Hi all,
A littlw while back I decided not to wait for the prospero book to arrive from forgeworld was it appeared that there were going to be a number of books before it before I actually saw anything heresy related. As a result I put together a 2000pt list and set about buying it all!!
I’m going to use this blog to show my continuing progress with all thing heresy wolf and the army I seem to be amassing.
NMM stands for non-metallic metals. It’s a technique to paint something that looks metallic yet using non-metallic paints, for example. Although the process painting process is relatively ‘simple’, understanding where the shade and highlights go on a 3D model can be a challenge (click here for some theory and example NMM).
EDIT: The model used is Monique De Noir (54mm) from Reaper Miniatures.
Gold Armour
Basecoat – GW Snakebite Leather
Highlight – GW Bubonic Brown
Extreme Highlight – Vallejo Deep Yellow
Shade – GW Bestial Brown/ GW Dryad Bark
Starting off the whole armour was painted with the basecoat colour then the highlight was used to mark off areas where the light would catch and the shade was used to find those shadows and emphasise them. These layers were slowly blended together to get a smooth transition between colours. Finally the final highlight was used on the hard edges and on the centre of the reflections to brighten up the armour.
Blue Trim
Base coat – GW Regal Blue
Highlight – GW
Extreme Highlight – GW Astronomican Grey
Shade – GW Storm Blue
Same technique was used here as for the gold armour. Basecoat the area finding those raised areas with the highlight and the recesses with the shade.
Finished Model
Here is the finished model on the tombstone base it comes with. The sword blade again, painted with the same technique as before.
The sun disappeared below the horizon by the time I got the sheath finished so grainy yellow image is the result.
Final Thoughts on NMM
Bleeeeeeeeeeeeeh. Exhausting, but fun. A lot of the apprehension of trying NMM is gone but I understand that my own technique is far from perfect but I did get a lot of practice blending. In the future I would most likely use metallic paints as they are quick and easy to use, I would probably apply the technique used in NMM to emphasise the reflections.
Tips For First Timers
1) Thin your paints -NMM are like onions… or cake, you need those layers to get those smooth transition of colours. Here is a pretty comprehensive guide to thinning.
2) Use hard light as a guide – grab a lamp and shine it on your model. This will cast shadows and reflections on your model which you can use as a guide of where to put your highlights and shades. Remember though this is just a guide.
3) Practise on something small with lots of features – Sounds counter intuitive as you might expect to practise on something big and flat but I found that harder. I tried to paint a bit of sprue to test my reflections but it looked odd and weird. It got simpler when I just started on the model where I had bumps, curves and hard edges to work off.
4) Patience – If you want quick results just use metallic paints. Although you can apply NMM reflection theory to metallic paints to bring out, and emphasise, their natural shine.
5) NMM (mine at least!) looks much better in a photo than in person, don’t know if it’s because the photo is blurring the image to make the paint job smoother or just me…
6) Have fun (see tip #4).
Other Useful NMM Links
Various NMM colours
Video tutorial for quick gold NMM
Happy Painting!
After years of rolling badly with cheapy basic dice bought from Games Workshop and years of receiving (good humoured) abuse for using GW’s limited release Adeptus Mechanicus dice I finally caved and thought I needed new dice (That and my confidence in the fairness of these dice were waning).
If one wanted super precise and fair dice they would get casino dice. These little gems are highly regulated and controlled to ensure that they are ‘fair’, the dice are machined to ridiculous tolerances and the pips are drilled and filled with coloured material of the same density as to preserve the dice’s centre of gravity and are never smoothed off in a rock tumbler commonly used in commercial dice manufacturing. I wasn’t crazy enough for those so I settled for the next best thing, GameScience. These so called ‘ugly dice’ are also not put through the rock tumbler process to preserve their shape and balance unlike other dice on the market.
They come in a variety of colours but I got the green ones just because my other internet handle is ‘limey’ and thought it was fitting.
But do these roll better than other dice on the market?
It would seem so, when compared with Chessex equivalent.
Does the rock tumbler process cause that much of a difference in a practical sense?
No, not really but after playing with them the sharp edges of the dice feels nice in the hand in a masochist sort of way… ahem.
So why use these ugly GameScience dice?
Cause they are the fairest of them all.
I have yet to use these dice in anger yet but when I received them I just couldn’t stop playing with them, a good sign for the future of these dice [insert your own innuendo here].
Note: It would seem that GameScience dice are a bit limited of late due to some issues I don’t fully understand. But head over to The Dice Shop, they seemed to have inherited a large collection of GameScience dice ready to find new homes.
Happy Rolling!
Hobby changes for Monk
So I have finally made some big changes recently on the hobby front and ditched warmachine and 40k. With numerous failed attempts to getwarmachine running consistently in Bristol I have thrown the towel in and sold off my stuff.
