Citadel

Citizens of our RPG’s and an Evil Sorcerer

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Only 6 days before we move into our new house! And I honestly don’t think I can wait much longer!

Our tiny apartment is already completely cramped with boxes and I stopped counting my various bruises from bumping into furniture and doorframes trying to get around… And we still have all of our inventory from our shop we need to move aswell!

But I promised myself that I wouldn’t neglect my blog!! So here is a little post with some of my odds and ends that I snapped pictures of before they were gently placed in moving boxes! (In foam of course!)

Here is a group of Press Gangers from Privateer Press. They were some of our very first miniatures for rpg’s, and I recently stripped them of paint (from a rather shabby paint job) and gave them a new coat of paint and new bases.

I painted the female press ganger before the men and had already photographed her, hence the different backgrounds. The female is a very unique and humorous character with a luring expression and a firmly gripped mace hiding in her back hand! I painted her in Marienburg colours using Breonne Blue with the Ocean Triad for the blue parts and Rust Brown highlighted with 50/50 Rust Brown and Sun Yellow.

I repeated the combination on one of the male press gangers. I even had my first try on facial “stubble”. It ended up okay, I think. Definitely need more practise! I still haven’t finished the last one of the group, a guy with a sack which suspiciously look like it contains a man trying to break loose!

Black Chapel Steamheim Veteran

I stumbled upon a Spanish company named Black Chapel which produces a variety of miniature that fit perfectly with Reaper and Games Workshop’s minis. I bought different models from them including their Altreich Engineer, Alchemist, Guard of the Ancestors Chamber (dwarf champion), dwarf Blacksmith, and this Steamheim Veteran. I can greatly recommend these minis. Lots of character and very unique minis!

It was a rather “speedpaint” job, but none the less, he turned out pretty cool. I assembled him in a “pointy finger pose”, rather than pistol wielding (he comes with two arm options and two head options)
Since I bought this bunch, they have released several new minis including some very interesting Wood Elves, which I will definately pick up at some point!

Oldschool Tzeentch Sorcerer

Last but not least a good old Chaos Sorcerer! I decided to go nuts with blues, pinks, purples, greens, and my favourite colour: turquoise! (which proved difficult to spell in English!)

Tzeentch Sorcerer

It shows through that I spent most time on the facial features than on the rest, but it actually just started out as a fun test and practice with colours! I have recently shown progress with gold and non metallic gold techniques, but not on this one :-P I even painted a tuft on the base in different purples and blues and added some nail-glitter-thingies shaped as beach shells and starfish on the base and painted them in the same theme.
Pretty psychedelic and matches my passion for Led Zeppelin :-D

I used one of my old Games Workshop Screamers from my Warhammer Daemons Army as a reference.

SONY DSC

Classic Dryads to serve the Dryad Queen

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As I wrote in the previous post, I made a trio of dryads (old metal versions before the plastic sets came out) My husband and I laughed at the idea, as the miniatures look a little ridiculous. However, I used all my skills to make them look authentic for our Nordland campaign and to match Drycha!

Dryad Trio

Again, I used various brown colours from Reaper and finished off with very light browns (I never use pure whites, as they easily comes out as chalky and way too bright) Reaper’s Khaki Highlights and Scale75’s Thar Brown are the brightest colours I use.

Dryad Trio

I painted the guy on the left first, and somehow thought I used 32mm bases instead of the 25mm he is on (he was hiding in our cupboard) so I put the other two on 32mm’s. (Kromlech’s Windfall bases as usual) Oh well, it looked fine on the game board :-P

Here is the trio next to Drycha (Even though lower dryads don’t really have a gender and usually transform into female beauties when luring soldiers into the woods, I thought that the 3 dryads had to be men luring village women in :-P )

Trio with Drycha

I would love to paint some of the plastic ones as more obvious female versions, but I will have to buy 16 at a time and the pretty neat Branchwych (foolish name aside) costs a staggering £14 for a single plastic mini… So I might wait a while!

