Swooper

Herdstone done! Not much more to say about it than what I already have, so I'll just get on with the pictures. Already the next models are on my painting table, this time something I've been looking forward to painting for a while: Dragon ogres! Here's a WIP shot of the first one, showing skin tones pre-highlighting: After agonising over it for the past few weeks, the colours I ended up with are: Stegadon Scale Green for the draconic skin Thunderhawk Blue for the underbelly Dark Reaper for the scales on his back (nearly indistinguishable from Stegadon, but whatever) All of the above washed with Coelia Greenshade, then a layer of Nuln Oil around the scales and any horns on the back to darken them further. The ogre skin is (wet)blended from Stegadon Scale Green on his back, through Thunderhawk Blue on his sides, arms and shoulders, to Rakarth Flesh on his face, chest and hands, with Naggaroth Night blended into the shadows. Thinned layer of Druchii Violet on the fleshy parts, thinned Coelia Greenshade on the intermediate areas. I didn't do any sort of shadow blending on the lower body, am considering whether to go back and do that or just let the highlights be enough. Probably not purple, at least. Blue maybe? We'll see. I'm very pleased with how the torso is turning out, I was worried it might end up sort of dull but I can see now that won't happen. Adding purple into the mix was a really good decision, I think. The skin will end up a lot less purple than it currently is, by the way, once I'm done highlighting. Oh, and as a final point of interest, the leather loincloth there is done with the new Word Bearers Red, with Gal Vorbak Red in the shadows. I was sort of surprised how different these two were, Word Bearers Red is a very orangeish red colour, close to something like Squig Orange really, while Gal Vorbak is much more on the purple side of the spectrum, almost wine red. I assumed they were supposed to go together as base a base and a highlight, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Edit: That part about Gal Vorbak Red was wrong, I must have accidentally confused the bottle for Barak-Nar Burgundy! My bad. Gal Vorbak is a nice, saturated orangeish red, a little darker than Word Bearers so those two work nicely together, as I originally thought. I really like this tone of red, and will probably look for opportunities to use it more in the future!

I like the blue one a lot more than the purples and oranges (which appear very washed out and dull if I'm completely honest), although it needs a little something. Fade to white (or black?) at the edges, and a bright ghostly green on the skin maybe?

Excellent, welcome to the herd! I will be watching this with interest. Your beastlord is very impressive!

Most BoC players will leave a shaman and an ungor unit at the herdstone, kill them to deny most of our summoning points. Deploy to deny ambush units easy access to your backline (ambushing units have to set up within 6" of board edge, 9" or more from enemy units - same with summoned units). Try to get the charge on bestigors, they gain an extra attack if they get to charge. Gavespawn players will have a single beastlord with the Mutating Gnarlblade artifact, he's actually deceptively deadly (6 attacks at 3+/3+/-1/3 with some rerolls in the mix). Kill him before he assassinates one of your heroes. He'll probably turn into a chaos spawn when he dies, like all Gavespawn heroes. Spawns are the focus for the Gavespawn command ability which gives a nearby unit an extra attack. Kill the spawns so they can't use that buff. Our monsters may look scary, but they're actually made of papier-mâché. They have somewhere between 8 and 14 wounds but only 5+ or 6+ saves, they go down pretty easily. Most of them also deflate significantly after moderate damage.

Been making progress with my herdstone, thought I'd share it! Still pretty early as I haven't even basecoated everything, but it's starting to take shape. I picked up several of the new base and layer colours on Saturday, and have put a few of them to use on this project already. The stoneis painted with Corvus Black, which I discovered to be disappointingly light instead of the off-black I was hoping for. Took two layers of Nuln Oil and one of an Abaddon Black glaze (~40:60 with Lahmian Medium) to get it as dark as I wanted it. You'll notice the base is a bit lighter and matter, that's because I haven't applied the black glaze there. Will need to carefully reapply some drybrushing and/or edge highlights after the glaze, as well. The chains and a lot of the weapons on the base are done with Iron Warriors, which is just fantastic. Finally a proper gunmetal colour from GW, I can stop mixing Abaddon Black into my Leadbelcher now! I tried using Death Corps Drab as a shadow colour for both the wood and the bone, which kind of works but it's not really dark enough for that. Needed a drop of Dryad Bark in there as well, which I was hoping to avoid. The main bother with painting this model is deciding on colours for all the weapons and stuff scattered all around it! For much of it I've gone for very neutral colours, but I couldn't resist using the red-jade-and-bronze colour scheme of my Stormcast side project! Sadly, pretty much none of my friends play any of the armies represented in the loot pile, or I'd use their colours... The fire is going to be my orange-to-purple sorcerous fire colour, with some OSL of course. I've started laying the groundwork for that by highlighting away from the fire. Anyway, that's it for now, I'll chime back in once the herdstone is done! Edit: I just noticed my cat Mikki is photobombing in the upper right corner there! 😄

Very nice griffon conversion, the HE Warden wings totally work on this gryph charger!

