[PLOG] - Darkprincess' Vampire Counts Army

[Darkprincess]

Hi guys. Some of you will have seen the photos of my Dark Elves Cult of Slaanesh army here; viewtopic.php?f=9&t=77298

So I thought it might be cool if I uploaded a bunch of pictures of my other main army - Vampire Counts. I've started a seperate thread for this, so as not to get them mixed up with my Druchii. Since this is my army, it goes without saying that most of the time, it will be fielded as a Lahmian list, though I have models that lets me use other configurations too.

The Vampire Countess
OK, to kick off the proceedings, no Lahmian army would be complete without a great Lady at its head, so here she is;



This miniature is from the Wargames Foundry Elven Revenants range, so she's noticeably taller than other Warhammer figures, but for character models, I think this is OK within reason. I have to admit that she looks a lot better on the tabletop than she does in this closeup picture, but I'm quite pleased with her. I have a few more miniatures from the same range that one day will become Lahmian Countesses - because one is good, more is better

The Vampire Lord
OK, in general I don't field male characters but the Elven Revenants miniatures come in packs of two, one male and one female (also two weird cherubs - I have a plan for those elsewhere ), so I decided that the male character from this set would make an awesome vampire character, so here he is in all his glory;



Facially, he looks very similar to the one I used in my Slaanesh DE army as Senix Belakyth, so maybe Foundry are using the same face sculpts in this range. Whatever the reasom, I really love this miniature even though, like his female counterpart, he stands taller than most of his minions, but then that's as it should be I tried a grey skintone here to make him look more undead and I think it worked pretty well. I quite like the roses on the sword too - not to everybody's taste I guess but I think it looks cool on this great mini.


Skellies, Skellies and More Skellies...
OK, powerful as these vampires are, they'd find it tough to defeat an enemy army on their own, so they're getting a bit of help along the way, firstly in the form of three large units of skeleton warriors. For the purposes of photography, I've arranged them as three units of 32 skellies, but more often I would field them as 6 units of 16, depending on my mood and how insane I want to be on the day (yes I actually have movement trays that can take 32 models on 20mm bases, but they're still stashed away somewhere and I still havent located them - that's what you get for not playing in several years)

Here's a few photos. Some of these are still WiP as you can see in the pics and most still need their bases finished, but they'll all get completed one day

Skeleton Warriors #1


These are pretty standard pre-7th edition VC skeletons with a few TK bits thrown in here and there. There's also a few Heroquest skellies hidden in amongst the others too. Note that I have a few gravestones on bases in the unit too. I like these because it's a neat way of beefing up the unit size by using bits that come with the skeleton sprues anyway, and they also make superb grave markers for spawning points in all kinds of games including Mordheim and so on. I've used this method to boost the unit sizes in my Zombie units as well.

Skeleton Warriors #2


Pretty much the same as the above unit, again with a few gravestone bases and a couple of Heroquest skellies as well. Once I'm more confident about my painting skills, I'll finish that banner too
As with the first unit, the painting is pretty straightforward - bleached bone with a brown ink wash. Since these were not all painted at the same time, on some of them, the ink wash is not as diluted as on others, leading to a bit of variation with some of them looking older and dirtier than others, but I think that works well, as those just climbing out of the ground are going to be more dirty than some of the others. In most cases the weapons were painted with tin bitz over the black undercoat followed by a light drybrush of boltgun metal. This has the effect of making the metal look old and tarnished.

[WiP] - Skeleton Warriors #3


OK this one is obviously very much more a Work in Progress than the other two units of skellies, but it will be painted in much the same way. I need to find a new equivalent to tin bitz though before I can start as my pot of tin bitz has dried rock hard


Corpse Carts

Ok finally (for now), here are a couple of Corpse Carts. I actually have two of these and I'm not going to finish them completely just yet as I'm thinking of a few conversions to try with them first, so as soon as I come up with a good idea I'll give it a try. So far I have one empty cart without its zombie crew painted reasonably well, and a second one, with the zombies, currently unpainted. I haven't added the corpses to either yet though...




OK I'll upload pics of some more VC stuff tomorrow and link them in this thread.

