Infantry Detachment (I)

Last post of painted miniatures of the year and I am bringing 19 bases!

I was only able to accomplish this because I am super hyped with the game, you need to paint infantry before using them and overall it took me only 4 hours!

Painting recipe

I have decided to paint my Legions Imperialis army as Sons of Horus, similar to the one I own for 28mm. I have therefore followed a very similar colour palette, although of course a bit streamlined for the scale. The basic idea here is not to use a single highlight, just to paint base colours and let the scale do the rest, there are so many that nobody will notice and anyway people are looking at the Titans. You can even notice that in one of the Command bases I started to do highlights but then stopped because I decided that it was not worth the effort.

Infantry's recipe is:

1. base coat black
2. base coat green
3. thinned down agrax over the whole miniature
4. paint black all details (boltgun, shoulders, etc)
5. metal for some details on weapons
6. gold for some details on the captains
7. sepia shade for the gold
8. red for cloak, crests and other minor details
9. blue for plasma guns (not pictured in the photo as I forgot it)

The steps for the bases are:

1. base coat black
2. "wet" dry brush neutral grey
3. dry brush wolf grey
4. dotted random details with parasite brown
5. black on the rims

Once the recipe was clear, I painted all of the miniatures that can be seen here in about 4 hours. Painted them directly on the sprue and then carefully clip and attach them to the already painted bases. It was a bit tedious but fast.

The set is just 18 bases but with provides a few extras, so I decided to assemble another extra Infantry base by using a plasma gun, to be honest, it is so difficult to notice the difference between plasma and boltgun that nobody will see it. In fact, I had forgotten to paint a blue stripe on top of the plasma guns and just realized that when taking the pictures. I have fixed that now.

Lastly, after painting these I realized that I actually need another box of Infantry in order to file a complete Demi-company, so I bought another one that is now basecoated and ready to be painted, although that will be a job for 2024.

Painted in 2023

Armies on Parade: Los caballeros de la mesa cuadrada

Above you can see the Bretonnia Army Book released for Warhammer Fantasy 5th edition in 1996. This is the edition that had the core box with Bretonnia and Slann, both new armies at the time! (not really new in terms of lore but in terms of rules and miniatures).

Back in the day (late '90s), I started a small army of Bretonnia that ended up as a Mordheim band because I did not have the money, time and energy to collect and paint complicated banners for my Knights. Since then, I have always wanted to collect them and the small scale was the perfect opportunity.

To keep the same trend as with my undead army I gave them a funny name, "Los caballeros de la mesa cuadrada", which is the name in spanish of the Monty Python's Holy Grail movie. I chose Forest Dragon miniatures because from my point of view, they are the best available in that scale, see my comments about it here.

List building

For list building, there is no direct translation of Bretonnia into Kings of War. There are many different lists that can recreate an Army similar to the classic one, but none that are a 1:1 match, so you will always need to make some adjustments. You could use Basileans, Kingdoms of Men, The Order of the Brothermark or The Order of the Green Lady. After playing a bit with the different options, considering I had a few "must-have" in my list, I chose the Green Lady because they could cover almost all options I wanted, and for the few that I did not like or want, I could get a suitable alternative.

The basic list is shown below (including CoK 23 updates) and I am pretty happy with it, although might tweak it moving forward.

Painting

Before painting, I spent quite some time browsing over the old Army Book as well as more recent Bretonnian content to get inspiration. In particular, I spent quite some time going over all the posts from this painter that has managed to capture exactly the feeling I wanted to convey, if you don't follow him already, I encourage you to do so! There are a few rules that one must follow when painting heraldry that I of course did not know about, so I decided to follow exactly the same patterns I liked from some of the books and posts I selected.

After having spent quite some time doing that, I quickly realized that the super quick technique I followed with the undead would not suit this army. Undeads were painted just by applying base colours without much care and then a generous layer of agrax to cover them in grime. As this army must look bright, clean and shiny, I could not really use agrax at all! That meant that I would need to be much more careful and paint a lot of white over black basecoat :D

Lastly, because of the amount of knights in a single base, I also decided to paint them separately and only glue them to the base once they were done. This was also a pain as I needed to carefully add texture in each case making sure the underlying base was not visible. I did not manage to do it properly in all cases, but most of them.

Overall, I am quite satisfied with how the army looks, but I have to admit it took me much much longer than expected! My favourite miniature of the whole Army is of course the Green Knight which is incredibly well rendered in 10mm.

The Army is fully magnetized and fits in a single small metallic box for easy transport and storage.

Photos

Back in the day, I painted a full-scale Green Knight, and here is a comparison with the 10mm variant. I have to say that Forest Dragon has done an amazing job at capturing the original.

