A-Haunting We Will go... My Nighthaunt Warcry Warband

Good morning/afternoon/evening everyone!

This week, I thought I'd show you my Nighthaunt warband for Warcry. Along with Kill Team, Warcry is one of my favourite games at the moment and, up until recently, I was playing it at least once a fortnight with a group of friends. I've even managed to get The Better Half to give it a go.* Like Kill Team, it's a game that's quick and easy to learn, with no complicated rules to get bogged down in. Warbands are typically less than a dozen miniatures and games take no more than 90 minutes or so to play. The fact that almost every faction in the Age of Sigmar universe has warband rules (some with multiple warbands available) and each warband has a wide choice of models to choose from makes it ideal for a hobby butterfly (like me) or someone who has access to only a few models for any given faction. It's easy to put together a viable warband from a few cheap Ebay purchases. I have had a few warbands planned for years, mostly making use of models that I already had kicking around, and the Nighthaunt was the first one that I got around to assembling as a viable force. I had loads of models to choose from, as I had collected quite a few from the Mortal Realms partwork, so I chose what I considered to be a good mix of lightweight cheap troops, medium-strength troops, and a couple of real heavy hitters. 

Having assembled my force (and given them a name- Lord Balowskyr's Retinue) I used a few test models to create a paint scheme which meant I could get the warband painted and ready in double-quick time. Here it is:

1. Spray with Grey Seer, then a zenithal overspray of Corax White

2. Then an all-over wash of a mix of Nihalikh Oxide/Hexwraith Flame/Athonian Camoshade.

3. Add in some Dark Angels Green into the previous mix and apply this in a pin wash, just around the deepest recesses, and where the different layers of cloak meet. Also apply this mix on the hands, blending it out up the arms.

4. Apply a wetbrush stipple of Grey Seer.

5. Paint all the details: 

Metal: Leadbelcher; Brass: Runelord Brass; Wood: Gorthor Brown; Leather: Mournfang Brown; Copper: Vallejo Copper; Gravestones: Mechanicus Standard Grey followed by Administratum Grey; Bone: Ushabti Bone followed by Screaming Skull. Then wash all of these areas with a mix of Agrax Earthshade, Athonian Camoshade and Nuln Oil.

6. Using a very soft brush, apply a light drybrush of Grey Seer followed by White Scar.

7. Blend Tesseract Glow around where the ghost form meets the base. 

8. Use the mix from step 3 and apply it to the tips of any ghostly flames. 

9. For the bases, I first applied some Stirland Battlemire, whish was drybrushed with Mournfang Brown then XV-88. I then applied Leaf Litter from Javis, stuck down with PVA glue. When the glue was dry, I sprayed the whole model with gloss varnish, then a spray of matt varnish. I then drybrushed Grey Seer around where the model met the base. Once all that was dry, I washed the base with Agrax Earthshade, then added Nuln Oil wet in wet around edges. And here's how they turned out:**

Lord Balowskyr, Knight of Shrouds	Lady Natasha, Guardian of Souls	The Brothers
Gwen, Edwin and Rikard	Nell, Vyvian, Mhikal

And, if you'd prefer that information in an easier format, here it is- my first one-sheet painting guide*** 

Since I started playing with them, they've fared quite well, I've won a few and lost a few. The playing style for them takes some getting used to, as they're fragile on the battlefield, but have some useful abilities, but they're good fun to play with. The next warband I need to do is to finish painting the Skaven one for The Better Half, that I started months ago****. After that, who knows? I've got miniatures for at least half a dozen other warbands, and a Stormcast Eternals one that is already half-painted (which I started for some other long-forgotten project.) To be honest, I'd happily paint up one of each of all the available warbands, there's so much character in each one. Trouble is, I'd also like to do the same with Blood Bowl, Underworlds, Necromunda...

Thanks for reading!

p.s. if you like what I'm doing here, a click on the link below and the donation of the price of a pot of paint would be a wonderful gesture. I'm thinking of adding special stuff to the Ko-fi, like competitions and prize draws, so it'd be a good idea to at least have a look there now and then 😁 

*True to form, she beat me. She beats me at every game we play...

**A gold star if you can identify the inspiration for their names...

***I realise I'm far from the first to do this idea, but I love a good bandwagon...

****She's very patient...

Shiver Me Whatsits! It's An Ogre Pirate

Good morning/afternoon/evening everyone!

