Slaves to Darkness Era Khorne Beastman

Hello again fellow Oldhammerers! Hope you like my Khornate (why did GW stop using these excellent and atmospheric words?) beastman? I actually painted him up just before the last Oldhammer Weekend and only found the time to get him photographed today. Despite being August, the weather in England has been its usual drenched self and so I lacked the light to get a decent shot outside. 

Today is a little better and so here we are. 

With this figure, I was hoping restore my trademark superfast painting style. Completeing a model in a single sitting is the only way for old Orlygg to go and so I was keen to get back up to speed. There is a little conceit in this, as I actually undercoat, basecoat and wash all of my figures before starting work on them proper. Sometimes years can go by between the time I prime a model and actually sit down to paint it. Not so with this model. 

He was undercoated in white then based entirely in a dark red. A few dark brown washes over the top of that and he was ready to work on. Drybrushing and highlighting made short work of the fur and skin, with increasing amounts of orange being added to the red base coat. I used British Camo Green for the trousers, highlighting with Foundry's Boneyard paints - an essential shade, with a great many uses. 

The metals were easy too. Black undercoat, then based in a black/dark metal tone. This I washed over with a chestnut ink wash to age the metal before drybrushing over again with silver. For the shield (a metal Maurader one, I think) I went a little further and based with bronze, before washing over with glazes to create an aged verdigris look. Again, a bright silver was drybrushed over to bring out the detail. 

Painting the horns was a little more challenging and I was pleased to see my hands growing more steady and confident. I used the Boneyard Shade for Foundry to complete these (working from a black base for the hoof, to create a little variation) before adding a brown glaze to tie the colours all together. A three tone yellow highlight of my own devising helped finish off the rope belt and the boots and eye-patch were drybrushed in grey before being highlights along the edges. 

All in all, a thoroughly enjoyable painting experience and a fantastic model, from a less overwrought and more subtle age. A classic Warhammer model that deserves to be in everyone's painted collection. 

How many of you have one? 

Orlygg 

A Tale of Four Oldhammer Gamers: May

Hello again dear readers. It has been some time since I last posted here (or anywhere in fact) I know, and things will remain sporadic at best over the next couple of months I am afraid. There is a great deal going on in my personal and working life at the moment and opportunities for Oldhammering are few and far between. Luckily, I was able to spend the entire day today (bar the time to complete the usual household chores) sitting at at a rather cramped and temporary painting station hopelessly daubing paint onto a couple of vintage Citadel models. 

The first of my endeavours to see completion was this rather nice Warrior Troll (check out this blogpost for more detail about troll typography) I have had in my collection for sometime. He had the misfortune to be undercoated and based some months previously, but I never quite managed to get beyond the 'picking him up and looking at him' stage. Wanting to tackle something 'big' (by this I mean easy) after a month or more away from the brushes, I decided to include him in my Nurgle army. 

Nurgle is a very forgiving master when painting. Dribbly bits, messy brushwork and peculiar blobbing all fit the Father of Flies' style perfectly, so the rusty painter is wonderfully supported when working on miniatures in his ilk. I used the some green recipe I have been mucking about with recently for the skin and used drybrushing and washing for the rest of the model. I was very pleased with the rust effect I achieved using a orange paint/chestnut ink wash but my dodgy photograph above doesn't really do it justice. 

This model will represent a minor troll hero in my army and will weigh in at 115 points. Despite the stupidity risk, trolls can do incredible damage in games and can of course regenerate too. Perfect attributes for a small, elite army like mine. The heavy plate and mail gives a better armour save than usual too. 

The second model I worked on came from an aborted Nurgle army I started three years or so ago. Originally, I was going to use this figure as part of a wider Nurgle force once A Tale of Four Oldhammer Gamers was over. However, my painting has moved on since he was completed and looked rather shocking in comparison with my more recent work. This came as a surprise really, as I had considered this figure's paint job one of my all time best. It was originally painted at a time I used a great deal of white to highlight models and this resulted in quite chalky, pale finishes rather than the inky brightness of my recent work. So, I decided to repaint him. Being pressed for time, I opted to just paint over the top of my earlier work rather than stripping him completely. I kept much of the original paint scheme too, though the skull, armour and flesh have all seen extensive reworking. 

He now fits in with my other Nurgle pieces very well. I unearthed another five poorly painted Bob Olley Nurgle beastmen alongside him too. These poor mutants have never even graced a gaming table as far as I can recall. They are now awaiting repainting in the near future. Well, relatively near future! Perhaps by the end of June?