Citadel Travelling “dramatic pause”…… Actor!

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I painted this mini some time ago, but I thought this gentleman deserved his own post!
Let me introduce the flamboyant and extravagant Actor!

Traveling Actor

I mainly paint in subtle base colors with spot colors now and then, and rarely practice true bright colors, as they tend to look… messy. Atleast when I’m painting them!
I had just bought a few bright paints and wanted to test them on this old travelling player: actor.
I have already painted the St. George miniature which was a ton of fun to paint, so I decided to paint the actor really dashing with an arrogant attitude (my inspiration was Calculon of Futurama – the self proclamed best actor in the universe) and I even added an actor mole! The result is a fruitcake of dimensions!

As most old citadel miniatures (this is probably from the 80’s before I was born) the scale is a small 25mm, but they still fit into our 28mm game perfectly. I can completely imagine this guy storming the stage and pushing any hopeful and aspiring new actor to the ground!

Ranged Orcs (Mordheim)

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I recently painted 5 Orcs for my husband’s Mordheim Warband. He needed some Ranged Orcs for his Warband (+1 Ballistic Skill for a group, might as well use it). Having found 4 “Ruglud’s Armoured Orcs” on Ebay not long ago, we figured that these would be perfect for the job, even though they’ll be using bows in the actual warband. The 4 Ruglud’s Armoured Orcs can be seen below:
Rudlug's Armoured Orcs

Nicki (my husband) wanted one more orc for the group and decided to convert one using Orc bits from Spellcrow and an old plastic orc (From the Warhammer Fantasy 6th Edition Core Set). The result ended up pretty funny with the orc having poked out his eye and is now attempting to clean his teeth with an arrow.

The entire group can be seen below, you can also read some fluff that Nicki wrote about the orcs on his Mordheim Orc Warband page. Mordheim Ranged Orcs

Stone Troll – Golden Jewelry Style!

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I really love those old metal Stone Trolls from Games Workshop. They bring so much character and perfectly resembles the stupid trolls from the fantasy battle edition. They were initially part of my husband’s Christmas presents last year, and he plans to make a diorama at some point.

Bling Bling Troll

They are really a joy to paint. My husband requested the vivid blue colours he remembers from when he was a kid and had just started the hobby.

This is the first one I have painted so far and I thought it would be fun to paint the trolls as individual characters. This one is very proud of his stolen jewelry and he constantly shows them off to his inferior troll buddies!

He was mounted on a rocky base and I painted the weapon as a stone aswell, ’cause you know, he’s a Stone troll!

Classic Warhammer Wizard Miniatures: Grey and Amber

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Here are two of my classic wizards from my collection. I have finally managed to collect all the miniatures from the citadel line counting: Light, Amethyst, Gold, Celestial, Bright, Jade and these two (Grey & Amber)

Here is the Grey wizard, a master of deception in all his glory!

Grey Wizard

And here we have the Amber wizard, a rural caster with close ties to the realm of beasts and other wildlife:

Amber Wizard

Despite the fact that these miniatures are very old (about 1990) and they all have the same pose, they are still really cool and it has been a lot of fun to try and capture their specific wind and painting them to my best effort! I haven’t finished all of them, but looking forward to getting them on the blog when I get there :-)

Commission Completed!

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Finished and sent this amazing group of miniatures last week to a loyal customer from Spain! This has been the most demanding commission so far and it took me quite a while to finish, but I am proud of the results! :-)

Here is an overall picture of the commission!

Commission 1

I don’t dare to think about how long the work took, but each miniature took me around 2,5-5 hours, so a looong time :-P

Here are some of the heavy-weights (both in size and time spent on painting them)

Ogres

The Ogre Butchers took a long time to paint and the one on the right was made of metal, which proved to be very hard on my wrist. The first one however, was resin/finecast and a lot more easy to handle. The right hands of the miniatures had magnets inserted, so different weapons could be attached, which is pretty clever. I painted 2 additional halberd/swords for those.

