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Topic of the Week - A new army!

Posted: Mon Feb 20, 2017 9:33 am
by Daeron
Greetings!

It's confession time... Did you start a new army? Well? :)
Did you use the new year to start a new army? Or is there an army you're hoping to get started on this year? Perhaps there's a release you're waiting (or rooting) for. Or will you be trying to keep your wallet safe this year?
What is the latest or next planned project that gets your hobby juices flowing?

For me, I wouldn't really know where to begin. I'm buzzing to continue my dark elves, as I seem to do at the start of every year. But then, I also consider starting my Stormcast. I made a tester model, got a few new paints to make some improvements, and I'm all set to get cracking. I wanted a simple but striking scheme, and the prospect of being able to paint it quickly is encouraging.
But I also started a Chaos Space Marine army. My friends and I want to dive into 40K sometime, so I can't hold that off forever. And I'm in a campaign that might need me to paint more Bloodbound.
On top of that, I'm trying to make time for some website work (for Druchii.net) and I have a few pet projects of my own. It's just a little too much to do all at once, so I'll be forced to rotate between these projects if I hope to continue any of them.
The great thing is I get to do this and keep my wallet safe... Since I failed to do this last year and bought more than enough models to last me all year. My biggest expenses have been paints, and probably will remain to be for the coming months.

But enough about me. What are your prosepects?

Re: Topic of the Week - A new army!

Posted: Mon Feb 20, 2017 10:53 pm
by Malys the younger
I recently had two Kickstarter games arrive (Dropfleet Commander and Blood & Plunder), as well as I just picked up Blood Bowl. I have never played tabletop Blood Bowl before but it's picking up steam in my area and it's my first foray into painting anything Orc/Ork. I'm traveling with a friend for business next week and I plan on taking the box so he and I can try it out. I've already assembled and painted the Dropfleet Commander models but I haven't had a chance to do anything with Blood & Plunder yet. As far as the Dryads for this months painting challenge, those are at about a 90% solution...lol

Re: Topic of the Week - A new army!

Posted: Mon Feb 20, 2017 11:03 pm
by cultofkhaine
I'm working on my Son's lizardmen army (not my choice of models, but he likes them) My next big project for dark elves is a slaanesh themed Ghrond army - that's what I'm looking forward to the most.

Re: Topic of the Week - A new army!

Posted: Mon Feb 20, 2017 11:29 pm
by Darkprincess
Well I like inventing new armies, as many of you already know. So far I have written lists for Drow, Illithids and Lovecraftian Deep Ones, all compatible with Warhammer Fantasy 6th Edition (though undoubtedly could be tweaked for just about any system). I haven't really started a new one this year but I've been taking another look at the Southlands Tribes army that I worked on some years ago. Taking inspiration from a couple of pieces of art by Rodney Matthews (see below) as well as the Darkest Africa range of minis from Wargames Foundry, it's still in its early stages of development (having thrown out the old concepts and started again) but will remain faithful to my original idea of having it as a human army that can take lizardmen units as Special or a lizardmen army with humans as special choices. The basic idea is that if your army general is a human, then lizardmen are special choices while humans are core, but if you choose a lizardman general then lizzies are core and humans are special.

At the moment it's a largely melee army with limited access to ranged weapons among the human units, large stylised beasts, some interesting cavalry mounts and of course anything you like from the lizardmen army books. This is essentially a "good guys" army (if there's actually any really good guys in Warhammer) hence the lizardmen connection.

I don't have any specific minis ready yet but I will in time. I'm not a great lover of paper minis, as I prefer the real thing, but I'm coming to realise that they can be a very useful tool for putting an army together cheaply and quickly in order to playtest it. In the past all my attempts at making paper minis were really bad but since I picked up a few great tips from Wyloch on Youtube, I'm now able to make some quite nice ones (using the pictures on the Wargames Foundry website)

Anyway there's still an awful lot of work to do on this army but it keeps my mind ticking over in the winter months and inventing new armies is always loads of fun :)

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Hopefully these should give you an idea of the sort of thing I'm aiming for. As soon as I saw these I was inspired to make this army but after a couple of false starts, I'm beginning to make a bit of progress now :)

Re: Topic of the Week - A new army!

