Reconstructive Surgery

Check it out! Actually hobby progress. How long has it been since I've posted that?

Don't answer that. It's a knowable thing and it's deeply embarrassing.

Anyway, as you can see, I'm working on getting all of the commanders sorted for my Lothlorien army. Sadly, for some reason, Games Workshop makes a highly limited selection of Lothlorien commanders. The resin Galadhrim commanders are all archers, even though Galadhrim companies can have spears, glaives, or bows (and, the gamist in me wants to point out, Galadhrim shooting pales in comparison with the prowess of the ordinary Sylvan irregulars in Galadriel's army and even if you did want to field Galadhrim archers, you probably aren't going to bother with banners or horns, since their effect is to make the unit faster - not something archers care about).

As far as the Wood Elf commanders, the kit from GW only comes with a banner bearer and a captain - no hornblower - and both of them have extremely bendy metal weapons that can be hard to straighten out.

The extra captains I need for my Galadhrim were easy to sort out: I just assembled one dude with no helmet and we'll call him a captain. The hornblowers needed a little more surgery to fit into their units, replacing the bow with a glaive or a spear, snipping off the quiver (you can still see part of it on the glaive-wielding hornblower's back, now representing a sheath - on the spear-elf, it's been whittled down and then obscured with the shield slung across his back) and resculpting the hair underneath. For my Wood Elf commanders, I simply replaced the banner pole with some brass rod, clipped off the banner bearer's bendy glaive and replaced it with one from the plastic kit, and robbed a Frostgrave sprue for a suitably neat sword for my Wood Elf captain. A bunch of Wood Elf sentinels, two of which have musical instruments, are on their way to provide me with an appropriately modeled hornblower.

Overall, I'm quite happy with these kits. They're quite distinctive and well made, even if the gear is limited! My next plan is to wait until the aforementioned Sylvan hornblowers and my movement trays come in before taking a big group photo and then getting priming.

And after the priming comes the painting!

There and Back Again

When I was but a little nerdling, the Lord of the Rings was one of my favorite things. My father - also a Tolkien buff - had a beautiful annotated and illustrated edition of The Hobbit, which I spent hours "reading" even before my skills were up to truly reading the book myself. When I finally did, it was a revelation. I had to sneak around in order to read The Fellowship of the Ring, which my father insisted I was too young for, though I suspect that my virulently anti-speculative-fiction mother had something to do with it.

Fast forward some more years. I continued to explore fantasy fiction in middle school and high school - I even tried my hand at writing some myself. I got to understand how the Lord of the Rings wasn't actually the pinnacle of literature, but it still had a very special place in my heart.

In my adult years I became estranged from my family. I'm not going to go into all the reasons right now, but we had intermittent contact and lots of conflict. Throughout it all, speculative fiction - especially fantasy, especially the Lord of the Rings - remained a touchstone for me and my father.

Last year, my father passed away very suddenly and unexpectedly. Since then, I've found myself dwelling more and more on Games Workshop's Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game. I spent a lot of time looking at the models online, reading about the game, and generally obsessing. I'd never had any interest in the game before.

Any that's how...

happened.

And of course, a few more things happened, such as...

and...

This it Litko, if you can't tell

because I'm not the kind of guy who gets his ducks all in a row before pulling the trigger.

If you're familiar with LotRSBG you may notice a couple of oddities:

1. I've bought two command teams.
2. I've bought movement trays.

If you aren't familiar with LotRSBG you might not know why those are oddities. LotRSBG is currently pretty much exclusively a skirmish game. Games Workshop isn't supporting the mass combat version anymore: the rules aren't available, they don't sell movement trays, etc.

For me, however, the Lord of the Rings is inextricably linked to huge battles, so I'm going to give the mass battle game a shot. I've read the rules - I got them for $10 from an online used book seller - and I think they've got a lot to recommend them.

In comparison with WHFB, it's a lot cleaner. Bases of guys (always eight, makes it a lot easier to acquire the right movement trays) operate as models, with the individual models acting more or less as wound markers. You don't have to count up individual guys or noodle around with the width by depth of a block of troops - it's completely obvious. Heroes don't hang out on separate bases - when they join a unit, they displace one of the troopers, who simply reappears when the hero runs over to another unit. I've heard that there are balance issues, but I'm confident that the gamers in my area can work out some house rules to plug any holes we find.