Hope you like them...

[Amboadine]

Nice to see a few non DE models here. Looking forward to seeing your work on these.

[Darkprincess]

OK here are a few more of my VC pics; Starting with the zombies. I love zombies - they're overpriced in points (better to raise them than to take them at the outset - the only good zombie is a free zombie), they're weak and slow - but they're enormous fun, and can really mess up your opponent's battle plans by blocking and generally being a nuisance. I spent many an hour in my youth watching movies like Dawn of the Dead, Zombie Creeping Flesh and so on (many of which ended up getting banned in the UK as the infamous "video nasties", yet compared with the stuff that gets released these days, they were pretty tame. Anyway on to the models; Once again there are a lot of WiP miniatures in here (painting horde armies is a tough commitment) but they're getting there (slowly, as befits their shambling status)


Dawn Of The Dead - The Zombie Horde Arises - Part One



Zombies are great fun to paint as well because there are really no hard and fast rules (and you don't have to be too neat). For most of these I used earth colours (mostly greens and browns) for the clothes, while the flesh was painted Bleached Bone and given a wash of diluted brown ink. The gory bits were painted scab red and highlighted with a mix of red and purple inks, then given a couple of coats of 'ardcoat varnish to give it that wet, slippery look. All in all, I think they look pretty good - both scary and amusing at the same time. It's awesome fun to use these in Mordheim type games too where more and more of them spawn each turn. The other great thing about zombies is the ability to mix & match parts from a wide variety of kits from many other armies, so you can have a lot of fun creating unique and characterful models. Fluffwise, this is Old World stuff so you have a few former Empire soldiers among the their ranks, as well as a few (as yet unpainted) ones from the Corpse Cart crew.

I particularly like the one at the front eating the braaaiiins


The brain was made from a Tyranid Adrenal Gland that I had in the bits box - I've used a few of those for the zombies (there's one in there with a bit of one on top of his head to make it look as if the top of his head has been sliced off)

Also, I have a few old Heroquest minis in there too like this one;


The painting looks pretty rough in these closeups, but they look great on the table, so that's fine by me.



Day Of The Dead - The Zombie Horde Arises - Part Two

More WiP zombies here. This time a smaller unit of 20. These are mostly completed apart from the bases and I think they look great. Again there are quite a few minor conversions, as well as two Heroquest zombies. I love the characterful face sculpts on the GW zombies as well as the large variety of weapons they have. The painting was the same as the other zombies - bleached bone, brown ink and the usual scab red with ink washes for the entrails. Quick and simple to paint and looking suitably messed up.



I'll probably need to rearrange them within the unit so I don't have all the same weapon arms together as in this closeup;


I'm very happy with the way these are looking. If I can paint the rest of my zombies as good as these I'll be OK.



The Night Of The Living Dead - The Zombie Horde Arises - Part Three



For this last unit of WiP zombies , I've used the technique of having them emerging from the ground, which serves two main purposes - firstly because there are a lot more arms and head than there are legs and bodies in the zombie kits, meaning that I can use up a lot of the spare bits and get more models at the same time and secondly they can help in ranking up a larger unit where some of the models may get in the way of others, making it harder to get them to fit nicely on a movement tray. It also looks really cool and helps to bulk up units. Also, they make awesome grave markers. Eventually, once all my zombies are painted and based, I'll mix them all up in various units so I can spread out the emerging ones into the other units so they look a bit more consistent on the table. Altogether I have around 90 zombies and 100 skellies (and probably a few more languishing in the bits box if I ever get around to putting the odd bits together - essentially to make an emerging zombie (or skeleton for that matter) I put a blob of Milliput on the base and smoothed it towards the edges so that it formed a mound. Then I poked the middle of it with the back end of a paintbrush to make the hole, and wiggled it about a bit to get it the right sort of size, then I added the details - sometimes just a headstone, sometimes a skull, or a hand, or a weapon arm, part of a shield etc - the possibilities are endless, suitably cutting them and pushing them into the base to make them look as if they're just coming up out of the ground. Then just do the basing and you're good to go. Since you can get 100 x 20mm bases on ebay for like £5 (compared with £3 for just 10 from GW), it's a great way to add character and bulk to your undead units, and they could double up as graves if you want to play skirmish type games in and around a large cemetary, for example. Normally, I would use round bases for markers and similar stuff (such as Wyrdstone markers for Mordheim, for example) but putting these on square bases is a cool technique for unit building. Just be careful not to field too many of them otherwise you'll end up with units that look a bit weird, even though they'll play just fine.