This week, I'd like to talk to you about this chap:

He is Gorlok Blackpowder and he is the leader of Blackpowder's Buccaneer's, a warband for the hugely successful Warhammer Underworlds game. I painted him for a recent competition held in my local GW store. The competition was held to launch the newly updated Citadel Contrast and Shade paint ranges and had to be something bought especially for the competition and had to make extensive use of the new paints. This would not be an issue for me as, since the launch of the Contrast range, I don't think I've painted a single miniature without using them in some way or another.* I've found them to be incredibly versatile, useful as glazes, shading washes, additions to base and layer paints for colour variations...I've even used them for their advertised purpose, on occasion!

As for painting this particular miniature, I was going to go through each stage, step-by step and describe each paint used and when, but I have decided against doing this, as I never originally planned to write an article about the painting of this miniature, didn't take step-by-step photos so I don't have anything with which to illustrate such an article. Without pictures there's not a lot of point. So what I've decided to do is instead focus on a particular technique that was used on the majority of this miniature. See, what I wanted to go for when I started painting was texture. I wanted his equipment to look old and weathered, without the smooth highlights that are my usual style. I still wanted it to be clean and bright, and based on the 'eavy Metal style, but I wanted there to be a certain amount of wear and tear and worn-in-ness to his clothing. As it was, I couldn't take it as far as I wanted to as I ran out of time to get him finished by the deadline for the competition but I was pretty happy with the way it turned out, particularly the leather of the coat, and this is what I'm going to talk about in this article.

So, for all the leather areas (the red of the coat, the black coat lining, the boots and the shoulder bag) I utilised a loose style, stippling and flicking the brush across the surface to give loose, random highlights, imitating a worn, battered effect. It's a really good idea to look at reference with things like this**, as it can show you things that you wouldn't necessarily have thought about. For instance, with old leather, where it wears away from use it naturally forms its own folds over time and, if not treated, those folds will crack and, being more exposed, will naturally get scratched and their colour will fade. when the colour fades and the surface cracks, the natural tan colour of the leather will show through and this is something that you should bear in mind when painting. The highlights of the colour will be the lighter tone of the base (eg. for black, it will be grey) but the areas of wear will be light brown. If you look at these pictures below, hopefully you will see what I mean. 

There's a clear difference between the grey highlights for the black, and the tan areas to show wear. I did the same on the boots but, obviously with the boots being brown, the difference is not as marked, although the effect is still there. As for how it was achieved well there's no great magic to it. I started each area with a very thin basecoat, using Contrast paints, sometimes mixed with Shades and then applied a deeper shade, wet-in-wet, to make it look patchy and uneven. I then used layers of opaque paints Bases and Layers, to build up the highlights. As I mentioned, these were not blended at all and were applied in a mixture of stippling (to build up the texture) and flicking across the surface (to simulate scratches and random wear.) Finally a highlight of light tan (I used Morghast Bone on all the leather areas) was applied more carefully to show the cracks and splits where the inner leather is showing through. I also added careful light drybrushing of this colour (used sparingly) to show where the top surface had been scuffed off. I then followed all this up with glazes close to the base colour, applied all over at first. These were very thin, applied carefully, the idea being to just smooth the transitions a little, but not too much. A stronger, more saturated glaze was then applied in the deepest recess (again, wet-in-wet, to allow a certain amount of bleeding into the thin all-over glaze). In the pictures below, you can see the difference between the red pre- and post-glaze (apologies for the discrepancies in the photos, they were taken while working on the miniature in less-than-ideal conditions for photography. Hopefully you'll get the idea.) 

As I said, I had then planned to go back and re-establish some of the cracks in the light tan, but I ran out of time. Maybe next time.

So, here's the end result.

In the competition he got second place, which I was chuffed with. In terms of the actual painting, I wanted to experiment with textures and work on my NMM and, in that regard, the project was a success. As I said, I'd love to have had the time to do more work on the wear and tear on the leather areas, and I'm still not 100% satisfied with the NMM, but I'm getting there. I had a lot of fun with this miniature. It's got bags of character, and one of those models that is a dream for the painter, with loads of areas of different texture to play with. At some point, I'm going to have to get round to doing the rest of his gang...

