Posts Tagged ‘vallejo’

All about the base

Posted: January 18, 2015 in Uncategorized
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Years ago I was very much against basing Epic scale tanks. I didn’t like the look of them and I thought that based tanks would look strange if they were based, for example, as urban bases but where then fielded on tables covered in grass. As time went on I warmed to the idea of basing my Epic scale tanks because it reduced the handling of the models themselves when moving them around. I originally used to use Warmaster bases but moved over to equivalent sized bases when I discovered them. I really liked the look I got with the bases and have since kept basing my tanks. In terms of gaming with based tanks I measure all distances from the tanks hull.

This year I made the decision to use slightly bigger bases for my tanks because some of the Epic 40k Imperial Guard range are quite wide what with them having additional armour plates on them or whatever and they look a bit squeezed onto the 20x40mm base. Instead I upped the base size for standard sized tanks, such as Leman Russ, to fit on 25x40mm bases. They look the right size giving a better visual balance to the base and model:

bases1

This was all great until I realised that the army I’m building and painting at the moment will include Forgeworld Epic models. As much as I really like the out of production Forgeworld Epic range the tanks are rather small compared to Citadel Epic models because they’re not quite the same scale and the Leman Russ tanks don’t come with side sponson weapons. This means that they look even more tiny on a 25x40mm base:

bases2

Yet a Forgeworld Hydra looks not only the right size on a 25x40mm base its guns will get a bit more protection when moving the model around:

bases3

However, I want all of my similar sized models to be on the same size of base. I decided that, sod it, they’ll all be on the same base and that the Leman Russ sized models will just look a little lost on their bases. This was all well and good until I finally managed to buy some Forgeworld Leman Russ Vanquishers for a sane price using the “Epic 40,000 Armageddon Buy Swap and Sell” Facebook group. The seller had based his tanks, IIRC, on 20x40mm bases with the tanks right at the very back of the base to offer a bit of protection to the tanks very fragile gun barrel. It was a good idea but sticking the Vanquisher at the back of the base looked odd. On a 25x40mm base it looked even more odd:

bases4

The solution was to put them on scenic bases. I really like the look of scenic bases but I’ve never done them because they can be time consuming but given how few Forgeworld tanks I own (currently 56) it shouldn’t add too much time if I did the bases in batches. I decided to start with the Vanquishers. The first thing was to chop up one of the small ruins sprues that used to come with the Epic 40k infantry bases, I’ve got a huge bag full of of these so I don’t need to worry too much about cutting a few up. I then planted Coal Ballast Scatter into the Greenstuff to be used as either big rocks or debris from the building:

vanquisherbases1

vanquisherbases2

The razor wire was from Army Painter:

razorwire

The razor wire was twisted around a small drill bit, stretched and then planted into the green stuff. It looked far too neat so I clipped it in various places and squashed it a bit. I then added coarse sand I bought from a pet shop about 15 years ago and applied that to the base near to the building ruins:

bases5

I painted over the coarse sand and once dry I applied fine sand to the rest of the base:

bases6

I then painted the ruins and coarse sand Vallejo Basalt Grey (70.869):

bases7

After that the bases were painted as:

  • Army Painter Dark Tone wash over all of the grey areas
  • All grey areas were drybrushed Vallejo Basalt Grey (70.869)
  • The fine sand was painted Vallejo Chocolate Brown (70.872)
  • Vallejo Beige Brown (70.875) dry brush on the fine sand
  • Vallejo German Camo Beige (70.821) dry brush on the fine sand

The razor wire was painted as follows:

  • Vallejo Black (72.051)
  • Vallejo Gunmetal Grey (70.863)
  • Citadel Chestnut ink wash
  • Vallejo Gunmetal Grey dry brush

The finished bases, and tanks, looking as follows:

vanquishers

vanquishers1vanquishers2

vanquishers3

Dwarf Standard Bearer

Posted: May 11, 2014 in Uncategorized
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It there’s one thing that’s lacking with the Grenadier Dwarves Fantasy Warriors range it’s the number of standard bearer models. There are only two sculpts available and although they’re both nice models I wouldn’t want to use lots of them in an army. There’s a fairly decent standard bearer in the Grenadier Fantasy Legends Dark Dwarf command blister but I’m using that model for my Slayers because it looks suitably crazed enough for that unit. This meant that had to have to convert my Army Standard Bearer using a model I bought from www.forlornhopegames.co.uk I’m quite pleased with how he turned out:

ArmyStandardBearer1

The Dwarf model is from the Fantasy Warriors range, he’s usual wielding a two handed axe:

ArmyStandardBearer2

I carefully removed his axe, drilled into his grip and inserted some brass rod. The standard is from the Games Workshop Dwarves range. I bought it for £1 on ebay and removed most of the runes that were covering both the front and back of the standard. I was unable to remove the remaining rune, which is a shame because I think it looks a bit naff. I had a rummage around my bits box to try and find something to replace it with but I couldn’t find anything that was suitable.