Here are a couple I'm working on at the moment - I love the guy with his brains scooped out - to do that I simply sliced off the top of his head and drilled it out.



OK, that's all the zombies I currently have. Back later with some converted Necromancers, Wraiths and other cool stuff

[Amboadine]

Impressive number of zombies there
Good work.

[Darkprincess]

Impressive number of zombies there
Good work.

Thank you. You can never have too many zombies I think. I have bits left somewhere so I could probably get another ten if I put my mind to it
I also have quite a few skeletons to use up - and also a bunch of Necron warriors which one day I may convert into Black Knights (since the Necrons have a wide stance so it should be easy to fit them to mounts - assuming I can find suitable mounts for them...)

So many projects, so little time

[Darkprincess]

Here are a few more models associated with my VC army project.

Starting off with the Necromancer(s);



The Wizard Necromancer



This is a fairly straight build from the Empire Wizard kit. I just need to finish the basing and a few fine details on this guy. As my VC are generally Lahmian-themed, I don't really use Necromancers to any great extent but they're really fun models to build and convert, and this particular one has seen more action in games of Mordheim than anything else.



The Painkiller Necromancer



Probably the most heavily converted Necromancer I have. This one is based on a character from the Town level of the 2004 PC game "Painkiller" in which he stalks the streets throwing fireballs at you while you wasted all your ammo fighting off hordes of zombies (so really more of a wizard than a Necromancer but anyway...) The model has the legs from a HE archer, the torso from a 6th edition night goblin, a skull head from the skeleton warrior sprue, a set of beastmen horns and the staff is from the Corpse Cart kit. I need to tidy up the painting a bit on him but otherwise he's a fairly close representation (as close as you can get without sculpting custom parts) of the video game character. I really love that game, and playing the Town level is amazing - if ever there was a video game that was the personification of the world of Mordheim, that was it (well that level, anyway). Back in the day, our group's Mordheim table was based very closely on that part of the game, right down to using the Painkiller Editor to save out maps and textures to use as reference. We still have some of that old terrain now, scattered among the former group members, but I'm led to believe that much of it is in quite poor condition today (my sections certainly are). It would be really amazng to rebuild that table in its entireity one day. I regret not shooting more photos of it back then. Somewhere online there are some photos of a few of the buildings that I made for it, but I no longer have the link - I need to rediscover it I think.


The Hunchback Necromancer



This guy is from the Corpse Cart kit with the staff converted from skaven bits (thanks to our friendly neighbourhood Skaven player - now married to my mum - for letting me scrounge some of his surplus bits for my own nefarious purposes)

The Not-Really-A-Necromancer Necromancer



Not really a Necromancer - just the Corpse Cart guy with a spiked corpse - I did field him as a Necromancer in a few Mordheim games back in the day, hence his description in here. A nice characterful model and worthy of inclusion I think.



WiP - The Black Coach

Before we leave the Corpse-Cart-as-parts-donor conversions, here is a scratchbuilt Black Coach.



The bodywork is all made from plasticard with aluminium mesh for the windows and matchsticks for the wooden details. Note the two Corpse Cart lanterns on the back and the use of various shield bits as details. I still need to sort out a couple of suitable steeds to pull this thing but I think it will look OK once it's finished. (Mental note to self - needs more spikes)



The Revenants

Once again I turned to the video game Painkiller for inspiration here - in the Cemetary level, the player gets attacked by a band of armoured skeletons. I did my best to replicate the design for my army, even going to the extent of developing specific rules for them (they count as having heavy armour and move a tad quicker, making them a real menace).



