Brass Scorpion part 2 (TSG Post)

Continuing on from the previous post on this matter, the good Doctor TSG has made progress on his Brass Scorpion. Which he has no intention of making into an oversized Blood Cannon of Khorne, I just got two conversations crossed (actually, he was talking about turning Logan's wolf sled into a Blood Cannon, and somehow I got the conversations crossed. Oops!).

Anyway, here's TSG:

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I finished the construction phase of the Brass Scorpion!

 Next up, the painting! With the Brass Scorpion in hand and ready for a pre-primer washing, it is time to start work on my new Spartan!

Two of these bad boyz hold 50 Space Marines!

-TSG

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I look forward to seeing what he does with that Spartan kit. The Spartan was the scratch-built kit featured in the first White Dwarf that I ever bought (119) and I have always hoped to see a product produced for it.

-Neverness

An example of a good battle report

Recently I wrote a scathing post about the deterioration of quality in the battle reports presented by Games Workshop, particularly in White Dwarf. It was called  The-sad-sad-state-of-battle-reports. Well today I received the recent Warlord Games newsletter which had a link to a Bolt Action battle report that I decided to check out. I have been itching for over a year now to play, or even observe, a game of BA, as I have very much enjoyed reading the rules. I had hoped, unlike the sad sad "battle reports" White Dwarf presents these days, that this would be a good and educational read.

And it was! I was very impressed with the report! Read it here: bolt-action-battle-report

"Budda budda budda." -Or any gun-firing effect onomatopoeia from a Sgt. Rock comic! 

Why was this better than a current White Dwarf battle report? 

• Clean, step-by-step presentation
• An effort was made to clearly present rules. A teaching aid if you will, but not dumbed down.
• Nice, honest photographs. Yes, they are a miniature showcase, but not presented at the expense of the report itself. In more recent WD reports, it almost feels like the flashy, over-populated photos are made first, and the "report" is written around them! This Bolt Action report didn't feel nearly as staged and I could believe that these photos were of the actual game table (sans dice of course).
• The players explained why they did what they did and remarked at the end of the report. This occasionally still happens in WD, I just found this to be more believable I guess because neither player suggested a product that they wish they had purchased in order to get a different result! 
• I didn't have to pay $4 to be disappointed! In fact, you can read this report for FREE!

The stage is set, and very well presented!

Over all, a well done presentation. Not too long, not too short. Clearly written and presented. Well done Warlord, clearly the chaps there remember how battle reports should be written. Although you guys didn't use tactical maps, this was clearly a small game and the report reads fine without them. When you guys do write a report for a bigger battle, I would suggest incorporating a few maps as this does aid the narrative of following along with the course of the battle. But a complete image of the board that explained the scenario's objectives and deployment zone was presented in this report and was well done indeed! I look forward to reading more battle reports from Warlord, especially of their other game systems (Hint, Hint: Judge Dredd and the Gates of Antarres).

Images used are copywrite Warlord Games, and are from the Warlord Games website, and are presented here for review purposes, not as a challenge to copywrite, 

More Orcs (part one)

With my new painting station in my studio space now set up, I wanted to get something going painting-wise. I decided to take a break from all the red that I have been painting (fear not, my fellow Khornites, I shall return to it soon!) and paint something....well, GREEN! I have been getting a lot of requests to play WHFB lately, but my time is so limited at the present that finding time to play anything has been a challenge I've yet to overcome. Nevertheless, I was on a pretty click with the fantasy orcs last year, and I decided that a bit more work on them might fuel my fire for fantasy. Now, I have every intention of getting to my Daemons, which I can use for both systems thus allowing me to stay 'khorney', however storage is something I still need to work out for them. So Orcs it is!

Over on the left is the first of this group of orcs that I fully painted. I finished him years ago (2009-ish?) and I wrote more about him last year when I started working on these Warhammer Orcs. Today I decided to work on the actual unit that he belongs too, so that me might join the rest of his boyz in all his double-choppa glory! While I'm at it, I will be ambitious and attempt to do the Arrer Boyz as well. 

For the most part, these models are pretty much in the state they were in when Warfrog gave them to me. But I had to add the grit to the bases before I could continue. Next, I painted the grit to help keep it from flaking off as I work on the models. 

Painting dirt to look dirtier. 

 The Arrer Boyz are a weird unit, and I toyed around with the ranking a bit while the paint was drying. The Choppa Boyz, in the back, rank up a heck of a lot easier than these brutes.

I took this next pic for the blog so you can see how much work is needed to get them up the finished model's level. Note that the drummer boy was base coated around the same time that I painted the lone orc, I guess I lost interest at that time?

