Tricky project, this. I started with ambition to make super shiny gold NMM but my enthusiasm for the idea petered out by the time I'd finished the first couple of feet. Urgh. Motivation, right? But sometimes it's best to press on and just get the project done.
Meet trooper K9 from 298th Infantry Regiment aka "The Plucky Division". Gifted a print of this cracking sculpt and tried to paint it best I could. Our hobby Discord created their own Imperial Guard regiment, and a friend bought and printed a few of these pugs for a group of us as a gift.
Something very different to my usual model pick. I don't enjoy painting animals or Imperial Guard so tried to do it my way. It's not a perfect match to the unit's colour scheme - a little too much magenta in the shadow, and from looking at reference pictures a pug wouldn't be so brightly jowled, but I liked the result so he'll stay like this.
This started with a paintalong for HobbyVices and LonelyHavocs' 1-Hour Hero challenge where I picked one of these guys at random and it escalated quickly into completing the full warband. It wasn't a long or complicated exercise, maybe 12-15 hours in total, but nice to get them completed and ready to play.
The one hour paintjob, from bare plastic to this in sixty minutes.
After moving house, my hobby mojo took a bit of a hit. I had a few projects on the desk but couldn't bring myself to be enthused for any of them. Talking to a friend about playing Gorechosen and thought it would be fun to kitbash my own champion of Khorne as an exercise in nothing to something.
It's worth noting I don't kitbash, or greenstuff, as my creativity on this front is enormously poor, but taking the frame of an oldschool Chaos Warrior, throwing 40k Ork pieces at it until something looked right, then adding a Space Wolf space marine head ended up with something rather enjoyable.
The colour scheme is deliberately cool tones and a little less of the rich Khorne red than you'd normally see, as I wanted to paint something Warhammer in a non-Warhammer palette and more toward things like Kingdom Death.
Oh, the name? Well, I'm pretty awful at naming things, and when I haven't a clue what to call it, it ends up as a Bob. Let's lay the blame for this squarely on a childhood of Blackadder.
WIP shots in reverse order. Got to love that GW pack of skulls.
Okay, so maybe THIS guy is my favourite. I know I said Radukar was my favourite, but don't tell him and Gorslav can actually be the real favourite. It's a great sculpt, and the combination of ornate headdress, shovel and ripping open a coffin just sold it to me. It was a contributing factor in me buying Cursed City.
At some point I should stop being lazy and taking fast pictures. But despite my best efforts, I find photography an enormously dull exercise and it just gets in my way of wanting to paint more miniatures.
I didn't take a lot of WIP shots while painting models, but I was reasonably pleased with the skin, so you'll find a close-up shot nearer the bottom. This guy is seriously deficient in vitamin D.
A little trepidation painting the wolf pelts on this, as I wasn't happy with the last one I painted (Frozenfang in 2019) and that was a lot bigger. But I spent a little more time considering how to make it look good and think it paid off.
Overall, I loved painting these. Loved it. They didn't start as my favourite models in the box, but that's where they've ended up.
Okay, so it turns out I may have fallen a little behind on updates, so let's catch up ...
Since the last update I've resigned from my job, spent the summer with my family, and we've moved house. In addition I was ploughing through the Cursed City box to try and get everything completed before it was loaded into a removals van.
I wanted my blood-born to look enormously ill, but still alive in some form or another. So there's an ill pallor to the skin tones which was a nice change from all the bones painted on the skeletons recently. Glad I'd changed the blue basing a little, because this scheme worked nicely with the broken pillars.
A friend sent this 3D print as a thank you for painting a model for him. It was a quick job just playing with the idea of lava in skin and the blade.
A classic sculpt from the lovely Alfonso "Banshee" Giraldes. Had this sat in the patient pile for far too long. It's finished for now, but I feel there's further to go with it, but unsure as to where.
And I remembered to take a few WIP shots on this project too.
These are some handsome skeletons, really enjoyed painting these. Bit of a slog toward the end as they've been on the desk for three weeks - but a combination of loss of mojo, sweltering temperature, and general real life getting in the way slowed things down considerably.
Still working through the Cursed City box, and having a lot of fun as I go. It would have been nice to have more variety in the pose of the zombies, rather than all hunched, but I'm not much in conversions so painted everything as is. But one minor gripe aside, there's so many lovely details to pull out.
Bonus shot with all the mysterious objects too. Starting to feel there's a coherency to the set now.
I won't bore you with multiple posts on pieces painted fast, but it was good fun adding shots of colour into the landscape and making them evidently items of interest.
The sharp eyed may notice I've repainted the bases to be less eye catching than the original scheme. After seeing so many figures finished and in-situ, it was clear to me that the red element was simply too much. There's little glimpses of it peeking out still, but not consistently present in the tiles.
Cursed City continues, and remains enjoyable to paint when time allows. June has been a complex month. Bats and rats were a quick reintroduction to painting in batches.
After the indulgence of the characters, coming back to the denizens of the Cursed City has been an interesting process in adapting the techniques to move quickly for completion. Happy with the progress to-date.