These were dead easy to make - basically Dark Eldar warriors on 20mm square bases with skull heads and weapons from various sprues. I think they look pretty good too. Here's the original version in the game;



So far, so good. More cool stuff to follow

[Lord Drakon]

I like the cool stuff you are producing! Especially the Revenants are great

[Sabious]

Coach and Revenants look great. Love something a little different

[Amboadine]

Coach and Revenants look great. Love something a little different

Yes indeed. Great Revenants.

[Shadowspite]

More good work, DP!

The black coach is looking interesting. I've never tried scratchbuilding something on that scale.

It's also nice to see some of the old Heroquest minis make an appearance. That game was my first contact with the WH world and I still have a soft spot for it. They were remarkably good quality plastic minis for the time.

[cultofkhaine]

Love the scratch built Black Coach. Also great to see something different on the forum for a change - you have quite a bit of work to go on the army. Will we see some progress shots?

[Darkprincess]

Love the scratch built Black Coach. Also great to see something different on the forum for a change - you have quite a bit of work to go on the army. Will we see some progress shots?

Yes that's my intention - to post updates on the progres of this and all my armies (the main ones being DE and VC but I'm intending to post threads on some of my minor stuff too like the Drow, Illithids and so on, not to mention a new project involving the rebuilding of our old Mordheim terrain pieces).

Most of the pics I've posted thus far are of models I did many years ago. Those marked with the WiP prefix are ones that I'm currently doing work on. The Black Coach for example, was built around 7 or 8 years ago, but I've recently started thinking about actually completing it - starting with this very update



UPDATE - The Black Coach

I've done a bit of work on this model in the last day or two, so here's the latest photo;



As you can see, I've managed to find two old GW horses (minus their tails, I'm afraid, but I think I can fix that later) and test-fitted them to a custom base. The base itself is 50mm x 150mm and is cut from 3mm thick perspex sheet. I think this is the correct size for a Black Coach, as I believe the real model comes on a 50x100mm chariot base and the two horses are on 25x50mm cavalry bases. I think that for a model of this type, it would be better to construct the whole thing on a single custom base to prevent it all falling apart later on.

The wooden section linking the coach to the horses (sorry I can't remember the proper name for it) is stuck together out of cheap hobby matchsticks. I still need to put a body and legs on the driver, and I may need to bend his whip upwards slightly so that it doesn't get in the way when I attatch plumes to the horse's heads (For those I will use the same sort of Dark Eldar helmet plumes that I'm using on my Cold One Knights - I guess I could adapt a couple of those to replace the missing horse tails too)

All in all I'm pretty happy with the way this project is shaping up, though I think it needs a few spikes along the top rails of the coach roof - the tips off wooden toothpicks should be perfect for these. I'm also planning on making/sculpting some scenic base details from Milliput - a large base like this will look very sparse without extra detailing.

I will of course post updates as soon as I have them

[Amboadine]

Exciting project. Very impressed so far.

[cultofkhaine]

Yes looking great! I think it would look better if you had four horses to pull the coach with.

Also very keen to see your Drow army (I have a weak spot for this myself, with my own army)

[Darkprincess]

Yes looking great! I think it would look better if you had four horses to pull the coach with.

Also very keen to see your Drow army (I have a weak spot for this myself, with my own army)

Right now I only have two GW horses but that may change one day. As for the Drow, there is very little actually completed on this project as yet, although I was at one time very busy developing the army list and rules. I would like to build a small Drow army though (Maybe around 1000-1500 points or so) as a P&M project (if only to give me an excuse to use some of those forest goblin spiders that I picked up long ago)

While I was playtesting the Drow list, I was using my DE models as proxies, but it would be really cool to have a proper army built up. Needless to say a large part of such an army would be converted from witch elves and stuff like that. I'll have a search through some old stuff to see if I did actually manage to get anything built up for that. I should try to find my old army list and post it somewhere I think as a lot of people have asked me about the Drow project...

