Old Warhammer World Photos: City Fight Table Part 1

Back in 2013, I went up to an open day at Warhammer World, and at one point went around taking a bunch of modelling reference photos of some of the various gaming tables they have up there. I've been doing a bit of maintenance on old folders and found these during the clear out, and thought people might be interested.

I took a ton of photos of the (new at the time) city fight board they'd done. There's some lovely ideas in here. For the sake of my sanity, I'm uploading this lot in two posts.

Druze Bayram Security - and some Mercenary friends

With ITS Season 10 due soon, and my painting held up in turn by a messy painting area and a house move, I decided to farm out the job of getting my Druze Bayram Security painted up for the table. I mentioned this, and Aodhan from my local club offered to do it as he's taking commissions. I'm massively pleased with the results.

In terms of prioritising miniatures, I asked Aodhan to paint what I already had assembled at the time! This mostly means I've now got a full Druze Core Fireteam painted, along with Saito Togan and some Bashi Bazouks. More models will follow in time, but these are figures I'm pretty confident will get taken often.

Process wise, I knew I wanted the figures to look like they were operating in a near future city at night, bathed in neon. Aodhan used a couple of test figures and tried a few different techniques before settling on the one used here (ironically, pretty much the first one we tried).

I'd also picked up a few mercenaries for Soldiers of Fortune, which conveniently will also work for the Ikari company in the future, and as I didn't have any other Druze models assembled at the time, I sent those over for a nice paint job as well.

The nice simple paint job really accentuates even these older Yuan Yuan sculpts. I particularly like the sword Yuan Yuan, and I think Aodhan really liked her as well.

I'd also found a pack of the "fat Yuan Yuan" models - a limited edition sculpt based on an old in joke between Corvus Belli and the fans. So, they also went over to get painted up.

The biggest challenge was the one still landing his jet pack, as the flame jet needed to still work with the bright neon.

As it was, I think Aodhan did an excellent job getting the extra light source to work. This shot aso demonstrates the way the fire arc markers are working as well.

So, my first Infinity models fully painted, and I'm looking forward to getting some games in with them! I can defintely recommend hiring Aodhan if you want some of your models commission painted.

Old Warhammer World Photos: Fantasy Village

Back in 2013, I went up to an open day at Warhammer World, and at one point went around taking a bunch of modelling reference photos of some of the various gaming tables they have up there. I've been doing a bit of maintenance on old folders and found these during the clear out, and thought people might be interested.

This set of photos is of a fantasy village table, intended for gaming. What I loved about it was that they'd just used the standard kits of the time and painted them well to give a very different feel to the usual box art.

Painting some Reaper Bones Scenery

This weekend, with a lot of tidying going on for the housemove, I realised that I had cleared a space to my painting table, and there was actually some space to get some painting done. Revelling in the novelty of this, I settled down at the table in my tidying breaks to get a little painting done.

I decided the easiest "quick win" I had lying around were some larger pieces of scatter terrain from the Reaper Bones line. I'd already cleaned them up, done what little assembly they merited, and given them a basic undercoat.

Given that Bones is hydrophobic, I started off by giving them a brush basecoat in a dark brown. Even this was still pretty streaky, but it gave me enough to make do.

I played around with a couple of techniques on this "weapons locker". I tried drybrushing in circular motions, as recommended in the GW scenery videos, but I found my tiny drybrush really wasn't doing it. I managed some beautiful stippling, but it was hugely time consuming. I reverted to a sort of half drybrush, half paint still on the brush approach. I then gave it a thick wash of Typhus Corrosion, wiping off the worst with a piece of kitchen roll. This made it far too dark, so I went back in with a really light orange to drybrush a few corners to give it a lazy edge highlight.

The following day, I'd had an opportunity to pop into my local gaming store and grabbed a GW scenery drybrush. All of a sudden, everything made sense. It gave some lovely textured coverage with very little effort -this is a rough blue over the brown base. I then added another lighter drybrush with a lighter blue to give more contrast.

Again, I repeated the Typhus Corrosion wash and wipe off technique, followed by a final bright blue highlight on edges and the centre of the corrugation of bin lid to brighten it up.

This said, once I looked at the scenery pieces under natural light, rather than my painting light, they looked a bit dark. Let me demonstrate using my lightbox.

This is the weapons locker, on a white background with an LED light strip illumination, and my iPhone camera told to balance for the white. It's a little washed out, but you can see all the gorgeous texture and colours, with browns, reds and even oranges that fade towards yellows.

And then this is what it looks like when I balance the iPhone camera on the storage locker itself. Incredibly dark, and I lose a lot of the detail because the light doesn't pick it up. Let's try it again with the bin I painted...

Here we are focussing in on the white. This one barely even looks washed out - you can see the different levels of blue, the sponge chipping of metal, the built up grime...

