Minotaurs: TH/SS Terminator WIP

I ordered the shields from Scibor in my latest Wayland order again as I didn't get them the last time. And this time around I actually got them and I could try to assemble one  to see how it looks.

So first of all I took the arm and hand holding the Storm Shields and duplicated it using Instant Mold and greenstuff, worked perfectly for this kind of work. Then I trimmed the symbol on the shield as I want to have the chapter symbol there instead later on. I then just glued on the lovely looking FW shoulder pads and voila done.......... or almost.

Well I'm a bit unsure about something, and that's the helmet. I first tried out a Chaos Warrior head with the horns trimmed off. And with this look he looks more like the soldiers of ancient Greece, so it's either this or the normal terminator helmets. I think I like the WoC helmet more on him but I'm still unsure, what do you guys think? Standard helmets or not?

More Minotaurs stuff is incoming and I will start to paint this Terminator as soon as Iv'e made up my mind. 

Showcase: Halberdiers Horde Finished, and a Poll

My second large horde unit is done for my Empire army and the Halberdiers is forty men strong which was my goal with this unit. I made the unit tray for fifty though so in the near future I will probably up the unit to fifty but for now I consider this unit finished. Really like how it turned out actually, well I love big horde units and the Halberdiers looks particularly nice in big units in my opinion. It got two unit fillers, the pillar and grave and the playing bear and also some stuff added to the movement tray with a a tree, bird and skulls etc.

The last five I painted may not look that good but they are in the back row after all, also I'm a little sick of painting them right now so it will be a nice change to paint something else now for a while, and that is to finish my Demigryph unit with two more to go. And also convert seven more Knights for my Inner Circle bus unit. Iv'e also decided to build up and paint my Ancestral Hurricanum as well but here I need some help from you guys.

I don't know how to paint it up, I have two suggestions and both are found the Empire Army Book.

Option 1: I first wanted to paint it pretty much like the Eavy metal team did with their. Different shades of blue with the main body being a quite dark blue colour. I really like the look of it, but I doubt my version would look that nice if I tried to paint it like they did. But the colours used here is making the wagon look like it belongs to the College of the Celestial Order. 



Option 2: Though on the other hand I don't have any dark blue in the army at all so maybe something that blends in better with the rest is the way to go? In the Empire AB there is a lot of nice concept art. Like for the Hurricanum and it looks different from the one Eavy Metal painted up. Here we get the provincial colours of Talabecland on the actual wagon as you can see on the pic from the book. 

Of course I would do this with my Ostermark colours instead and the chariot will not look out of place in the army. I will paint apprentices in their appropriate colours though, after all, they are from the Collage of the Celestial Order, so white and blue for them.

So what do you think? Please help me out on this one as I can't decide on my own. And you are very welcome to write in the comments why you choose your choice or even if you have any other suggestion. Thank you in advance.  

Option 2

Option 1

Demigryph Knights Preceptor Finished!

At last this model is finished. But it's the same with all the Demigryph Knights, you can paint them forever and add the last touches for hours. But after a while you have to stop and consider it finished so you can move on to the next thing in line (in this case two more Demigryph Knights!).

And I don't really it's that strange, they are really nice models in my opinion and great centrepiece models for the Empire Army. So I think you should spend time and effort to paint them up nicely. So here we have the fourth Knight Manticore (as the chapter is called) in this unit and also the Preceptor or the Champion in the unit. As I don't think I will use champions much in these units I decided to magnetize this sword arm so you can put an ordinary lance there if you want to. 

A little bit of kitbashing here as well with an head from the good old Empire Knights kit and a Manticore from the old 5th ed Bretonnian Knights of the Realm. Think it turned out really well in the end and now I'm working on the last two in this unit, the standard bearer and musician.

Please tell me what you think.

News: Total War developer to make Warhammer games

Looks like a dream will become true, SEGA has obtained licences to make games based on Warhammer Fantasy (not 40k it seems as THQ still have those). And why is this so exciting? Well they are letting one of my all time favourite gaming developers Creative Assembly making the new game/games. I for one think and hope that we will see a Warhammer: Total War, and that would be so awesome! Down below you have some more info taken from IGN.com:

SEGA has teamed up with the studio behind the Total War series, Creative Assembly, to enter into a multi-title licensing deal with Games Workshop.


