Colours come on as the nights draw in

Over the weekend I found a few hours to do some painting. Rather than sit at home alone and paint, I went round to a mate's house and we both set to work being all arty and geeky - productive, sociable, and just generally a nice chance to catch up with how things are (helped with having KFC for dinner). It's always nice to talk to fellow gamers about their armies and projects/plans they have. This friend has been working on a squig-themed night goblin army. I haven't played against it yet, but it sounds like great fun and the models look brilliant - a fantastic red and yellow colour scheme makes it really distinctive. He has quite a few different armies (to say the least) and they all have a really nice design idea behind them - as do other ideas he has planned/might like to do if he won the lottery and could afford to spend more money on little plastic figures!

This is something that I can relate to as the design aesthetic is something that I really like about different armies - my dwarves have their red and brass colour scheme and rocky bases, along with their 'pound them with guns then smack them with hammers' mentality; my black templars are a definite assault force, looking for the knightly valour and punishing the heathens, in their characteristic black army, white/bone tabards and red detailing; and then my fimir will be a magic-heavy force (ideally 3 wizards by the end of the project) backed up by some brutally blunt melee, lurking from the mists and the marshes. I wanted a different colour look from my other armies, so the blue kilts seemed like the perfect area to focus on - the dark blue of the base fabric and the bright light blue drybrush over the top. These blue colours will be key aspects across the army - even the moorhounds have the light blue as their eye colour.

So I was able to spend a brilliant bit of time on the fimir and moorhounds and the washes have really brought them to life. I knew that the black wash on the metal, shields, etc would work nicely to dirtify them; but I was really pleased with how well it worked on the kilts - darkening the dark blue base, providing the shadows for the folds, yet leaving the light blue nice and bright on top. And then the moment came to try the GW seraphim sepia wash over the grey undercoat for skin. Ok, I think I might be slightly biased but I'm really bloody pleased with how it has turned out!

Just need to finish the standard bearer model by adding something to the top - like an animal skull or similar. I do have one that I think would look really nice, but it's metal and would make the model really top-heavy and unstable. Then I need to finish off the water effect and grass on the bases, possibly adding in a few bits of bark as fallen marsh trees. Then it's just a case of mounting them all up, but it's all coming along rather swimmingly (not that you can swim overly well in a swamp - so perhaps the phrase should be swamp-stride-ingly). And then It's on to making more models and attempting some of the other troop types for the army. So many ideas, so little time and money!

Unforeseen reinforcements

Today I was doing some painting of my fimir (blog update to follow in the next week or so) and talking to a good friend of mine about the next steps for the project. I started talking about other units from the army book that I want to model - in particular the Marsh Reavers. These are fimir riding bog beasts into battle. I have has my eye on a particular model for the bog beasts for quite some time now, and came home to just check on the model again and think about what I wanted to do with them when I eventually get around to getting that far in the project many many months from now.

Then I read their website homepage which said they are stopping their online store on 4th November 2013! In a mad panic to get the model that I wanted I may have inadvertently impulse bought three of their Dragonblood Miniatures Lava Lizards - oops! Just imagine it painted in swampy colours!