Back on topic, this beastman will lead a unit of seven models and has been beefed up as a Pestigor Champion in heavy armour and wielding a double handed weapon. He weighs in at around 60 points by my reckoning and he brings my total to 175 points this month. 

Not bad for a day's work. 

Orlygg. 

Speed Painting Chaos Beastmen

A few days ago I popped over Stuarts to do a little painting. It reminded me of the good old days of my youth when such activities were more common. I'd pack up all my paints (inside the Citadel Colour boxes), a few miniatures and my paint brushes and cycle, with my stuff dangling in a plastic bag from the handlebars of my bike, as I rode my way to my friend in question's home. 

These days, I go by car! 

Stuart was keen to get working on miniatures again - inspired I think by what he had seen during the Oldhammer Weekend - and had mooted working on a Nurgle Warband. We talked at length about how I go about preparing a model for painting and introduced the concept of ink glazes and washes. 

I had brought along and model that Stuart had asked me to paint months ago and challenged myself to paint it in an hour. So setting up my paints, and balancing my watch where I could easily see it I began. 

Again, Stuart wanted something Nurglesque... 

Here is the front view of the beastman after one hour's painting. I had McDeath with me as I was finishing off his shield, in case you are wondering. 

The rear shot (steady Chico) of the two models. If you are wondering how long I spent on McDeath - at a guess, its was probably closer to three hours painting time over several days. You will also notice that the beastman's base isn't complete. I hadn't actually sanded it when I started work, so decided to take the model home for completion later. 

And here he is all finished up. Obviously, I worked on the base a little more once I got him home and added a few tufts of static grass but otherwise, he is ready for Stuart's collection. 

Acceptable in the '80s: Marauder Beastmen

Issue 129 of White Dwarf came and went following the now familiar pattern of abundant Rogue Trader and Big Box game stuff, including the seminal Space Marine Armour Variants by Rick Priestley. Warhammer Fantasy Battle is relegated to a few painted figures in the 'Eavy Metal section and the now ubiquitous Marauder Miniatures release.

That month, it was chaos beastmen. 

Now I have many, many Citadel beastmen in my collection, including thirty-odd painted up examples, all of which are different, Back in the early '90s, it was much the same, though most of my models were but sad daubings with paint and brush - a bit like today according to some! Still, I really enjoyed the range for its malevolence and diversity. Even the old Ral Partha beastmen were worthy of ranking up alongside the Citadel ones I had, in fact, many of them were even more zany and bizarre as the mid to late '80s ranges. 

The trouble with the Marauder range was that they just were not as good. They just became the generic muscular goated head men that they would remain, largely, until this day. I expect that producing models to a more coherent design philosophy was much much easier than just letting your sculptors run amok with their wild imaginations, and to be far, some of the examples produced between 1985-7 are really rather naff, but there are more than enough diamonds amongst them to make the risk worthwhile. 

Perhaps Marauder lacked the resources or time and these models were all they had time to produce. At the time I was sorely disappointed by this release, and my feelings haven't changed to this day. There are many great models in the Marauder range (Ogres? Chimera?) but these beastmen are not part of that elite group. 

Even today, with all the sculpting technology that companies have at their beck-and-call, most of the ranges I have seen still hark back to this generic model. The goat man. I think this is largely due to the influence of modern plastic Warhammer figures, after all the other companies just ape the biggest fish, but I for one would really like to see a more frightening, mutated, varied range arrive one day!

Hopefully, sculpted by Kev Adams at the Foundry! (;

A Warhammer Besitary: Chaotic (and Evil) Warriors and Sorcerers... ohh and a couple of new beastmen of Slaanesh!

Regular readers will know that my output is often sporadic, but has seen a slight increase in recent days. Well, this is due to it being half-term this week, and me being a teacher, I can spare an extra few moments to write up articles for fellow old school Citadel enthusiasts. 

With an increase in spare time, painting will swiftly follow, surely? Well not so for me, not in the first part of this week anyway. I had hit one of those ruts that all painters find themselves stuck in from time to time. I just couldn't find the motivation to pick up the paints and get the chaos warrior that has sat on my desk for two weeks completed. 