For those who are interested, here's the colours used:

BOOTS: Base: Garaghak's Sewer; Shade: Agrax Earhshade/Nuln Oil; Highlights: Doombull Brown, Tuskgor Fur, Jokaero Orange, Morghast Bone; Glaze: Agrax Earthshade/Athonian Camoshade; Recess Glaze: Garaghak's Sewer

JACKET: Base: Flesh Tearers Red; Shade: Nuln Oil; Highlights: Mephiston Red, Evil Sunz Scarlet, Morghast Bone; Glaze: Bloodletter***; Recess Glaze: Flesh Tearers Red

JACKET LINING: Base: Basilicanum Grey; Shade: Black Templar; Highlights: Eshin Grey, Mechanicus Standard Grey, Dawnstone, Morghast Bone; Glaze: Nuln Oil; Recess Glaze: Black Templar

SHOULDER BAG: Base: Snakebite Leather; Shade: Garaghak's Sewer; Highlights: Flayed One flesh, Morghast Bone; Glaze: Seraphim Sepia; Recess Glaze: Agrax Earthshade

That's all for now, see you next week, where I'll be talking about some teeny-tiny little cars... 

Thanks for reading!

Stuart

*plus, I hardly needed an excuse to buy more paints, or  new miniature specifically for the competition... 

**And don't restrict yourself to looking at, for example, old coats as reference for old coats. Think about other things that might have old leather on them. I found some great reference looking at old sofas and writing desks...

***it's a real shame that GW have discontinued the glazes. I know they're easy to replicate but having them ready-mixed in the perfect colours, density and opacity was really useful, and I'll miss them once I've used them up.

The Inevitable March Of Decay And Entropy. And Nurglings.

Good morning/afternoon/evening everyone!

If you read last week's post you'll have seen my review of the new Death Guard codex and an army list of my very own Death Guard army.

Today I'm going to talk about my first proper army since...oooh, probably before some of you reading this were born...

When the new Death Guard were originally released in 2017, with the launch of the Warhammer 40,000 8th Edition, I was quite taken with the miniatures. Particularly, as a painter, I was extremely impressed with the work the 'eavy Metal team had done on the miniatures, managing to make them look suitably dirty and manky, yet maintaining the clean, bright house painting style*. 

Having got my hands on the Dark Imperium boxed set I planned to paint up both factions (the Death Guard and Primaris Astartes) into small skirmish forces. The advent of the Conquest partwork made me decide to expand that into two full armies. 

Of course, that never happened.

Both factions languished in boxes, doomed to gather dust with the rest of the Pile Of Shame. That is, until my friend Ollie announced that he'd like to start collecting a 40k army (Astra Militarum, to be exact) in order to start playing some games. I decided to dust off the Death Guard and do something with them at last. Why not the Primaris? 

Four reasons:

1. I'd just finished painting rather a lot of Adeptus Astartes on commission, and was somewhat burned out on them. 

2. My friend Jack was planning to do an Imperial Fists force, and I didn't see the point in having two Astartes forces in our little gaming group.

3. I wanted an army that would be fairly quick to paint and one thing that my experience has taught me is that it can be very difficult and frustrating to paint Astartes quickly to a standard that I would be happy with.

4. The Death Guard playstyle of basically just plodding forward and rolling over the enemy, while soaking up any incoming fire, sounded about right for my level of tactical sophistication.

So, with the Death Guard chosen as my army, the next thing would be to decide how to paint them. As I mentioned, I wanted to be able to burn through them pretty quickly. I know what I'm like for flitting between projects and I knew that, if I wanted to get this one done, I would need to make it easy and quick to do. However, they have to look good enough to appease my delicate artistic sensibilities, so I needed a scheme that would strike a balance between speed, ease of painting and looking good on the tabletop. I knew I wanted to go for a version of the Death Guard's Heresy-era scheme of grey armour and green pauldrons and so I began experimenting on a few of the spare miniatures from Conquest, that I wouldn't be using in my force. 

