This week I have mostly been painting.....

[sir.spamalot]

WOw, awesome man, would you mind giving us some quick step by step instructions for painting those wolves?

cheers, the spam meister

[Arhalien]

You are certainly not wrong when you say you don;t mess around! How many Knights is that!

Any chance of seeing some of your Elves btw?

[The Judge]

So is all this painting for Fantasy Apocalypse then?

Excellent work on that Wolf... hope something equally good continues with the White Wolves cloaks!

[spikedog]

Good lord.

Just seeing how much you have to do has made me feel bad about moaning when painting 12 Gaunts/20 Zombies.

I tip my hat to you good sir.

P.S. That wolf scheme rocks! I love it!

[JT-Y]

Heh, well if it keeps you out of trouble Harry...

Are you currently going through a bit of an 'I love cavalry' phase?

Anyway, you clearly have more determination than me, or a greater attention span.
I tend to be like a stunned bird when it comes to painting armies I'm ashamed to say.

Keep it up.
Wolves look cool.

[BattleofLund]

What generation Goblin riders are those wolves getting?

[Harry]

WOW! So much encouragement. Thank you all. After yesterdays comments I was inspired and got a shed load painted. All this encouragemnet and interest makes me want to redouble my efforts. I should have done a log months ago!

Oh, this looks like a nice thread to follow.

I noticed that your ordinary wolves are white, while your white wolves are black, is that right?

Most amusing. The white wolf cloaks are now white!

WOw, awesome man, would you mind giving us some quick step by step instructions for painting those wolves?

cheers, the spam meister

I will do that for you.

Any chance of seeing some of your Elves btw?

I imagine Elves will be what I will be 'mostly painting' next. With their book just around the corner. (Maybe along side some Chaos?)

So is all this painting for Fantasy Apocalypse then?

Excellent work on that Wolf... hope something equally good continues with the White Wolves cloaks!

Fantasy Apocalypse!?!? You heard it here first folks. I do have a couple of biggish armies.

Undicided on the white wolf cloaks. My bumper book of animals shows white wolves as looking very different from the timber wolves on which my wolves are based but then this scheme is more exciting so I am very tempted to stick with it. I may paint them up cream and white to see how they look and then post them for comments.

I tip my hat to you good sir.

P.S. That wolf scheme rocks! I love it!

Spikedog. Any positive comment from you, sir, is praise indeed. I love your threads and your painting. You are a huge inspiration.

Heh, well if it keeps you out of trouble Harry...

Are you currently going through a bit of an 'I love cavalry' phase?

Anyway, you clearly have more determination than me, or a greater attention span.
I tend to be like a stunned bird when it comes to painting armies I'm ashamed to say.

Keep it up.
Wolves look cool.

It does. If I wasn't painting I would only be out raping and pilaging and running a muck.

Not sure about the cavalry thing. it was just what grabbed my interest from the huge ammounts of stuff I have to paint.

My painting problem is picking things up and losing interest before i have finished thenm and moving on to something else. I am confident i have more half painted miniatures than most people have miniatures.

The main point of starting this log was to, with folks encouragement, see a few projects taken to completion.

What generation Goblin riders are those wolves getting?

The Marauder metals.

Thank-you all again for your kind words and encouragement.
I will get some more pics up very soon.

[Karlon]

I love the wolves and Im eagerly awaiting your step-by-step.

Great work.

[Mutantdale]

Good work Harry nice to see a decent sized army for once . None of this 2000pts small skirmishes

I like the wolves scheme so far and am looking for to an update on them....

Skip the empire though and start the chaos

MD

[Harry]

It got a mention earlier but it occured to me that people (who have not read the watchman) might like to see my last project.

I collected about 3000 points of Tomb kings for under £100 using ebay to source vintage and out of print models and supplemented these with some 'alternative' models for the units that are new and were not available as old models.(you'll see whay I mean when you check out the photos).

I then tried to paint it in a weekend.

Here is the painting part of the article. (For those of you who are interested in a bit of preamble. I did not reproduce the first half of the article about collecting them).

PAINTING
THE QUICK AND THE DEAD

I have no idea how much time it has taken to actually collect this army. It is impossible for me to work out how much time was spent on e-bay finding these bits or how much time I spent building them, doing the odd little conversion, basing them, sorting them into units and just looking at them, planning armies. Countless hours. But I don’t count those hours. That is the part of the hobby that I enjoy the most. That is what I do for fun and relaxation.

The bit I find it harder to do is commit to painting something. With this in mind and to set myself a challenge I decided to see how fast I could paint this army.
I thought it would make an interesting comparison and show a very different approach to painting to my last painting article (The Orc Boar boyz I did for Golden Demon in last months Watchman) where I took every bit of painting time I could find in a month and put it into one unit.
In contrast I aimed to paint this entire army in a two days!!!! Here’s how I did it.

Let me start by saying the entire army was already built, based and spray undercoated. And I had also spent half a day to make the movement trays.

I started by painting every bit of bone in the army. Everything, every skeleton , every horse, every chariot all my Ushabti, the Skull Chukkas. All of it. I started from a white undercoat and painted everything in an Ink wash of dark brown ink. I could have saved myself an hour right there by spraying black undercoat but I find the result is too harsh. The dark brown base gives a softer more natural feel to the bone than a black base. Then I dry brushed all the bone with snake bite leather then with a mix of snake bite leather and bleached bone then with just bleached bone then finally with bleached bone mixed with a little skull white for a final highlight. I can not stress enough just how carelessly I did this dry brushing. This army does not bear close inspection but some how with undead it does not seem to matter if it’s a little ‘shabby’ and I like the way different colours show through where bits have been missed so I am happy with the overall effect. Having said that as anyone who has done dry brushing knows that the knack is in getting the paint the right consistency (wetter than you would think for ‘dry’ brushing!) and getting the right amount on the brush (less than you would think you could paint with!) If you can get these right you would be surprised how fast you can slap it on and not get a very different result than if you had done it very carefully.
This is surprisingly satisfying because even though it sounds a bit boring only dry brushing nothing but bone the speed and the visible progress makes up for it a spurs you on. In the space of a morning the army seems half painted. And, in all honesty, it is!