Thankfully, I got over my painter's block on Tuesday and have managed to get quite a few miniatures finished off for my Warhammer Bestiary project. If you are coming to this post fresh and wonder what I mean by this, its simple! I am attempting to paint a single model for every entry in the WFB3 Bestiary using old school Citadel lead only. 

The first miniatures to share, in order of the Bestiary, are the Chaotic humans. Here we have a couple of mid '80s Realm of Chaos models. I am not sure who sculpted the warrior, but the sorcerer is one of Jes Goodwin's classic Chaos Sorcerer range.

Starting with the warrior, I chose to paint him up in traditional (for RoC, anyway) Slaaneshi colours as my embryonic Pleasure God old school army needs all the help it can get. As you may know, pastel shades are the order of the day here and the best way to produce those is by adding pure white to any base colour. I didn't really want to go all out on the pink front, so restrained the colour to the breastplate and went for a blue colour scheme for the rest of the armour. I added horn and gold here and there to act as spot colours and used black to suggest a dark leather boot on on of the model's feet. The weapon was just a Bleached Bone job with rust effects created on the blade using old Citadel inks. This model was really a paint by numbers exercise as I have painted quite a few chaos warriors in my time and this one took no real effort.

The sorcerer was a different matter. Here I didn't want to go down the road of any particular god but was inspired instead by the crazy multicoloured chaos schemes of the mid 1980s, with particular reference to the original Chaos Sorcerer advert which can be seen here. I noticed that the sorcerer's head was covered by some kind of facemask and a jester's hood. The colour red immediately sprung to mind here and I decided to offset this tone with white, using grey to create the depth. For the rest of the model, I just painted a bit here one colour and another with another. I played around with the colours until I was happy with the way they had been spaced out. I used red to line the edge of the robes to build some continuity with the jester's hood. I feel that the result works really well, don't you?

On reflection, I found that the purple of the sleeves was too starkly highlighted and felt that they needed bringing down a little. Instead of just repainting them I opted to experiment with a heavy glaze of the base colour (Imperial Purple) first. After this glaze had dried the purple had a far more subtle and warm look so I left the model as it was and concentrated on the base. This type of technique is certainly something I would like to experiment with in the future and something I recommend you try out when you are highlighting cloth. 

The shield on the chaos warrior was another one of my by the book jobs, though I chose green to match with the shoulder pad. I have written several articles on how to paint faces like this and instruction can be found here. The only thing I did differently was to paint the eyes red and dot them with yellow while the paint was still wet. Once dry, I added a line to act as a pupil and used a tiny white spot to create the look of reflecting light. I was not entirely satisfied with the result so I will have another go with it on a future shield. 

As regular readers will know, I have been working on my textile painting technique as it had been a shortcoming of mine throughout this project. I was pleased to discover that the Warhammer Third Edition Bestiary includes a section on EVIL warriors and sorcerers, so I would have a chance to paint a more conservative robe here. Yes, that is EVIL. Demonologists, necromancers and so forth, though I didn't want to walk the brightly coloured route of the model above, nor did I want to tread the street of the 'uber-black' necromancer type either. As a compromise, I opted to paint the model as a hedgewizard and suggested that he was evil by using purple paint and ink washes on his skin. This was a method I used on the evil warrior too. 

The evil sorcerer is my personal favourite painted model in this series so far. I feel like I got the face, hair and clothing right here and it really is rather surprising to compare the quality of the result with miniatures I produced last year. A project as varied as this certainly helps improve your skill and I heartily recommend such an endeavour to anyone. 

For the evil warrior, I choose a old Paladin model that I had lying around in a draw. I wanted something unconnect to chaos, for this model would represent an evil man, rather than one who had sold his soul to the Ruinous Powers. I quite liked the idea that he was a fallen knight too. I went quite John Blanche on the hat and boots, using natural tones based on cheetah fur before using white and black dots to give the impression of markings. I struggled with the silver plate armour though, and the gold is rather lack lustre too. So I have found myself a new target for future work, painting gold and silver across large flat spaces on a model. Thankfully, I am now armed with advice from the Greatest, Fraser Gray, and I plan to base with yellow when I paint gold in the future. 

I chose purple as a spot colour for the gloves and scarf on the warrior. Purple is a royal colour but it tends to have a whiff of deceit about it too, well for me anyway. The shield was a touch up on an old Paper Tiger design from back in the late '70s and you can find a tutorial about how to achieve such a shield here. I added a gold shield rim to help tie the shield in with the rest of the model and washed over the entire design with a chestnut ink glaze. This aged the 'look' of the shield and gave the model and aura of experience I think.