I also removed the shield from the back of the model as I wasn’t too keen on it and replaced it with a spare metal shield from my bits box that looks far more suitable!

ArmyStandardBearer3

What surprised me with this conversion was how easy it was to do. Time and again I read on various messageboards about how hard metal miniatures are to convert compared to plastic miniatures and for things like weapon swaps and the like I don’t agree. The most time consuming part of my conversion was cutting all of the runes from the plastic standard and the conversion only took around ten minutes to do.

Anyway, one thing you will have noticed is that I’ve not been getting much painting done this year. When I’ve had the time to paint, which has been rare, I’ve generally not been in the mood and when I force myself paint when I’m not in the mood to paint I tend to do a bad job and end up stripping the models. I.e. it’s a bigger waste of time than me not painting the model in the first place. This brings me to the paint job on my first Dwarf model that I started a few weeks ago; I really wasn’t happy with how it was coming along. The biggest problem with the model was that my attempt to copy the Foundry three colour method wasn’t working for me. At all. Feeling a bit more refreshed I decided to re-visit the model and iron out the bits that didn’t work. Essentially it came down to the fact that the green clothing was too harsh being just three variations of green; dark, medium and light. So, I broke it down into five Vallejo greens:

  • Olive Grey
  • Olive Grey/Medium Olive50/50
  • Medium Olive
  • Medium Olive/Olive Green 50/50
  • Olive

This gave a much better result and more what I was aiming for:

hero2

The good thing about this paint scheme is that the models are about 80% chainmail so batching up the five green stages should be nice and quick. All I have to do now is actually pull my finger out and paint around 140 miniatures rather than just staring at them hoping that they’ll paint themselves when I’m asleep..!

Finally, I managed to get hold of an old Grenadier Dwarf Fire Thrower model. This poor chap had been trapped in his blister pack since 1989!

DwarfFireThrower1

Ah.. doesn’t he look much happier now that he’s on my ever growing paint queue! 🙂

DwarfFireThrower2

Building the army

Posted: March 16, 2014 in Uncategorized
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Since buying those bags of plastic Grenadier Dwarf models from EM4 along with a number of Grenadier metal models from Forlorn Hope Games I’m becoming a bit of a convert to the Grenadier range, particularly the Nick Lund sculpts for the Grenadier Fantasy Warriors game. These models might not be as characterful as the ever popular 80’s/90’s Citadel ranges but there’s a battle hardened look to the Grenadier range that I’ve really started to appreciate as I’ve been building the army. In fact, I really love the look of the army!

It’s also hard to ignore just how cheap these miniatures are to come by second hand, or even new. On ebay I’ve been averaging 60p or less per metal model when buying in bulk which has been really great. Sure, there are the usual nutters on ebay wanting £25 for a model I can buy new for £3 but there are also a decent number of bargains to be had very easily. Don’t get me wrong, I understand that not everybody likes these miniatures. As I mentioned earlier, they lack the character of the classic Citadel ranges but they’re still really great sculpts imo and they rank up into a great looking army. My army is now at the 2500 point mark and that’s still cost me under £100 and includes me buying some frivolous items that improved the look of the plastic models.

Speaking of which, one of the things that makes the plastic models look very samey, apart from them being identical sculpts, is their shields. I did buy the appropriate plastic shields for the models but it became obvious rather early on that they weren’t working for me visually. This resulted in me searching online for better looking shields at a decent price. Believe it or not this isn’t quite as easy as you’d think, or maybe it is and my searches were rubbish! Nice looking resin shields seem to average around 50p a shield and I couldn’t get enough plastic shields from various bitz sellers for the army who, again, weren’t that cheap. However, it was a fluke discovery on ebay that resulted in me buying a decent number of metal shields for £14. £14 on shields? Yes I know! I did think about it for quite a while before clicking on the “Buy It Now” button but I worked out that even doing that meant that I bumped my plastic miniatures up in price to about 40p per model which was bearable. Ok, that’s around 100% more than the models cost on their own but once I received the shields I knew that I’d made the right choice! The difference they made to the look of the plastic miniatures was huge as it added some much needed variation to the ranks and they look great visually as well (apologies for the blurry picture!):

spears1

I’ve also spent time press molding my own warhammer heads and using these instead of the axe heads the models came with originally:

hammers

They’re not perfect, far from it, but they should paint up well enough. Saying that, as part of an ebay win, I did end up with a metal Grenadier Dwarf holding a double-handed warhammer and this got me thinking about changing the whole unit to metal models but it turns out that Grenadier only made two Dwarf miniatures holding double-handed warhammers, the trooper I own and a hero who looks like he’s about to take off Superman style. The other models armed with double-handed weapons are armed with either an axe or a mace and I wanted my entire unit to be armed with warhammers exclusively so the plastic models were kept to make up the 2nd, 3rd and 4th ranks:

hammerers

One of the things I decided to do with this project was to simplify my painting style. When I paint my Undead models I take far too long per figure to the point where I struggle to build up the enthusiasm required to continue painting it. As a part of this I’ve decided to give the Foundry three colour method a go but without using Foundry paint, which I did consider, but decided against it because I already own a large selection of Vallejo paint and I didn’t want to spend money on paint I don’t really need. I know I’ll cave in eventually and buy Foundry paint but not today. I organised my Vallejo paint into three variations of colour to emulate the three colour method and it’s been surprisingly easy to convert to painting in this style.

