Beastmen Reinforcements

This is kind of silly to publish now, but I actually wrote a kind of a journal of my painting exploits last week. It has been sitting in unpublished state for a few days now and today I just went through the text and thought if I don't publish this now, then I'll never do it.

Also yesterday (tuesday) we played the game after work at my office. It was a massacre of my troops by the evil Dark Elves. I was planning to write a battle report of the battle later, but the photos I took are total BS because of the lighting (one half of the field was not lighted - broken lamp).

Basically it was a massacre of my forces. I had a cunning ploy of deploying all my heavy hitters (chaos knights, hounds and marauders) in a trailing force. What I did not take into account was that this meant extra 24" of ground they had to cross under fireball, lightning bolt, crossbow, hydra's flaming breath -fire. Basically I walked/ran towards him desperately trying to get into melee before my army melted into oblivion (which it did).

Still my opponent was a fun guy and I hope that despite my lack of strategy and sore mood (which I failed to mask at times ashamedly :( ) he will play with me again. As we have not much experience on this edition of the game this was, I think, a learning experience for us both.

Anyways, here's the painting log...

Monday 29.8.

Ok so a week ago, I was confused and trying to find out what my next project should be. After selling the two 40k armies I bought some beast men through a Finnish forum's buy and sell area. The guy who sold me the minis seemed to share my interests in war hammer 3rd and other random games, and guess what… We set up a 3rd edition battle for next week's tuesday :)

The Battle is supposed to be 3000 pts with the usual limitations (max lvl 3 wizards, no vorpal spells and other things, which potentially make it unfun for the other player). I asked the fellow to pick his opponent from, Chaos, O&G or Dwarves, which are the armies I have. He chose chaos, so now I have to paint at least some of the minis I he sold me.

I already got 17 beast men in the army and my plan is to paint as many as I can before the game.

About half of the new guys are some kind of small puny variants of beast men with  20x20mm bases. I plan to rip them off, base them on 25x25mm bases and use them as regular beast men, or baggage guards or something.

Here're the minis I bought:

All of the guys with the larger substitute bases I plan to use for the little guys. I ripped those off some extremely ugly arrer boyz, which will probably go to the bin soon.

The larger guys. They have some sort of big ass axes, which could be 2h-weapons or halberds 

The puny smaller guys. I have no idea who made these, but maybe it's some other (non-GW company). I think they're kinda cute :)

Tuesday 30.8.

So last night I got a couple of hours to operate on the fellows. After reviewing my existing army I decided 24 Beastmen including a shaman was needed for the game. Here's what I got done:

Test colors

Test colours from behind

I'm not sure at this stage, if its possible to paint all 24 miniatures in a week, but to have even a slight chance, a very simple scheme is needed and that's here:

1. Airbrush black primer
2. Airbrush white zenithal highlight
3. Layer sand yellow/golden brown (Model Air) to skin areas (some guys with one and some with the other)
4. Layer metal parts with Gun grey (Model Air)
5. Layer wood parts with Earth Brown (Model Air)
6. Layer bone parts with Bone White (Game Color)
7. Layer belts with Beasty Brown (Game Color)
8. Wash with Army painter Strong Tone (Army Painter)
9. Highlight metal parts with Runefang Steel (Citadel)
10. Highlight Furry parts with Ice Blue (Game Color)
11. Put some Blood for the Blood God on axe and elsewhere (Citadel)
12. Paint white edge highlights
13. Base with martian Iron earth (Citadel)

I'm not totally happy with the level of contrast on the test miniature, but it's best to stick with the scheme, and if there's time enhance the minis somehow after the raw work is done (or after the game).

The new guys should fit at least somehow to my existing army's bases, which I can't replicate, at least not fast. The Martian Iron Earth does not fit perfectly with those, but I figured, they can be rebased later, if these start to bug me.

Today as I was painting I realised just how tight the schedule for this project is and it hit me, that I should have a STRATEGYwith targets for each nights work. I somehow got to 7 separate phases and since I have 7 nights to finish, I must go through one phase each night at minimum.

So I painted all the Skin parts (phase 1) and some metal parts for the remaining miniatures.

Skins painted

Saddly after finishing it hit me that my STRATEGY is not going to work, since there's still more stuff to do besides the basic painting of the unit. For instance, they need a movement tray and also I'm sure they would be embarrassed to march to battle with a plain banner. Tomorrow I got more time to work on these so my strategy will be to get into panic mode and paint like crazy.

Also, as if I didn't have enough to do already, there's this lady on a cooking fire, whom I just had to add to the project. See, I found an old giant miniature from my old chaos miniatures and it would be nice to include him in the list. Chaos can only take giants as mercenaries in this edition so I need a baggage. I thought maybe to paint some of those little guys (if I got time) preparing her as a dinner for the giant.

I'm not sure, if this miniature is a bit too much. On the other hand if you read the original realm of Chaos books, they used to be quite specific about the sick stuff these guys do instead of speaking about "evil" in a general kind of way, so here goes...

Wednesday 31.8. to friday 2.9.

Disaster! I am not well and not able to concentrate enough to paint. I hope This blows off soon or otherwise this is not going to work :(

Saturday 3.9.

Ok so I got over the flu and whipped myself into a painting frenzy tonight. I basically painted everything ready beginning somewhere around 2100 hrs and finishing in the morning hours (0100 or something. I just post the photos here with explanations. Basically I followed the painting plan described in the beginning of this post.

Here are the guys with horns, skin, armour and belt painted

Herer's a closeup after wash

Here's the unit without bases, but otherwise done

And the final unit