Don't talk to me or my son ever again

New project: Legions Imperialis

I am super excited to board the hype train of Legions Imperialis!

I have always loved the look of Epic Armies, in particular, the Titans, Super Heavy Tanks and Thunderhawks but I never had the chance to play it. I resisted the urge to buy a couple of Titans when Adeptus Titanicus was released but I could not really resist collecting this one. Of course this has an impact on my year objectives and the overall target of not accumulating miniatures if I have not painted everything, but hey, I will need to deal with it.

I have made a modest investment for now, that you can see in the picture below, but I already committed on buying another box of Infantry, a Warlord, a Reaver and Knights. They really look amazing and I can't wait to paint them.

Of course I will paint them as Sons of Horus and I will do my best to paint them "fast". For now I have only assembled the Rhinos and I must say I am honestly impressed by the quality and the amount of super tiny little pieces that I needed to stick together in order to assemble one.

Overall I am already loving it and can't wait to play my first game!

Nyarlathotep Challenge

After the great experience painting Dunwich earlier on the year, I decided to challenge my brother to a painting contest of another one of these busts. I gave him the chance to choose it, and he chose Nyarlathotep.

Although the challenge has not started yet, in preparation for winter time I have prepared and primed it already.

It was primed with a zenithal approach like it was done for Dunwich as it was very helpful for the lights and shadows. As you can see from the picture, we can already see much clearly the shape of the different muscles.

We plan to run a competition sometime in 2024 in the same way we did back in the day painting the Blood Bowl teams of the new edition. Hopefully I can post about it on the second half of the year.

Mini airbrush

Hello folks!

Since airbrush started to be popular a few years ago I always wanted to get one but limitations in terms of space, noise and other factors were an impediment that I could not overcome. Luckily for people like me, there are a few mini airbrushes out there in the market that are super easy to pack, cheap and not too loud that on the paper seem like a perfect fit. So the other day I finally decided to pull the trigger and buy one.

1. This model for 60€
2. Cleaning pot very similar to this one from my local hobby shop for about 18€
3. Vallejo Thinner for 7.5€
4. Vallejo Cleaner for 7.5€

For a total of less than 100€ I now had an airbrush that I could safely store and use and I could experiment with, that's great!

I am super noob in terms of airbrush, having used it only once before when a member of the ITGC Berlin  was kind enough to let me use his to basecoat a few tanks. Still, he did all the hard work (preparation, cleaning and mixing) and I just pressed the button!

Last weekend I finally found the time to pop it open and test it. I decided to basecoat a Leviathan Dreadnought and try out a bit of shading on a base. After all, how bad could I possibly screw that one up? You can be the judge.

My key learnings from the session where: super fast to set up and pack and not very loud to use. In less than 15 minutes I had my dread basecoated including one highlight! 

There are still lots of things to improve though. I  do not know how to control the flow properly, I need to figure out where to mix paint and thinner so that when I pour it into the cup it does not go all over the airbrush and lastly learn what is the process to change colour "fast". I used 4 colours and it was a bit messy the process to clean and change - any tips or hints are really appreciated!

But overall, I am super hyped with it as it fits exactly my requirements in terms of size and setup. I am now really looking forward to experiment a bit more and not only do basecoat.

After I was done I carefully disassembled it and put it back again, so that I learn better how to handle it. I am now really looking forward to my next painting session!

Armies on parade: Zombie hordes of Brácula

In the image you can see the cover of the the army book to play Undead for Warhammer Fantasy Battles published in 1994. From the moment I saw it for the first time, it really captured my imagination and since then I wanted to collect and play and undead horde!

I really did not have the energy for a 28mm scale undead army, but I knew I could tackle a 10mm project!

List building

If you check the army list you will see that undead have plenty of choices, but I decided to restrict mine to what I felt would be closer to the "classic" fantasy Vampires. That meant ghosts, zombies, skeletons, bats and wolves. After a few attempts using proxies I finally settled for the list that you see below, it is based around the idea of a giant horde of zombies resurrected by a Necromancer while a Vampire in a shiny armour leds the assault on top of some monster (could be a Dragon or a Black Pegasus).

The name of the General is "Brácula" which comes from a famous comedy movie from Spain (does not make any sense, I just find it funny).

My plan when painting this army was to get it quickly ready for battle. Due to the scale and how packed are the figures one next to each other, it is almost impossible to see them, aside from the first and last rank, therefore I decided not to dedicate much effort to them.

All units were painted using the same technique: base colours + agrax and a few highlights to make some stuff pop like blood in the zombies or skin in the bigger monsters. The colour palette was limited on purpose to get a cohesive feel but hopefully diverse enough to make it not look too boring.

Bases were a bit painful to make as first I needed to paint the ranks separately, then glue them onto the base, add texture to cover the tiny base included with the rank and finally paint it including in between ranks, with already fully painted ranks.