Oh hey, I remember seeing some of these very distinctive hooded elves a while ago, probably on reddit. Glad to see you're back on track, will be keeping an eye on this!

I recently painted up a D&D character of mine, converted out of mainly the Steelheart model for Warhammer Underworlds. His helmet got swapped in from the Marauder Horsemen kit and the wings are from the Reaper Dragonman Conversion Kit. He's an 18th level half-dragon gestalt crusader//dragon shaman, for those of you familiar with D&D 3.5! His armour and sword both have a slight green tinge, done with Coelia Greenshade, because both are made of adamantine and I wanted to distinguish that from regular steel. It's actually more visible in these photos than to the naked eye. Also, notice the reflections of the plume on his chestplate and helmet, and the white cloth on the sword. I'm quite proud of those, even if they're not perfect. I think this might be the first time I paint pupils in eyes. I don't work a lot with human faces usually... The wings are painted by mixing true metallic gold paint into browns and yellows, to represent the weirdly hybrid organic/metallic nature of his gold dragon ancestry. Unlike the green tint to the armour, the metallic shine of the wings is more visible to the naked eye.

Finished those ungors, finally! Whose insane idea was it to do OSL on rank-and-file ungors!? Oh, that's right, mine. I've done OSL a few times before, and I've always done it as an after effect, after highlighting the model "normally" i.e. lit from above. This time I kept the light source in mind the entire time I was painting the models, highlighting from that direction. The actual OSL work was then just a couple of layers of Troll Slayer Orange glaze as most of the effort was already done. I much prefer this method, don't know why this didn't occur to me before. Also the first time I do OSL that stretches across three separate models! To be fair, I've never done OSL on anything except solo models either. The one in the middle is the one with greenstuffed horns, I'm pleased with how it turned out in the end. Managed to hide any roughness from the sculpting with the paint. Although he still has no ears, for the chaos gods are fickle with their gifts. I did rust effects on this unit, most clearly visible on this picture. Should I add rust to my gors as well? I'm uncertain. It does add a lot of visual interest to the metal, but I am also a bit of the opinion that once a model is done, it is DONE and shouldn't be altered. Anyway, after a quick palate (and palette) cleanser of some Wildlands board game minis (I did base coats and washes on a team of five models in a couple of hours while the texture paint on the ungors was drying) I am planning to tackle the herdstone next! The plastic GW one, not the custom WIP converted one, not just yet...

I will be very sad if there will be no Skaven releases in 2020, the Year of the Rat.

No issues with small bases in close proximity? My friend magnetises all of his bases, and says his 25mm ones tend to push/pull on each other when piled in tightly.

Bits&Kits sells them separately. The popular ones tend to sell out, but they restock two or three of times every month.

Looking forward to seeing more pictures!

Halfway through painting some ungors, I got the urge to assemble my (first) shaggoth. I was always planning to do a weapon swap on him to match the dragon ogres better (never liked the shaggoth's axe), but a member of the Beasts of Chaos facebook group inspired me with his conversion to add some special effects as well! A Geminid orb gave its life for this conversion. I wanted to use Warp Lightning Vortex (mostly to distinguish my conversion more from the other guy's), but it's been sold out on the only bits site that sells endless spells for months so I gave up and used the Geminid instead. Inspiration struck while I was pondering how to pose the lightning, so instead of having him sort of catching a lightning from above, I had it arcing from his hand to the glaive. That way it's like he's casting Sundering Blades, which is perfect! The base is incomplete, waiting for some bits that might or might not find their way onto it. Ungors standing in the background, impatient for me to start highlighting them. Soon, little goats, soon. I had to file down the studs on his leather scraps, because they were miscast. Tried salvaging them with greenstuff, but couldn't do it. Might need to add a tiiiny bit of greenstuff where the bulk of the lightning hits the blade. Right, back to painting those ungors...