In addition to the four models shown above, I also painted up a couple of new beastmen for the very slowly developing Slaaneshi army I am building. The blue fleshed model was painted first in about thirty minutes and employed very few colours. The flesh (and fur) was just a light blue basecoat worked up through highlights in stages of additional white. The horn was Bleached Bone drybrushed with white. The belt was a simple leather brown with a Bleached Bone highlight. For the chainmail, it was silver mixed with black base with a silver highlight while the club was created with a little red being added to the belt basecolour, and again highlighted up by adding Bleached Bone. Upon reflection, I am quite pleased with the result considering how little time I actually spent on it. It is easily the quickest paintjob I have produced since by 'base and wash' days, circa 1988. 

The second beastman took me longer, about two hours. The fur was drybrushed up using the same mix as I used for the first beastman's belt, only I added the final highlights with brush before using pink and brown ink to build up an impression of the boar like mouth and nose. Pure white was used to highlight the teeth. Drybrushing with a final highlight via brush was used to complete the weapon too. With the edges of the axe blade having a pure silver line added to it. I feel these kind of touches make a blade look suitably sharp. 

The gold scale mail was completed using my usual method. Using Imperial Purple (again!) I quickly highlighted up the leather bands that hang from the beastman's girdle and used gold dots to pick out the studs on the end. I used exactly the same pink mix (red with white paint, 50:50) to work up the girdle itself, adding a touch of white each time to draw out the detail. Another nice result here with this beastman, with some nice rich colours and took little effort to complete. 

And so here I will leave you. Half-term draws to a close and I feel like I have got over my slump. Next, I need to turn my attentions to the tropical forests of Lustria as I tackle '80s Lizardmen. Right, I better get basecoating!

Orlygg.

Slaangor: Beastmen of the Pleasure God

As Monday night draws to a close I have managed to get some Slaangor (that's Slaaneshi Beastmen to the uninitiated) completed, based and have added their shields. Like Adolphus in the previous post, these models were started quite some time ago and were abandoned as my interest was piqued in other areas so its good to get them finished. As I did with my Khorne army, I attempted to match as many of the tones for these miniatures as those used in Slaves to Darkness; namely pastel hues of green, pink, blue and purple. Black and gold were also added for good measure. 

Here we have the first two Slaangor. I am not sure who sculpted these, but they did a good job, filling the models with lots of additional details that were fun to paint. I used inks to add depth to each of the colours in turn before creating highlights by adding white. The metals were painted in my usual way. I was particularly impressed with how the two shields came out. I had opted to use different shaped shields than those used on the Khorne models. There I favoured the round shields but with the Slaanesh beastmen I chose to use the original chaos shield shapes. I have painted on them before in the past, and several of my Khorne army have got them attached on their shield arms but this was the first time I had used them extensively. A change in shape brought about the need to adapt my 'chaos face' designs. Have a look at how the designs came out- what do you think?

Here's a close up of the first design. This is the first time I have painted a design on this type of shield and I must say I feel its once of my best. I opted to paint a more human face but this time in profile. The addition of the glaring eye and gnashing teeth gave the design enough malign presence to be suitably chaos like. Again, I mixed in purple ink with my purple paint to create the depth and richness of tone before highlighting the detail with white. My son, who is three, told me that this shield was 'too scary' and that I should hide it high up in the cabinet!

This design had a great deal more in common with those I have done in the past, with the addition of a few subtle boils to the 'skin' of the face. I also shaded the eyes in with green to contrast with the light pink of the face itself. This colour was achieved by adding a touch of white to a very bright red. This gave a deep pink that was suitable as a base colour. Over this I shaded with a chestnut ink/red ink mix. I added white to create the highlights in increasing stages. 

Next, the standard bearer. This was a simple conversion. I cut away the old spear that this miniature is armed with and drilled through with a pin vice. It was a simple job to push the wire through and create the banner pole. The banner itself is made of paper, a departure from the tin one I made for the Khorne standard. The method was much the same, with the background created through flicking paint in varying shades against a parchment base colour. The large, purple face was added later and was painted in exactly the same way I do the round chaos shields. I added some plastic shields and an orc head from suitable decoration. 