And then we focus on the colour balance here. Again, it looks just a little too dark. It's not terrible - scenery shouldn't be too bright as you need to focus on the minatures they're next to instead. But I think I need to have a think about how I paint and perceive colour to stop painting too much too dark.

And I leave you with another teaser for next week's post, as I've done a bit of a photo shoot for some of my commissioned Infinity figures. Two weeks in a row with new paint jobs! Some of you may die of shock...

Old Warhammer World photos: Converted Vehicles

Back in 2013, I went up to an open day at Warhammer World, and at one point went around taking a bunch of modelling reference photos of some of the various gaming tables they have up there. I've been doing a bit of maintenance on old folders and found these during the clear out, and thought people might be interested.

This set of photos is of a series of abandoned construction vehicle conversions scattered around a dig site. There's also a couple of some of the buildings on the rest of the table. I believe the table they're from is now retired.

 

Daydreaming about future plans

While still not able to really do much hobby during the move, I thought I'd ponder some of the things I'm looking forward to getting into once we're settled in to the new flat.

Adeptus Titanicus

My darling wife is super excited about this, as she's always been a titan fan. We need to have a chat about who is going Loyalist and who is playing the Traitors, but otherwise I'm just looking forward to some nice meticulous modelling and painting. The game play demos I've seen also appeal, with resource management per titan, tracking sheets, and lots of lovely crunchy stuff.

Age of Sigmar

I've been meaning to get into Age of Sigmar forever. I think it probably merits it's own dedicated post at some point, as I probably need to rationalise the projects I've got and focus on something in particular. Right now, I've got Chaos, Order and Goblins, and that's probably too much. Working out what to drop is proving a challenge, though.

Warhammer 40,000

So, I love the look of the new edition. I haven't played it once. Part of the problem is, I think, playing Guard is proving to be a challenge in terms of storage space and getting stuff to a game. Originally, I'd planned to get over this by moving to a mixed Imperium force with tons of bits and pieces from all over. Unfortunately, the easiest way to get a balanced pick up game when you don't play very often is to use the matched play rules, but they've updated those rules to remove the ability to use the "Imperium" keyword to pick an army due to an assortment of abuses in tournaments. I'm left not really sure what it is I want to be doing in 40K...

Kill Team

While Warhammer 40,000 requires this big bucket of effort to get the army out, find time to play, and all that stuff, Kill Team is looking like an excellent low effort alternative. Less space to store, fewer models to paint. I hear it's pretty balanced too. Definitely one for quick games with my wife after work.

Necromunda

Basically, everything I just said about Kill Team above. Small units, I can use the same terrain for both, and you can get a game done in a reasonable time frame. It's mostly just a case of working out what gang I want to run and picking it up... I used to run Cawdor back in the day, but both Orlock and Van Saar look tempting today.

Shadespire

Again, a nice looking game with pretty miniatures, small cost of entry and minimal storage requirements. What's not to like? Once I'm moved, I'm keen to get a demo game in to work out how quickly to get it, but its definitely something I'm excited about.

Blood Bowl

The only real question is what team to get. I ran a Blood Bowl League in my school when the last edition was released. It's stood the test of time and I adore it. I still have my old Skaven metal team, but they may end up getting sold on - the new Chaos cheerleaders are tempting me towards a more fighty game than a running and passing one.

Warhammer Quest

I have Silver Tower, and the Hammerhal version also looks like it's Even More My Jam than Silver Tower is. Plenty of gorgeous models to paint up, though it's quite a few to paint in one go before you can start play, so likely to be something I do after getting one of the games with a smaller barrier to entry done first.

Aristeia!

Like Shadespire, but in the Infinity universe. I've been offered a demo game down at HATE, which I hope to fit in at some point. The base game comes with 8 models, and you need a team of 4. These are the sort of painting numbers I can feasibly achieve. Very tempting!

Malifaux

The announcement of Malifaux 3E has both excited me and persuaded me to pause on my Infinity stuff for now. The game had been suffering from bloat, and play had been dropping off a bit, too. I'm not painting anything up until the new edition drops, so I can decide whether to stick with my current faction or switch to another one. Collodi, my main master, has dropped from tournament play, which is where I get most of my games. While I realise most UK tournaments will include the "Dead Man's Hand" rules to allow the lost Masters to be played, this edition change would be the best opportunity to switch factions.

As more information about 3E comes out, I'll pull together a few thoughts about which way I'm pulled to play, and what I'm considering.

Paint job by Aodhan

Infinity

In the language of the modern youth (I believe), Infinity is bae. It's my gaming love right now, and I'm really enjoying it. ITS Season 10 is around the corner in September, and my Druze Bayram Security will be taking the field for it. Expect more photos soon of Aodhan's brilliant paint jobs.

Decisions, Decisions

I'm not pinning myself down or committing to anything until the move is done. At that point, I'll pick up some small hobby projects and start working from there. If the blog is a bit quiet, the move will be eating into my hobby time, but I hope to try and keep semi regular posts up in the meantime.