As a result of the deal, a new development team has been set up at Creative Assembly's UK studio to work on the first of several games based in the popular Warhammer universe, which is due to release sometime after 2013.


Tim Heaton, Studio Director at Creative Assembly, said, "The incredibly rich and detailed Warhammer world is something we grew up with, and has left an indelible imprint on us as both designers and gamers.


"We’ll be doing the Warhammer universe justice in a way that has never been attempted before."


Creative Assembly now has quite a lot on its plate; this new Warhammer game is the fifth project in production at the studio, joining the likes of Total War: Rome II and an as-yet-untitled Alien IP.


So...would you guys be interested in Warhammer: Total War?

You can also read more about this at Creative Assembly's webpage.

Empire Update: Bechafen's Finest, Greatswords

Bechafen's Finest. Well, that's my working name for the unit anyway, if you have any other suggestion please tell me. Anyhow a little update on my Empire army, Iv'e finished some more Greatswords and it actually starts to look like a big nice unit now even if I have more or less half of them to do. The idea is to have the unit in Horde formation so I also need to do a new Horde movement tray, and that one must be magnetized because the musician falls of the tray all the time right now. And the goal is to have all of my trays magnetized  but I have the magnets so I just need to get around and make those trays as well.

These old metal Greatswords is actually quite hard to paint, at least some of the ones I have. You see miscasts could be seen even before Finecast, and the batch of models I ordered ten years ago or so had some miscasts in there. Most often it's solvable with a cutter and greenstuff but some other parts are trickier, like faces for example. As you can see on one of pics the right side from our perspective is a little malformed. I have tried to cut away most of it and also tried to cover it as much as I can with paint and I don't think it looks to ugly right now.

The paint job on these is a little bit sloppy maybe (like not painting the eyes) but I will have these in the back or middle of the unit that It won't show much anyway. Hopefully the full unit will look nice and I like the look of it even now.

Review: White Dwarf December 2012

A little late I know, I actually got my issue quite late this time around (got it on Monday . Also I have been sick so I haven't managed to write this review until now. So because of this and also the fact that the design and layout is the same as the two previous issues I won't go into that any more in detail. So on to the rest then.

New Releases
Big focus on the big release this month with The Hobbit: An unexpected Journey Strategy battle game of course, with the new rulebook, the Starter set with a limited ed. Radagast miniature, trolls, orcs, goblins, the white council a couple of characters and a kit called Goblin Town which are walkways and ramps like in the Starter set and makes a good addition if you want to expand the battlefield. We also get a Hobbit Figure case and Paint set. Not much more stuff besides the Hobbit stuff then, but we do get a nice Wh40 k Campaign book called Crusade of Fire and looks like a W40k version of Blood in the Badlands for Fantasy.   They also releases the Imperial Defence Network in three separate boxes.

Painting and Modelling
Yeah we know the drill by now do we. We get the usual segments like in the last two issues like Blanchitsu, Parade Ground showing different nicely painted flyers for W40k among them a reader's flyers and this time it's actually Garfy from Tale of Painters, great work btw. We also get the Kit Bash showing villains and and monsters, really nice stuff and a segment I really like. In Battleground we get a look on the big Somaro Starfort, a cool looking Orbital Space Station which is one of Battlegrounds in the Crusade of Fire book. Paint splatter is showing us how to paint the different Dwarfs and Goblins from the Hobbit Starter Box. Very briefly though as they just show us which base colours to use, and from what I can tell there's more into it than that to paint them to this standard. I don't mind these easy painting tutorials but I would like to see a `Master Class` like before now and then as well showing us how to paint a miniature from start to finish. I like the Keith Robertson part though where we get to see how he does his rust effect seen all around his army. And this army is shown in the Army of the Month segment in this issue, a really large Ogre Kingdoms force sporting even Halflings and Chaos Dwarfs and we get a little of the classic look as well with green painted base rims. For last we also get two pages of Hall of Fame showing us the beautiful Coven Throne.

