Three Warmachine Figures

I recently finished up three Warmachine figures. One Mercenary and two 'casters for Menoth.

First we have the new Steelhead solo, Sgt. Nicolas Verendrye. I've actually been waiting for a 2-point  Steelhead solo for some time, to fill out my Damiano theme list. He fits in perfectly. And he was a lot easier to build than those blasted Steelhead Halberdiers.

Then we have one of the "new" journeymen 'casters. This one for Menoth: Tristan. Cool figure...I like him.

Finally, there's the latest Menoth 'caster, Durst. I've played him several times and really enjoy his tanky ways.

'Til next time.

Orin Midwinter: Assembly and Painting

I've been away on vacation for the last few weeks...but before I left I started up a small project: assembling and painting Orin Midwinter, a Warmachine Mercenary.

I've put the project up on a video blog here:

Here is the finished figure, painted up in Menoth colors.

A fun little project, and a nice miniature with good animation in the sculpt.

'Til next time.

Finishing Up My Galleon List Models

I'm getting close to finishing off all the Mercenary models necessary for my Bart Galleon list. Here are Dougal, the Vanguard and Wyshnalyrr.

Everyone and their brother seems to have a Wyshnalyrr model.

Because so many 'casters need an upkeep focus.

Dougal sees a lot of work in Merc lists.

So good with shooting colossals...like Galleon!

And on the Vanguard, I used the same painting technique I developed for the Galleon. It has a rust brown undercoat and then a green overspray that was distressed away with a stiff brush and rubbing alcohol.

When I glued the Vanguard pieces together, it seemed that the natural position for the arms left the pike and shield below the level of its feet. So to counter that, I built up the base with cork and perched the Vanguard on top.

This painting project went very fast. It's a simple scheme with some fast weathering. But all in all, a pretty cool looking light 'jack.

'Til next time.

Step-by-Step: Building and Painting the Galleon

Well, you can't play a Bart/Galleon list without a Galleon...so here's the guy I built to Batten Down the Hatches!

This is a step-by-step post, so let's start with the model. All right...I have to admit, I don't like the look of the damn thing. I find it kind of silly-looking; particularly with the overly-large trident. But it ain't gunna build itself.

So, as we've come to expect from Privateer's big resin models, the mould lines and flow gates are ridiculous. I spent a long time cleaning the parts. And in this kit, there are a lot of parts. I'm glad they included an exploded diagram for the thing, because, honestly, I would not have figured out how to put the Galleon together on my own.

Thinking about how I was going to paint this colossal, I figured that the best strategy for building it was to assemble four large chunks...the hips, upper torso, left arm and right arm.

I started by priming black.

I wanted to distress the green paint scheme to reveal rusty metal underneath. So, I sprayed all the assemblies with a combination of hull red, brown and rust colors. After that dried, I sealed all the brown areas with multiple coats of Testors Dullcoat.

I'll use the cargo claw as an example of how I got to the end finish on the rest of the model. First, I taped off areas to avoid overspray. In the case of the claw, it got a spray of yellow (I used two different shades here).

Removed the tape, and moved on to spraying other areas with green (two tones again...a dark then a light).

And this is how it looked after the top coat was distressed.

To distress the top coat of paint, I applied rubbing alcohol to the surface of the model. I then used a brush with very stiff bristles, and rubbed away the top coat. The alcohol loosens up the top coat to make it easy to remove, and then evaporates quickly, so the new distressed paint scheme stabilizes in about a minute.

As you can see here, I also painted in the metallic areas as well. I used two metallic progressions for this model...a light bronze from Foundry, and the silver metal metallics from GW.

Once I had the hip assembly complete and painted, I glued it to the base, applied glue and sand and painted the "soil" brown. Once that was dry, I attached some of the other scenic base elements. These included a section of fence from GW...

...and a few larger slate stone pieces. These were blended into the ground cover with more glue and sand.

Skipping ahead a little, I then applied a fair bit of static grass, tufts, scale flowers and a few extra odds and ends. You can see a sword and shield leaning up against the fence here.

Anyway, after all the painting was done on the major assemblies, they were all attached with CA glue, and the model was largely done by this point.

I applied some silver paint chips, and then added some rusty washes to the finished model.

Like the highlight of the yellow claw o the left hand, I made the shoulder pad on the right side red to add another accent to the model.

The bronze was washed with sepia, and then green and blue inks to weather it. The silver metal areas, on the other hand, were washed with umber and rust colors. Both got a final highlight drybrush.

