Tuesday 26 February 2013

Back in the Painting Saddle

Progress!
I have finally finished some more little pieces of lead! And when I say finished, I mean finished up to the final matt varnish application, hence the shiny gloss varish effect. There may also be some static grass to go on them too, only it's up in the loft and I'm down here. You'll get the idea though.

Skavenslave Standard Bearer
Back in the good old days a crappy skavenslave unit could expect to march into certain death  er, battle with a shiny banner to give them that +1 combat resolution that could get them to stick around for 2 entire combat rounds. Now they have to rely on steadfast whish is something I'm very skeptical about. The model is by Black Tree Designs, and not tooo bad. There is no banner per se as I intend to sculpt a couple of skinned cats to hang from the banner, thus giving the whole unit the fighting name 'The Cat Skinners'. I imagine I'll have that done sometime in 2017.

Clanrat with fat-tailed rat
 Next is an old Citadel Clanrat that I picked up off ebay for less than it's original cost (more or less) and not some grossly exaggerated price that some internet rip off merchant thinks he can get some poor saptitian to buy for £10 or some other farcical amount. I modeled a rat onto the base, you know the new kind with a huge fat tail that makes them ever so vicious (the rat not the Clanrat). All I have to do now is convince my opponents that an extra rat = an extra attack and  I'll be sculpting these things everywhere!

Packmaster with staff-whip
 What do you do when you buy 16 skaven standard bearers in a job lot of Stormvermin and Clanrats? Well this really, cut off the banner pole and make it into a whip. Voila! One less standard, one extra Packmaster. As I have way too many Clan Moulder gribblies in relation to their unpleasant overseers, I have managed to kill two birds with one stone. I sometimes even amaze myself!

Ratty Rat Quisher
As if painting up the 3000 or so unpainted figures I own isn't a difficult and time consuming enough task, why not make it harder by modeling rats onto various bases? This one had an annoying upturned left foot that was probably due to a miscast or me sitting on it. Either way rather than bend it back the simplest remedy was to model a slightly squashed rat on the base. A liberal application of Red Gore and Go Faster Red to the base and it look like he got caught trying to nab cheese from his bigger cousin! Not much else to say about the figure except it's probably my favourite from the late 80's range.

6 points of fodder
Three skavenslaves whose job is to die in a way that both amuses me and hopefully furthers the will of the Council of Thirteen. The first two are Citadel whilst the third is from Black Tree.

Clanrats A and B
Two Clanrats with their shields in their right paws. I like the thought of these guys deciding that swapping their shields to the other side improves their survivability (they are deployed on the right of the unit) whilst at the same time exposing the Clanrat to their immediate left in true Skaven fashion.

Gravestone shield
I suppose giving this Clanrat a name could make this paragraph more interesting but I'm not going to. Just one more body to add to the horde. He has a shield that was probably stolen from an undead army.

Man-thing  Axe-chop
Finally an old Citadel Zombie that is just going to be placed in my Skavenslave unit. Both arms have a few open wounds on them and hunched stance which suggests to me spending a long time in cramped tunnels getting bitten regularly by rats. Probably a captain from the Empire whose own unfortunate resilience and cunning has enabled him to survive in the hellish nightmare of a skaven lair.I have plans for about a dozen other non-skaven skavenslaves to go into the unit including a High Elf, a few goblins, a beastman and anything else I can chop up from my bits box.

So there you are, my first offering of the year to the paint gods, not overly spectacular but probably worth reading for the ridiculousness of me making up a back story for a skavenslave/zombie model. Who knows I might even write a short story about him.  

Sunday 24 February 2013

Somebody Punch the Sculptor!

Inept Sculpture
This is the worst figure in my collection, a truly dire dwarf adventurer I think. If there was an award for lazy talent less sculpting then this lead piece of cack surely must be a shoe in. I didn't intentionally  buy it, it was hidden in an old box of Heroquest that I bought in a car boot sale for about £2. Luckily for the old geezer that sold it to me, he was long gone before I found this epic fail of a miniature. On the plus side there was also another dozen lead figures in the box that didn't make me feel sick. Now don't get me wrong I am not a brilliant scupter, but I'd like to think I could do a better job with a size 4 desert spoon.

Dung in lead form

Maybe I can start a trend of blogs where talent less individuals post their pathetic attempts online to showcase their incompatibility with creativity. Oops, I've just realised that's what this blog is all about.
My Bad.

Tuesday 19 February 2013

I'm Not Dead!


Despite 8 months of nothing on the blog, and before either of my two followers (I had 3 but he/she dumped me) fill in a missing persons report, I have gotten out of my painting hiatus and started messing up my figures again.

I'm even too late to do an end-of-year review type thing to brag about how good I am at hobbying! Looking at a previous post I had the following in my figure cases awaiting pigmentation;


Telekinetic Wyrd
5 Attilan Roughriders
2 Orlock Juves
4 Mutants
Chaos beastmaster (converted)
Nurgle Sorceror
Eldar swooping Hawk Exarch
Astropath
Genestealer Hybrid
Beastmaster Wyrd
2 Ice Warriors of Valhalla
Catachan Luitenant

The Skaven Screaming Bell
Ratling Machine Gun
3 Jezzails
Deathmaster Snikch
Skaven Assasin
5 Wood Elf Archers
Necromancer
Gotrek & Felix
Mutant
Glam the Laughing Elf
Wood Elf Hero
4 Dwarf Ne'er Do Wells
Norse Warrior Woman 


Also in my previous years review, I had promised to finish these;


5 Marine Scouts
a 10 man Space Marine squad
Fabius Bile.


Of this long list of miniatures all I managed to complete was 5 Wood Elf scouts. Pathetic really.


I also didn't finish my four pieces of scenery, write any batreps or achieve ANY of the things I promised to do. So last year was a victory for apathy.


My inherent laziness 1 My Overoptimistic Ambition 0.


We'll  see who wins in 2013.