All miniatures are from Forest Dragon except for the Goreblights that are from Teremki Studio and the Zombie Trolls from Omnioji. The Vampire on Undead Pegasus was converted from one of my Bretonnian Army using head and sword from a vampire on foot.

From my original wishlist I am only missing the Wights because I have not yet found miniatures for them.

2 Regiments of Soul Reavers

2 Regiments of Deathpack

2 Regiments / 1 Horde of Zombies

2 Regiments / 1 Horde of Zombies

2 Regiments of Zombie Trolls

2 Regiments of Zombie Trolls

2 Regiments of Deathpack

Vampire Lord on Undead Pegasus

Vampire Lord on Undead Dragon

2 Goreblights

Vampire heroes

Vampire heroes

Necromancers

Army pic

Kings of War Proyect Kick-off

Last year I played a couple of games of Kings of War and I got aboard the hype train.

I have always wanted to play some small scale fantasy games, I have tried a few, including Warmaster, simply because I love how nicely the armies look like as an horde in the table, but I never found a rule system that I really liked. Up until now with KoW.

The fact that it is 10mm and not 28mm is great because it is just small enough so I won't feel bad about not painting all possible details. And also it helps increase the feeling of huge army vs skirmish.

I always wanted to play Undead and Bretonnia but never got around to do that due to the amount of time it takes to collect and paint a new Army, on average, it takes me 2.5 years to collect and paint a 28mm Army. Choosing them for this project was a no-brainer. In addition, they are natural enemies and they look amazing in the table, especially if you paint your zombies in the same livery colours as the Bretonnia, so that the Necromancers and Vampires are actually feeding on them!

Kings of War

It is a relative easy system that would feel familiar to many Warhammer players despite having key differences with it, that actually take time to master. I am still making many mistakes especially when moving or placing units ready to counter-attack thinking in "old fantasy" while I should be thinking on how combat is done in Kings of War.

Nevertheless, I really enjoy the fast and streamlined gameplay. On top of that, the basic rules are free, you can find them here. And you can also create your armies for free here, although only two lists without a paid subscription.

Important to mention that the rulebook assumes bigger scale (typically 28 or 32mm) so what we do is we just divide by two all measures, for example a unit with Speed 10" would mean 5". We play in a table that is half the size and you can transport a full Army in a tiny cookie box (eating the cookies first is an added benefit!).

If you are interested in this combination of KoW and 10mm check out the following links. Here is an introduction to the armies being collected by my local club and here is an article about one of the armies.

Miniatures

I browsed many different armies, catalogues and manufacturers until I settled for Forest Dragon, You can find the store here and the patreon here. I bought the STLs and asked a colleague from the Berlin Club to print them and another person to cut the MDF bases. To choose the list of figures that I wanted to print I created two 2300 points army lists that I could use as a base from where to expand in the future, and printed that.

I have followed the rule of cool to base the miniatures, and not necessarily sticking to the guidelines of the rulebook since at this scale it does not matter too much and the exact figure count does not matter for KoW. That is why you will see for example that each Regiment of Zombies have 24 zombies instead of 20. Each stripe contains 6 so I was not about to cut one from each :)

Without further ado, here are the two lists and pictures of the unpainted miniatures!

Vampires (Undead)

• Infantry
• 4 Regiments of Zombies
• 2 Regiments of Soul Reavers
• 2 Troops of Wraiths
• Swarm
• 2 Regiments of Deathpack
• Large Infantry
• 4 Regiments of Zombie Trolls
• 4 Regiments of Wights (not pictured below as I have not found miniatures for them yet)
• Heroes
• 1 Hero on Black Pegasus
• Dragon
• Monsters
• 2 Goreblights

Since I am adding a magnet sheet into each MDF base, I will be able to combine each 2 Regiments into 1 Horde if so desired, for example, for the Zombies. After printing I realized that the zombie trolls were too big for the scale as they are for 15mm and not 10mm, I should have scaled them down, they look like giants!

Bretonnia (Order of the Green Lady)

• Infantry
• 2 Regiments of Men-at-Arms
• Cavalry
• 2 Regiments of Order of the Brotherhood
• 2 Regiments of Order of Redemption
• Large Cavalry
• 2 Regiments of Order of the Forsaken (Pegasus)
• Hippogriff
• 2 Unicorns
• 2 Pegasus
• Lots of mounted characters

I made a few creative decisions with the miniatures as I really do not like the Beast of Nature style of figures but I want to use them in my Army, so I will have a few "count as" miniatures.

And just to round it all up, I also got a few terrain pieces printed that make the table look amazing. Need to build now a few forest and hill pieces to round it up, but that should be hopefully be easy.