First Few Custom Doors

So as you may of seen in my last few posts, I've shifted attention towards getting my zealot double doors painted up. and to make it a little more interesting for myself and the overall dungeony feel I decided i was going to customize them ALL!

Be it very minor customisations to slightly more flamboyant themed doors. so with the help of a little greenstuff and a route through my bits box ive finally managed to get them all customised and have now finished my first 4.

DWARF TOMB

The idea here was that with a very little bit of change i could make something somewhat slightly resemble a dwarven doorway. adding some hammers to the base of the arch and a dwarven rune (master rune of kingship) would be a nice little touch too. as you see a simple change. but still something different. 

ORC THEME

The idea behind this one was to have something resemble that of some orcish lair or throne room to a warlord. again pretty simple to achieve. as you will see with this one. i attempted some light sourcing. as a few of these doors have torches on to light the way. this being the first attempt..a little bit of a fail as i dont feel i got it quite right, but brush down and better the next one with light sourcing and all will be good .

 VINES

Got to have something overgrown right?

making all of these i tried something new ive not done before, the mushrooms on the base was my attempt to show the dark dampness of the dungeon. im quite happy how they turned out. the vines...well they add more, but not brilliant. again I added a dwarf rune as the idea in my head is that most dungeons were once dwarven  strongholds or at least dwarven built. even sewers of the old world were built by dwarves.

 WARPSTONE

Another very simple one where i attempted a little less subtle light glow.

another dwarven rune and a few chunks of warpstone set this one off quite nicely

So thats my first 4 if you exclude my 4 earlier testers. another 14 to go and ill be all finished.
im just in the painting process with the remaining ones now so hope to have more to show soon.
so until then!! :)

Clanrats

so i havent blogged too much recently. havent really had the time. so my infrequency to post things is purely based on me having free hobby time. ive made a ruck load of graphics, tiles, speelbooks for AHQ this year so will be posting these up shortly.

but my job at hand is fleshing out my bestiary. whilst most recent posts have followed along the lines of skaven, this post is no different, with 1 exception.
I GOT LAZY!!!
yup. too many things to paint with very little time to do so.
i also have to state. whilst skaven are great creatures. they arent particularly inspiring to paint. so having a mountian of figures to paint can be daunting. so i went for the very basic method of base colours and washes for a average table top standard

so here they are

whilst they would probably only get a 4 or a 5 on CMON. it doesnt really matter. what does matter is that i now have 15 clanrats ready to drop into my dungeon

so far ive got the skaven slaves.
rat ogres
and these boys.

so my decision to go basic painting on the basic models should hopefully pay off. and later on when i start doing characters and the more 'special' ones. i can apply a better paint job to those to help them stand out on the table.

so there we have it. one of my very rare blog posts..
sometimes i wonder if i just post to myself on here. i never get much feedback on things and whenever i try to kickstart a discussion i get no responses. maybe this leads to the infrequency of my posts i dont know. but be sure of one thing..ill still be posting what i create. even if it does pan out more as a personal library
:)

see you in 6 months lol

SNOTLINGS EVERYWHERE

and I'm back in the house!! sort of...........

ok so its been a long long while since i posted anything up. but truth be told. ive simply had no hobby time what so ever. all the real things a husband and father has to do have been much more important for me to tend to throughout 2014. that being said. i do sometime get a smidgen of time to sit down and paint. and believe me im learning new things...paiting whilst a 20 month old little girl is trying to climb up your leg to see whats going on is no mean feat i can tell you. along with that and my hiatus for some reason i decided to pick the smallest frikken critters in the warhammer bestiary to tackle....i know right no sense in that whatsoever.

i did however discover a nice little way to get these painted up with relative ease.
so without much ado.

i had painted more than this but only realised after id taken the pictures that id left a couple on the shelf.
i painted these with a simple wash over base colours, due to me not painting much i felt my skill were somewhat lacking (even at the best of times) so wanted to take the shortcut approach with these.
the skin was simple basecoat with Ogryn Camo and then washed over with Biel-tan green. simple and very easy.
ive always viewed snotlings as the lightest of all the greenskins so this seemed to work a treat right here.

