Warhammer Fantasy Revisited

Relax everyone – I promise these won’t be daily updates for the next month 😉

Thought it might be useful to track the time I actually spend (regardless of how efficient that time might have been) with regard to this project, to see how long an army actually takes me to get from assembled and primed to ‘tabletop ready’. Today’s efforts were a zenithal airbrushing of the GW Zandri Dust primed minis with a Coat of Desert Yellow Stynylrez primer, followed by a lighter zenithal highlight in white primer. Goal is to cheat somewhat and let the airbrush do most of the shading and the AP varnish at the end hide the rest of my sins.

And the black orcs who were previously primed in AP Plate Mail git hit with a coat of Vallejo Black Ink through the airbrush to sort their armour out.

Project time so far – 80 minutes.

I know, false advertising in the title…

So this is my quick and dirty/super lazy way of doing metallics on minis which have a lot of metal armour.

Step 1 is to prime the assembled minis with Army Painter Plate Mail spray. Most of my minis are picked up second hand and this still provides good coverage over underlying paint schemes even when I haven’t been able to strip the mini back fully. I’m pretty sure you all know how to work a rattle can so I won’t harp on about the basics here…

Step 2 is to pick your ink of choice and load into an airbrush. As the ink won’t bond particularly well to the metallic paint on the mini I try to avoid thinning down the ink too much (if at all). My airbrush is a super-cheap one and it clogs a little with some straight inks but even I can get away with about a 10:1 dilution with airbrush thinner. I set my PSI at about 20 and away we go. It usually takes 2 or 3 coats to build up enough ink on the mini to give a nice tone so be prepared to let a coat dry and come back later. Also make sure your airbrush is completely dry before you kick off – any water in the system form a previous cleaning will just bead on the metallic primer and mean you have to wait for it to dry before you can continue.

If you were feeling particularly fancy once you have a couple of coats on you could edge highlight the armour pieces and then either give another light coat with the airbrush or just brush on an ink wash to tint the edges back towards the original colour to bring in a bit of depth. I’ve done this for character minis but as I tend to hit multiple units at a go nowadays don’t know that I’d personally bother doing this en masse except maybe in really visible areas where you’d notice (maybe just helmets and pauldrons? Or the tops of shields?). As I tend to use AP varnish at the end I find that this knocks out any subtleties with blending done up to that point so I either don’t bother or go for less than subtle blending which then gets tinted and toned back to look a little more believable.

Step 3 is optional but one i’d highly recommend (I’m going to do this for all of mine moving forward) – hit the minis with a varnish to protect them from chipping or paint rubbing off as you continue to work on them. It’s frustratingly easy to damage the ink coverage when working on minis given how poorly the adherence between the metallic primer and the ink coats is, and it’s annoying to try and retouch accurately with a brush (you can make it less obvious but it’s still visible if you go looking).

A word on ink choices. I’ve only tried a couple of brands through the airbrush – Vallejo Game Colour and Army Painter Inks. The Vallejo seem to have much more pigment/richer colours but this vibrancy does make the colours seem a little more ‘comic book’ that the AP counterparts, which have a ‘grittier’ end look at the cost of requiring an additional coat (or 2) for a similar depth of colour. Both work well but It’s a bit like comparing a vibrant eye catching poster paint to an oil paint that requires a bit more prep – go for the one that will give you the result you are after. I imagine other inks would work as well and there are plenty to choose from, I just haven’t used this approach with any other brands as yet.

A bit of progress on a few fronts over the last couple of days. First point of note was a pleasant surprise in the post from Spain – Minis form the MOM Miniatures ‘Mercenaries’ KS. Outstanding quality and timely delivery – very happy and already plotting another order for more of them. In amongst the bundle of gorgeous goodness I found an orc warlord mini that I had included as an add-on on a whim. Perfect timing as he will be much more appropriate to lead the orc horde than the kitbashed orc I had, who has now been downgraded to unit champion. In amongst the rest of the minis I found the perfect sculpts for a Dogs of War paymaster and a Middenheim army Battle Standard Bearer, so once they are painted up I can call those armies complete (for a given definition of ‘complete’ at any rate…).

In an effort to get some space on my paint bench I pushed through the two blocks of Slaanesh Chaos Warriors and got them up to the dip stage. Once dry I’ll hit up the bases, which will be a snow texture, which I’m hoping will work well enough as the minis have turned out much darker than my original ones (which were painted 20 years and two GW paint ranges ago…).

As for the orcs, hit all the skin areas with the GW contrast paint ‘Ork skin’. First try with the Contrast paints, nice and flowy and good coverage but didn’t seem to contrast as much as I had anticipated straight out of the pot. When I got to the Goblin Wolf riders I wanted a lighter tint to the skin so I mixed a few brush-loads of the Ork green contrast colour with a healthy dose of Liquitex Matt Medium which worked perfectly.

The Night Goblins had been prepped to that point earlier in the year and the Black Orcs skin I’ll paint up with conventional colours and then do a dark tone varnish at the end.