And, of course, I'm not adverse to playing the occasional skirmish!

So that's a new thing I'll be doing. I'll be sure to post pictures when I make some progress.

Five Billion Thin Coats

I have heard it said that red is a hard color to paint. With my Adeptus Mechanicus army, this difficulty is combined with the fact that cloth is also hard to paint. Over the course of the last year, however, I think I've finally created a method that gets me pretty good results, so I figure I'll share it with you.

Step One: Zenithal Highlighting

 

Shown here with the basecoat on, but you can get the picture. Zenithal highlighting means taking a model, priming it with a dark color, then adding a lighter color from the top. When you apply the semi-translucent basecoat, some of the light shines through, giving you a little boost when you start laying down the lighter layers later.

I believe that this technique is sometimes called "undercoating."

Step Two: Basecoat and Shade

No picture here, because who doesn't know how to put down a basecoat and slop a wash on it? For my dudes, I'm using Citadel's Khorne Red and shading it with Carroburgh Crimson. Make sure to think out the Khorne Red a little so its semi-opaque, otherwise the zenithal highlighting will have been a waste of time.

Step Three: Thin Coats

The next thing I do is many thin coats of Wazzdaka Red.

Many thin coats.

So many thin coats.

More thin coats than you thought humanly possible.

Normally, I'd use the coats on edges and upper surfaces, but because of the shape of these coats, I like to alternate between thin edge highlights and thin, almost wash-level applications over pretty much the entire surface. The way thin paint tends to pool on these coats reinforces, rather than washing out, the way light would pool on the flared bottoms of the coats and has the added benefit of smoothing the transition between the different levels of light - cloth has notoriously smooth transitions, which is part of what makes it harder to paint than armor plates.

It will take many thin coats to achieve this effect. Put on a podcast, have a couple of other projects on hand to work on while they dry, and be ready to add layers over the course of several days.

Step Four: Edge Highlight

The last thing you want to do is add some edge highlighting to make the folds of cloth really pop.

I think he looks pretty good, if I do say so myself!

Airbrush or Hairbrush?

The last thing I should do is admit that I am a recalcitrant weirdo. A lot of people have told me that it's easier to get this effect with an airbrush, to which I say... so?

Personally, airbrushes aren't ideal for me for a variety of reasons: my wife has asthma so I would have to be scrupulous about setting up an (expensive) ventilation system, I tend to paint in little spurts rather than sitting down for a long time, and airbrushes rely on numerous finicky and breakable components, which just plain irritates the hell out of me.

And of course, I think I've gotten pretty good with the conventional brush. You'll have to be the one to judge.

Action Shot!

A gaming buddy of mine got a great shot of my minis in action during Game Two of our FLGS's Kill Team campaign. Here are two of my Skitarii rangers sniping out my opponent's Astartes scouts.

I am really enjoying a) Kill Team and b) the Adeptus Mechanicus. They've got a good combination of gonzo special rules that make them fun to play and models that are both neat and gribbly in ways that make them fun to paint and convert.

Perhaps it makes me a bad person, but it doesn't hurt any that I am tearing it up in Kill Team. In the game pictured, I ended up losing two guys and killing most of my opponent's models. Any faction that relies on melee, multiple wound models, or 24'' or shorter range guns is going to really struggle against Adeptus Mechanicus 6+ bonuses, 30'' range basic rifle, and other nastiness.

But most importantly, I'm glad to finally get a picture of some finished models up on this blog, even if it's just a pair of lowly Skitarii rangers.

A Little Wednesday WIP

Let's have a little fun with some works in progress.