that snotling right there at the front picking his nose was actually from the first blister packet i ever bout way way back in the 80s. he came from a bloodbowl blister pack of 18..all for the grand price of £1.99........now it costs 6 times that for the rest of the snotlings you see above...
actually i paid 8 quid for mine from an ebay batch of amazing proportions (something like 80 figs for that price)

anyways i dont think they turned out too bad. my first project for a while that i had actually completed all of. so im happy. and happy to be able to finally post something on the blog again.

so there we have it. bunch load on snotlings. packed full over character and ready to bite you ankles.

a little more
.
whilst ive been toying with teh whole greenskin flesh tones. ive also been toying with the idea of using gnoblars instead of goblins (an idea i saw on this amazing thread over at warseer. HERE)
on that great little thread hes taken the same approach i like to take to dungeon fodder and the likes...and thats to give as much character as possible.
now ive not liked the look of goblins for a long time. not sure why, but to me they just lack character. Kev Adams is still the master of the goblin.
  so with that i needed new gobbos, ithink the 80s is stuck with me on this front. because I kind of get the vibe of David Bowies little buddies from the flick Labyrinth

these little twerps had character and would swipe a baby right from under your nose.
and Gnoblars kind of have that same feel about them. not quite as sinister looking as GW current goblins. but still have character and look kind of nasty in a "stab you in the back" sort of way.
i claim no ownership of this idea. Seb did it before me. and i wanted to do the same.
so below is a WIP on my new Seb inspired goblins using various greenskin bits and bobs.
gnoblar heads
goblin regiment bodies
night goblin arms
and various shields i have in my bits box

so far. im quite happy how number 1 is turning out (paint job not quite finished yet)

also im trialling some new skin tones. when i have finished them all . expect a much bigger update..

anyways that it for now. my first blogpost in a long long time.
hope you enjoyed :)

MORE FURNITURE

As promised here are my next batch of replacement furniture

Bookshelf

again this was created with a mixture of 1.5mm thick plasticard, and an array of loose sprue bits.
the books themselves were created using super sculpy that i roughly flattened out then after cooking. i immediately chopped it up before it fully cured. much cheaper that using green stuff anyways.
what i did differently with this one was that i flattened greenstuff over the wooden surface area and sculpted the wood grain this time instead of carving it into the plasticard like some of my previous attempts. again i wanted added details not just on the shelves but on the sides too. furniture is damn sparce in a dungeon right? so it would get used in a ramshackle sort of way.
so whats on here detail wise?

• HQ rat on bottom shelf and books.
• more books a decapitated and still undead zombie head a animal skull on middle shelf.
• more books as some pots on top shelf.
• 2 books (including chewbacca's autobiography on top shelf)
• a coat rack on one side with a hooded cloak and quiver hanging from it
• spider and web on other side.

 

see chewbacca's autobiography! :)

TABLE

for the tables i wanted them to have all sorts of different things on them. it always bugged me that searching a room with an empty table would find something of value.

so i chose to have them themed. this one is kind of like a feasting table. i imagine some orcs were stoof around this getting their fill of junk they like to stuff down their over sized cake holes!

details on here?.....have a look. i guess its no fun if i keep telling you is it?

again the the theme of how i made the table should be forming like everything else. plasticard to make the table. greenstuff and spare sprue bits..oh and more spiders! gotta have spiders in dungeons right??

 more coming soon ! :)

Zombies

ok these ones are the only so far out of the minions that I haven't dipped in army painter. at all. I did these a while ago but recently rebased them. I always thought these looked good. they look a lot better in front of me than they do on my pictures. I think I'm still having issues taking photos and all peoples pictures seem to be flawless in comparison to mine. its kind of frustrating and a little disheartening considering my skills are limited at best to see my creations knocked down a peg even further with my poor ability to take decent pictures. but any way ill stop feeling sorry for myself now and give you a look.

you may see I've used anti shine again and also fallen foul of the dreaded dust monster. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong here as I've tried various methods to prevent this, but my results are a little torn between two extremes. that dust isn't visible to the naked eye either which frustrates me even more with digital cameras he he (I'm still feeling sorry for myself aren't I?)
here's a closer glimpse too

DUSTY!!!!!!!

regardless of my results im getting closer and closer to finally finishing something I started as a wee little nipper more than 20 odd years ago with a few tins of enamel paints. maybe by the time im 60 I will actually achieve what I always planned to do. and that is to create my own deluxe edition encased within its own treasure chest!

here come the green skins!