Posted: Tue Feb 21, 2017 1:20 pm
by van Awful
2016 got in the way of actually doing stuff hobbywise. I had some (good) ideas at the end of 2015.But it all got shelved come march '16. So new starts with oldish plans in 2017.

I bought a skaven army for my girl to paint, completely selfless obviously, to bad she's not interrested in playing the game, bar mordheim, but if she's willing to paint with me i shouldnt complain. Damn her skills and learning arc though.

The army itself is still quite basic. 3 halves of island of blood boxes add a wheel , a bell, a cannon and some plague priests and you got yourself an army under 150 euro's.( just waiting for some sweet deals on some characters, jezails and globadiers)

My own project was building a VC army out of other races left over units, give 'm some headswaps and ghoulish paintjob and bob's your uncle

So what I got so far:

Dire wolfs; Old chaos hounds, and if need be (o&G)wolfs.
Ghouls; I got my hands on some mantic ghouls, awesome models.
Skeletons; Easy answer would be skeletons from tomb kings but id rather do something else then normal skeletons
zombies: this just going to be mix of night goblins, empire, skaven and bretonian infantry.

Grave guards; I was thinking empire greatswords, the old metal ones.
black knights; bret and empire knights
Crypt horrors; Ogres
Hexwraiths: Centigors
Vargheist: not sure yet but i was thinking bret. pegknights
Varghulf: morghur
Blood knights: chaos knights (metal)
Terror gheist: old Chaosdragon (metal)
spirit hosts: Wood elf way watchers and scouts?

Wight King: Crom the conquerer / mounted Wightking: valten nr 2
Necromancer; Shamans from night goblins and beastmen, maybe a human aswell.
Vampire; dark elf corsaIr and a knight and
i got the old aldenbrand ludenhof model. he seems good vampire material.
banshee:Witch elves?
wraiths: old executioners maybe?
ghoul king: Dwarven Slayer or savage orc

Corpse cart:grail relique
black coach:miner cart dwarfs ?
Coven throne/mortis engine:
Fellbats FLYING SQUIGS
batswarms
abysal terror a griffon or manticore

So the things in orange, i was hoping you guys could help us out with? Id love to add some dwarfs, they are a bit underepresented right now. I've got an mostly untouched hell cannon i would LOVE to be able to use. Same thing with a wingless Be'lakor ANY suggestions are welcome. The other thing i listed above are not set in stone, just stuff we got laying around and seemed lke a logical replacement. But if you have a good idea! Let me know.

I did some test models all ready , build some knights aswell. ll see if i can post them in painting and modeling

Re: Topic of the Week - A new army!

Posted: Tue Feb 21, 2017 2:39 pm
by Darkprincess
van Awful wrote:My own project was building a VC army out of other races left over units, give 'm some headswaps and ghoulish paintjob and bob's your uncle

So what I got so far:

Dire wolfs; Old chaos hounds, and if need be (o&G)wolfs.


LOTR Wargs make really great dire wolves - just paint them black, give them a quick drybrush of grey and red eyes and they look really great. I'll link my VC painting log at the end of this post so you can check out some of my VC conversions and WiP stuff

van Awful wrote:zombies: this just going to be mix of night goblins, empire, skaven and bretonian infantry.