Here are some of the Tomb Kings miniatures from the commission:

Tomb Kings 1

They ended up looking really cool, and I kept the colours in the same theme. Even though they are mummies I painted them pale so they could serve next to skeletons without standing out.

Here are the Mummies together with a bunch of skeletons I painted in the same theme.

Tomb Kings 2

These very detailed Khorne Blood Warriors were part of the challenge. They serve as evil warriors in a more subtle colour theme, though still loaded with details.

Blood Warriors

Last but not least I received this Age of Sigmar Liberator (I believe it is) which has a marauder head replacement and meant to look like a barbarian. Due to the futuristic look the Sig”marines” have, I had to work my way around it and make him more medieval :-)

Barbarian

I experimented a bit with Scale75 metal paints (Added Reaper black paint to S75 Heavy Metal) since I only had light metal colours at my disposal, but I think he ended up pretty nice :-)

Also painted a few Snake critters for this pack just like I did with the Lizards on the last Commission.

 

Another Commission Job!

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I finished this commission just before I went on vacation (still am while sitting by my laptop!) And I thought I’d share it!

I really loved painting those critters so I went straight to Ebay and bought a pack of them for myself :-D It was really fun painting in bright colours for a change and they ended up great (I hope my customer thinks so too :’-)

Commission Critters

I already have the Banshee miniature myself, but I wanted to paint her more creepy this time for commission and she ended up exactly that: Creepy!

Commission Ghost

The old Sauron miniature is meant to be more of an undead lord sort of guy instead of the classic Sauron. So I had to work around that and come up with a different colour theme (dark red and rusty) and I ended up with a kind of Lich King pair of eyes. He looks very impressive in person and he is a pretty big guy!

Commission Sauron

I also painted a very cool Dark Elf Assassin miniature to look like a human thief with freehand work and details, but the pictures ended up blurry so he is only featured on the overall picture..

Commission Job

Ooh and the small Chimera ended up a lot better than I anticipated, which reminds me that I just finished assembling the Banebeasts Chimera which I have coveted for years now, and thanks to commission I could now afford it! <3

The Death of Ghartek

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Another break from vacation!

As mentioned in a previous post, our heroes from our RPG group recently went on a search for a Dwarf named Snortek. The reason for this is that the very well loved dwarf Ghartek died a horrible death in the Knobelsdorff society (our First Aid expertised hero failed to save him) Little do people know that Ghartek was an extremely racist Dwarf who hated Elves (especially our Wood elf Hero Beluar with whom he relentlessly pranked in every way possible) and it so happened that right before he died from a Skaven attack, he put all the blame on poor Beluar who now believes he is cursed! (he did temporarily dye Ghartek’s beard pink, drop his glasses into his chamberpot and other sorts of devious pranks)

Luckily, there is still hope for our poor Beluar! Ghartek’s nephew Snortek is heading for Middenheim with funeral plans. Maybe Beluar can redeem himself by being VERY nice to the nephew?

Either way! Here are the now late Ghartek and his rather confused and narcoleptic nephew Snortek (pun intended)

Ghartek & Snortek

The Doctor is in!!

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Decided to dust off Doctor Festus and his loyal champion that my husband very creatively named “Fat Little Nurgle Champion”.

As a collector (of far too many miniature lines) I, of course, collect old Chaos Champions. More specifically Realm of Chaos Miniatures. Not sure which line this guy is (other than Citadel), but he deserves a shared post with “Herr Doktor”. Even though Festus is made in Games Workshop’s Finecast, assembling him was rather painless and the paint really stuck this time. Guess I got lucky :-D
Really love how the Champion fixed his missing leg with an extended arm! Also painted the guy in very rusty colours.

Festus is currently part of my WFRP campaign in Nuln, where he puppeteers the Nurgle followers. Recently, a group of heroes thwarted his grand plan, and he is now keeping a low profile while counting his losses.