Working from scratch

Bear with me folks!  Now that I have the new lighting setup, I am able to take groups shots and other similar pictures for the first time.  So, I am working my way through some of the older army minis... this time the Tainted Legions of Pharaoh Pseusenes.

Everything in these images was either scratch built of massively converted.  I know the long time viewers have seen some of the Tomb Kings stuff way back when, but it was so neat to see all of the scratch built stuff all in one place.

And, with the new Obelisk terrain no less.

I had lots of fun making everything here... the Colossus, Heirotitan, Screaming skull catapult, carrion, and so on.

A better shot of the Titan!

And the Colossus!  I have numerous step by step posts on these guys... sculpting, painting, and so on.

Sadly, all the catapult does is blow itself up, but making the sphinxes which hold the posts taught me how to make them for the display board.

More scenes like this to come.  I hope you don't mind!!!

A warped beginning

Using the new lighting, I was able to take some shots of an old terrain piece, one that was featured in a terrain building video.  It's the warp gate!

I had to redo this for the video, since there are some GW bits attached.  There was no way to remove them, so I built new ones.

If you look through the blog, you will be able to find some shots of this item in the final battle of a huge 4 part campaign.

This campaign involved secret maps, special characters, wargear, reinforcements, you name it.  The whole thing was all about control of this warp gate.

Rich had his Chaos marines, and I had my beloved Demonhunters.

After many hours, and lots of casualties, it came down to my unit of terminators vs what was left of a mix of marked units... Nurgle, Undivided, Slaneesh, etc.

Lots of crazy things happened, that's for sure.  The special character ended up killing a large number from each side.  You could not 'control' him.  He was only interested in the gate.  Whoever had 'control' of the gate is who he hung out with.

If he was threatened, he would use a psychic power to kill everything in a certain radius, no matter who it was.

I don't know how it would work with 6th edition.  It was 4th edition when we last played the scenarios.  Still, it would be fun to play on this thing again :-)

Once the new warp gate is painted, I will post those pics!

Then and Now...

OK, here is something that I used to do a lot back in the day.

That is, paint the same figure which I painted years before to see what kind of difference there was in appearance, time it took to paint, and so on.

The idea was, I could see what improvements there were in the technique over a given period of time.  Since time was also very critical in getting things done sooner rather than later, conserving time was just as crucial.

If a figure looked about the same, but took 25% less time to paint, that was also a huge win!

Long gaps between attempts would yield some shocking results.  I remember one of the first "Then and Now" projects not only had a huge visual result, but it took 3 days less to paint!

Most of you are familiar with the Celtos Fomorian Siren that I posted earlier this week.

  

However, unless you were looking at my Cool Mini or Not gallery in 2003, it is very likely you never saw this.  Circa early 2003:

This was probably done in 2010, so a 7 year gap.  I know it was probably a huge saving in time, but there were other advancements.  Photography and basing would be two of them!  I tried to keep the base as similar as possible to better estimate the effect.

This was also about the time that I was starting to do a lot more experimentation with various color combinations, such as the greenish brown hair with the purple flesh.

Give this a try yourself!  You might be very surprised.

Playing on a sloppy field.

Hey, this is a bit like playing on the Soldier Field turf on a given Sunday!  Nice and swampy.

Here is a color test figure for the Slime Bay Packers. Or Pustules, depending on how you see it.

I did not do any of the conversions on this team.  My role is strictly to add paint to them!

This first mini is a Pestigor... just about the only guy that can handle a ball.  However, I think that ball won't last long with that claw!

Something to shake your fist at

Here we go... one more Imperial Fist!

Yet another Forgeworld piece. :-)  The base, as usual, is from DragonForge Designs.

Have you got a pair?

More shots of the second Redeemer!

It's been very cool to have all these new shots of these vehicles.  I only with I had this system much long ago!

When I look at these guys, and remember all the crazy little parts that I spent hours painting... which are practically invisible!  Ouch...

I have to say, I do prefer creating my own freehand than messing around with the Forgeworld doors.  Aside from the fact that they never fit, are warped, have air bubbles and too much mould release, it is just more fun to make my own designs.

I also had to create a turret mount for the Multi Melta, which was done with a carved piece of sculpey..

Now for some top views!

And a matching set!

These shots are very cool for me to check out now :-)

Get out of my way!

Happy again.

The Golden Boy

One more Celtos figure from the archives.  This time it is from the Sidhe faction.  There were lots of very nice miniatures that came from the elves, including some very dramatic archers, and the dragon riders.  I really liked those, and I have and example of that here:

http://wappellious.blogspot.com/2013/02/sidhe-dragon-rider-from-celtos.html

Fortunately I was able to collect several of these back in the day.  In an ideal world, I would have enough of them to make a decent sized High Elf army.  There are lots of female figures and characters that could work well.

I also did a few Sidhe theme dioramas... here is a link to one of my favorites!

http://wappellious.blogspot.com/2012/03/celtos-sidhe-stone-temple-diorama.html