Dark Elf Spearmen

It may come as a surprise, but yes, I still do collect my Dark Elves.  They are still the only actual army I own, now excepting the Infinity Yu-Jing bunch, but I count them as more of a strike team than an army...

This is a unit that I actually built almost a year ago now, but only to 66% completion.  I finished the highlights for the blue armour and the skin, the highlights and insignia on the shields as well as the gold-ish pieces of bling and the bases in the last couple of days.  My next port of call with the Druchii would be to either finish off some characters that need finishing, or to begin the labourious task of repairing my badly chipped Black Guard regiment.  I'm either going to need a battlefoam-esque contraption to carry them or I need to varnish them thoroughly, the first's expensive and the second's undesirable.  Unless I bother tracking down the good matt varnish I saw promoted on some forums...

There's an Infinity hacker ninja in the works too, but there are still a lot of hard-to-reach pockets of metal visible on the model, so it's gonna need a bit of touching up before it gets uploaded.

That's it for naow.  Happy dice-rolling!

Black Dragon with Dreadlady finally finito.

As some of you may recall, I began a painting a Dark Elf Black Dragon from GW's Summer 'Storm of Magic' Expansion push.  Frankly, I believe that the entire shablang is a push in the wrong direction from Gw's marketing side, instead of creating new games they're trying to push people to play their existing games on a larger scale, which I think makes it much harder for new gamers to get into the hobby.  Dreadfleet is a push in the right direction in this regard, it's a pity that it apparently sucks.  But as a Druchii player, the option of finally owning a Dreadlord on a Black Dragon was simply too tasty to pass, so here I am.  It could have been a Sorceress of course, but I compromised by making a female Dreadlord by using one of the Sorceress heads.  Technically they do exist in Druchii society, even though in times of peace, the female highborn Dark Elves are expected to plot against their husbands' enemies and poison rivals and so on.  Looks like this one didn't fancy it...  Enough talk, now pics!

I am sorry that this took so long, I am an extremely whimsical person who often follows his urges instead of his brains, and sometimes I don't feel like painting, sometimes I do.  With this finished and out of the way, we'll see what I'll do next.

That's all folks!

Frontline Gamer: the Imperium of Man as a metaphor for Games Workshop.

Blogging will be sparse these days as I am constantly distracted by Space Marine's fantastic multiplayer and unimportant things like job-hunting, but also because my paint station isn't the most convenient here at home:

It's a tad cramped, is what I'm saying, and no room to set up my laptop to watch the Thundercats reboot while I apply bloodstains to my Druchii.

So, I'm compromising a bit, by resorting to plagiarism.  Well, not really, but kinda.  I recently came along a fantastic article about the current state of Games Workshop, which can be read here.  It compares GW to the Imperium of man; massive, dogmatic and fanatical, beset on all sides by heretics and aliens (both old and new) and decaying away.  I thought it was a well thought out and provoking extended metaphor/theory/argument, and I'd urge you all to take a peek at the very least.  Just pop over to see what the fuss is, in a way.

That's all for now folks.

Upcoming Hiatus and Greg.

This will be the last post from me for a few weeks you'll be glad/sorry (delete as appropriate) to hear, as I shall be going to France on holidays.  This is mostly for my parents, who have been stressed out with work and Grandma having psychiatric-related problems, and me and my brother are going with them because they're paying.  So, I won't be back until the second week of August, when I will begin searching for employment in earnest.


For now though, I'll give you a few pictures of how my Black Dragon, Greg (yes, I'm sticking with that name) is getting along.

 
 Slow going, I admit, but only because I haven't painted flesh in yonks.  I'm too used to painting sharp, angular models, like armour-clad elves and marines, give me something with organic limbs and I get lost.

  I also had a change of heart with the colour scheme.  The scheme for my Druchii is to have dark blue as the main colour, with red and gold to balance it.  Essentially, the Night Lords colour scheme.  First, I thought of making it a darker-hued version of my Hydra:

 But me being weak to the lures of adhering to army backgrounds, couldn't quite face the idea of painting a Black Dragon any colour other than black (I know, I'm pathetic) so in the end, I've decided to paint it properly black, with the spines and the wing membranes red, and then the blue will be provided by the Dreadlord and some warpaint/tattoos/markings on the dragon itself.  The gold bits are essentially the same on both Hydra and Dragon of course.

  I was also going to mount him on a grey sand/snow base like the rest of my merry killers, but my brother mentioned that it would be cool if it was 'a rock in the sea' kind of thing, and I was so mindblown by the image that popped into my head that I immediately sculpted the sand I had already laid down with a lot of PVA glue into something resembling cresting waves.

Ta-dah...

I then laid down several coats of PVA to smooth it out, bombarded the base (strategically) with paints and washes, beginning with Dark Angels Green, moving to blues and Space Wolf Grey, and occasionally drenching it in Thraka Green and Asurmen Blue washes, and then I put the white on.  Then, 'Ardcoat Gloss Varnish.  I put it on the rock as well, to show that the rock would also be drenched in water.  Logically, part of the tail and the dead tree should be drenched as well, but I'm not sure how far up I should go.
      I'm also a little concerned about the base out-doing the model with its shininess.  Almost considering glossing the dragon completely, to achieve a shiny black scale look, but I'd logically have to gloss the Dreadlord as well then, and I think that might be a little bit too much. 

      But those problems are problems for tomorrow.  Hope you all have a fantastic summer wherever you are, happy gaming, painting and modelling.