Basing your miniatures for Age of Sigmar and Warhammer 40K

A nice base makes your miniatures look cool and can be used to tie your army together visually. Now you can hop over to GW and get some texture paint (and that is fine), but I prefer to go a bit further. I do this for three reasons:

1. It looks cool.
2. It gives me a chance to practice modelling.
3. It gives purpose to excess bits.

Not featured: Lord Harkon (excepting his feet).

The five horseman of the Tzeentchpocalypse

I hate painting cavalry. No clue what it is, but for some reason I'm always annoyed while painting cavalry models. These five Chaos Knights are excellent models and I love how they turned out, but even here I still hated every minute of painting them.

By the last breath of the fourth fifth winds blow....

The mysteries of a Realmgate await...

This Realmgate was lounging around in the bits box and in desperate need of assembling and painting. As my plan to play the first three Age of Sigmar missions requires a Realmgate (and feeling rather uncreative) I just assembled it according to the GW manual. I went for a paint job that will allow me to use the Realmgate beyond these three scenario's. As an aside, I did not think much of this piece of scenery when it was launched. But having assembled (converted) and painted a number of them, I'm warming up to it. It is a great centerpiece to fight over, can be used with some interesting rules to change a battle and it is great fun to paint.

Add some purple smoke...yeah that looks mystical enough. 

Enchanting death from above

This weekend I finished a Chaos Sorcerer Lord on Manticore. The regular Chaos Lord is still somewhere on my paint station, but I guess he'll just have to wait a bit.

I should not have called my Manticore Simba, now I dare not get off for fear of revenge.

Age of Sigmar Terrain: Blood geysers for the Brimstone Peninsula time of war

Last year I started planning new terrain projects based on the battles and time of war missions in the Age of Sigmar Realmgate Wars books. As my first project I picked the three opening missions of Mighty Battles... that take place on the Brimstone Peninsula in Aqshy. The realm of fire has been thoroughly corrupted by the influence of the blood god Khorne and battlefield on the Brimstone Peninsula feature geysers that spew boiling blood (queue Raining Blood by Slayer). The rules tell you to use six markers, numbered one through six and place these on the battlefield. At the start of each hero phase the player whose turn it is rolls a die and at the number he rolls blood spews forth and all units within 6" suffer D3 mortal wounds. To put this in the game, I decided I would make bloody geysers on a 6" radius MDF base with a move-able marker. The end result looks like this.

That's D3 mortal wounds for you mister!

Chaos Spawn join the warband

The Chaos Spawn kit may not be the shiniest and newest in de Games Workshop collection, it is a barrel of fun to glue. You get two basic bodies and enough spare bits to mutate an entire Chaos Army. As I had two of the Spawn kits on the plastic pile I decided to just have some fun with it and build two generic failed champions and two Tzeentch themed monsters.

I tried following a How to paint Seraphon Feathers for the feathers on the Spawn's arms, but I'm no Duncan. I ended up splashing some Agrax Earthshade on the stained mess and now I try not thinking about it too much.  

Mass painting Tzeentch's Warriors of Chaos

I have to admit that I don't really love the Warriors of Chaos kit. The poses are stiff and your choice in assembling them is very limited. You basically choose between two hand-weapons or a hand weapon and shield without getting a chance to modify individual warriors. As the models are rather dense (from a design point) it is not very easy or obvious to make big changes. On the plus side this does allow for some very serious painting speeds if you combine the airbrush with the paintbrush. This unit of twenty Chaos Warriors was assembled and painted over the course of my weekeind.

I am rather happy with the color and design of my freehand banner.