Well, that's the whole thing. Another colossal in the bag. I still think the model is pretty goofy, but I'm happy with the finished result.

"Til next time.

Maxing Out the Boomhowlers...and Taryn di la Rovissi

I painted a minimum unit of Boomhowlers a few years ago. Recently, I pulled a couple of Boomhowler blisters out of the pile in order to upgrade what I had up to a max unit. Here are the four guys I finished off this week.

And here are all of them together.

Last weekend I played in a Steamroller and wanted to try out a new piece in my pKreoss assassination list. It's Taryn di la Rovissi. With two magic shots and the ability to negate an LOS unit block, I think she's a pretty good piece.

She's a mercenary, but I put a couple of Menoth colors on her, so Kreoss would accept her into his list. Haha.

'Til next time.

Aiyana and Holt...and another Workshop at the LGS

The holidays are just about here...which will mean some serious hobby table time. Don't know what the Christmas project will be yet...we'll see. Anyway, this weekend I finished off Lady Aiyana and Master Holt, a Mercenary Character Unit. I had started them many weeks ago, but they kind of stalled out at the skin stage.

Holt is pretty much painted from his Privateer artwork, but with Aiyana I wanted to add in a few more colors to try some stuff out (and tie her closer to Holt with the blue base color).

Last Thursday night I ran another painting workshop up at the LGS, Thunderground, in St. Albert. Roy had the tables set up for us, and this week we worked on skin. We hit caucasian, zombie and goblin skin during the couple of hours we were there.

Well, this turns out to be post number 250 for this blog, and the Hobby Table has had more than 300K pageviews since starting up a little over three years ago. Thanks to all of you for peeking in once in a while. I appreciate the comments that come in, and look forward to posting another year's worth of hobby and game articles in 2014.

Now, let's see what we can knock off before the end of the year.

'Til next time.

Step-by-Step Skeletons, Alexia and the Risen, and more

So, my last project for our local Journeyman League was a large unit. The requirement was to paint a unit of at least 10 figures. Well, I had Alexia and the Risen sitting around. Now, Alexia starts the game with 9 Risen in play...but she can accumulate up to 20 by gathering corpses. The box set comes with 10 undead, so I figured an interesting project would be filling out the rest of her Risen with spare undead models I had sitting around from Mantic and Lord of the Rings. Then, adding in a couple of her Thrall Warriors, I was able to submit a 23-man unit for the last painting challenge in the league. 

And, here they are...Alexia and the Risen. 

Now, there are a lot of skeletons in this unit, so I'm going to take this opportunity to add a skeleton painting tutorial into this post. First off, skeletons are fun and easy to paint.

Step 1. After assembly and basing, prime white and add a dark wash.

Step 2. Apply a very thin layer of dark bone color. I use the Reaper bone shades...starting with Bone Shadow.

Step 3. Build up layers of lighter colored bone shades (Aged Bone and Polished Bone in this case), and then blend all the layers together with a sepia wash.

Step 4. I applied the last bone highlight layer later in the painting process...actually, it was one of the final steps. I was trying to gage how much I needed the bone color to pop out on the game table after I had the rest of the figure painted. Anyway, the final highlights were painted on with a very thin layer of ivory. As always, you want to just hit the raised features with your highlight layer. This enables the stark bone to really be visible on the tabletop.

Step 5. In any event, back to the rest of the figure. After the initial bone colors are down, I moved on to metal. This is a layered process as well. Shadowed Steel goes down first...then a careful drybrush of Chainmail, followed by a wash of Umber.

Step 6. After the wash dries, a final highlight of metal is drybrushed on (Chainmail and Mithril Steel from the old GW line of paints).

Step 7. Last comes the clothing and leather. I chose red cloth for the figures, to give them a unified and ominous look. All the belts, collars, boots etc. got hit with leather brown. The reds and browns were layered as well to add as much depth to each figure as possible. Then finished the basing, and that was that.

Here is Alexia with the 10 Risen that come in the box. I did some head swaps to add variety to the limited number of poses.

And here are the additional 10 undead figures...most are Mantic skeletons, but there are a couple of Lord of the Rings figures in there as well.

I also did two Thrall Warriors, as Alexia has the ability to generate one of these solos per round.

For our Journeyman League we were also challenged to paint a unit attachment. So, I did a quick Gun Mage Officer figure for Cygnar.

 All in all, a pretty productive week at the hobby table.

'Til next time.