Eldar/Aeldari Guardians

    The very first army I ever bought for the purpose of wargaming was an Eldar army. My colour scheme was bright yellow, white face plates and bone guns, so they blurred into a mess of bright. I used the army for years until the Daemon Hunters codex came out and became popular at my club at which point my Eldar army started getting tabled really quickly every game and I swapped to a Chaos army.

   My Eldar have been repainted and restarted so many times over the years but I've never been happy with the colour schemes I've tried. The recently I had an idea on how to modernise the old yellow scheme. The guns would need to go black to give the model some real contrast and this might have been enough, but I had the idea of making the uniform shift tone from yellow to orange. The yellow is just Iyaden yellow Contrast over Wraithbone and the orange is 2 layers of wash, one starting at the elbows and waist going down, then the second starting at the knees and wrists, also going down, to give the impression that it gets darker as you go down.

   In hindsight, I think the weapon platform needs something on the big flat yellow area, but otherwise I'm really happy with the project.

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What, More Romans?

    I've said it before this year and I'll say it again, smaller scales are starting to fascinate me. The idea of playing those big famous battles basically one for one and seeing how the tactics worked (or didn't) just feels like an area of the hobby I don't see enough. I've basically fallen in love with 15mm but have hit a bit of a painting block on it as you really need to finish a unit in a sitting or at least be able to leave stuff out between sessions. Then I saw Mark Backhouse was writing a 2mm game, which inspired a few companies to start doing blocks of 2mm armies, while I'm unlikely to buy his rules, the figures do interest me.

   At Salute I picked up 2 bases worth of Roman Legions and an Alae of Roman Cavalry* (although I bought the wrong base size for the cavalry) and decided to give the idea a test.

*and some buildings but that's another story

  I also wanted to test some of the terrain ideas that Mark has been using and the cheapest and quickest was forests made from bath mats. Actually really impressed with it.

I'm not sure how quickly this project will progress, I need to do a bit Warbases order before I can carry on but I've been really impressed. With very little work I can get two massive armies on the table to try out ideas.

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Awakening The Tomb

   I am pretty confident that the next few posts will all be the first units of a series of different new(ish) projects instead of me actually getting on with something useful in my limited hobby time. The first of these new projects is a Necron army for 40k. I've said before and I'll keep saying it, while I don't play 40k a huge amount - normally a small game or two a year with someone who is thinking about getting back into it, the universe has a grip in my head that I'll never get rid of and I like the idea of having armies ready in case I ever fall into a group that does play it regularly.

   But why Necrons? Honestly, cheapness and speed to paint. I've got so many projects where units take ages to paint, and I like the idea of one where I don't need to think a whole lot while I'm painting. Plus I can box them up when done and due the cost of the figures (mostly the other halves of other people's starter sets and magazine freebies) I'm not going to cry about how much money is stored in those boxes if/when I don't use them for years.

   The first finished batches are a unit of Necron Warriors - although I think my basic unit will be boosted up to 20, a Necron Spyder (the only thing I've bought in separately from GW) and 5 packs worth of Necron Scarabs. There is nothing too special about the colour scheme, as I have gone for a dirty version of the classic metal and black, however, I've been using the technical paint Tesseract Glow for the green bits and that pot is what's making this project work.

Next time, something completely different.

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Adventures in 3D Printing

    A bit of a mixed post and its not how I planned to blog about these vehicles but as I finished them at the same time, I thought I could make a point of them.

   The 15mm WW2 British vehicles (2x Matilda and a Daimler Dingo) are from Butler's Printed Models and my first thought when they turned up still attached to all the supports was that I had completely wasted my money. There was no way I would get the supports off without ruining the models, so I dumped the box in a pile of other stuff, leaving the decision of when I would just call it a bad job and throw them out to another day. It took a few months before I decided to just take a pair of cutters to them figuring they would probably end up in the bin anyway, so I couldn't really do any damage, but to my surprise the supports came off fairly cleanly if you just pulled them.

   I'm pretty pleased with the end paint job although the next lot I do will have more of the blue and grey camo to them.

   The next thing was a bit of an experiment. I've got a new-ish project that's been floating about in my head, but one of the main criteria for it was cheapness. The project is a 40k traitor guard army but I wanted to use as few STL Imperial vehicles as possible, and make those I was using look captured but this meant I needed a source of alternative 40k vehicles that weren't going to blow the bank. I found a shop on Etsy called Culverin Models which looked like they fitted the bill, so a quick test order placed and I was away.

