Wednesday 28 July 2010

Touched by the hand of celebrity (sort of)

I was skimming through my FaceBook feed this morning, when I see a post from the day before yesterday on the My Battalion page:

http://mybattalion.com/content/artic...-by-tigerstyle

That looks familiar, I thought...

The admins at My Battalion had picked out my Ogres to feature on the hobby page! I was quite excited, sad but true.

And it was picked on my birthday as well :D

Tuesday 27 July 2010

Battle Report: Chaos Space Marines Vs Imperial Guard

I had been planning on playing 8th Edition Fantasy at club night last week, but I couldn't find anyone with a small army so I ended up playing 40K instead. I haven't played 40K for a while so it was a nice change.

I was playing an Imperial Guard player, who's army had more heavy weapons than I've ever seen in one army. He must have had about 20 or so heavy weapons teams, plus 3 Leman Russ (one ordinary, one exterminator and one punisher), plus some veterans. There were so many gun teams in fact, I'm not wholly sure how he?d managed to get them all in, but then again, I don?t know the IG codex that well. Anyway, it was Annhilation with Dawn of War deployment.

In my list, it was more or less my usual 1500 point list, except that I dropped the Defiler and Vindicator in favour of 2 squads of 2 Obliterators. This was one of the driving forces for me for the game, as I've got a tournament coming up in November so I thought I give them a try and see what the fuss was about.

My plan was fairly simple: get close and kill IG in assault. This is exactly what I did. My units suffered a bit on the way over there, but once I got there I was able to tear units apart. IG have nothing really against a unit of Plague Marines up close, even two of the Leman Russ were of limit use. The Punisher cannon was pretty useless against T5, FnP Plague Marines. Even my Rhino got in on the act and tank shocked 3 heavy bolter teams off the table. So the end result was a win for me by tabling him in turn 6.

The obliterators worked fairly well, while they didn't kill much they felt pretty threatening throughout the whole game. I had lost three of them by the end, but not one had died to enemy fire. No, my dreadnought had gone into a fire frenzy twice and killed three of them. The game helped me with some thoughts around what will we be in my tournament list (Obliterators) and what won't be (Dreadnoughts, of which I had thought about taking three).

Tuesday 20 July 2010

Ogre Butcher

I've not had much time to devoted to painting recently, but I've just managed to get my Ogre Butcher finished:




The Halfling Cookbook:


The apron wasn't very smooth, I'm weak at smooth green stuff. With hindsight, I should have used milliput as that's much easier to get smooth.

The blood sprays on the apron were done with a mix of scab red and chaos black. I then thinned that down, and dipped an old toothbrush in it. I then used the stiff bristlles of the toothbrush to flick the paint over the model, mainly the apron and the cleavers. After than I added some more blobs of paint by stippling Scab Red and then Red Gore to highlight some of the larger blobs.

Ironguts are on the table next.

Sunday 4 July 2010

Ogre Bulls: Finished

Just found a spare half an hour this weeks to finish off the bases, to complete my first fully painted unit for my Ogre Kingdoms army: 4 Bulls with additional hand weapons.




The colour selection for the minis was a bit of a gamble, as I hand't painted any test models before hand to try it out like I'd done for previous armies. I knew I wanted to do snow bases, and knew that I wanted to keep to a fairly muted, cold palette for the unit as I plan for them to be from the high peaks of the Mountains of Mourn. I quite like the colour selection, but I'm not sure on the banner background for a future colour, I think it needs more contrast.






Mostly the unit was done with GW foundation paints, with Adeptus Battlegrey and Astronomicon Grey for the skin, Fenris Grey, highlighted up to Shadow Grey for the trousers.

Generally speaking, I'm pretty rubbish at painting faces, but the size and level of detail on the Ogres meant it was quite easy to do. I'm particularly pleased with the Bellower.

The standard was a bit of a gamble as well, as I hadn't planned out any kind of army or tribe symbols so after much deliberating I went for the symbol of the Great Maw. I figured I could always paint over it if it went wrong. I started but drawing around a 1 penny piece with a pencil to give me a circle to work to, then I drew in the teeth part with the same pencil. Once that was done I painted them in with Mechrite Red, highlighted with Blood Red and touched over any stray pencil lines or red paint with the grey.

The bases were done using GW snow, something I hadn't used before. I toyed with painting parts of the base white first and then snow covering those, but in the end I decided a more natural effect would be to do the snow in a couple of layers. I think next time I'll texture the base a bit more first with some milliput to provide lumps and bumps and then add the snow in a couple of layers.

With 8th Ed just around the corner, this unit will probably get bulked out to 5 models and have a character added to give it two ranks of 3 Ogres. I envisage using my Butcher in this unit, so that's what is going under the brush next.

Friday 2 July 2010

Precinct Omega Podcast

If you're after a new podcast to listen to, then I can thoroughly recommended the Precinct Omega hobbycast. It's five episodes old, and I'm really enjoying it, it's a change from the usual podcast fair as it focuses purely on hobby stuff for all different types of miniature painting. Robey from Precinct Omega studios is a great painter so the information is very good (he used to go to my local club before he moved down south), so check out his podcast here, or search for precinctomega on iTunes.