOTR tournament a few years ago.  That was a lot of fun :-)

I had a whole story around the Easterlings and the Knights of the Blood Rose. There was also a large display board constructed... here's a link:

http://wappellious.blogspot.com/2012/11/better-late-than-never-painting-display.html

There's much more of the army to be seen in the Lord of the Rings section of the blog!

Stalking around the dealer's room

I guess I will be doing quite a bit of that this weekend at GenCon.  It's going to be very busy for me!

To make sure that I had some files on hand for blog posts when we are in transit tomorrow, I snapped tons of images on the new Hangar 1 backdrops.  Once again, images that were not possible until now!

I loved this unit of Stalkers for my Tomb Kings.  They are heavily converted, as you can see.  The pillars match those on the display board.

The unit was designed to go in a very specific spot on the display board, right underneath a recently dug hole into the Tomb Complex.

There are some WIP images of the conversions here:

http://wappellious.blogspot.com/2012/06/why-does-it-always-have-to-be-snakes.html

Then I had to see what they would look like on the brown backdrop.  I knew that the greens and blues would be showcased a great deal :-)

For those not familiar with the theme of the army, it is essentially a Tzeentch tainted Tomb Kings army.  There is an entire story written for the army, which can also be found in the Tomb Kings section.

The bases and movement tray are all sculpey, of course.  Once again, many WIP images showing how all of it was made.

The Hieroglphs around the edge say "Those who enter the Tomb Cities of Pseusenes shall suffer a fate worse than death."

A pity that they were so awful in combat.  Well... that's just about all of the Tomb Kings units.

Next up... Necro Knights!

Pillars of time

There have been in incredible amount of things to try and get ready for GenCon.  Doubt if all of that is going to happen, but at least I will try!

This set of bases is supposed to be for the new Holy Orders faction from Wild West Exodus, which they are unleashing at GenCon!

This is pretty standard Sculpey stuff here.  Cork on the bottom, a layer of baked Sculpey on top!

Trying out a few different designs...

I want to try to create a lectern on one of them.  I will be sculpting a big book to go there!

I also want to have some marble columns.  I rolled out some tubes of sculpey, so that I could carve and weather them as needed.

While the clay was still soft, I cut some lines into them to create sections in the columns.

These smaller pieces are going to be the bases for the columns.  I will carve them after the clay is baked.

A whole set!!!

Another big tile with lots of Sculpey for baking.  Most of this is for use at GenCon.

This was also my first time using the new over to bake sculpey.  It seems like it sent well!  It's way easier to see what the temperature is, that's for sure.

Wish me luck getting to GenCon!!!

Let's go raiding!

And to do that, we need a sweet ride!  We have one right here... sporting the Blood Star icon.

Of all the vehicles, I think I was looking forward to this one the most, as it had some of the best freehand opportunities.  

The large sail was obviously a perfect canvas.

Also, this has been the classic notion of a Dark Eldar army all along.  I could not wait to put my spin on this iconic vehicle!

It's not an easy thing to paint, that's for sure, as I had to paint a number of the parts before I could even think about putting it all together.  Some of them were deep interior pieces.

Getting the crew to be in just the right position was also more difficult than I expected.

There are certainly a number of things that could go horribly wrong with painting pieces first, but there was just no way I was getting my brush into some of those areas!

Front and back.  There are also a number of WIP images here, including all the work on the underside:

http://wappellious.blogspot.com/2013/04/a-piece-here-and-part-there.html

The next set of images will feature the guys who rode in this.  Kind of a surprise :-)