One of my main priorities on the Drow project was trying to make it unique and specifically different from just being a themed DE army, so all the units had their own rules etc. Points values were roughly equivalent to the DE but I scoured hard all the Drow reference material on the web and tried to cherry-pick all the best stuff and turn it into a proper WFB-compatible army list. (So you had stuff like Arachne and Matriarchs as Lord choices, Driders as Special, Giant spiders in the Rare options and so on). I think the list was probably a bit broken, but then I guess I always tend to err on the side of overpowering when I write lists up)

[Darkprincess]

Black Coach Update

Made a lot of progress on the coach in the last 24 hours;



The perspex base was covered in a thin layer of Milliput which was smoothed at the edges and is not perfectly flat, so as to add interest. The dead piles were also made from Milliput that was press-moulded then painted bleached bone followed by a diluted brown ink wash. I still need to tidy up the sides of the base and add a bit of static grass here and there for effect.

Then I still have a bit of work to do on the horses (not least of which is shading and highlighting - on the coach too), and lots of small details to add later. I'm thinking of adding stuff like reins and authentic-looing harnesses, as well as maybe a couple of grisly trophies to detail the coach. Part of the problem here is that the GW Black Coach is essentially a hearse, with large windows, curtains etc, whereas mine is more like a passenger-carrying version, so it has taller sides which right now are just large flat areas that need more detailing.

The spikes on the roof of the coach were cut from toothpicks but don't stick down well and keep falling off at the slightest touch, so I'll have to pin then I guess, or find a different method for doing the spikes.

I'm beginning to think I maybe should have made a longer base and added an extra two horses, then it would look a bit like the coach in the Van Helsing movie (which was a big influence on my VC project). Maybe that's a future project but right now I think this is starting to look pretty good...

[Shadowspite]

Looking good!

I think it looks fine with only 2 horses. The whole thing would end up being too long with 4.

For the big flat sides of the coach, have you considered using greenstuff to sculpt some screaming ghostly faces?

[Amboadine]

Coming along very nicely indeed.

[Darkprincess]

For the big flat sides of the coach, have you considered using greenstuff to sculpt some screaming ghostly faces?

Not sure if my sculpting skills are up to that to be honest, but it's a really cool idea. I guess I'll practice doing some over the weekend.

[Vulcan]

Try making an impression of a face in greenstuff and then streching it...

[Darkprincess]

OK it's been a pretty hectic weekend so I didn't get half as much done on the Black Coach as I wanted to do (Instead a few of the old group got together to plan the rebuilding of our old Mordheim table), so in the meantime, here are a few more pics of some of my other VC models...


Some Dire Wolves

I'm not big on using these guys in games but I quite like the way they've turned out;



These are just bog-standard LOTR Wargs mounted on cavalry bases. I just painted them black then drybrushed the fur with grey to bring out the detail. Inside the mouths were painted scab red and the teeth were done in a mix of bleached bone and white. The eyes were blood red with a drop of 'ardcoat varnish to finish.



The Spirit Host



These ghostly warriors were obviously inspired by the Army of the dead from LOTR, and are made from Brettonian Men at Arms - 3 per base. I replaced the ugly Bret shields with much nicer HE ones and swapped out a few heads for skulls. The paint job was very simple - white undercoat and a light green wash (I can't remember the exact mix I used on these but I'm pretty sure it was Goblin Green mixed with Skull White). Sometimes a simple scheme like that can look quite good. If anything they're probably a tad too bright but I can't see myself trying to repaint these now after all this time.


The Spectral Wraiths

OK something a bit different here;



I think these guys look pretty cool. The models are from Blacktree Designs, and although they have a reputation for poor-quality sculpts, their Undead range are actually pretty good - and cheap too - these are all metal minis and I think I paid around £18 for the whole unit about 9 years ago - I'm sure they're a lot more expensive now though (but still nowhere near as expensive as GW's £9 EACH for their Cairn Wraiths - and I thought that £35 for ten Witch Elves was taking the p155!!!!! )

The paint job was a simple drybrush of light grey (probably Fortress Grey IIRC) over a black undercoat. One of the guys (sold as the unit captain) has robes that were just painted black and highlighted with a mixture of black with a little drop of grey added. I like these guys but I now have more wraith minis than I could ever field in one game, so I often use these as an extra Skeleton Warriors unit. Somewhere I also have a bunch of custom 40mm bases (just a square cut from an old CD case, with a little lip around the edges so the minis don't fall off, and a bit of Milliput sculpted to make the back corners level with the mini bases) into which these will fit so I can put three together and use them as a second Spirit Host. I need to find those bases and post pics as they're a really neat idea I think.


