Saxon/Viking Light Infantry

I hate these models,  well most of them anyway.  I have a Gripping Beast and Bill Thornhill model on the two commands stands and they improve the look of the unit. 

The rest of the models are Warlord Games plastic Viking Bondi (previously Wargames Factory) and they're really light on detail and weird poses but they'll do for multi purpose dark age light infantry.

I did a pretty simple paint scheme with just base colors and then an army painter strong tone dip. Now that I'm slowly picking up Hail Caesar I have quite a lot of models to paint so need to get used to bulk painting again.  After years of painting skirmish forces I need to relearn how to paint lots of models!

Dark Ages Shaman

I don't even remember where I got this model from as I don't remember buying it.  But it really does suit my Jomsvikings and will work nicely adding flavor to our dark ages games. 

I went for pretty natural neutral tones as a color scheme. 

Stug

Dammit,  I hate resin models they're so hard to fix if they're molded wrong.  This is a Warlord Games resin Stug G and that's right, it's wrong. I've had this for year's and hated the original paint job, it didn't match any of my later models and just looked shoddy. So in a fit of positivity I pulled it to bits (carefully), stripped it and started again.  It was at the this point that I remembered that the tracks were curved and no amount of hot water baths and gentle bending would restraighten them.

So in the end it was a little green stuffing to the rescue,  I don't think you can tell they're bent anymore. 

I added the schurzen this time round as I like the flat space for the camo scheme and decals.

I don't think Warlord make these anymore with the introduction of their plastics range so I'll hopefully never have to deal with bent resin again (yeah right).

Hanomag

Another Rubicon kit with loads of cool parts and clever hidden joins. I did scratch build a gunner for the Mg42 but he kept breaking off so I decided to go with just a driver.  

I'm quite happy with the camo scheme,  it's in theme with my other German armor and gives a coherent them.

If anything my infantry now let's down my armor,  I've got a box of Warlord Pioneers that I need to put together to go with this,  but it'll probably take me a few years to get round to it. 

Death Guard Predator, Kinda!

OK,  I like to save money cos I'm stingy. That's right,  I'm a yorkshireman which means short arms and deep pockets so whenever I can avoid spending cash I will.  And with GW's terrifying prices down here in NZ its pretty rare that I would spend any of my hard earned on their products. 

I'm quite enjoying painting my 40k Death Guard at the moment,  it makes a refreshing change from the hordes of Saxons and Roman's I've been doing recently. So I decided that I needed some heavy support to back up my not Hellbrute and what better way than a not Predator!

This originally started life as a Tamiya 1/48 Cromwell that bought to support my slowly growing Bolt Action British however I bought it before they released version 1,  and not knowing how popular it would become and how everyone would get 1/56 scale armor for the game. Which is fine but my 1/48 Cromwell dwarfs Tiger 1's so unfortunately it's sat in my cupboard gathering dust for the last decade.  

However 40k minis are huge so the footprint of this is about right for a death guard tank so I grabbed my plastic glue, scalpel and set to work nurglifying it! There are parts from chaos marauders and warriors,  ogres, vampires, tau, rogue trader era space marines as well as a sh#t ton of milliput to give it that mutated look. 

I've gone a little overboard whey the rust effect but I think it works okay,  I may have to rusting my Hellbrute now,  just to keep them in theme. 

This top down view gives you an idea of just how much milliput I used to sculpt all nasty organs, flesh and random pipes type stuff.

Somewhere in the fleshy mutation on the front is a face of some poor lost soul dragged into this beast as it thundered across the battlefields of the grim dark.

I used a lot of inks and washes on this to try and get a suitably grubby and pestilence feel to it,  I quite like how it turned out. 

Ancients Skirmish Archers

Another bunch of the old Wargames Factory models,  I don't even recall what they're called but I'll be using them as generic ancient Mediterranean skirmishers (they look kinda Greek). 

They work nicely across a bunch of forces in for Hail Caesar.

I have the same complaint about these as I do for the Bondi, very vague features and not a lot of detail,  but in these it doesn't look too bad! Painted like the bondi, block colors and army painter dip, nice and quick. 

Hail Caesar Intro

A couple of weeks ago the Kapiti Gentlemen Historic Wargamers convened at Castle Bowman for an into game of Hail Caesar (and some general chit chat and merriment). Scott had kindly organized an intro game for Bryan,  Roly and I, so one stormy night Bryan drove us both up the long, dark and dangerous newly opened highway to Chez Bowman, meeting Mijnheer Roly there. 

What followed was a hilarious, embarrassing,  tense,  comedic and downright fabulous evening of gaming, with some of dark age Britain's most disreputable Kingdoms battling it out for possession of a tiny little bridge in the middle of nowhere. Where legendary decisions were made ("march across the bridge in column", "but they'll charge us sir!") and betrayals were rife ("how many turns have your viking mercenaries sat on that hill now Bryan?", "errr, they're having tea").

I'll let the pictures do the talking

Initial deployment, you can see the bridge in question, my Saxons bottom right cheerfully planning to run full speed to claim it with Bryan's Vikings holding my left flank on the hill. Roly was facing him and had plenty of time to ford the river to get in to position, whilst Scott was going to swing down our right flank while also pushing across the aforementioned bridge.  