As for 40k, I have just lost the love. I thought 7th edition may have helped but alas no. However good news. They have been replaced by some new things. Well I say new i’ve been sat on them for a few months but without further ado heres a quick recap of things
1) Holy shit Relic Knights arrived!
Yep CMON stopped dicking us EU folk around and delivered. Some of my stuff is missing however 😦 It hasn’t stopped me from assembling my Black diamond bits which were all complete. The quality is hit and miss though, whilst the large bits are easy to clean up and a joy to…
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Another bunch of models scratched off my to-do list. Yay!
My own Dreadball team ready to play, the Voracious Vagabonds (because why not alliteration and it sounded better than the Hungry Hungry Hobos). I bought this box of Dreadball models roughly a year ago after I saw they were SPACE RATS PLAYING BASKETBALL. The game of Dreadball itself quickly appealed; it is very easy to pick up with simple rules and the games could be played relatively quickly.
On to the painting. The paint scheme was suggested by Jay, paying homage to the old Skaven Blood Bowl team, red painted finger nails and all. The painting technique I used was a modification of the basecoat-wash-highlight formula I’ve been taking recently, instead of the extreme highlight I usually go for I thinned my paints down a bit to get a bit of a smoother colour transition on the edges of the armour plated. Though it adds a bit more time than usual I’m happy with the results; I was averaging roughly 1-2 models per day.
Armour
Base – Waaaaaaaaaaaagh Flesh!
Wash – Devlan Mud
Highlight – Warboss Green
Reds
Base – Mechrite Red
Wash – Devlan Mud
Highlight -Evil Sunz Scarlet
Flesh
Base – Snakebite Leather
Wash – Devlan Mud
Hightlights – Snakebite Leather, Vomit Brown
Wraps
Base – Astronomican Grey
Wash – Devlan Mud
Highlight – Astronomican Grey
The hardest part of these models was trying to clean up the mould lines (I missed some as well annoyingly…). The hard plastic Mantic games use is… different, the worst problem areas were the wrappings around the feet of the strikers where I could not distinguish mould line for fur and fur for feet (on one of the strikers I actually chopped his little toe off thinking it was a bit of flash…). I won’t lie, I’ve been spoilt when it comes to models having been primarily a Games Workshop kid. Say what you want about Games Workshop but the material they use for their plastic kits is some of the easiest to work with, and even though their range of finecast models had poor quality control, the material, I have to admit, was very nice. But given all its difficulties the Mantic models were very fun to paint, and now with a fully painted team I feel obligated to make them hit the playing field, hopefully with the face’s of the opposition.
The following pictures show the model basecoated before a wash and the finished model after some highlighting and detailing such as verdigris and battle damage. Hopefully this shows you can get relatively good looking models using simple techniques to bring depth to the model.
Enjoy and happy painting.
Commission work is one of those ideas I’ve always entertained myself with. Painting something for another person is something I like to do, either as presents or just ’cause. But being paid to paint, that required some obligation on my part (not like those pesky birthdays, pfff.) But recently I was tasked with dealing with my first painting commission.
The Models: Dead Man’s Hand renegade indians gang
The Task: Good tabletop quality using a muted colour palette to give the models a look that was period correct.
This is the first time painting something in this period of American history but I think I have a pretty good idea of the aesthetics after such immersive films as Wild Wild West, Shanghai Noon and Cowboy versus Aliens.
Thanks goes to the brave C.J./Azzabat that let me paint his models. Hope you like them.
…Aaaaand the other two members of the gang photoed with blurry cam and poor white balance!
by Dave Fraser (aged 35 and a bit)
So Bristol Vanguard (BV) are back running WFB events again, with a new shiny venue. The wonderfully named Future Inns hotel in the Cabot Circus area of Bristol, I’m not sure what makes it ‘the future’ as it appears to be the same as every other hotel with conference facilities I’ve been to but it does have a couple of nice features. The room was 2 sides windows so nice and bright and with the balcony door open was reasonably air, anyone who has suffered through gamer stench will be acutely aware of what a wonderful feature this is, the heat and noise also being helped by reasonably high ceilings so I could hear my opponents speaking which has been a challenge at some venues I’ve been to in the past. Finally to put the cherry on the cake you can park in the Cabot Circus car park for the day and get it for free, if that’s not a selling point I don’t know what you people want.
So having sung the virtues of the venue I best get onto the important part, what on earth was the event about? In sort a nice friendly 3 game (1 day) Warhammer tournament. There was the usual smattering of army restrictions and special rules set out in the pack, which in this particular occasion were pinched from another tourney. As a result there were some rather different armies on show which was fun to see, but those who care about balance and ‘the best person winning’ seemed to be of the opinion it didn’t do that very well (and it was hard to argue otherwise) and the organiser agreed.