Twilight Creations do a dirt-cheap bag of 100 zombies;
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Twilight-Creat ... G97TEFC620
These are 25mm scale (1:72 truescale) so they'll look a bit small when stood next to GW minis, but you can get away with it to some extent if you use them as unit filler and raise them up on their bases. They're not great and the detail isn't great but they are really, really cheap. They're also a softer plastic so they're a bit tougher to paint (wash them thoroughly first and use a good primer)


van Awful wrote:black knights; bret and empire knights

I used some necron warriors mounted on TK skeleton horses and made cloaks / barding from aluminium foil. I haven't put the pics up of those yet. I should get around to doing that one of these days as they look pretty cool


van Awful wrote:Hexwraiths: Centigors

If you're going the centaur route with these (which is a damn cool idea I think) rather than the mounted wraith method, then check out my Slaaneshi Centigors - these were converted from beastmen Ungors and LOTR horses;
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You could take a skeleton and graft it onto a skeletal steed in much the same way :)

van Awful wrote:Necromancer; Shamans from night goblins and beastmen, maybe a human aswell.

Check out my VC plog for some nice necromancer conversions :)

van Awful wrote:Vampire; dark elf corsaIr and a knight and
i got the old aldenbrand ludenhof model. he seems good vampire material.

Yeah agreed. I used a few Wargames Foundry minis for my vamps but there are endless vampire minis out there. Undead armies are easy to do because every company has great ranges of undead minis. Blacktree Designs have some really cool undead stuff - http://eoeorbisuk.com/

van Awful wrote:Corpse cart:grail relique

This is one of the tougher models to convert / scratchbuild, because although the cart is a straightforward build (lolly stick base and semi-snapped toothpicks for the ribs), the corpse pile on it will take a bit of work. Not impossible, but tricky to do well. If I was going to scratchbuild one of these carts (which I'm not, as I have two already - one from the VC battalion box and one bought seperately), then I would make the corpse pile by arranging a bunch of minis into a pile (possibly holding them together with blue-tack) and make a mould from it using blue stuff or maybe a two-part moulding putty (I've used Siligum for this in the past, but it can be tricky to find locally (although you can find it online easy enough) and expensive. Blue stuff is also not that cheap and it is tougher to use as you need to heat it up in hot water and press it onto the model before it cools down, but it does have the advantage that it's reusable - just re-melt it and go again. You can also do this with hot glue but it's messier to melt (tends to stick to the side of the pan you're heating the water in) and is harder to remove from the model once it cools down. Once you have a mould, you can cast the part in all sorts of materials from fibreglass resin to hot glue, 5-minute epoxy or even paper mache or salt dough. In fact salt dough is a great medium because it's really cheap (though hard to make in small quantities) and sets as hard as concrete. The downside is that it's really heavy.

van Awful wrote:black coach:miner cart dwarfs ?

Check out my Black Coach (in my VC plog) as it's pretty much all scratchbuilt (aside from the wheels and the horses)

van Awful wrote:Coven throne/mortis engine:

both myself and my mum's bf/husband (my step-father? - that sounds weird as he's only two years older than me LOL) are both working on scratchbuilds of this model. He will probably get there first as he has a little bit more time than I do, but one way or another, once we have one, I'll be the one painting it then I'll add it to my VC plog (as I play Lahmian VC, mine will undoubtedly be the Coven Throne rather than the Mortis Engine)

van Awful wrote:Fellbats FLYING SQUIGS
batswarms
abysal terror a griffon or manticore


For my Fell Bats I used old metal DE Harpies and painted them to look like the ones in Van Helsing. My bat swarms are just normal VC bats (metal again, as they're really old) but I mounted them on longer wires to make them more dynamic looking. The bases were resin and bought on ebay. They have lots of cool detail but also lots of air bubbles and other cating defects. If I knew before I bought them how crappy they were going to be once they arrived, I would have made my own from scratch. You get what you pay for I guess...

But yeah, VC have infinite possibilities, especially if you're prepared to go outside of GW for your parts (I know that GW have a bad reputation for being overtly anal about conversions and scratchbuilds, but I don't play in store or in tournaments anyway so for me their attitude isn't a problem. For other people it might be, so feel free to ignore any or all of my suggestions, GW or otherwise, and above all, have fun :)

My VC painting log;
viewtopic.php?f=9&t=77319