A closure shot of the beastman and his shield design. I stuck with the colour themes of pink, gold and black with this one as well as purple and green as spot colours. The shield was painted in green to contrast with the orc's head at the top of the banner pole and was just a longer variant of the chaos head. I used red and brown ink to create the weeping lips and eyes which I again highlighted by adding a little of the light green. 

A quick top down view to show of the colours on the banner. The shields were taken from the Gripping Beast plastic viking range and the orc head is, of course, from Warhammer Plastic Regiments.

By adding the new miniatures to those that I painted a couple of years ago for the Realm of Chaos campaign I have my first completed unit for Adolphus' new army. These beastmen will act as his bodyguard and I intend to paint an additional beastman for the unit to ensure that he can be replaced if I decide to field him as an independent character!

So far, so good!

Orlygg.

A Warhammer Bestiary: Beastman

Those of you with short memories, or coming to this post at a much later date, will need reminding about my current project. I intend to paint one miniature for every entry in the Warhammer Third Edition's Bestiary. For more information about the 'whys' and the 'what fors', have a look at this entry. What follows is the first painted example in the sequence, the humble BEASTMAN. Or BEESTMAN as this one is tagged.

As discussed previously, this is the miniature I selected to paint first. I am sure that many of you will recognise this model from the 1987 (?) range of beastmen, as published in the famous 1988 catalogue. At this time, the nature of what a 'beastman' was not really defined and all kinds of wacky combinations left the studio over the later part of the '80s. Hence the rhino head in this example. However, I am not sure who sculpted this particular example, so if you know, please drop me a line in the comment box below. 

A here is the finished result. What do you think? The miniature didn't take me long as I was highly motivated and, as with other things, work seems to fly by when you feel this way. I opted for a grey skin, which related to the rhino head, and a brown loin cloth dangling around his beastly bits. I used gold to pick out the metallic objects scattered about his body, as it had a distinct 'African' feel to the model. Perhaps this beastman lurks in some steamy jungle somewhere, scavenging among the ruins of ancient civilizations? It was fairly obvious to use a bone shade on the horns and claws and a nice pink for the unpleasant tail that sprouts from the model's back. Finally, the cleaver was treated to a new rusty metal painting I am trialing, and seemed fairly successful I am pleased to say. 

The base was handled my usual way, only this time I add a few 'chaos fungi' with a colour scheme inspired by that Realm of Chaos scenery Jamie Sims made and Evo has safe in his collection. These were made very simply for greenstuff and are one of the first things I have actually 'sculpted' if such a word could be used to describe them. nice time, I will try and be a little more creative and make proper 'chaos toadstools' for the base. But for now, I felt that this was enough to keep the model consistent with the others I have painted for my Retro-Collection. 

I always paint the inside of the shield black (as do I the rims) to match with the black bases. I took this from the Arcane Armorials packaging as it suggested this was the best way to showcase a freehand design on a small shield. 

For the shield, I opted to continue the 'Jungle' theme. Inspired by an old Dave Andrews miniature in White Dwarf, I took the 'Paper Tiger' symbol from inside 'Heroes for Wargames' and developed it into a painted freehand design. I borrowed heavily from the source material and learnt a huge deal about painting different freehand designs with inks and acrylic paints. Small silver dots were added to the studs to compliment the back shield rim. 

The shield didn't take that long to paint, perhaps thirty minutes, and most of that was faffing around with the orange background. I used Old School Hobgoblin Orange as a base, and blended in yellow around the tiger's forehead, nose and mouth. Once I was happy, which took a while, I blended in a little white to create the 'eyebrows' and 'lips' - I am sorry, I do not know the terms to describe these parts of a big cat's face, can anyone help me out?

The rest of the detailing of the tiger's face was carried out with black ink straight from the pot. I learnt quickly to avoid pooling the ink by brushing the tip of my brush across the back of my hand before placing the tip on the shield. This gave me a great deal more control about where the ink went and stopped the stuff spreading across the shield. I played very close attention to my source material and tried to capture every line that I saw on the 'Paper Tiger' design. I was extremely impressed by the realism this promoted and I shall be using source material a lot more in the future. 

All in all, I have got my first miniature completed and I am keen to start the next. In fact, as I type that model is already sitting on my desk ready to be cleaned up and based. As I have already said, I am going to play around with the greenstuff as I am prepping this model to see if I cannot make some little toadstools or something similar. In case you are wondering what the next model is, its going to be a Chaos Centaur.

I'll post it up as soon as I complete it!

Orlygg