BV have been masters of terrain (and a brief sidenote here, I’m somewhat lucky in that my previous club ELG were equally blessed with an amazing terrain guy) and it resulted in a 16 tables with a really nice mix of different terrain themes, types and variety of stuff on the boards making it a pleasure to walk up to the tables and not face the standard tournament fare of 2 hills, 2 woods, 2 buildings and 2 ‘other’ Zzzz. If I were to critique one thing it was that the majority of it still sat towards the edges, I’m a massive fan of impassable terrain being in the middle of the board so it actually impacts the game in a meaningful way and isn’t just used to hide something behind during deployment, but I do recognise I’m somewhat unusual in that view as most players I’ve faced at tourneys consider that a chore.
I could bore you all with a detailed run through of my games but for a couple of reasons I won’t be so cruel; 1. You don’t care 2. I did really really badly. I will talk through my opponents though as basically they’re what make or break an event. You may have picked up from my preramble that I’ve been doing tourneys for a while, so I tend to know quite a lot of folk and this was no exception. Out of the 30 people present I’d guess there was over 10 BV members, plus a handful of people from surrounding clubs and then a number of faces I’d not seen before. I managed to get 3 games against people who I’d not met before, a couple of them were Bristol locals so have been playing down the Old Duke (if you’ve not been, get down there, it’s awesome) but given my gaming hermit status I’d not bumped into them.
But to start the day off I had a grudge arranged through the medium of twitter (again seriously, if you’re not on there get on it, there are so many toy soldier fanatics clearly sat bored in their day jobs putting up a host of wonderful 140 character long ramblings), so the grudge was set up a while in advance to play one Andy Matthews (@Dillusion1979), he’s a tourney organiser down in Bournemouth and a delightful fellow but I’d never had opportunity to play before.
So we rocked up, chatted nonsense, hit it off wonderfully as one would expect seeing as our shared joy of toy soldiers and talking nonsense and to top it all off he brought out a flask of coffee and set me up with a delightful homebrew. Anyways we briefly played a game (where he smashed me taking all my toys off) and then with an hour to spare had a good natter and a look round the armies present.
For those not familiar with 8th Edition Warhammer armies have generally grown in size, not always the case but generally speaking, as a result of the increased model count the painting standard had taken a dip a few years ago. But now we’re 4 years into the edition and everyone knows the good stuff to take in a list the painting quality has been ramping up at a rate of knots. Locally lots of people will be familiar with Ben and his Beastmen. Frankly put they’re beautiful, and he’s a git for that, but it’s hard to hold it against him as he’s more or less a nice guy, plus they’re Beastmen so it guarantees that he’s not doing it for the filth. There were also some really nice Empire (Richard Burdett, again names, meh), Matt Lees OrcGers (yep that’s Orc themed Ogres but painted white rather than greenskins, matt does all his armies white, it’s his thing), Ian Scovells utterly gorgeous Dark Elves (similar to his previous gorgeous dark elves but an entirely new army), Daemons by Les (I’ve already forgotten his second name) and one of my all time favourite armies in Russ Veals WoC (though he did have a few new bits that he’d not entirely finished to his top standard). Anyway safe to say that for a 30 person event it was punching well above it’s weight in the painting stakes. What would have been really helpful would have been some pictures, but I’m far to forgetful/lazy/easily distracted for that but I’m pretty sure Jan has posted some up on the BV and Warhammer forums.
A spot of lunch later (being gamers healthy salads all round…) and it was onto round two. I got a relatively new player with a good looking VC army, lots of terrain built into the movement trays and stuff like that. Russ is a Bristol local so hopefully will see him down the Old Duke (plug plug) again as I really enjoyed the game and it was actually 2 surprisingly similar lists despite being from different books! Ultimately I made a stupid mistake which let him get to me earlier than I wanted which tied up my light mage from casting that made my life difficult, from there on I couldn’t do owt to get out the hole I was in. A fun game and a small loss ensued but at least I had some models left alive at the end!
Final game saw me hit my ideal matchup, an ogre army with no magic, I should have just blasted it off the table. Of course I didn’t! Again a new player in the Bristol area Matt had a lovely and incredibly fluffy army (no ironblasters, no magic!). He also had a giant which he informed me had never survived a single game, if it survived it would be named after me… Guess what there is now a giant walking around called Dave Fraser. God damnit. I should probably apologise as I got a tad frustrated this game as nothing worked, but Matt was a true gent about it and just played his game and took my army apart, another tabling. Again I hope to get a chance for another game with him, as there were some things he missed as a new player that I’d had a chat about afterwards and always good to see people getting further and further into the game (plus I want revenge).