I grabbed a box of Chaos Spawns at the FLGS this week. Gavespawn seems to be the strongest greatfray, and to at least have the option of sometimes playing that I need some spawns. And boy is this kit amazing! It has fifteen head options for two bodies (most of them cool), loads of interchangeable parts (the arm and head sockets are the same size), fully posable ball socket joins... and at the same time I hate it a little bit because the number of ways it could be assembled is just overwhelming. It took me four sessions over three days just to overcome my indecisiveness and finish assembling the two spawns! I went for shapes that could conceivably have mutated from beastmen as a theme, with mostly horns, spines and hands along with a healthy number of tentacles. I guess I'll do the more daemonic options later, because I'm sure I'll pick up at least one more box of these things (I reckon I'll need at least four or five spawns available for a 2000p Gavespawn list), and I also have ideas about a custom built one... Another flaw of this kit are the gaps. I don't think any kit I've seen has gaps this bad, and I've seen the easy-build Stormcast pauldrons. Fortunately, spawns are very easy to greenstuff as their shape is sort of... freeform. All the greenstuff you see on the picture is just gapfilling. Anyway, that's all I have for now, not a very exciting update but I'll be starting a batch of ten ungors tomorrow featuring torchlight OSL, hopefully I'll be able to have them done in two weeks or so.

Beasts of Chaos, but I don't actually play, I just paint and convert for now.

So uhm, shouldn't this be in the Chaos forum?

Looks like Reikland Fleshshade rather than Seraphim Sepia to me.

Finished a batch of ten bestigors yesterday! Or, well, nine bestigors and the Wargor Standard Bearer I converted, which is probably always going to be a bestigor standard bearer anyway. I painted them in a batch of ten, and it didn't go too slowly. I think I'll switch to batches around that size from now on, should get the rest of the rank and file ready a bit faster. I didn't give them all the same skin colour though - three got the standard Rhinox Hide treatment, four got Dryad Bark and the remaining three got a new tone, similar method as the fur on the Ghorgon (Dryad Bark, shaded with Abaddon Black, washed with Nuln Oil, layered with Stormvermin Fur, this time with fine highlights of Karak Stone). Really like how it came out, if I had known this method when I was making colour tests a year and a half ago I might have ended up with an Ulgu darkwalker herd... I've been using Runefang Steel as my (edge) highlight colour for steel, but I recently gave up on it and got Stormhost Silver instead. The ghorgon was the first model I tried it on, but there's not a lot of steel on it so it didn't make a huge difference, but on these guys it's really visible, and what a difference! Their weapons look much sharper and their armour is shinier than anything I've painted before! I don't think it's coming through very well on these pictures, but in person it's like night and day. I really recommend Stormhost Silver! The five bestigors I had painted previously had almost no bronze on them, but as I had discovered this new method for verdigris recently I wanted to use it more, so I gave them all bronze girdles. I could have painted the banner with my regular yellowish leather colour, but I wanted something slightly different, darker and redder. I ended up with Rhinox Hide, wetblended with Khorne Red for the midtone and Doombull Brown for the highlights. It gave me this kind of interesting burgundy colour, which I'm very happy with. Contrasts really well with the blue. I kept the yellow leather on the other side of the banner, though. Here's the musician I converted recently. These three got the new skin colour. It reads kind of like a dirty black, I think. Might try it on some gors to get a better feel for it, there's not exactly a lot of skin showing on these guys. That's it for now! Next on my painting table is a D&D character (converted from Steelheart, from WHU) which I'll probably post on my side project thread when it's done. I'm actually not sure what I'll paint next for my army... The herdstone? Ungors? Dragon ogres? Who knows, stay tuned to find out!

Vince Venturella was at the seminar and took notes. I've linked into the place in the video where he starts talking about the paint: The important detail is that you don't need any special primer for it, should be perfect for a zenithal undercoat. I'm looking forward to trying the new paint, but I won't use it on my BoC army for consistency reasons. Probably a nice tool to have, doubt it will revolutionise my painting style. We'll see.

Regarding the Pitched Battle Profiles booklet, I don't think anyone has mentioned this in here: It will be sold as part of the GHB and not separately, it's just to make that part of it more easily portable and so that the GHB2019 itself remains more "timeless" after subsequent ones come out.

According to Vince Vinturella (see the review video above), it's AT LEAST one tome per GA this year, not only one per GA.

The chaos tome could be Tzeentch.

Pretty sure that was @Melcavuk. -- I really love the snake cultist models (that makes two warbands that will be autobuy for me along with the beastie boys), but I was really hoping they'd actually tell us more about how Warcry plays. They still haven't told us ANYTHING about the gameplay except that it's apparently a skirmish game.

Do we know if Contrast paint requires a special primer (the "Wraithbone Contrast Undercoat" spray can shown) or if it will work with regular primer?