An Army of Bros

Finally finished up 1000 points of brotherhood a few months ago but never bothered to take pictures for some reason!  Well better late than never.  Also get to preview a new city board that I'm working on and will have a full tutorial eventually as well!

I've had the minis for this army since 7th edition Warhammer Fantasy but kept putting off painting them for one reason or another.  Thankfully KoW has multibasing so the chore of painting up peasants is lessened slightly!  On top of that the army is playable unlike the poor Bretonnians..

I painted up the Green Knight a long long time ago but a new base is always welcome.  Now he's conscripted as a redeemer exemplar.

I wanted all the infantry to look like it belonged to the knights via colors.  I can imagine that the nobility would bring along a contingent of lower troops or militia to a gathering of forces.

For the peasants I went for an easy trick of priming white, running a sepia wash over all the minis and then filling in the rest of the colors with washes.  The sepia wash gives the other colors a bit of shading to work with and creates a more faded colors look keeping them suitably dirty.

Ah the knights.  Each one with individual heraldry and for the most part painted up separate.  There really isn't a nice easy way to batch paint these at all and it was super slow going.  It took more time to do one regiment of these than it took to paint my first 1k of Empire of Dust!

And there's the whole 1k points along with a bit of the new city board.  I love how this army looks on the table but fear how long it will take to paint the rest...


And as a final aside I painted up this little chap for our recent 40K Tournament.  We have been running short on terrain and did a fundraiser tournament to fund two new boards and terrain for them. Some of our community including me volunteered to paint up peoples minis for a prize as well as others getting to choose the theme and colors to be used on the boards.

I'll be doing a full tutorial on the boards and terrain eventually but have some other sci fi projects to finish first.  Here's a preview of just what insanity I'm working on for 40k though...

Back to Nature and Stunties

Been a while since the last update but it doesn't mean I haven't made progress on the hobby front.

The dwarves got some much needed love in the form of a regiment of Ironclad.  These of coarse are the GW Ironbreakers and they are beautiful models and some of the last models they've made that still have that 'dwarfy' look that I love so much from them.

To accompany my tree herder for Forces of Nature I added a forest warden (smaller base so it works!).

Been meaning to add another Beast of Nature so I stole this one and rebased it from Warhammer quest.

Finally got my hands on some of the Mantic Earth elementals and wow was I impressed.  Great sculpt and lots of fun to be had with these models.

Added another Unicorn to complete the trio of massive healing.  These guys combined to keep a unit of Naiads alive for nearly an entire game.  Thanks to healing and regen that unit probably took around 60 damage over the coarse of a game.

I'm am super stoked about the Woodland Critters added in for CoK 18.  This really is the type of unit I wanted and more for Nature.  They tank decently well despite the 2+ nerve, move reasonably fast and are super cheap!

The last woodland Critters horde is made up of toy spiders painted up to look as neutral as I could make spiders look!

And finally the forces of nature are at a good stoping spot for now and I consider them 'done'.  As such they have moved on up to the Finished Projects pages at 5000+ points!

Recently Risen Reinforcements

We are doing a 'It's How You Play It' game day for Kings of War in a week.  I'll be supplying most of the painted armies for it so I need to kick some painting into high gear!  The undead army I finished up didn't quite play well and felt like it was missing nearly everything.  So I added some reinforcements to it in order to bring up the power level a bit.

The big thing it was lacking was killing power so a troop of soul reaver cavalry should do the trick.

Then ditching the skeletons to upgrade my regiment of revenants to a horde should help even more.

The hard part now is finishing two hordes of peasants for the Brotherhood in just a few work days...

Farewell to Tau

8th Edition 40k is even less of my cup of tea than 7th or even 6th was.  For me the design is outright lazy and relies on making something super strong to sell it for the next tournament cycle, backpedaling in a faq, breaking something else unintentional and repeat.  It's not even flavor of the month more like flavor of the week now so I will be simply playing the games I like instead.

Of coarse since this isn't my kind of game I really can't justify holding on to the miniatures anymore.  Before sending everything off to the great ebay in the sky I might as well get some decent pictures of the finished items though.  As such the Tron Tau will be added to the finished projects.

I do have some slight regrets as I was hoping to find some fun glowy paint scheme to do for the kroot but I really don't want to waste any more time on a game I just don't want to play.  For all of you having fun with the game though keep playing and enjoying it!  There is plenty of room for different types and gamers in the hobby!

The Bro-Hood

Finally finished my first set of Brotherhood minis!  Because of the stupid amount of colors and the individuality of each knight these things took way longer than the first 1000 points of Empire of Dust...

Of coarse they can also be combined for a horde (the bases line up).  This is definitely not an army I'm looking forward to painting up as it just takes soooooo much time but I think it will look stunning on the tabletop with all the crazy colors so totally worth it I hope.

Photo Fun

I've been working on the Kings of Thrones campaign rules recently and in a fit of madness decided it need photos to fill in the blank spaces left by cleaner formatting.  So I set up some models and terrain and then got to work...

For all of these I just put up the terrain, in this case the chaos dwarf display board, and put a single color background behind it all.  Then I removed the background with Clipping Magic and put a new one in with Gimp (hey its free!).

The rocky backgrounds were dropped off at the store at one point by some random patron!  After a quick black priming some zenith highlighting painted them up in seconds. You might say they've gotten a lot of use.

This castle was made for a KoW campaign before I had any building rules so its rather small.

Getting barely creative with the terrain results in a cute little sunset raid of a mountain pass.  Again I love those background rocks!

Finally since I have a painted and themed Halloween army it might as well get out more than once a year.

Trying something a little different with Nightstalkers crowding the foreground and some unfortunate elves cornered in the back.

Can't leave out the crazy rainbow river and candy mountain either!

I'd encourage anyone to try it out as setting up some scenes is kind of fun honestly and looks more interesting than just miniatures in a light box for sure.

Dusting Off An Old Empire

For some reason or another I had a few days off in a row (a true rarity) and decided to see if I could paint up an army in one go.  I've been looking at doing a purple and teal army for a while now and decided that the Empire of Dust would be a good opportunity for it.  I already had a now super rare Tomb Kings army as payment from a commission long long ago so gathering the models was easy.  With the Clash of Kings 2018 rules giving a buff to chariots I just couldn't resist any longer and after a quick build on easy army the priming begun...

Cursed High Priest and Revenent Champion.  The Champion was a charioteer left over from replacing a driver with the next model:

The Cursed Pharaoh on chariot gave me a good reason to put the old Tomb Kings special character in a place of prominence within the army.  Plus I needed something to lead the masses of....

Chariots. Just so many chariots.

And if I ever want to run them as Egyptians from KoW Historicals I have a legion.  Not a good idea with how GIGANTIC the footprint is but options are nice...

The Skeleton Cavalry definitely won't cause damage at 5+ to hit but they are nice cheap chaff units for sure.

Scavengers were far too good to resist and I didn't want to just do more cavalry to fill in the 1k points. Of coarse I had to try and keep the purple and teal theme going (even if its a very dark purple!

So after 5 days I had an army painted up and ready to go!  They did of coarse lose their first outing but hey I lose a lot with armies I even know so a new one is a learning curve all it's own.  The models for the most part are a real easy paint up generally starting with a white primer with a brown wash and drybrushing the lighter colors.  Generally after that thin layers of color go on easy.  The bases had the peaks of the sand built up with super glue and smoothed over as layers of sand were glued on with mod podge.

Overall I'm happy with the army especially with how fast it came into being.  It was also nice to paint something easy as the brotherhood are proving to be as challenging as I thought they would be.