Here’s a test paint job on a Dwarf hero that I’ve not quite finished:

hero1

Again, not a great photo, but the paint job turned out a lot more scrappy than I wanted and I’m blaming that on me not having painted anything for months on end, I feel incredibly rusty! I’m also really not comfortable painting gold and green so there’s still plenty to learn working with these colours.

In other news I bought a couple of really great paint racks on ebay from a wargames store for around £12 including P&P:

paintrack2

I bought one and was so impressed with it when it turned up that I immediately bought another one the same day. Obviously it only fits Vallejo paint, which is my paint of choice, but as you can see my non-Vallejo paints and inks are safely stored on it.

Zombie Cavalry and the death of Epic

Posted: May 5, 2013 in Uncategorized
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After much procrastination I worked out how to paint my Zombie Cavalry. A test model can be seen below:

zombiecavalrytest

It was fairly simple but it looks good enough for me.  The horse was undercoated black, the bone detail was picked out, then the horse was base coated with Vallejo Leather Brown. After a couple of coats of Vallejo Leather Brown the horse was generously washed with Devlan Mud. Once that had dried the horse was washed with Ogryn Flesh Wash. When that had dried all wounds and areas around the bone were washed with Baal Red a number of times. With other horses I tried different basecoats finding that Vallejo Beasty Brown gave a very nice result (pictures will follow at some point!) but Vallejo Dark Flesh was disappointing as it resulted in a muddy finish.

In other news both GW and Forgeworld are winding down their Specialist Games and Epic/Aeronautic Imperialis ranges. What this means is that when they run of particular models they won’t be casting anymore. I’m not surprised that GW are doing this, I expected this when they released their Finecast range, but FW? This really came out of nowhere! If this is news to you then good luck panic buying what’s left because there’s pretty much nothing left. I’m sure the usual gits bought remaining stock with the intention of re-selling it on ebay for stupidly inflated prices and I pass wind in their general direction.

The worst thing about all of this is that not every game can be easily played with other manufacturers models. Bloodbowl, Mordheim, Necromunda and Warmaster players are all very well catered for elsewhere but when it comes to Battlefleet Gothic and Inquisitor things get a bit more difficult. With Epic it’s a mixed bag, there are plenty of 6mm modern/sci-fi manufacturers out there but for most of their armies you’re either going to need to do some decent scratchbuilding and ebaying to get what you need. So, all in all, it’s sad times.

Imperial Guard Vindicator Company

Posted: April 30, 2012 in Uncategorized
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These might be the ugliest sculpts GW ever did for this game system but they painted up very quickly. I can kindof get what they were trying to do with this sculpt, an assault gun with a flat ablative armour look, but it makes the sculpt look very flat and uninteresting.

Imperial Guard Vindicator Company

Given that I’m not keen on this model why on earth did I use it over the original Mark 1 Vindicator sculpt? Good question! I did it because I wanted my Imperial Guard Vindicators to look different to my Space Marine Vindicators. I’m not 100% convinced it was the right decision but it’s bit late now. You’ll notice that the command Vindicator has a miscast main gun, I didn’t realise this when I bought it off ebay because it was covered in really thick paint, and I only discovered the problem when the tank was stripped of about 3mm of paint (seriously!). I did try to repair this but was unsuccessful. At least I can tell which is the command tank without the need to paint it differently.

Speaking of which I did think about putting some Imperial Guard transfers on top of the tanks using the old Space Marine V2 era Imperial Guard transfers but they just looked wrong, they made the tanks look more like toys than the paint job suggests.

I’ve finally managed to glue both my Imperial Guard Heavy and Beastmen Companies together. No photos as I realise lots of unpainted figures isn’t that exciting to look at. The intention is to paint my Heavy Company next.

Sphere Hobby Products Vallejo Paint Rack

In other news I finally treated myself to a lasercut paint rack for my Vallejo paints, bought from the ebay store Sphere-Hobby-Products:

Delivery was swift and it’s a great product but it’s not without a couple of issues. The smell from the laser cutting is very strong, considerably stronger than laser cut MDF figure bases I’ve bulk bought (if you don’t know what it smells like it makes your hobby room smell like somebody’s been burning charcoal in it), it took about a week for it to subside. I was slightly disappointed that when built it leans slightly to one side, I tried various configurations to remove the lean but try as I might I couldn’t get it 100%. I suspect that most people won’t notice or be bothered by it but it sits on a shelf taunting me everytime I look at it. So, would I recommend the product? Yes, actually, I would. The design is neat and once I’ve sorted my paints into some sort of order it’ll save me rummaging around a box trying to find the paint I’m after without knocking other paints over.