I also treated the mummies exactly the same way just varying slightly by not applying the snakebite leather stage of dry brushing and by being more patchy with the rest of it to get more colour variation in the bandages.

The next thing I did was paint everything that was not bone with chaos black. For the things I had not painted yet the Giant Scorpions, the Tomb Swarm, the Carrion this was a spray paint with black undercoat. For everything else it was the weapons the spears, the bows and helmets, etc. So now the whole army is bone or black. To be quite honest it looks so cool with just these two finishes you could do the bases now and call this army finished. So that’s what I did just in case I ran out of steam. I painted all the bases in PVA and dipped them in my gritty sand mix and left it to dry over night. And that was the end of first day.

I painted all the sand with a watery mix of a colour called yellow ochre. (The closest thing to this in the citadel range is bubonic brown. I just needed a large quantity because I did some dessert game boards so I had already bought a big pot and used the same method as my board to ensure the bases and movement trays matched nicely.
The sand just soaks up this watery mix and it spreads nicely up to the minis without risking getting too close so this isn’t too slow. Next dry brushing again. Three stages of a mix of Yellow ochre/Bubonic brown and increasing amounts of white. Job done.

Sunday lunch. With the family Slow roast Gloucestershire Beef, Yorkshire pudding, the best roast Potatoes in all England. If life got any better I couldn’t live with myself. A short snooze then back to work.

Half a day left. Where to concentrate my efforts. If I was actually limited to just two days I would undoubtedly have given the rest of the time to the characters However, as I can actually take more time to finish these to a higher standard I decided to leave these and to return to my skeleton rank and file and give a little more attention to them.

Faces are such focal points of the model that an extra bit of effort here can make a big impact on the overall impression the model gives. So I have returned to each skeleton and ensured that each eye socket was dark, (neither missed by the first coat of ink or subsequently filled with a dry brushed colour). Secondly I have painted out the mouths again with the ink and then returned to these and picked out the teeth with an off white colour.

So this is where I am at the time of writing. Over 3,000 points, collected for under £100 and mostly painted in two days.
It may not be the best painted army ever but I have got to be happy with that for one weekends painting. If there is a quicker army to paint than this I can’t imagine what it is.

Finishing them off.

There is still a fair bit to do to finish this army.
I will be lavishing lots of attention on my characters to make them stand out and I need to build a casket of souls for the Liche priest on the Planquin
I will probably return to the bone areas again and wash in some dark ink to any detail which has been obscured. May even catch some final highlights with a bleached bone skull white mix.
Finally to add some lustre to my army I will dry brush tin bitz, burnished gold then shinning gold to the weapons and helmets.
Obviously the carrion need a proper paint job but aside from this I am fairly happy with the rest of the army as they are.
I also need to give my heavy horsemen shields. Fortunately I have enough left over from my current Tomb Kings army to do this without further expense. Although I am tempted to have a hunt through my shields to see If I have enough of the vintage round ones to match the chariot spearmen.
I will however use one of the left over standard tops/icons to finish of my icon bearer.


Future projects.

Basing and painting my Bone giant dinosaur is my next job.
I have got the a unit of light horsemen to finish to complete all the available options.
I have got a Liche Priest riding a skeletal steed/undead construct.
Just in case you were wondering what I was planning to do with the other forty or so skeletons I have scratch built a nile barge which I intend to have them carrying on their shoulders like some sort of giant coffin for my Tomb King. I have no idea yet what rules I will come up with for this centrepiece for my army but it will be along the lines of the Dwarf Throne of Power and very nasty!!!
And just to round things off I will, of course, be adding a sphinx!

[Harry]

And some pics. First ones of the whole army.
The pyramid complex was built for a sige game. (It was not part of what i painted in the weekend! ;D)

[Harry]

Some close ups of the units.

[Harry]

My Carrion, Tomb scorpions, Tomb swarms, and Ushabti

[Harry]

and some of the 'special' characters and unfinished projects.

Now, go easy on me with all of this lot. It was all done very fast, (as a challenge). Lots of it is unfinished.
It was the large sunday lunch and afternoon nap that scuppered me.

[Angelwing]

splendid stuff harry. I noticed in the background of one of the tk pics a shelf full of stuff. Just how much stuff do you own?
Keep us up to date!

[Boss_Salvage]

Nice article and impressive speed job on the army. My favorite part has to be all the old models (catapults and mummies!), and I really like those skeletal dinos as ushabti.

- Salvage

[Zodiac]

Sick is good? right? Thanks mate.

Hmm.. Yea.. for you, sick is good

And white wolf knights! Woohoo!

[Arhalien]

Great to see those in close up Harry

Oh, and I think a comment I saw about General Steiner is true here:
"Massive scrolling bar of Doom FTW!"

[Harry]

[

Anyways, how will you base them?

Like this.

[75hastings69]

Ooooohh, Harry has a Project Log! I'll be watching buddy, like the paint scheme on the wolves, very nice.

I'll make the effort and get my log up and running if I ever manage to get home!!!!

Look forward to seeing more pics (especially of the goblin room , oh and some MoW stuff including boards).

Steve