So overall a day of results I’d happily forget but 3 fun games with new people so I have to say I really enjoyed myself and will be back for the next BV fantasy event (though maybe I should just help out with organisation on the day given my performance!)
In summary there was some winners, some losers and a lot of abuse for the comp pack but everyone (that stayed for the whole event, a story I won’t tell) seemed to have a good time. Congrats to Warren Brewster (BV member) for winning the whole thing and a massive thanks to Jan for organising and managing the rabble at the event.
Dave ‘dafruk’ Fraser
Last weekend, myself and 3 fellow Vanguardians jumped in a tiny arse Vauxhall Corsa and embarked on a 2 and a half hour journey to the deep darklands of Wales to take part in the first tournament to be held by the Towy Valley Tyrants. The tournament was also being run by one of our [Mantic’s] newest Pathfinders Tris. After a few conversations on Facebook with Tris after he joined I threw him a copy of my previous tournament rules, and a few tweaks later Tris had a tournament up and advertised and I was eager to show him some support.
Having been to previous tournaments in Wales where the only attendees were those who came over from Bristol, it was great to hear that through advertising in the right areas there were due to be 18 players there, which given how young the Dreadball tournament scene is, is…
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After finally getting around to watching Dreamwork’s ‘How to Train Your Dragon’ (awesome movie by the way) I’ve got an itch to do more dragon painting. So to satisfy that itch I got working on an older model I always promised myself I would go back to and touch up, this model was the Forgeworld Carmine Dragon. I got this model for £55 before the price hike and with it standing at approximately 180mm tall it’s a lot of resin for a relatively cheap price and was such fun to paint.
The touch up work was just highlighting the scales to make them more pronounced, give the red skin more highlights to give it a bit more definition and to clean up the base a little by replacing the GW static grass that I used previously.
I painted this surfing monstrosity a year or so ago using the following colours (be prepared for lists),
Skin: basecoat with GW Mephiston Red, heavy drybrush with GW Blood Red, wash with Devlan Mud, highlight with Blood red, highlight with blazing orange on the extremities.
Scales: basecoat with GW Storm Blue, light drybrush with GW Imperial Purple, highlight each scale with GW Imperial Purple followed by GW Liche Purple and an extreme highlight of GW Bleached Bone. Scales were given a final wash of GW Druchii Violet wash to bring it all together.
Horns: basecoat with GW Dryad Bark, followed by drybrushing in the following order; GW Snakebite Leather, GW Bleached Bone, GW Skull White.
The scales on this dragon sometimes blend with the skin, since I was using two base colours I tried to follow this blend when I could by dry brushing one basecoat into the other.
The Base
The dragon was mounted on a GW 40k flyer base and painted to represent a swamp. To represent the water I used a two-part resin. Initially sand was glued to the base and painted to look like dirt and the lower elevations were painted green to represent the swampland. Once the base was painted the resin was prepared with a bit of GW Thraka Green mixed in. The process was… messy. Initially I built up walls on the base to prevent the resin from just leaking off however my wall building skills were shoddy to say the least and most of it leaked out (did I say I did this in a plastic tub? phew…). The only saving grace was the sand texture soaked most of it up so I got some form of bog looking terrain out of it, not a total loss but not the effect I had envisioned.
Currently I’m happy with it but give it time and I’ll find something to improve/alter later on, maybe someday I’ll give the horns striations rather than the smooth look.
Now I’m looking for more dragon models to paint. Here are some of the other large dragon models which I particularly like and want however most of them are out of production… sigh.
Angrislaug by Mierce Miniatures.
Fire Dragon by Forgeworld. Out of production? Its not on the Forgeworld website anymore.
Confrontation – Titan Dragon by Legacy Miniatures. Out of production and very rare.
The Dragon by Heresy Miniatures. Veeeeeeeery long waiting list (there’s over 150 people on the waiting list and he’s been casting for three years).
Happy Painting
Part one of the 4 man Apocalypse game that happened just over a week ago! (Sceleris & Faith is my Shield vs HistoricalGeorge & Trumpkin)
This is it, the big one! Some friends and I have been planning an Apocalypse game ever since Sceleris sold me all those tasty, tasty tanks. He messaged me on the forums asking if I wanted a big 5,000 point game with the Imperium vs Chaos, and I said hell yes! Then, after reading the Apocalypse rulebook for a bit, we thought it might be even more fun if we upped it to a 2v2 Apocalypse game. What’s more, we decided to throw the point count out the window and just bring everything we had.
So, for my team-mate I approached HistoricalGeorge, the Space Wolf player who I have clashed with on a couple of times, once being a (comparatively small!) 4,000 point game. He accepted, and with that the Iron Devourers and Vlka Fenryka put aside their grudges and joined forces to combat the Chaos menace!
After…
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Bristol Vanguard 