And tonight, at my stopping point for the evening, I have added the Goblin Green level to the flesh of the Arrer Boyz. Still got to do the Choppa Boyz, then it's on to the ink washes.

Hopefully, by the end of this I will be sick of green again and want to get back to the Khorne guys. But, since I don't have to pack up minis every time I finish working on them any more, who's to say I can't jump around between projects? The difference is that I have vowed to not clutter up my table with endless projects like I did in the past... (link to my old man-cave) Yup, a real bona fide vow! 

Brass Scorpion and Bloodcannon part 1 (TSG Post)

Greetings. If the title wasn't a give-away, the following post in a guest blog-post by my best friend of 26 or so years, the man I have been calling "the Doctor" on here but we shall hence forth go with calling him TSG, as it lacks the pompousness of "The Doctor", and doesn't insinuate any unintentional Dr. Who affiliations. He doesn't have a blog of his own yet, nor does he even have a google account (he replaced his nipples with Apple logos back when the iMac was launched). So, since I have shown off on this blog some of the models that have I painted for him over the years, I decided to put a tab on here for his projects. He likes to share, via text message or email, work in progress shots of his projects, and darn it, it's a real shame to not share these with the rest of you. So here we go, guest blog-post #1. Which is really just a compiled series of text messages organized and edited for your viewing.
-Neverness

EDIT: And, with any experiment, there is risk of failure. Apparently I was confused by the first line of the text, and well, no, he's not turning a Brass Scorpion into a Bloodcannon. Oops.

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Making progress on the Brass Scorpion. I am going to use the model for the Bloodcannon.

I had to cut a foam armature to hold up the body while I custom pinned each leg on.

Then, using my Paxxon drill, I was able to easily double-pin each leg joint--greatly adding to the stability.

The join between the body and tail was horrible.

I needed to be able to unarticulate this joint for storage in a KR Multicase, so I built up the region with greenestuff, double-pinned the joint, but left one side unglued, then hid the join in new greenstuff cables.

This morning I woke up and decided to take 30 minutes to work on pinning the front shield arms in place. Here are the results:

I won't glue them in right, pending getting the rest of the front gun bits on to ensure the shields do not obstruct the gun.

It is important to remember how big the brass scorpion is:

Here it is next to my half-finished knight titan. You have to admit, this thing is going to look phenomenal...

I expect to have rough assembly done by the end of next week.

-TSG.

Early '90s Deathguard

While getting my new painting station set up, and getting my chaos marines gathered for some more painting action, I found myself admiring these really old Deathguard. These are the original models released for use with the army lists that were presented in Realm of Chaos: Lost and the Damned, one of the single finest books GW ever published (and if I may be so bold, this isn't an opinion, it is a measured, weighed and studied scientific fact!).

During my 2nd year in art school my room mates and I played an all chaos campaign per the rules in the chaos books. and I played the Nurgle faction. One of my roomies, Ron, sold these models to me, along with a few others he gave me, and thus my chaos force was started. I thoroughly enjoyed those games, and my experience with Chaos has been nothing nearly as awesome of those early games. I still consider myself an 'nurgle player' even though I haven't fielded an all-nurgle faction since the early
90s, as I feel that with the current rules that fighting against that might not be too fun, and I sort of like the smorgasbord mix of unit types that make up the current chaos warbands that raid the worlds around the Eye of Terror.

These are the painted ones, that I have yet to strip down. I did not paint these, in fact, I don
t think Ron did either as I believe these might have been 2nd hand to him as well.

I think these models have so much character compared to the Deathguard that would follow. Also, I always thought that nurgle worked better as a long-range fire-support role than an assault option, as their added Toughness made them annoying to deal with. Also, as the next pic will support, they were sort of intention for a more long range mode. The original Deathguard list could have 2 las cannons per squad!

I already stripped the really badly painted model. 

These are some pretty rare models actually, especially these las cannon guys. So I wanted to share these with you while I consider stripping these models and repainting them. However, I also want an opinion on the red trim from you all. This was a legit paint scheme back in the RT days, but faded away with 2nd edition. I like the contrast, but I might go for a rusted-red look as opposed to a painted one.

I have seen some amazing paint jobs on nurgle models throughout the years, starting with the first issues of WD I ever saw to the more recent Golden Demon awards, and have always thought that my nurgle models would be my ultimate challenge as mini-painter. While I tinker with the World Eaters, Orks, Orcs and Space Wolves, I am thinking of these guys and how I want them to ultimately look.

I hope you enjoyed this!