The Death Guard miniatures are very detailed, with all their mutations, gribbly bits and whatnot, some of them are very busy miniatures, and that can look a bit overwhelming, especially before painting, when the whole model is the same shade of grey all over. I've seen some excellent conversions, where people have cut back a lot (if not all) the bone protrusions and tentacles and they look really good but it did look like a lot of work and, as I said before, I didn't want this project to drag on, so I decided to go ahead with them as they were. In the end, I'm glad I stuck to my guns as, once I started putting some paint on, what had initially seemed an overwhelming level of detail really started to come together and I was reminded why I liked them in the first place. 

On to the painting...

As I said, I wanted to get them done quickly. I didn't want to get bogged down in yet another unfinished project. I was determined to get this army fully painted and tabletop ready. I usually go for a clean, 'eavy Metal style but that sort of style does not lend itself to getting done quickly. I wasn't looking to spending 10+ hours on each miniature here! Luckily, the Death Guard lend themselves well to a rough and loose paint style but it's a bit of a step into the unknown for me so I've been looked at a lot of the grimdark-style painting for inspiration. I can highly recommend 28 Magazine if you want to see some incredible work in this grim and gritty style. I'm not trying to match the artistry presented there, by any means, but it certainly is a great source for ideas and, after a bit of experimenting, I had a method that I thought would do the job, giving me miniatures that would satisfy me by looking good on the tabletop but be quick and easy to do.

 

The miniatures were given a spray undercoat of grey primer. I use this one because, well, it works and it's cheap. After that, all the armour areas were stippled with a couple of coats of Grey Seer. Now, I could have gone with a zenithal overspray of the Grey Seer spray, and it would have worked quite well, as well as being really quick, but I wanted the texture that stippling would give. As for technique, you want to use a good-but-past-it's-best brush. I used an old Series 7 size 1 that won't form a point any more. Taking the paint straight from the pot and loading the brush well, wipe most of the paint off on a tissue and use a stabbing motion to build up the colour. Don't worry that it looks so messy, that's kind of the idea. I did a couple of passes of this, building the layers randomly.

The next step was to basecoat all the other areas with the appropriate colours. The shoulder pauldrons were stippled with Death Guard Green, the flesh areas were painted with Rakarth Flesh and the zits, slimy and gribbly bits were painted with Ironrach Skin. The rubber undersuit areas and pipes were painted with Skavenblight Dinge, the boney protrusions with Morghast Bone, and the gun cases with Corvus Black. The wood was done with XV-88, leather with Mournfang Brown and the Cloaks with Gal Vorbak Red. Finally, the metal areas were done with Iron Hands Steel and the Bronze areas with Runelord Brass. Again, I've not bothered to be perfectly neat and tidy here. The focus has been on getting them done quickly, rather than going for any showcase quality.

Once all that is done, the next stage is to do an overall wash to shade all the colours and to tie the composition together. In the grimdark style, this is often done with oil or enamel paints but I wanted to see if I could get the effect I wanted with acrylics. I made up a mix of Athonian Camoshade/Nuln Oil/Agrax Earthshade in a 2/1/1 ratio and washed this over the entire miniature and you know what? I was actually well pleased with the result. 

Once the overall wash was dry I applied extra washes to some of the other areas, to introduce some variety into the colours. The tentacles are given a wash of Drucchi Violet/Carroburg Crimson mix, sores and boils get a mix of Drucchi Violet and Bloodletter. while these mixes are still wet on my pallette, I mixed a little Blood for the Blood God in with them and started applying them randomly, wet-in-wet over all the skin areas, adding touches of water to let it flow a bit better where necessary. Finally, some Nurgle's Rot was added into the mixes and this was applied as a glaze over all organic areas, leaving them with a lovely, grotty sheen...

The final stage is to stipple the armour with Grey Seer again. This stage is probably unnecessary but it really does finish them off nicely, giving the armour the look of having been painted and repainted over and over. You'll notice some stuff on the base in this photo too. This is Extra Course Pumice Gel from Golden Artists Colour. It's a transparent medium that has these hard crystals in it. The plan is to use them as a base for a sort of mud effect. I dunno if it's going to work yet, and it's going to take some experimenting with I think, but I've got plenty more miniatures to paint yet, before I need to do the bases.

So, there we go. I'm happy with the way they look as a unit and they only took me two hours each. Result! At this rate I'm actually going to have a functional, fully-painted army by the time I can play some games against my friends!

Thanks for reading!

-Stu

*I actually asked Max Faleij about it at Warhammer Fest the year they were released. What a nice chap.