Hmm what happened!

Lucky command roll, my medium infantry slammed into Scott's heavy infantry while in march column, however I didn't crush them (shocker) and so had to settle for being stuck in combat. But in the plus side those heavy infantry were unable to form up on the bridge so fingers crossed for next time. 

Ha,  next time I pushed them back.  And it only cost me my General (doh!).

Meanwhile Scott swarms my right flank with skirmishers. Luckily I had left a close order infantry unit to protect my flank as I was suspicious about those viking mercenaries I'd hired!

Rightly so as it turns out as Bryan managed to repeatedly fail his division orders and they refused to move.  Luckily so did Roly so all the action was on the right flank. 

However just when is given up hope The vikings surged down from the hill just as Rolys forces forced the river and it was on!!!!!

And unfortunately we kinda called it there as it was late, emotions were frayed, we'd exhausted all the tea and biscuits and our respective significant others were probably beginning to worry (apart from Lady Bowman who was possibly wondering when these boisterous old men were going to stop playing with toy soldiers and go home).

Next time,  Roman's!

Hellbrute.....I think

So this is an old model, not quite oldhammer in vintage but there is a new version of out now that I think is a pretty poor version of this original!

It’s the old Sisters of Battle Penitent Engine, a lovely sculpted but a pain in the arse model to put together (there’s a really niggly ball socket that joins the body to the legs). Now obviously this is not how it looked originally but as it has sat in my pile of shame for many years I decided to repurpose it for my slowly growing Nurgle warband. So obviously the first thing to do was kit bash the heck out of it! 

This now features parts from Space marines, Ogre kingdoms, Orcs, Plague Marines, Chaos Marauder, Warriors and other spiky bits as required. There is also a significant amount of milliput to replicate some kind of flesh mutation yuckiness!

When i was putting it together I honestly didn’t know what I was going to use it for however its slowly morphed into a Hellbrute which I think will suit it nicely!

Cultists Baby!

That's right,  cultists.  I had a bunch of Cadian imperial guard models left over from some project or other and so I went a bit wild with the bits box, adding bits from the Beastmen box and applying some random melted bits!

You'll see that I tried to cut or melt the imperial Aquila wherever I could,  these guys are supposed to be a guard unit on garrison duty on a newly reconquered world that's gone a bit native!

Rot Glorious Rot

I picked up these second hand and just applied various random colors to see what it would look like.  It's actually quite fun trying to make them look all plaguey (is that a word?).

Army painter inks came in handy for accenting the various pustules and mutations. 

I have more of these in the pile and as they're a lot better in larger units I'll be painting some more up soon. 

Death Guard

It's taking me a while but here's a few of my recent Death Guard attempts.  I've been enjoying making them all grubby looking. I'm sure I'll eventually get them on to the table at some point.

These guys are so much bigger than the original plague Marines and have a number of cool extras on the sprue that will come in handy at some point (he he he). 

Watch this space I guess.

Papa Nurgle Comes Calling - Chaos Sorceror

I've returned to my childhood!

Kind of, I've decided to start up a 40k Chaos Marines force,  nurgle specifically.  I'm not sure why,  maybe it's a midlife crisis and I want to be a kid again, or maybe I'm tired of painting the good guys,  or maybe it's because it's hard to get a game in the game systems I play so I thought I'd just do something a bit more popular here in nz!

Who knows. 

Anyways I grabbed a box of Nurgle Marines from Kapiti Hobbies and am slowly building and painting some shambling, rotting death machines.  It's going to take a while as im painting them just for fun so don't feel the need to rush anything.

One thing I did decide was to try and keep the budget down,  so rummaged through my bits box and found an old GW chaos sorceror from my WFB days,  a bit of kit bashing and liberal application of a grubby paint job and hey presto, a HQ choice for my fledgling force. 

Now I just have to find enough random bits to build some chaos renegades!

Napoleonic British Infantry Test

I may have been bitten by the napoleonics bug,  I'm not sure yet.  I have bought a couple of boxes of French line infantry and cavalry but as I've struggled to paint up these British infantry I'm not sure I'll be able to muster the courage to paint anymore. 

Hmmm, a work in progress I think. 

3d Printed Dragon

I am so slack, I had all these good intentions of keeping up to date with the blog but then stuff gets in the way and I totally forget to actually post anything.

But I did remember to take pictures of something that's been on my painting desk for a couple of years now,  a 3d printed dragon that I bought as a bit of an excitement to see what these 3d printed models were like. 

I don't know all the technical jargon or any of the names of the materials used however I did find the model hard to clean up, flash being a bit tricky to get rid of.  Also some of the detail was a little light in places but that's probably something to do with the design file or some such digital wizardy.

Anyway, taking my time to paint it had paid off as I actually enjoyed putting the effort in to the detail after letting it languish for so long. I enjoyed the eyes  which is weird cos normally I hate that part. 

 It'll probably end up as a scenario objective or something for a skirmish game at some point.