My Old GW Wraiths

I also have a set of the old GW metal wraiths (back when they cost about £2.50 each for a substantial chunk of metal, rather than almost a tenner for a few grams of cheap plastic);



These old metal wraiths are really great minis and always look good on the table. They're also very quick and easy to paint too - the robes are just black with a highlight and the skulls/hands etc are just bleached bone with a diluted brown ink wash. The headstone was painted codex grey and drybrushed with fortress grey then given a very thin brown wash. The scythe handle was scorched brown drybrushed with graveyard earth, and the blade was painted tin bitz then drybrushed with boltgun metal and given a wash of diluted brown ink. The hourglass was covered with 'ardcoat varnish to make it look glassy.



Similar paint job to the previous one. I think the highlighting on the robes came out a tad better on this one, though the base might look better with a bit of flock, though the original idea was that it should look like a freshly dug grave, which is why I didn't put any static grass on it at the time (same with quite a few other bases on my VC stuff). I may yet add grass at some point though.


Death Of Rats

While we're on the subject of wraiths, I thought I'd share this one with you. This is not my best conversion by a long way but I'm pleased with it and of course it's a little nod to the late great Terry Pratchett. This is made primarily from a goblin with a rat-like skull (can't remember what sprue that came from) and the bell from the command sprue that you used to get in lots of plastic regiment boxes. I need to tidy up the paint around the hood and skul (which looks glaringly obvious in the closeup photo - more so that it does on the tabletop anyway). The painting scheme was more or less the same as the other wraiths, and I think the blade of the scythe looks really great. I just need to tidy it up and finish the base.


The Mummies



Mummies are not really all that usable in a standard VC army, but I'm quite fond of these guys. They're old Heroquest minis that were just undercoated in black and painted with bleached bone. The faces were painted in codex grey then the whole models was washed with diluted brown ink.


The Bat Swarms



I quite like the way these look despite a few issues with the scenic bases. The basic technique was to fix the bats to brass wire to give a bit more height than I would have got if I just fitted the stock models to the bases. The bases themselves are pre-cast resin ones that were bought on ebay and to be honest they were a bit crap. As you can see in the photo, some of them are quite bad castings and not even flat on the bottoms. There were also quite a lot of air bubbles in them as well. I added the headstones myself but the rest of the bases were (badly) cast in cheap orange resin. I can't complain too loudly though as they were very cheap (I bought a pack of ten 40mm - I used the other five for my Fell Bats (more of which later) and four 20mm skull-pile bases for about £5 back in the day), but on balance I probably could have made better ones myself (the dead piles on my Black Coach base, for example), but I guess we all learn from experience... Other than the crappy bases though I think these look OK, and the posing of the bats is pretty cool.


The Banshees (but no Siouxsie, sorry )

OK I have two of these - one of which I;m happy with and the other one I feel a bit meh about;



I do like this one (despite the fact that it could do with a bit more definition around the face - ethereals are quite tricky to paint in a way that gives good contrast and detail, but also looks ghostly at the same time), but it suffers from having one of those crappy resin bases I mentioned above. I guess I could tidy up the bottom of it with a bit of putty and make it flat when i get five miniutes, but as with all things, there are too many things to do and not enough time to do them. Maybe one day...



And this one I'm not as happy with, despite it having a better base and a neater paint job than the first one. I think it's because I didn't paint the hair in the same ethereal scheme as the rest of the mini, so it looks a bit wierd IMO. Nothing that couldn't be fixed one day though. I think it's just an example of a miniature that would be improved by a better paint job. I'm not sure if the sword is appropriate for a banshee either, but it's impossible to remove from this mini anyway so it will be staying

OK, that's it for now. There is more stuff to follow, including the Van Helsing inspired Fell Bats and a couple of Harry Potter style Dementors (complete with their own special rules), and much, much more, as they used to say on TV...

Note: You can see a blurry image of some of the Fell Bats in the background of the photo of the Dire Wolves above