Terrorgheist! And Nurgle Chaos Warrior Grave Guard

I wanted to post some in-progress pics of my Terrorgheist, which Caitlin got me for my birthday last May (!) and finally chastized me about not having STARTED recently. I told her I was waiting until I could do it justice.

I followed Rob Hawkin's tutorial on magnetizing the wings to make him much smaller to transport, and now I'm working on magnetizing his head, rider, and rider's weapons as well. (If you can't tell, I'm really liking this whole magnetizing thing.) I plan on super-gluing the chains around his neck to give the whole thing some support when the wings are detached. They'll be glued in a dynamic, swooping angle to reinforce the sense of movement in the model, which I think is pretty sleek already.

I also had to do some single shots of my Nurgle Chaos Warrior grave guard, so here they are for your perusal!

Themed Chaos Grave Guard, Malus Darkblade

I was stuck on the idea of doing paintjobs for my warriors themed after the four chaos gods. A day of painting later here they are! From left to right, they are: Slaanesh, pink and purple (the most FABULOUSLY frightening!); Nurgle, green and yellow and particularly rusty and corroded; "undivided," with the least alteration, just some rust and brighter silver armor; Khorne, all bronze and red and looking particularly happy about it; and finally Tzeentch, with his particularly bright blue and yellow highlights. I had a lot fun doing these, not least because it let me get out of the "undead drought" of bone and black I find myself doing so much of.

 Click for bigger pics!

I really wanted to try and expand my horizons as far as rust was concerned with these guys so it would stand up to the scrutiny of Carpe Noctem's painting challenge. To that end I tried to layer lots of different colors in the rust including green, purple, white, bone, and finally some blazing orange to top it all off and unify the rust. It was a lot of fun!

I also managed to get some pics of Malus Darkblade, headed for the girlfriend's Dark Elf army. He was originally going to be a Christmas present, but he got pushed back a bit with the trip to Virgina to see my sister. I tried to emulate the color scheme Caitlin is going for with bright red and yellow armor, but the Cold One he's riding was a scheme of my own invention.

 Since he's got such bright armor, I decided to make his sword plain ol' silver to balance him out a bit.

First time painting scales, and more detail than I think I've ever put into a face before. Hopefully the time spent shows! Truly a labor of love. Caitlin says she liked the "lava" bases, so that's the plan for now..

Finally, I cheated on a couple of "army shots" since I didn't feel like digging all my magnetized models out of the storage bin, but wanted to give readers a quick update since the last ones are so out of date at this point.

Krell's Children: Grave Guard Chaos Warriors!

Astute readers might recognize some of the half-finished an totally-not-game-legal conversions I attempted several years back with the 5th edition (?) hunchbacked plastic chaos warriors. Carpe Noctem happens to be doing a "Krell's Children" challenge this month, where the goal is to convert some chaos warriors (presumably the CURRENT ones!) into the undead. I thought it'd be the perfect time to revisit my old abortions I MEAN VALIANT ATTEMPTS AT CONVERSION

The originals were quite honestly a bit of a mess... I tried just mixing up the 5th edition skeleton and chaos warrior sprues to varying effect, but didn't get much in the way of working models. The parts seemed too disparate to blend together well. I also didn't do a particularly good job of figuring out how the parts were supposed to work together, as evinced by the bevor (neck protection) being used as a crotch guard on one of 'em... thank goodness for googling these days. I wanted to make sure the new guys fit onto the game-legal 20mm bases and also roughly matched proportions with the current skeletons, so I've got my 10 most recently finished sword-and-board skellies here to help with sizing. Here's the pile in progress. You can see I sanded the torsos down significantly, which helps to narrow the frame. Hopefully this will also make it possible for them to carry shields and still rank up.

I went even further with the mix-and-match approach this time, making sure I broke off legs and arms and attaching skeleton bones between, so that it actually looks like there's a skeleton inside the armor. Hopefully the results seem a bit more like skellies in chaos warrior garb, and less like a mix-n-match.

 I wanted to get in a few shots with some of the other varied undead models than I plan to put in the grave guard unit. I really want it to have a mix-n-match look, so you'll see a couple reaper models and one very cool undead dwarf with twin hammers from Stonehaven Miniature's kickstarter hiding in the background.

I may or may not decide to do a bit more with the colors and give them a "4 gods and 1 undivided" color scheme... the silver drybrushing over black was simple and fast but I feel like it's a bit much for an entire unit.

In completely unrelated news, I finally finished those Forge World Skaven Wolf Rats that have been on my painting table for about a year... I went for a quick-n-dirty grey palette that will let 'em join my units of Battle Masters wolves as dire wolves. Now I've got about twenty for the glory of the undead! I'm particularly fond of the dirty, bloody bandage look that I think came out pretty well.

Since I was going for quick 'n dirty, I basically drybrushed the entire model in progressively lightening shades of gray. I picked out the leather with a light coat of brown, and since it was already shaded from the gray drybrushing, the highlighting was already there. I picked out the bandages with some off-white and then did some gooey reddish black splotches all over 'em. (I figured anyone willing to bandage up a bunch of ravenous wolf rats only wanted 'em to live long enough to fight a battle and wouldn't do a great job of it!) The whole thing was pretty fun, but then, I'm a drybrushing addict. The level of detail on the forgeworld stuff is amazing.

Fimir! ...and a couple WIP Orcs

Edit: Better pics!

Finally managed to complete a few HQ models. I'm trying to speedpaint my way through these guys but my perfectionist streak keeps surfacing. The fimir were some of my favorite models as a kid and with their resurgence in Storm of Magic and the Warhammer Forge models, I wanted to do the little guys justice. (Apologies for the dark pics!)

