Dragon King

 So, yeah, this guy is ready. The big bad who has delayed my painting progress throughout this year to a significant extent. But a while ago Dragon King was finally finished.

...

And as a reward it tore my ongoing settlement to pieces, essentially killing a total of seven survivors. Then came spiderlings and took four more... but I digress.

Also included some of the hedge maze pieces, two survivor characters and the Forge Priest.

Scattered

 Did a few pieces of scatter terrain. Rows of gravestones will likely become small walls, while the others will function nicely as Sz 1 destructible terrain for Malifaux.

A Shrubbery

 Before it gets past a full year since last painting update, here's a few Malifaux models as well as shrubberies, crates and barrels. 

Shrubberies are supposed to go on some sort of zone to act as some sort of tall grass area same way trees often do. Crates and barrels will be much needed scatter terrain for my terrain collection.

I added some shrubbery to Tunnel Rats too in a fit of fancy. Kari Zotiko also received nothing but water texture for her base so that was a bit of an exception for me. 

Fumigator is has nothing special going on for it, but The Ferryman was envisioned as a 100% figurehead of the ghost ship, no mermaid corpses included. Some water texture was added to the base, as I had to somehow rationalize to myself how a ghost ship would move around on dry land with a weird water splash under.

A Skirmish Formation

 It's been a while since any kind of painting update.

So here we are. 

It has taken a gosh darn long time to paint this group up, but Orgoth Sea Raiders are finally up to 50 points painted. I did have a good excuse for delays - my left eye has been giving me hard time lately - but still excuses. 

This is the team I'm going to include in my next video, whenever that will be.

Follow the White Rabbit (for exclusive discounts)

 

Finished a couple of models yesterday, the other one of them being White Rabbit & Co. 

I had these decorative sticks lying around and got the idea how absurd it would be if you were strolling around in a forest, and suddenly you encounter these guys who try to sell you a hat. 

Considering all the insanity that goes around in Malifaux, I think that's only fitting.

I put the trees in place with epoxy glue, so I believe they are firm enough for play. But only time will tell. 

The hats are separate 3d-printed pieces I just placed on the model. Idea is that when they offer Comfortable Hat to a model, I can actually place that hat on the upgraded model.

The Joy of Markers

 I guess I'm kind of a sucker for effect markers.

And since it's been well over a year since last painting post, now might be the time.

Aura of Decay, Loose Bowels and Cursed Sludge are the ones I recently finished. Other markers are mostly from last year. For now, I think I'm missing only Drowning Aura, Urban Legend and Into Mist.

Although now looking at the picture I notice I have misremembered Remember the Lost and got Remember the Fallen instead. Whoops. Need to fix that right away. 

Here we have from left to right Remember the Fallen Lost, 2x Annoying (although its damn rare to get to use even one...), Aura of Decay in front, 2x Malifaux Mining Law behind Aura of Decay and 2x Negation Aura behind laws. 

Loose Bowels is there about in the middle, Rancid Smell, 2x Too Greedy to Die and last one on the right, Cursed Sludge. 

I left out Boring Conversation, Undivided Attention and Entropic Curse because those are old, old markers and these are new, shiny markers. 

Terrain update

 It's been a longest while since I did some terrain all by myself. I'm not counting these Streets of Venice buildings for this particular category - they were just build and paint, simple like that.

I made a hazardous terrain marker from some odd toy piece that had human-like figure bursting out from wall or something, and it looks rather nice. If you keep your eyes open in the flea markets, you can get wonderful material for terrain projects.

Additionally, since I bought some stretto bridges, I thought I needed a river so they wouldn't serve only as decorative bridges. Three river pieces were milliputty on the river banks, plasticard as river base and translucent acrylic mass on top of layers of paint. 

Also, since they were finished, I placed some Giant Stone Face terrain pieces for Kingdom Death to the picture.

January Update

 I haven't had time for too many games lately, because of reasons. And probably won't for a little while.

However, now and then I've been able to snatch some time to paint.

Two quick models were both Hanged models for Resurrectionists in Malifaux. Nothing big there.

But it's been a while since I've done any terrain for my game table. I've expanded choices with a total of eight wooden walkways, two stretto bridges and villetta alessandra, a pretty much 3"x3" building. All of them are by TTCombat. 

Price tag for these terrain pieces isn't wasn't that high for EU customers, but then Brexit changed everything. There were some issues with stretto bridges and villetta balcone zaira (not shown in picture), but nothing that a proper file and clippers couldn't take care of. 