Time spent adding green skin to the horde was about 6 hours so sitting at 7 1/2 for the project thus far.

A bit more progress yesterday.

Tried the Abbadon Black contrast on the wolves for my goblin wolf riders – mixed down with matt medium in about a 50:50 ratio. Happy with the results, think it will work well after the apparently inevitable AP varnish…

Instead of pushing on with the Orcs promptly got distracted by the Night Goblins and spent about 4 1/2 hours getting the three units up to the varnish stage, which I spent an hour applying this morning. While doing that I checked the Slaanesh warriors, varnish has settled in OK on them so I’ll hopefully look to base next weekend (I dislike basing so any excuse to delay the inevitable seems OK to me 🙂 ).

Additionally got some other odds and ends assembled and primed. Well, round 1 included breaking parts, super gluing my thumb and index finger together and failing to get parts to adhere. So knowing that I had somehow drawn the ire of the fickle hobby gods I decided to leave well enough alone and left everything where it was. Came back a few hours later and met with more success. Additions for the Orctober project include a bolt thrower and three goblin crew, six night goblin fanatics, two goblin shamans (one night goblin and one vanilla goblin flavour) (All GW models), a goblin warlord (reaper) ,  and an orc warlord (MOM Miniatures). Also pictured are a paymaster for my Dogs of War force and a battle standard bearer for the Middenheim army (Both MOM) and at the back an elf wizard who looks the part for my Pirates force (Journeyman Wizard from Ex manus Studios). Not photographed were a few more chaos characters who I have primed and set aside for later. I mean, let’s be honest – Chaos armies are all about overpowered short tempered two dimensional villains leading a legion of faceless goons, so clearly the more the merrier. We’ve all seen Game of Thrones, we know that they will all play nice and get along together, focusing on a unified objective… Anyhow…

Project time to date (exclusive of getting things assembled and primed) about 13 hours.

And about another 10 hours progress this week on the Orctober project. So about 23 since priming cumulatively. I grabbed the Vallejo wood and leather paint set and started work on the cavalry and chariots. Then rotated through to the miscellaneous goblins and then on to the orc foot. Using ‘Yellow Ochre’ as a feature colour to try and tie the units together as a cohesive force, beyond that it’s just whatever I happen to have on my palette at the time. Current state of play as follows:

• 67 Night Goblins (3 units) completed up to the basing stage;
• 10 wolf riders painted and ready for varnish;
• 13 boar riders and 4 chariots and miscellaneous goblins about 2/3 of the way through painting;
• 71 orcs (3 archers and 2 foot units) about halfway through the painting stage;
• 40 orcs (2 units of foot at about 15% painted
• 10 black orcs and 3 orc characters yet to really be progressed beyond priming.

So a little behind where I’d like to be ideally given the month is nearly half over (more importantly 2 of the 4 available weekends have been utilised) but I’ll see where I end up.

I did get distracted today assembling more pirate units for the Sartosa force – a unit of ‘Grog Lubbers’ (molotov cocktail lobbing alcoholic pirates) a unit of ‘Powder Monkeys’ (black powder addicted gun nuts who I’m sure the hung-over grog lubbers find are a joy to be around and all the loud banging noises they make are just endearing) and a unit of Buccaneers plus a standard bearer. So once it’s all painted up I’ll have around 1,000 points worth of pirates (with a little room for upgrades or potentially a magic item). As I find assembly and conversion slow going I didn’t pick up a paint brush all day.

In further news, looks like I’ll also be needing to learn to play the LOTR SBG – there is no way this will end without me building an Osgiliath tabletop, mark my words…

Well that was a thing…

OK, other than the general and a block of 10 Black Orcs I have the entire Orctober project progressed to the AP varnish stage. I’ll try and do that tomorrow so that I can then hit with a matt spray varnish on Monday and then start working on the bases for these guys, plus the 3 other units night goblins and 2 blocks of Slaanesh Chaos Knights in the production line. Yep, basing 250 minis at once is bound to take me to my happy place…

I estimate about another 25 hours spent since the last update (48 cumulative total), just putting paint on the palette and chain painting my way through every mini once or twice each evening. Used the Vallejo Wood & Leather set, plus Ivory, Leather Brown, Yellow Ochre and Oily Steel. In the GW Contrast range I used (now with their correct names…) Black Templar, Ork Flesh, Snakebite Leather, Nazderg Yellow and Gore Grunta Fur.

Kind of glad to have progressed as far as I have as I need to spend some time trying to reshape my Sharp Practice Napoleonic forces into Black powder scale armies for a game mid-week. I suspect this may involve a lot of primed only minis…

Short update – just spent another 3 hours (51 total) affixing chariot riders and getting the varnish on everything. Orcs got an AP strong tone and goblins a soft tone. Will give it until tomorrow evening to settle and then matt varnish everything. Also primed the pirates I assembled last week.

Still no further progressed on the Napoleonics…