Rules and Fluff
Not much of this in this issue either, we some here and there where they explain the new Hobbit game but not more than that.

Gaming
A Hobbit battle report of course, showing us one of the scenarios from the rulebook. It's nice and clean but as I have said in the past two issues, I think there are to many small pictures and we don't get any pictures showing us the movement on the battlefield. This makes it a lot harder to follow in my opinion.

The Rivals segment is back this month with Andy Clark saying that Ork Nobz can be kitted out to win any fight versus Simon Grant who thinks that Wolf Guard is the most powerful unit in the game. They then do three mini battles with 500 pts Nobz against 500 pts Wolf Guard just trying to kill each other and then in a bigger battle with two 2000 pts armies. I like this segment even though I thought the first one was better.

The Other stuff
In 'This month in' White Dwarf we see some of the painting projects the team is working on for both Fantasy and 40k. In the Design Studio it was focused on the different Hobbit miniatures made by Alan & Michael Perry and Aly Morrison and what they thought when they sculpted these miniatures. In Forge World we get some nice new photos of the Averland BSB, Night Goblin BSB and Dwarf Thane as well Legion Space Marines with Autocannons and the new Land Raider variant called Cerberus. Also from Black Library we get two interviews with CL Werner and James Swallow, so all in all a good read from all the 'This month in' articles.

Conclusion
The best part of the new WD format is that even if we have big release we also get something for those who's not that interested in that release. This was not the case before where we could get a magazine filled with only stuff regarding the latest release on not much else except ads. So I hope that this will stay, other than that I also hope that they change around the segments a little. You know, instead of just showing us the final result in Battlegrounds instead show us how it was made. Just as an example. So finally, it's a solid issue but it lacks something really interesting I think, maybe it has to do with that I'm not really that interested in the new Hobbit stuff.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

100 000 Views!

Yeah that's right, this blog just hit a milestone today and went past the 100 000 views mark. Well it may not be much compared to 825 million views for PSY - Gagnam Style over at youtube and so on but I couldn't imagine that I would got this much views when I first started this blog in 2008! Yeah it's that old, and well it I didn't have many visitors at first with only 250-500 views each month from 08 to 10. This weren't strange at all though as I didn't update the blog that regularly and I didn't promote it much. In 2010 and even more in 2011 I did this though and added my blog to different wargaming blog networks and started to update the blog more regularly. And soon 2012 is over and for this blog it has been the best year ever with an all time high month in October with 16 722 views.

Enough with all the statistics though, it has never been the goal with this blog. Even though I of course want it to be as popular as it can. But the main thing about doing this blog is to try and inspire other people when it comes to painting, sculpting, or just to continue with this hobby I for one loves. And even if it takes a lot of time and effort it's all worth it when I get all the nice response from you guys reading and taking your time to write something in the comments.

So I'm glad to say I'm going to continue to write my post here and I also have some plans how to expand the blog further, with some permanent pages with Army Showcases for example, just to make it easier for you to find the stuff you are looking for. So, some new things coming in the future and if we look closer to now I can say I got the new WD late this time so I got it today. Have to read through it more before I post an review. I also have some of my projects going on and currently it's mostly about my Empire and Chaos Warriors and when talking about the Warriors I actually got all the stuff I ordered from Wayland last week so I have been assembling some of them more about what I'm doing right now further down.

Been painting my Juggernaught Lord and can't decide on the painting scheme I went with this brass colour for the main body and I was thinking of painting more red parts on the actual lord, also as you can see I need to re-base this dude so it fits with the rest of the new Skullcrushers.

Been painting more Greatswords which just need their bases finished and some final highlights, also have some more Halberdiers and the Demigryphs which I intend to finish next.

Well that's enough of my babbling, I hope you enjoy this blog and continue to visit it in future and for last I must say a big 'Thank you all' who visit this blog! It means much that people are interested in what I do and it's because of you I continue to do this, and I hope you will continue to visit this blog and find it interesting.