There we go.

Spidicules

Hooray.

I took a long pause in getting things painted, but the brush is slowly warming up again. I had this particular Kingdom Death model nearly finished for, what, two months or so, but just couldn't bring myself to have the finishing touches done. But the spider is now complete.

All in all, my Kingdom Death collection appears to be coming together. Last year the amount of unfinished, gigantic monsters was daunting. But after this I only need Gigalion, Lion God, Dung Beetle Knight and Gold Smoke Knight to get some paint on. Should be doable.

Happy 10th Anniversary, Every one of them

It's been a decade.

Ten long years in the making, and only some regular card games and games such as tic-tac-toe being left out of this blog.

Along the years I've found it more difficult to find the time and enthusiasm to play tabletop games like I used to, but each month still seems to yield an entry or two.

Many things in my gaming habits have changed, and many have stayed the same. I'm not going into lengthy retrospection there, but there is something I want to share nonetheless.

Something, that has been with me throughout the ten years that have passed with this blog. No matter where and how life has tossed me around, something has always been there. Something loyal, something steady. I suppose one can say that you can't paint a wholesome picture without a proper palette.

So here it is. My palette that I've kept for over ten years. I can pinpoint the beginning of this particular palette to somewhere around the years of 2006-2008.

A vast majority of the models from "painted 20XX" tab have been painted using this piece of cardboard that was originally the backside of Citadel's green stuff package.

It's a shame I don't have a kitchen scale. It would be interesting to know how much weight this thing really has. Anyway, that's for the festivities.

Let's see how it looks like in 2030 next.

Total Eclipse

Alright, lately here has been a lot (at least to my standards) of painting updates. That's because I've been progressing in some of the more eccentric figures - I rarely do updates for Warmachine models because there are so common on my painting table. But the rare the piece, the more likely I'm going to bother brewing up a blog entry.

And I've been doing Kingdom Death models for a while now. If it wasn't for this beauty of a model, I'd probably skip this.

But not for Sunstalker.

I think the first three expansions I ever bought were Lonely Tree, Lion God and the Sunstalker, so it's been waiting a long, long time for some paint. And it probably still would have if it wasn't for a few days I spent feverishly with the brush. I don't think I've painted like that since my early 20's, so I don't know what happened.

Anyway, overall I'm pleased with the results. I had originally wanted some glowy spots to be bright, but they ended up too dark. I didn't want to ruin the model with thicker paint than that, so I let it stay relatively dark. The hood of hands was experimental, and I'm relieved how it turned out. To me it looks neat, and the bright white finger nails give it a more finished touch.

But here it is. The Sunstalker.

The Slenderking

I received this resin version of The King model for Kingdom Death as a Christmas gift from my dearest, and it sure took a while to actually start painting it. Looking at the painted listing for 2019 and 2018, the speed I've painted this year has been astonishing. That is partly because of the wonderful Citadel contrast paints - they're quick and decent enough to get less important models out of the paint desk.

So, finally The King is ready - and soon enough ready to make its first appearance on Kingdom Death as a proxy for Slenderman. I sold the original model because I don't quite enjoy such internet creatures polluting otherwise original world of Kingdom Death.

No contrast colors were used in other than gold trimmings of the robe, and that's because the contrast yellow is magnificent beyond words. No yellow I have encountered before actually looks yellow after just one layer, or ten layers. By using contrast in this particular field I could avoid the yellows looking blotchy at all, which often happens when I paint traditionally.

New Innovation

Tokens! Everywhere!

Alright, let's put it short.

I re-based my magnetized survivors. Or, based them in fact. They had no real texture to their base. I had been procrastinating with that, because I toyed with the idea that I'd put another magnet slot to the base. Why?

Either to keep track of various items and tokens that could benefit from having a small reminder, or just purely for aesthetical purposes.

For example, survivor uses Block. Sometimes it is easy to forget, but now you got a token for it. Or, if you use Gorn, Pulse Lantern or any other single use item, you can remove the token. I won't be making one for the most obvious one, though - Claw Head Arrow - because 95% of time it is used during first turn.

Also in the pictures some tokens for survival actions, and a special dodge token just for the sake of the memory of Burk.

Marked For Fun

Yesterday I finished painting some special miniatures.

