I bet you thought I forgot... :-)

No, I have not forgotten to snap some images of the Dark Eldar on the Basilica Canus!  Here is the first batch, mostly long shots and exterior views.

There is a surprising amount of room on here for additional units and minis, which is good.  That's because more are on the way!!

I was glad that there were a lot of good sight lines to all the various squads.

This will definitely be a very fun terrain piece for battles!  I can see all sorts of bloody action going on in here :-)

At first I was not sure if the upper levels would be adequate to hold the Venoms, the Raider and the Razorwing, but my fears were quickly dispelled.

More exterior views...

There were more touches that I wanted to add... more cracks in the walls, some freehand stuff inside the windows, etc.  I will do that later on just for fun.

Next up, some of the interior views and close ups!!!  Stay tuned!

Playing around with colors again

Now that we have a handful of the spiders, the color variations are more apparent.

On this spider, the main set of opposing colors was tan/yellow and purple.  The purple was used as the shading color so that it would 'grey down' the brighter yellowish tone enough to keep it in the same limited color set as the previous spiders.

This one is a little more 'visible' than the others, but not excessively so.  The colors are cool enough next to the lava so that the reflected light is still much brighter, creating the glow effect.  Using the fluorescent paints in the lava also helps to generate this circumstance.

The purple was a warmer shade, with much more red in it.  This kept the mixes from potentially turning green, or being too dull.

The next few spiders have the hard carapice, like the one on the right.  I will continue to vary the colors on this type as well.  All this color theory exercise is very helpful to dream up more helpful hints on the videos that emphasize expanding the range of one color... such as reds, or blues, or greens...

Itsy bitsy spider...

Time for some more spiders!  Trying out more of the Badger paints this time.  They definitely combine OK with standard paints.

It's interesting to try and get slightly different color feel on each spider, but keep them to as limited a palette as possible.  I am trying to keep all of the minis in this army to the same limitations... even the Morgul Knights.

I am looking forward to painting the Knights with the OSL of the lava reflections.

Here are some of the additional bases for the next couple of spiders.

Practice and experimentation

Last night was a bit of everything.  I was practicing the lava painting to see if I could learn some new tricks to put in the lava video.  I was trying to use less of the flourescent orange, emphasizing the mixing of magenta with standard yellow.  

Also, it was the first time I used the Badger paints for more than a brush stroke on a palette.  I was testing the ghost tints in particular, so see if they would make good glazing colors.

Using the Badger paints with a brush was great, since they are already thinned down!  I didn't have to use flow improver at all, which was cool.

I only used the very dark ghost tint on this spider.  I will be trying out some of the other ones as this moves along.  It seemed as if there was a bit of shininess... but I need to test out more colors.

I chose this type of base for the lava painting, since it is the easiest base for a newcomer to base construction.  It is also a little easier to replicate over the course of a whole army, as I am doing with this spider/Morgul Knight LOTR force!  Stay tuned for more!

Having some fun on the hardwood

Wow.  Some amazing effort by the IncrediBulls. :-)  Every time they play, you wonder how they even manage to get 5 players on the court.  Toughness personified!

Speaking of tough, these tree warriors from Raging Heroes needed to get those woodland bases I mentioned the other day.  So, I brought out the cork to position them on the base, and then some Apoxy sculpt to create some extra tree stuff for us to glaze!

These figures are slated for the glazing video.  We will be using some minimal initial layers of lighter colors, and doing the rest with all sorts of glazes and washes, including the bases!

Once the Apoxy sculpt set, I put down the sand and gravel.

I used the brown craft paint to prime the bases, since that does so well with absorbent surfaces such as cork and gravel, which regular primer has trouble covering...

Here are a few more views of the tree warriors.

After many weeks of prepping, I am getting much closer to having a full suite of minis for the various videos.  As I mentioned, there are a few of the videos that will have more than one miniature, so that you can get the most information on a given technique as possible!

This was quite the stunner.  It was so intense, all I could do at the time was slap primer and magnets on minis.

Cathy's Mom added another monkey to the family while they were here!

Stay tuned for more, including the Manticore from Raging Heroes...

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.