The first painted movement tray for the Tomb Kings...

I have been wanting to see what one of my movement trays would look like once it was painted.  That, and what the whole unit would look like as well! :-)  These trays are all magnetized both on the top and on the bottom so that they stick to the display board.

Here are a bunch of images, starting with the top views:






Here are some more lateral views.  The inscription says:, "With the help of the Great Winged God, I Psusenes, shall restore my Kingdom and all who reside within it.  Those who plunder my Tomb Cities will suffer a fate worse than undeath.".

The whole team! Group shots...

OK, the team is all here :-)

Another picture of the Wights:



Some Skellies...





And the rest of the team!

Ghouls and zombies, oh my!

The last of the ghouls and zombies for this team are done.  Now it is on to the skeletons and Wights.  It is very strange painting those after doing all the Tomb Kings!!



What is fun on a team like this is to try out different flesh tones on each figure.  It can really help identify which is which during a game.  That is important when that 4-minute timer is ticking away!!

More blood Bowl figures...

Here's some Ghouls for that Undead Blood Bowl team :-)

An Ilyad Ogre Butcher

Here's a figure I had never seen before.  It would make a fantastic ogre Butcher for WFB!



There were all sorts of fine details.  It was also resin, but not like Finecast. :-)  Thank goodness!



I had looked at blood splatter on many other miniatures to see how I wanted to approach this.  I thought it would be very fun!

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...