The cold, dark days of Winter

During the last few weeks, my warband of Chaos Warriors has received a handful of reinforcements. I've added the above twenty troops to their wintry ranks.

These guys are followers of Gshtaad, a Chaos god (or perhaps daemon) of my own devising, who is said to somehow be the offspring of Khorne the Lord of Skulls (god of blood, war and murder) and Nurgle the Plague Lord (god of disease, decay and despair). As such I like his worshippers to include a mix of models not just from Games Workshop's basic Chaos Undivided range, but also their Khornate and Nurglish lines.

You may also notice that a few of the miniatures shown here are not from any of the current Games Workshop Chaos ranges. This is because, over the years, I've drawn on a number of diverse sources for this collection, including Heresy Miniatures, Avatars of War, Rackham's Confrontation and older, now out-of-print, Citadel lines. In fact some of the older Citadel models are from my earliest purchases back in the 1980s, converted, or at least repurposed, to find a home here.

I usually try to blend these disparate sources together a little, in an attempt to develop some level of unity within the army, swapping helmets and weapons, and sculpting fur out of green stuff.

Wood, bone, leather, flesh and rusty metal also feature heavily, as do various shades of the colours green and red.

Some of the miniatures here, on the smaller bases, represent Marauders, rather than fully-fledged Warriors. In my mind Marauders are not just lighter-armed Chaos troops, but also less capable. So as well as big, brawny fighters, the likes of which are found in the Citadel Chaos Marauders box, their ranks might also include younger characters, or less enthusiastic conscripts, forced to fight: scrawny cannon-fodder who likely won't last through their first conflict.

Once finished I popped these on the shelf with their kinsfolk and took a quick snap. It's not a great picture, so I'll try to do some better ones when I can, but at least for now it starts to hint at the growing extent of my little Chaos warband.

Old dogs, new tricks

The last few weeks have posed an interesting challenge for me: trying to update all my existing Chaos Warriors to fit in with the new look I'm after, without entirely repainting them.

My previous approach to Chaos Warriors was to work on them one at a time with their own colours and markings, and make them look as individual as possible. You can see a bunch of them in their previous conditions in this post.

However this time around, as the force is starting to grow, I want them to look more cohesive, more like some of the groups of warriors and knights shown in the films I mentioned here.

Therefore it was never going to be a case of simply re-basing them on the larger, round Age of Sigmar bases, and adding a bit of snow flock. I was also going to need to darken them down, make their armour look metallic, perhaps even rusty, mute most of their colours, and even, in extreme cases, repose them and replace their heads or helmets.

But obviously I didn't want to spend ages doing all this to old models when I could be doing it to new ones, so the further challenge was to do it quickly and simply, and without adding so much extra paint that more detail would be lost, or worse, taking the models to such a bad place that I'd be forced to strip the paint off them completely and start again.

It made sense to add a couple of unpainted models to the batch, just to check everything was progressing in the right direction. The two models on the left, in the above picture, are new ones that had never been completed before. And while I'm going on about this, the warrior on the right is one of the old models that I gave a new head as part of his refresher.

So, although 21 models have been given new paint jobs, only two of them count towards my Addiction Challenge score. This means I'm down to the final fifth, but have still got further to go before I can get out there on a massive, toy-soldier-based spending spree.

ADDICTION CHALLENGE
REMAINING: 20

When the battle's lost and won

Following straight on from my previous post, here are another three models for my Addiction Challenge. I'm on fire!

But before I congratulate myself too heartily on this small victory, it's worth noting that, in real terms, the number of models I said I'd paint has barely even been dented.

It's also worth noting that none of these miniatures are the new Primaris Space Marines or Death Guard models that everyone else is talking about. This is because I got my copy of WH40K 8th edition last night, so at my current rate of progress it should be at least another three years before I have anything painted and ready to share.

Anyway...

The Necromantic Ternion of Gshtaad, otherwise known as the War-Locked, is a trio of hexmasters affiliated to the small Chaos warband I showed back here. Their original names have long since faded into obscurity, to be replaced instead by the arcane monikers they claim were handed to them by Gshtaad himself during a series of dark and impressive rituals involving much nudity, dancing, intoxication and human sacrifice. The usual kinda thing.

It is, however, far more likely they chose the names themselves – simply because they thought they sounded mysterious, foreboding, and maybe even kinda cool.

The Thaum-Augur

The Lorn Hierophant

The Reticulator

Obviously that depends very heavily on one's definition of 'cool'.

My decision to have multiple chaos sorcerers in such a small force grew out of an unshakeable desire to see three different characters, with different posture and poses, painted in different colours, all tied together by the of use of dirt, skulls, spikes, horns and the general tone of things.

