Painting the backlog: Necron Barbie, Diehard Orc and Dwarf, Dwarf Thunderers, Skaven Stormfiends and Skaven Doom-Flayer

 Recently I had a bit of a painting fugue, grabbing models from my Window Sill of Shame and just finishing the bastards. The result is a lot of joy (I finally added paint to the bastards) and a conundrum: how do I blog about painting the bastards. I decided to just throw them together in what will undoubtably be a completely disjointed blog post. Enjoy dear readers ;). Lets fire this one off with the Necron Barbie.

We can do anything, right Flayed One?

When GW announced it had joined forces with McFarlane toys to make action figures my thought was 'Isn't that the guy who draws gigantic feet on superheroes?' I guess I'm not up-to-date on modern collectible toy lines. Seeing the figures I had to own at least a few of them. So far I've gotten one obligatory Space Marine and a Sister of Battle. What I lacked was the guts to paint these. The I saw this Necron as a fresh release and thought 'everyone can do a Necron justice, it will be nice practice'. So I had a lot of fun painting him. As its a Flayed One to boot I could go wild on bloodsplatters too. 

I wanted to add some reference to King Kong here, but 'It was beauty that killed the beast,' doesn't quite work. I'm open to suggestions!

For those of you wondering what I'm rambling on about. Here's the model surrounded by Aeronautica planes. This is a line of toys about on size with Barbie (by Mattel!). Now all I need is to pick up a  Barbie Dream Tome Convertible second hand and convert it to be the vehicle for my Marine and the Sister of Battle. All stupid joking aside. The detail on these models is awesome and I'm honestly overjoyed they area released in paintable grey plastic so lunatics like me can take the collectibles out of their box and actually paint them. 

Oh dear, it is at this point that I spot forgotten eyes. They'll be back on the paint station at some point.

Moving on, I had this unit of twenty Dwarf Thunderers sitting in the mass painting area of my station, just as I was starting to get a bit tired of painting beards. I've forced myself to add blue to their sleeves, give some extra care to the beards and basically just finish them. My small force of Dwarves now has plenty of extra firepower against the glorious future day they'll actually take the field. 

The 'chilling while deciding whom I'll kill next'-pose is just awesome.

Next up is another Dwarf. This wonderful sculpt is one by Diehard Miniatures. I decided to call him the 'Black Prince of Karak-Wales'. If he ever finds himself outnumbered and with his back to the river at a battlefield that sounds a lot like Poitiers, he should do just fine. 

I think I'm getting better at highlighting capes.

I had a lot of fun going to extremes to make his yellow cape stand out. I also worked very hard on getting the grey highlights to the black armour to look okay. I'm still not entirely there yet. Perhaps someday in the future. In the meantime: painted is painted. 

This Orc - for a reason I can't quite figure out - was very difficult to paint properly. 

This Orc is also by Diehard with a wonderful not to the classic orc faces of the late eighties, early nineties. This was a surprisingly tough model to paint (and I'm not fully satisfied with him). After three trips through the dip I tried a very light green skin color on him (a test for my Kruleboyz as I was getting them ready to paint). I started with a Nurgling Green base color and built up to white, using a green glaze to get hum looking a bit greener and a green wash to get some extra shadows going. It was a lot of work and still not quite where I wanted to be, so I decided on another technique for the actual Kruleboyz.

Finally after all these years, I've painted three more Stormfiends. Now if only the rules had outlived their wait on the paint station's edge. 

I think I bought and converted these Skaven Stormfiends somewhere in 2018 (before the rules stopped you from picking your own weapons for the unit). This unit, together with Thorgrim Gudgebearer, the Warpgnaw Verminlord and the Zombie Dragon and Terrorgheist are large and therefore stood out as special shame-inducing eyesores on my Window Sill of Shame. They had their basic skin tones set for years. I finally sat down, painted the metallic parts, upgrade the skin tones and went wild with a few contrast paints to differentiate between metal bits to finish them. 

Don't worry too much, I'll be using them on the tabletop regardless of rules. 

To be honest, once you've got the skin tones set properly globbing on metalics adding fur bits and reds is not quite as much work as you'd think. Once the warpstone is set on Skaven it attracts all the attention away from your lazy painting style anyway. At least, I hope it does... No matter if that is true or not, I can finally properly add them to my Skaven collection  and slam them down on a table without 'grey shame' in the future. If only the rules had held up...

This model has been bouncing around different piles of shame for so long, the knives at the front actually broke off and had to be replaced with spare bits. *Insert shame-lady from Game of Thrones here*

Way back in May 2017 I decided to give myself two Doom-Flayers for my birthday. One Doom-Flayer because I wanted to try and keep my Skaven collection as complete as possible. The second for reasons I still can't quite explain. This became extra painful as I painted the first of these machines within weeks of receiving the model while the second one lingered on the Windows Sill (and in the cupboard) for half a decade. No more! I finally just slapped paint on the bloody thing and although I see bits that could be better, I'll call it finished and move on.

Its actually quite a pity that this gem of a model hasn't gotten more love from Games Workshop over the course of its existence (as far as I can tell it was released in 2010). I can tell from experience its wonderfully underwhelming (if it actually manages to reach the enemy). 

I've actually ran armies with my single painted Doom-Flayer in the past. Experienced opponents tend to react to it by saying somethin in the line of: 'What on earth is that? Is that an official GW model?' You know you have a lethal unit on your hands when its never, ever used. Ah rats, its one of the most useless warmachines in the Skaven arsenal. A mail order only finecast model with a rather stiff pricetag. And I've got two! I'm not entirely sure why this gives me so much joy, but I'll think I'll field both when I next have the chance. Just because I can (now let me tell you about the ten painted Poisoned Wind Globadiers/Skryre Acolytes I never use). With that last bit of rambling I'll wrap up this 'I also painted that post'.

I love these two sinister models and I can't figure out why the skin tones photograph so roughly. I also badly want to make a 'what do you want to do with your life?' joke, but I don't have the space... 

Oh no, wait. I also painted the Twisted Sisters by Diehard. I had a blast painting these two space rogues....rogue traders? Although for a long while I wondered about the wisdom of giving two rogues white armour. The solution hid in a dirty wash. One of the minus sides of this story is the skin color. I think it looks quite god in real life, but it photographs terribly. I know, sounds like an awful excuse, but I find that once in every while a nice paint job just doesn't look good at all when you shoot a photo of it. No idea what's causing it, but there it is. 

To be very honest, the Diehard models have not sat in my window sill for that long, they where just in easy reach during this paint fugue.  

Let's finish this post with the back of these two. Symbolically showing that I've seen the back off a number of models that were sitting on my Window Sill of Shame. I probably could paint some of them to a higher standard, but I'm actually quite chuffed just to have painted them at all. Especially the Stormfiends. Let me call those out again to remind myself not to leave large models out on the Window Sill too log, they draw too much attention (and getting the dust of before continuing a multiple years old paint job is a lot more work on these too).