I am really proud of this dude, though I can't claim credit for the original idea, which I stole off someone on Facebook. The base model is a rotbringer sorcerer. As you can see, I've sliced off his head and right arm, replacing them with the head of a ruststalker princeps and a tech-priest dominus, respectively. I filed down the buboes on his tummy and generally reshaped his torso to make him look fat rather than bulbous (and stuck a purity seal on one spot I couldn't get quite right), hacked off his elephantine foot and replaced it with some spindly mechanical claws, and gave him a backpack from (I think) the kataphron kit [NOTE: not the kataphron kit, the ruststalker kit], a claw that's definitely from the kataphron kit, and the niftiest servo-skull, the one from the tempestus scion box. I also had to chop off the weirdo tentacle he had for a left arm and tuck some claws in there to hold the scrolls he's carrying. You can't see it, but I also had t do some greenstuffing on the back to fill in the vario//us evil symbols carved into his cloak.

When I look at this dude, I imagine that he's some kind of specialist tech-priest, not a tech-priest dominus or an engineseer or a or anything else currently in the game. He could be a magos biologis, here to study some xenos dudes, a transmechanic carrying important information, or an explorator with forbidden lore. Of course, I'd have to write some stats to use him on the table, though I could also use him as an objective marker for a rescue-the-prisoner kind of game.

This dude was originally a titan tech-priest. Most of his conversions began as matters of necessity. Resin is a great material, but it's fragile and bendy. Forge World's sculpts are great, but sometimes they scale weirdly when compared to GW prime models. When I got my titan tech-priest, he suffered from both problems, with a warped axe-head and a spindly servo-arm that I eventually got sick of trying to get right. So, I went into my bits box and got some replacements - and as a bonus, I got to customize the model some! The new axe head is from the tech-priest dominus box, as is one of his two loyal servo-skulls. The two servo arms - one big and clawed, one small for delicate work - are both from the kataphron kit as well.

My plan is to use this guy as an engineseer. However, I think the model is so neat that I also have plans to occasionally use him as an inquisitor. Inquisitors can come to the Ordos from all sorts of backgrounds, so why not a former tech-priest?

Of course, that makes me think about getting some Imperial Guard bodies and using spare Skitarii bits to make them into a crew of enhanced lasgun-toting acolytes... but that's a project for another day, especially given that the Skitarii I already have will do quite well as proxies for acolytes with hotshot lasguns or plasma guns, thank you very much. So long as I don't want to use him alongside my Adeptus Mechanicus army, anyway.

Thanks for coming to look at my models! Don't hesitate to drop me a comment and let me know kinds of content you want to see more of.

Only the Tiny Plastic Dead Have Seen the End of Tiny Plastic War

A long time ago, I started a Tumblr. I called it "Tiny Plastic Dead," as in "only the tiny plastic dead have seen the end of tiny plastic war." That's a riff off a quote from the Spanish-American essayist George Santayana - not Plato as it's sometimes thought - and although it's damn depressing, it's also got some poetry that I have always enjoyed

Fast forward about a decade. Tiny Plastic Dead has become much more of a catch-all Tumblr that I use to argue about politics, but I'd still kind of like to post some pictures of models. What's a guy to do? Start a new blog.

What are you likely to see up here?

Warhammer 40k

I play Adeptus Mechanicus (Forge World Lucius), Imperial Knights (House Ohrlacc), Space Marines (Exorcists chapter), and Inquisition. Also inside the world of Warhammer 40k, I've got a huge pile of unpainted Escher, some old, OLD school Battlefleet Gothic models, and I'm going to get into Titanicus one of these days.

Warhammer Age of Sigmar

I love the entire Death faction, especially ghosts and skeletons, but also vampires and ghouls. I've also got some Stormcast kicking around who I'm going to paint up as Anvils of the Heldenhammer.

Dropthing

I have a bunch of Shaltari stuff. I've always enjoyed the space hedgehogs and their evil tricksiness. Dropzone and Dropfleet Commander appear to have some life in them, and I'm eager to see what comes next.

Dungeons & Dragons

I don't get to play as much D&D as I'd like, but I love to paint D&D minis. My painting time is usually pretty swamped by wargaming minis, but I get the occasional adventurer or monster painted up, and I'll post them here when I do!

If you're interested in pictures of minis, WIP shots, discussion of painting techniques, battle reports, and other random brain droppings related to these games, this is the place to be. And if not, get the hell out of here.