In the end this meant they were ever-so-slightly converted from their original forms, with a few additions and removals to achieve the look I was after. Here's the obligatory work-in-progress pic for anyone who's interested.

The first two characters are simple Games Workshop conversions, but the metal chap, although sporting a few Games Workshop bits, is the Apprentice Mage from Andy Foster's Heresy Miniatures.

And here's my new score:

ADDICTION CHALLENGE
REMAINING: 96

Hopefully more to follow soon.

Sculpting tips. Straight from the heretic's mouth

After my previous post, where I showed the latest progress on my 'Dredd' style Arbites shoulder pads, Andy Foster from Heresy Miniatures* offered me some excellent tips for modelling with putty. I've collected them here to share with any budding sculptors out there.

As reticent as I am to claim any kind of credit for the following nuggets of wisdom, it's got be said that my existing level of sculpting competence (incompetence) clearly inspired him to share this expert advice. So well done me.

I've tweaked it a tiny bit, but essentially this is what he said:

• Keep your putty fresh. Buy it fresh (not from somewhere that has stored it in a warm warehouse and a warm shop), then keep it in the freezer. This helps to stop it reacting to warmth and air. Put it in a grip seal bag or tub. If using the ribbon product, cut it into 1cm bits and keep them frozen in a tub. If using the tube version you should ideally do similar, rolling each colour into equal balls, before wrapping in clingfilm, then placing in the tub. You can then remove as much as you need each session

• Work in layers. Sharpen up details again after 10 mins as Green Stuff will try to soften edges

• For harder edges, mix ProCreate and Green Stuff together. But be aware, this gives it a shorter working time 

• Procreate is excellent for filing and smoothing into swords etc. Green Stuff is not!

• Main tip for full sculpts is always to keep practising, the more you sculpt the better you’ll get

• Always stop and let cure. Nothing worse than doing a really good bit of work, then turning the model around and squishing it with your thumb

• Learn to put the model down and let it dry under a desk lamp or similar. But not too close to the bulb or the putty will swell up

• Get a headband magnifier or reading glasses with strength 2.5. These will massively help with the sculpting

• And finally lots of bright light. A triple tubed daylight lamp is best. But beware, they are also expensive

If you follow the instructions correctly you should end up with something like this

As well as coming up with tips, running his own business, sculpting miniatures, doing Kickstarters, turning up at Salute every year, and getting involved on Twitter, Andy also writes the occasional blog post. For anyone thinking of getting into the miniatures business, he's written a particularly interesting entry. It's quite long, and fairly poignant in places, but also hugely insightful and rather funny. And it includes more pictures of the incredible model dragon shown above. It's his saga of how the production of the Heresy Dragon managed to, ahem, drag on for years and years. It's called Dragon: Slayed.

*If you're currently saying 'Andy Who, from What Miniatures?' then skip this post and go straight to the Heresy site. If you like minis, I reckon you'll love the Heresy range. Once you've checked out all their sci-fi troopers, trench-coat warriors, barbarians and whatnot, you may want to find out a little more about Andy. So if you're still feeling like doing some reading, he has a funny blog post from a good few years ago, which, if you care, will tell you who Andy Foster is. It's appropriately called Who is Andy Foster? Who cares?

Shouldering the burden

I'm aware that my 'Dredd' style Arbites Enforcers project has gone quiet recently. Quiet, but not completely forgotten. Well, not by me at least. I've been working out how to go about making those tricky little shoulder pads. It's one of the stages in this project that I've been dreading the most.

I chose a new trooper to use as the test model and I've been trying various things to get a sculpt of the pad that I'm happy with. There were the odd false moves in my process, but I've ignored those here and am only showing the four pertinent stages.

Sculpt and file the basic pad shape

Add a thin second layer

Carve the second layers in half, and add a basic eagle body to one of the resulting quarters

Carve into the eagle body to give it depth and sculpt the wings and the bars

The light grey material that forms the basic pad is ProCreate, a putty that offers a less rubbery appearance and can be filed or sanded into shape after it has dried. You can read more about it, or even purchase a pack, over at Heresy Miniatures here. The green stuff is, well, er, Green Stuff. I bought mine from Games Workshop, in a little roll, but I'm told it's better to buy the stuff that comes in two separate tubes, so it doesn't harden where the colours meet inside the packet. Coincidentally, I've just noticed that Heresy also sells the tube based variety, so you can pick that up here.

The next step for me is the mass production of all these pads. It's probably going to be the most arduous part of the process, and I'm rather hoping I can find a shortcut. I've got my fingers crossed. If you're interested in seeing how I get on, then pop back here every once in a while, or try using the Google + Follow button in the top right corner.