   This vehicle is called a Boar troop carrier and it seems to be a 40k version of a Universal Carrier, in my case I plan to use it as a command Salamander. I chaos-ed it up a little bit to hide some of the printed lines and got painting. I'm fairly pleased with the end result but it is obvious that it's 3d printed.

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Where I claim painted models that were mostly painted months ago

    I've not done much painting for a couple of months now, and its starting to show with my backlog. As a shark has to keep swimming to stop itself drowning, so wargamers have to keep painting to stop themselves drowning in their backlogs. Therefore, I have been working on getting my 3rd century Roman project one step closer to the table with a few units of Auxiliaries whenever I can sneak a few minutes of painting time - although if we are being honest, the vast bulk of these were done in times when painting was easier. 

   Nothing hugely special here. Two of the units were from my kickstarter haul from a few years back and the other is from my top up order when I decided to make sure I had enough to split the army in two for civil war games and have been given a pretty basic paint job. Historically accurate or not, I want to make sure my Legionnaires and Auxiliaries look different at a glance on the table, so the tunics being white or red should be an easy thing to spot quickly.

   Again, in an attempt just to get figures off my painting table quickly, this skeleton crossbow unit was next and as there is little on the models bar bone, they were a quick paint job.

I've still got an unhappy amount of units left to paint in the project, so I had better find some time to get on with it.

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The Kingdom Rises

    Painting has been a bit of a struggle recently with an increasingly active little terror but I'm finding the odd moments of time to keep projects moving. I have 4 or 5 projects that I have marked as priority projects that I want to focus on getting finished so I can get figures on the table, hopefully, this year - so it come as no surprise that this post is about another new(ish) project.

   Late 2020 when I was building up a painting pile ready to be broke for the next year or so, I got it into my head that I wanted a small, self contained ancient army that wouldn't end up sprawling into an endless project and I had half an eye on an Egyptian army. I'd priced up an army using Warlord Games figures, but as you buy box sets I was either going to end up with extra units to round numbers out or wasted figures, plus the army got really expensive. Then I discovered Newline Designs and their ranges. I placed an order for a Celtic chariot so I could test the size of the figures and see if I liked them - I can't remember if it made it onto the blog or if it became the last unit of chariots waiting to be built - and deciding I was pleased with the casting, I bought myself a New Kingdom Egyptian army after carefully checking my planned figures would fit in a single 4 litre Really Useful Box.

   However, with my fluttering interests moving around and currently focussing on 15mm stuff, the army fell way down my backlog list to the point where I considered selling it on. In the end, I decided that as long as I started it asap, it wasn't going to take up much space, it would make for an interesting game and as it isn't that many figures, it should be a fairly quick job. I have no doubt other armies will be mixed into between units, but I aim to get this army done before the autumn . . .

   The first unit was a unit of infantry. I wanted to test colours - esp skin tone - on something easy before hitting the more complicated stuff - I'm looking at you chariots. I've take a few assumptions with the painting, for one, I've seen claims that Egyptians of the period was darker skinned than their wall art and that lightening their skin was a way of showing that they were different to those black skinned savages in Numida, despite being similar tones. I've also seen it claimed that the art is darker than their real tone due to the paint they had at hand. So I've gone for something darker than I would paint someone from the middle east, but lighter than I plan to paint the Numidians - so that I'm probably wrong in both ways.

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Tying together

    Following on from my trip to Warhammer World I decided to carry on painting my 40k projects and as they were the newest, it made sense to get on with one of my (limited) purchases from the day. As my games at WHW were thematically the same force - Sons of Horus, Daemons to show the corruption and then my Chaos Marines which are the warband my SoH become, I thought it made sense to add some jump troops to my Chaos.

   I've painted them in the same palette I used 7 or so years ago, starting with a dark brown before moving onto reds and I'm pleased with how they have come out. I've always joked that squads armed with plasma guns and jump packs would be brilliant in 30k, so when I realised raptor squads can have 2 plasma guns in 5 men, I had to do it. Then the power sword is my first attempt at making a weapon look like it has energy flowing through it.

   While I painting the red armour, I decided to finish off some more strays that I ran out of time to paint in the run up to the Warhammer World trip, the second Hellbrute and some more Khorne Daemons. The hellbrute was from the Dark Vengeance boxset from years back and has been sitting in a box for just about as long, while the daemons are much newer and were the sacrifice to get my armies painted to the deadline - even building the last few unnecessary ones would have meant I failed the time pressure - but now mean I have 38 bloodletters and a herald.

   I suspect I need a second squad of raptors to complete the theme, but that can wait as I have a couple of better ideas first.

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