so I've finally managed to of succeeded in a quest that's took since the release of Heroquest.
and that's painting all of the monsters (still need to paint the heroes and wizards of morcar and also will be posting up the other bad guys over the next week or so)
but my approach was simple...since seeing army painters dip methods I knew this was the only thing that would honestly gee me up enough to get off my lazy ass and finally finish them. so all of the monsters and henchmen I've posted up so far have predominantly been given a dipping. and that suite follows here with all of the greenskins (ok fimir don't count, but still they are green so who cares right?)

anyways again the paint jobs aren't anything special. they were given their base coats and simply just dipped with army painter. I then rusted up some of the weapons later on. but really it was that simple.
results wise. they aren't going to be even getting a 5 on CMON. but what they do do is look tidy enough to be sitting prettily on the game board during any session. no longer will I have the solid coloured plastics sitting on my board. I now have these babies!!

 Goblins

 again im not really happy with my pictures...way too much glare. and I hate it when a picture shows up all the sloppiness (yes I admit my guilt,,, it happens...get over it :))

but again heroquest goblins are a bench mark. classic models, classic look, awful paint jobs hehe.

but like I say..finally painted! so the quality level doesn't matter.

 

Orcs

same method here applied. as you can see. this army painter stuff works. it gives an adequate level of quality with minimal time spent. I do have a little problem with the anti shine spray that army painter provide. I'm now on my second can of this stuff. and my second can I am getting results i'm not very happy with. all of these models were given a second coat of watered down matt acrylic varnish.. why you say? after spray these over they are coated with a fine white dust that you cant see with the human eye...... that is until you throw a digital camera in front of them. you may see some left over of this on the bases of the orcs. but at the end of the day ive had to spend a lot more time fixing these up due to this fine dust than I would of hoped for. because my first can I never had this problem at all.

I may be doing something wrong, giving too many coats. im just not sure. I spray them in layers until no shine is left on the models. so I don't know. if anyone has any info on this id be happy to know any ones else's results as ill be doing an article soon with a step by step of using army painters products that I use.

 

Fimir

I've never known what to think of these, they are kind of extinct I believe in games workshops line these days. they are a little comical. but the one thing you know when your playing heroquest is you don't want one of these creeping up as a wandering monster whilst searching that dark corridor.

they deal damage! but look odd in a way I cant describe.

it wasn't until I took this picture that I realised id completely missed the ankle bands on their left legs...oh well. im sure they will survive . Bad me again!

 



men at arms

not the greatest models around. but who can ever knock the clip on weapons of these little guys?
sent into rooms before the heroes as complete cannon fodder! haha
anyways the colour scheme for these I decided to base on my favourite football team (which will remain anonymous out of embarrassing performances of late)
again nothing too special. army painter strong tone dipped then I just touched up the eyes afterwards.
simple methods for simple figures, im resigning any real time and effort for the character models. so all of the monsters and fodder like these guys get the strong tone treatment.
Heck ive had this game over 20 years and only now decided to paint them up. a half decent lick of paint is better than none!

 

 

also id like to add. and it must be pretty evident even after only a few posts. I am awful at taking pictures. I do my best to get a good focused shot. but colours getting brighter and basically mushing out of colour from the original is a big problem. and glare is also another massive problem. no matter what I try on my budget setup I just cant seem to get pictures that im happy with. so if anyone has any tips that would be greatly appreciated. as id love to be able to post pictures that look exactly how I see them to my own naked eye. and don't feel once ive been able to do that.

its pretty frustrating. im no expert on taking snaps and don't claim to be. but surely there has to be a few bullet points I can follow to get better pictures.

please HELP!

Heroquest Mummies

MUMMRAAAAAAA!!!!

er whatever!

OK here's 6 of my HQ mummies. I originally painted these up very simply,
using bleached bone and then washing over with my own magic "dirt mix" ill explain this later on is anyone is concerned if I actually throw dirt onto a model!
I highlighted again with bleached bone. and then painted the skin up with a mixture of green and a flesh colour with a few highlights. I then gave it the army painter dip. and this really set these models off. giving them a dark shaded murky look. my previous wash also adding a nice element of depth to the bandage colour as if left in a dark damp place for years.

they are simple and basic. but fit the mould perfectly for a dungeon lurking bandage wrapped badass....not sure how these ever actually caught people.. but hey. that's the charm and magic!