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!

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)

Chaos Basing

Holiday season has been a pleasant slowdown from painting in the last few weeks. As a small filler post while I'm finishing up a few things, I thought documenting what I'd done on the basing for my Warriors of Chaos.

In the past I've had a tendency to overcomplicate life and come up with weird and wonderful schemes, so on the current armies I'm keeping it simple (stupid) to not get in my own way. In the previous post I mentioned that it's a few pieces of cork as rocks, some gravel and tiny stones, then sand atop everything. 

Here's what the basing materials and early stages look like. Cork and slate are superglued in place first and usually a tactical position to cover basing holes, or create resting points for feet and weaponry. Then liberal application of PVA across the rest of the base, a sprinkle of the heavy gravel, then the lighter gravel, tapping back out into the box each time so any loose material is saved for later, and finally the sand over everything.

The ballast fixer is great, but I can't stress enough how awful it smells. It's fine on one model, but when you're basing 80+ models at the same time, it's a powerful odour and I was happy to leave these out in the garden for a day to avoid the worst of the smell.

 Google have added a potentially interesting feature to Blogger, where it will auto-generate search links for useful terms. I tried it on my previous post, but the decision making, and therefore quality of links is poor. I don't think anyone wants to search for blue, for example, but the link to NMM is excellent. It could have utility in the future, just not yet for me.

Warriors of Chaos: Marlockt Beastface

So, it's time to share the test model - Marlockt Beastface.

He's done with NMM but I think that needs to change on the next model as it doesn't quite suit the feel of what the army should be; which is encapsulating that late 80s feel for how things were painted. Loath to repaint him at the moment, so next test model will be the starting point and then I can make a comparison between them. 

The freehand on the shield is a bit wonky, but captures the late 80s vibe I'd like and doesn't feel especially polished, which is fine for me.

  

The model is metal primer (yes it's oldhammer), black primer for grip, white ink over the top of that for general volume and light, magenta on top of that (bear with me), blue in the shadow areas to create a more purple tone, then layer up the colours quickly atop that. Sounds arduous but it works well enough en masse, so I'm hoping it'll speed the project up long term. Even if right now I'm thinking "Dave, you're an idiot".

Basing is simple. It's a few pieces of cork as rocks, some gravel and tiny stones, then sand atop everything. Left to dry overnight then a ballast fixer applied to make it rock hard. But maaaaan that stuff smells AWFUL. Leave it outside if you can because it's stinky. After that, just a couple of earthy tones on the base and job done.

Warriors of Chaos

Starting one army and focusing on that would be perfectly sensible, so ... that's not happening. I'm also going to dive into the The Old World too.

I saw there's a fantastic challenge running on this blog (https://oldworldarmychallenge.blogspot.com) and realised this is the structure I've been missing from a lot of my projects. In my rush to demonstrate how clever I am by painting whole armies, I manage to actually achieve nothing but a series of half-painted or abandoned armies.

Their challenge feels a bit cluttered with so many participants, but I love looking at the results. For the second half of 2025 I'm going to follow along! I'll aim to paint a unit per month, starting with infantry. I've made headway in preparation and finally based my oldhammer metal collection.  

 

They're set up in units of 20, but I won't be painting them quite that fast! This is just to gauge the effect and how it looks en masse, and I adore them already. This will probably be plenty for the next 6-12 months I think, but there's more in the drawer - in desperate need of a paint strip and some pieces need fixing. No-one needs to see that though, it's quite boring.

In addition, I've created a unit filler for the four Chaos Gods to use in different sized units for variety and adding a more thematic approach. Khorne and Nurgle were easy enough to finish up but I need to decide how to enhance the Slaanesh and Tzeentch ones now. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The big challenge is sitting down to prime everything. It's going to take quite some time to go through everything and get it ready for painting. My silly brain also wants to ensure post-prime that everything is grouped up by Chaos God so I put the right colours on things. Well done brain, making my life significantly more complicated yet again.