Hypno, Frog Shaman

This is one of Ouroboros' first models, from back in 2018 and only available on their Kickstarter at the time. I had the pleasure of meeting Tim, the brains behind the company, at World Model Expo in 2022 over beers and he was delighted to discover someone in person who'd backed the project. I came back from that, excited about painting it, started and procrastinated as I wasn't happy with the colour choices.

Fast forward to this year, where I sat down and realised what needed to be done, and then it just fell into place, and it's nice to see such a handsome fellow finished.

Chaos Lord on Demonic Steed

Finally we're back over to an army project. Sure, we both know I'll change direction tomorrow, but let's enjoy this for today. While we're on honest admissions, I'm an overthinker and wasn't sure how to paint him as the symbols indicate he's Chaos Undivided, or at least not overly committed at this point. The current Games Workshop schemes are very "on rails" for the Chaos ranges, and it's pink and purple if you're Slaanesh, blues for Tzeentch, red for Khorne and green for Nurgle. Reading back through my Slaves to Darkness and Realm of Chaos, Chaos should be a cacophony of colours; perhaps a single colour to the fore, but shouldn't be limiting you to just one or two colours.

Colours aren't tracked as I've chipped away at parts of it over the past few months whenever the mood took me. But there's magenta, purple, green, blue ... you get the idea, there's a lot of everything on here. 

A challenge of metal models is the handling to avoid rubbing off paint. This fellow was a particular pain because of the size, as I couldn't put it on a painting handle. I feel this will be a recurring theme on my metal cavalry, and need to think about sub assemblies to make it easier in future.

This was the miniature where I realised if I ever want to field a painted Warriors of Chaos army, I have to make a few compromises on the way in terms of quality, as painting everything to this level is unsustainable for seeing a finished army in the next decade. I'm at peace with this now, and feel it should be easier to finish more models faster.

If I had a penny for every time I'd swear I'd scheduled a post to publish on time, but actually hadn't, I think I'd be £1 to the good by now. For someone with 40 years playing and working with computers, I should be better at this basic level nonsense!

Gary the Gnome

Been a while since I posted something out of the ordinary, so I think this is overdue. Meet Gary.

Until recently we had two gnomes in our garden, Barry and Larry, painted by our daughters a few years ago. We realised that our son hadn't painted one, and neither had I. While my son's is still a slow work in progress, I finished mine up quickly enough.

It's a £2 garden ornament from Poundland (https://www.poundland.co.uk/products/bright-coloured-gnome), and mine was an offensive flourescent pink, so it received a few coats of white primer to lessen the brutality of the colours.

I felt it was a touch boring to have a gnome in just a one-piece item of clothing, so gave him stripey trousers, a big belt, then a pretty shirt. They're not big in terms of garden ornaments but as you can see from the in-situ photograph, he's still a lot bigger than a little Space Marine used for scale. 

Gerda von Evilstein

Another quick midweek project to keep momentum going with my Warriors of Chaos army. A lot of Slaanesh-inspired purple, pink and blue, with some stippled yellows for a touch of contrast to break up the various textures.

Finding a painted reference for this model was incredibly hard, but I recalled an old White Dwarf cover with a similar but definitely different model, which was helpful to think about handling the complexity of the leg sculpts and gave me inspiration for the hair.

(lovely quality image from FriendOrFoe)

Ork Battlewagon

In the nostalgia era of Warhammer, there was the Ork Battlewagon. It was a ferocious vehicle, filled with spikes, muscle and awesome. It was the sort of vehicle that young Dave dreamed of owning, but the cost was prohibitive and I never did.

On a whim, I recently looked at the second-hand price for the old kit and was mortified that people wanted hundreds of pounds for one. Thankfully, the excellent 3D modeller Dr Spork (https://cults3d.com/en/design-collections/Doctor-Spork/sci-fi-vehicles) created a comparable version and I bought the STL and had a friend print it for me.

This is not the finest painting I'll do, but that was never the point. This is scratching a nostalgic itch with an over-the-top paint scheme and just having an afternoon of fun. I think Dr Spork has done a lovely job on modelling the parts, and it was straightforward to build. With hindsight I'd paint a lot of the parts prior to assembly just to make access easier, but even so it's done exactly what I wanted. 

I have opinions on 3D models of current Warhammer kits (and other manufacturers). I think it's piracy. My view is considerably more lenient when it comes to long out of production models that are incredibly unlikely to ever be back in production, moreso when really I simply want to paint one as a whimsical project rather than people who I see passing it off as the original kit and trying to make money on eBay. This may suggest flexible morality hypocrisy on my part, but if you can walk into a shop and buy the kit right now, and opt to print your own version, then you're stealing.