Miniature painting for toddlers

Recently I have given in to my son's continued pleas to paint one of 'daddy's figures'. I was in doubt when to start indoctrinating introducing him to the hobby. I thought I'd wait until he was around five. Then a good friend from the local hobby club told me his (almost) three year old daughter started her first foray into the hobby. I couldn't resist handing my son a (very cheap) brush, an abandoned Space Marine and a choice of colors. This is the result.

When to get started on the painting and gaming hobby? As soon as you're able to hold a brush!

All praises to Nurgle, our grandfather of plagues, here are the Blight Kings

I have been meaning to build a chaos army for quite some time now. Having grown up with the Realm of Chaos books I know nothing offers quite as much opportunities for wild conversions and interesting riotous units.

What has delayed me for all this time was an inability to decide on my chosen power to worship. I have a few older metal models for Khorne, Slaanesh, Nurgle and Tzeentch. And as a temporary fix I painted up an old school pantheon a few years back:

The great four powers of Chaos band together to destroy La Maisontaal

Realmgate to the Garden of Nurgle

The local Warhammer store has asked me to build some extra terrain for the grand Games Workshop campaign this summer. I don't have a lot of information to go on other than that the campaign is set in Ghyran, the realm of life. I have been asked to build two Realmgates, one for Nurgle and one with a Sylvaneth team. I'll also be repainting (or re-using) some of the store's older terrain and I get to use a few brand new kits to hack to pieces. Always a nice bonus. For my first Realmgate I decided to go for Nurgle. Time being a bit short I used the Realmgate Wars Battle Tome for inspiration and then started building. I want this Realmgate to have a diseased theme (of course) and give it a completely corrupted by daemons look. You should not want to get near it. I started out with the old base of a Witchfate Tor. I made an MDF base and added a 4cm layer of polystyrene to get some extra height. The Realm Gate has to be imposing!

The work space looks relatively clean, it must be the start of a new project!

Chaos Dreadhold with huge Realmgate

I recently got a chance to work with a few of the Age of Sigmar scenery kits for the local gaming store. The request was to make something cool for an event. We chose a nice looking portal building from Age of Sigmar Balance of Power and I got to test a bunch of Chaos Dreadhold buildings, a Baleful Realmgate and a parts of the older Storm of Magic kits.

Let's start off with the end result:

Vampire Counts

Around Christmas 2015 I bought a big lot of second hand vampire counts stuff for a low price. As my second project for this year I've been painting a lot of it. Here is a quick impression of some of the models from the lot. Me being me, after the cheap first second hand batch I will be expanding with a number of newer kits to get a serious vampire vibe going for Age of Sigmar.

Banshees, Fell Bats, a few Black Knights and a Winged Vampire Lord

Orcs, orcs, orcs, orcs, orcs

I started the year (and ended last year) painting a lot of orcs, goblins, trolls and other models. I got all of these second hand or from a very old box out of storage. I should expand this army, and not everything I have is painted, but I got a bit tired of painting green, so maybe at a later point in time.

A Stone Troll 

Finished the Warhammer 40K jungle ruins

I finished the last buildings of my jungle temple. To start with I completed the building with the balcony. I angled one of the top walls to give the impression that the building is slowly collapsing.

Finishing the second building of the jungle ruin

So I managed to finish the second building of the complex. I also had some big leaves left from the aquarium plants I bought. I put these together on a small base. This is the complex so far:

Testing paint schemes on the jungle ruin

As I left off last time, I had glued together my jungle temple but I had not based it and I had no idea what colors I was going to use.

Basing terrain is simple and fun. I opted for my standard Ikea-sand on PVA (lots of rough sand, at a low price (in the grim darkness of the future they still have flatpack furniture etc.). A bit of sprue rubble on the sides of the buildings gives the impression of collapse and takes away the strange look of a straight wall ending in nothing at the side of the base.

On the bases itself (I use 6mm MDF for basing of terrain) I added some plastic tiles to give the impression of a floor long since corroded. I cut the plastic tiles from the remnants of a modular movement tray set.