Well, one is terrain for Kingdom Death. The Resin Dung Ball, which has been a little shy to enter the showdowns. Maybe because it had been unpainted.

Then, here are two markers I did for Malifaux. I've noticed Undivided Attention and Boring Conversation are abilities that are easily forgotten, or remembered retroactively. With a little more "sighty" reminder, maybe the abilities shall function more often as they should? Probably not. But hey, pretty markers!

Lonely Nightmare

Finally one of the bigger models for Kingdom Death is ready. It's the Lonely Tree. So now that it's painted, I suppose it is safe to assume it won't be drawn from terrain deck ever again.

Effortless painting

I took a picture of these just to make a painting update.

What we have here is a piece of terrain (a cage of some sorts), three models and markers for Malifaux.

Models are rushed paintjobs with Citadel Contrast Colors. I'm pleased with the results considering how much time and effort went into making these. Which wasn't much of either. Models are not official ones. They're Nolzur's Marvelous Miniatures or whatever those pre-primed D&D miniatures are called. Some of their scale matches that of Malifaux' quite nicely.

Then I made a multi-purpose markers for Malifaux. Kingdom Death bases are two pieces each, so they are like four-in-one markers now. Each of the eight markers can function as miscellaneous marker or Corpse, Scheme or Strategy marker.

Paint Campaign

So I've been painting my warband for Kings of War: Vanguard campaign.

When I enlisted myself for the campaign, I already had a couple of magnetized Kingdom Death survivors up and coming. So I quickly re-assigned them to another game. There's also third magnetized survivor in the picture. After campaign ends I'll remove them from their bases and hand them over to subconscious nightmare world.

Here are Executor, Shadow and Citizen Levy that are to stay on 20mm bases.

The three survivors I'll arm as needed to represent different warriors on board. Six models ought to carry through one or two game rounds. Next we'll be playing 125 point games.

There's also some extra miniatures in picture that are being worked on. There are two Summoner Crones, a Blademaster, Reaper Guard with Heavy Weapon and a reaper model for Catrul to summon.

I'll probably construct either a Reaper Guard or Blademaster with Large Shield. Maybe some other model, too. We'll see.

Low End Boss and minions

I finished painting the Watcher (former last nemesis boss in Kingdom Death), two spiderlings and four starting survivors for Kingdom Death.

They were mostly dipped and it didn't turn out too well this time. But at least they are finished now. Well maybe I have to clear that mess from some survivor bases.

Since I now have some real starting survivors, my current ones will likely see some adjustment in gear.

Too Long Years

This bird manipulates time.

Almost two years it has been roosting on my painting desk (as if I had a dedicated desk for that...) waiting to be born before being able to reborn.

When I first received this model as a Christmas gift from a person very dear to me, I decided to paint this phoenix to the best of my ability. Because I haven't been doing that very much. Always taking shortcuts and "letting it be" when things didn't go as planned. But here I wanted to give all I had when it comes to painting, and this is what came up.

I'm quite satisfied with the skin. It looks nice from a distance, and even better up close. Feathers, on the other hand, did not turn out that well. I might actually return to them one day when I've had more practice. When painting the feathers I realized I didn't have the skills nor the steady hand that they would have required. So I kept them relatively basic so I wouldn't ruin this gorgeous model.

Phoenix did have horrible gaps in some joints that had to be filled with green stuff. Gaps in facial area went remarkably well, but putting wings to main body less so. It was difficult area to work, and I had already painted both the wings and the main body. Having red/green deficiency in my eyesight gave me some trouble figuring out how smoothly the Stuff was melding there.

I tried to patch the worst of mistakes with a thick layer of paint in choice areas, which was good for the tiniest seams and harsh edges. Fortunately, however, the ugliest blobs were in places you cannot see unless you really search for them.

Anyway.

A sense of accomplishment to be able to write this blog entry.

First miniatures of 2018

My painting has been sorely lacking this year. Four months somehow passed without me finishing even one miniature.

But that's changed now, for I finished Manhunter for Kingdom Death.

Along came four monster fruits from Lonely Tree and a troll.

I don't know where I will be using troll, or even if it'll ever be used. Originally I think it was meant to be for Frostgrave, but I can't see a frostgrave campaign in near vicinity.

But hey, a troll!

There's also Paingiver Task Master somewhere in there, and Legends of Halaak for Skorne.

All of these miniatures are from a larger batch of models that I dipped. More to come at a later date.