I may have gone a little overboard with the bluish "verdigris" on the bronze areas, but it was my first attempt at the technique. Basically just a light bluish-green wash over gold. 

I also tried doing something a little different with the bases and painting on some "stone block" patterns of varying size.

 Gotta love the "birthmark/brands" on their backs! We'll say someone stuck hot irons into them to keep 'em in their place. What a great sculpt.

I'm still working on those Warhammer Quest orcs as well as a few other projects. The plain-looking HeroQuest orc in the background is going to be my first attempt at "dipping"... I'm anxious to see how he's gonna turn out.

In the background you can just make out Malus Darkblade's cold one that I'm painting for my girlfriend's Dark Elf army, and another blood dragon vampire on foot in progress.

Thanks for looking! Comments and criticism are always appreciated.

My Concern About 3D, as Terminator 2 Returns to Theaters

Excerpted from a post on io9:

The best thing about 3D also has the potential for the most abuse... fast, convoluted action sequences are easier to break down and understand when you’ve got an extra dimension to work with. The fear is that rather than make action scenes clearer and easier to understand (i.e. GOOD FILMMAKING), directors will film those scenes in such a way as to be undecipherable, with the assumption that, “If you can’t make sense out of it, you should’a seen it in IMAX 3D, cheap-ass.” MICHAEL BAY I’M LOOKING AT YOU, BUT I CAN’T TELL IF IT’S REALLY YOU OR NOT BECAUSE OF ALL THE EXPLOSIONS AND DEBRIS FLYING AROUND

The list was great, though. I know as a kid I was STUNNED by Captain EO, despite the nausea...

http://io9.gizmodo.com/the-best-3d-movies-before-avatar-made-3d-cool-again-1798405888

Delving Into Magic: The Gathering Fiction

Those who knew me as a teenager will remember that I spent far too much time and money on the collectible card game, "Magic: The Gathering." It started out at summer camp Mi-Te-Na, and though the cards were banned the first year after they started appearing in the counselor's luggage, the bug had already bitten me. I sold my collection in college for far, FAR less than I had spent over a decade of playing the games, but I'm fortunate that my exhaustive collection of M:TG fiction novels has survived the passage of time.

While looking for inspiration for my Warhammer army, I decided to pick up a few of the old novels and see if the background was still as exciting as I remembered. The first was the one that stuck out most to me in the background... The Brother's War. I was pleasantly surprised that the book was just as good, if not better than I remembered. Jeff Grubb does a great job setting up the relationship between the brothers and making it plausible that two people who loved each other so dearly in their youth would end up leading opposing armies against each other. It was interesting to note how little of the book was devoted to the actual war, which seems to take up only a few chapters at the end. Most of the book is spent getting to know the characters and their motivations.

After The Brothers' War, which spent a good bit of time pondering ancient Thran artifacts and the culture that created them, I immediately had to reach for the novel that dealt with that culture, suitably titled "The Thran." I was less impressed with this novel. While it was interesting seeing the birth of Phyrexia and the man who created that artificial plane, Yawgmoth, the novel just didn't seem as enthralling to me. Maybe it's because of the overwhelming theme of politics in the novel, but it didn't seem as exciting to me. The motivations of the character on the cover, Rebbec, also seemed confusing to me, as did the concept of the power stones making people sick. Do they still have that effect? Was it all lies on the part of Yawgmoth? Are the intricacies of pseudo-grecian politics really that fun to read about if you're a twelve year old male in 1995? The answer to the last one is, "probably not." The heavy-handed scheming and persecution themes are interspersed with some big battle scenes which would probably make a good movie, but something about this one left me wanting more. Also, "Yawgmoth" is clearly an evil, evil name... probably oughtta call him something a bit more neutral sounding at the beginning of this novel if you don't want to telegraph that he's eventually going to turn evil. Maybe I'm missing the point.

A quick trip to the trusty ol' storage space reminded me that I had a couple mid-90's M:TG comic books done by Armada, an Acclaim imprint. (Wait, Acclaim the video game company? They had a comic division? Ah, the 90's.) So I grabbed them and have been trying to crank through them in the past few days, since I have SO MUCH to do lately and I really can't afford another distraction. Anyway the Antiquities War and Fallen Empires series left a bit to be desired. The artwork didn't impress me and the writing didn't hold my interest. Also whoever they got to do the letter was an amateur at best and downright terrible at worst. But I was pleasantly surprised by the Homelands comic. I've been scanning the MTG Salvation wiki lately, looking for connections between different parts of the fiction and trying to keep characters straight, and the site does not have a glowing opinion of the Homelands card set. It is described as a low point in game design for MTG, but a high point of background and storytelling, which seems appropriate given the comic. The brothers Hildebrandt did the cover, which I found interesting, but it's one of my pet peeves that the interior artwork looks nothing like the cover, which I've always found to be false advertising. Fortunately the interior art is by Rebecca Guay, and is PHENOMENAL, if you can get past her particular painterly style. It makes everything sort of mushy and watercolory, but is very beautiful, I think. The writing is also a high point of this one. All of the comics so far have jumped around in time and place, which from reading the editorial notes sounds like a conscious decision to allow Armada to "stake a claim" to all of the various settings in Magic's multiverse. It makes the books feel a bit rushed, as they introduce you to a character, kill them off, then move a hundred years into the future to show the results of said character's demise. While it made the Antiquities War series seem like more of a "highlight reel" of the events that take place in Grubb's "Brothers' War" novel, the Homelands comic seems to be working with a smaller universe and cast of characters that makes the chronological leaps feel more logical. The whole thing has a beginning, middle and end that leaves you wanting more, but there's a feeling of completeness to the story that I found refreshing after the Fallen Empires and Ice Age comics. Did I mention Rebecca Guay's art is FREAKIN' BEAUTIFUL?