My Converted Viking Skirmishers

Well, I was looking for a good reason to use up all of these Warlord Games Barbarians.    This seemed as good a reason as any, Viking Skirmishers.



This is the first of two units.  While modeling them I thought I should give some of them beards, fairly easy to do with the heads that already had mustaches.  Also added some long hair, furs, left over knives and pouches from the Gripping Beast kits, and pony tails.  Some of them look like younglings.  Scale wise they are very close to the same size as GBP models.

Viking Test Model in WIP Paint Form

Well started painting a test figure for my Vikings.  This is one of the metal models from Gripping Beast.  It is still a work in progress, I have yed to do any fleshtones.  What you see on the face is simply some white paint. 

I tried a couple different things that I normally do not do.  I typically prime my armies in black primer.  I did that with this model, but I painted the red cloth area and the pant legs white first, then added the colors.  It definitely gave me that faded red look that I was looking for in short amount of time.   I also hit the flesh areas with a little bit of white paint to.  Still need to paint all of the flesh.

So there it is so far, coming along.

Next in the Viking Saga....Skirmish Archers

I decided a small unit of Bondi archers were needed.  I'll use them in a skirmish mode for WAB.  I also have some units of skirmishers that I will be finishing up shortly.

These are the Gripping Beast archers.  I scored them off of ebay for fairly cheap.  They are very rigid looking models, rather boring in pose.  I added a few more bits to sort of spice up the looks of the models a bit more.

Wargames Illustrated - Adepticon Coverage.

I see some pics of us playing the big Crusades Game and some of my Romans fighting against Vikings made it up on th eWargames Illustrated website.  If you scroll down to the WAB gaming at the following link:  Adepticon Coverage Link

The first pic, you will see Rich from Chicago Terrain Factory and Pat Lowinger from the Historical Wargaming Podcast and the nwhistoricalwargames blog.

Third pic down, the bald guy is the infamous Mike Butcher from the Butcher's Bill blog and the balding guy is me when I'm not in a go-kart.

The fourth pic down is a pic of my Romans taking on some Vikings....well the Praetorian unit was sold recently so technically I guess the praetorians are no longer mine, they are in Texas somewhere.

The seventh pic down is a pic of Mike's dirty rotten arabs in action, a very nice looking army, something I could not pull off with those figures.

The eighth pic down is a pic of my Crusaders teamed up with Mike's Saxons in action, from I think the first game.  We went on to win the WAB Team Tourney.

Then there are pics of the Minnesotan, Bennett Blalock-Doane's gorgeous Roman army, completely puts mine to shame.  Bennett is also a great player and won the Singles tournament beating Mike in the last round for the win.

All the above is very much worth checking out, in addition to that Flames of War stuff ahead of the WAB.  I'm not into FoW, but there is some really good stuff on there.

More Avatars of War

As I build and paint my Warriors of Chaos army I keep coming up with models that I want to add to the army, funny part is most of these additions will be relegated to normal rank and file models.  I recently picked up these two models.  The one on the left will certainly fit the bill for my band of mutants, and I will use it as a Sorcerer.  The one on the right will go in my ever expanding Marauder unit with great weapons.

 The AoW models are very nice sculpts and the castings are pretty good, but as you see I did find minor gaps that needed filling.  So out with the greenstuff while I was doing the mail on that Viking in the previous post and also doing some GS work on the beastman for the Lost In the Warp crossover project.  Never fear James and I have some working plans to show those crossover models as we are developing them.

And then today I saw that Reaper released another Tre Manor barbarian sculpt that I will have to get to add to my band of barbarians and mutants and mutant barbarians.  The fun never ends......

The Saga continues... A couple conversions.

Still looking at ideas for standard bearers and I came up with an idea using the one on the left, please ignore the crooked pole, this is just a mock up using a space marine back banner.  I think it has promise, just not completely convinced at the moment.  The model next to it is a conversion using the GB's plastic torso, a left over head, two-handed arms from War Games Factory plastics and greenstuff.

And here he is from the front.  The GB kit only has one set of arms for the two handed axe, so I thought this worked well to give me even more variety.  The sculpted mail is very much needed as the WGF mail is terrible looking and very shallow in detail.

So I like the looks of this figure.  I also started basing one of the units, will get to spraying primer tomorrow night and then try to finish up some more of the modeling before I begin the paint work.  Also started painting a test model, that is coming along, will have some WIP shots soon.

Madhouse Saga - Some Standards WIP

Well made a bit of progress on the standard bearers.  Also have a few more in the works.  And I added another character(figure on the far right), a Gorgon Miniatures Saxon that I got at Adepticon a couple years ago.  Figure reminds me of the Saxon from the Bruckheimer King Arthur from a few years ago.

 Below is a different view of the standards.  The two on the right use flags from the Fire Forge Teutonic Knights kit.  The one on the left is using a piece of banner from a Goblin standard, fused to the spear shaft with some plastic cement.  Have a bit more work to do on it.

And today was Sunday, and that meant go-kart racing.  I had a first and second in the heat races, which qualified me for the outside of the second row in the Feature.  In the Feature I worked my way from fourth, up to third and then second, then nearly spun it out, went back to third.  On the final lap I closed on the 1st and second place karts, threw it underneath the 2nd place kart could not make the move stick and cost me third in the last corner.  So a fourth place and sunburn, not the best, but that's how it goes.

Plugging Some Conversion Blogs

If you like my Games Workshop convesrsions then you will like or love these two blogs as they are converter / modeler jewels.

The first is MAXXEV's blog.  I've known Maxxev's work for quite a while as its stood out at Grey Death's Work In Progress forum for a good long time.  The conversion work is awesome and quirky and creates some very cool looking models by a little kit bashing and sculpting.  Very much worth checking out if you are looking for cool ideas. 
MAXXEV's Blog....I Convert Stuff

The second is Alpha Legion's blog.  If I was conversing with Maxxev, I would say because he likes Chaos the way I do.  Not much for words, and quite honestly it would be in I believe "Russian" and some English, but the guy can create cool stuff and paints very well.   Lots of great idead, Lots of great pictures....
Alpha Legion

So.....what are waiting for???? Go check them out.....

Fireforge Assembly of the Knights

Well was working on some more of the Vikings in particular the standard bearers and needed to come up with some banners when I remembered that Fireforge had some extras in their kit. So as I did that I got the urge to assemble a bunch of their fine looking miniatures. Assembly of them is very simple and the flash is non-existent for the most part so very little in the way of removal of mold lines, and even the ones present were simply shaved off by one pass with an Xacto #11 blade.

Above is what I have assembled so far. The unit has great variety, none of that stagnant and boring look that many metal miniature manufacturer's have. A great plastic kit such as this has excellent versatility. My intention is not use these as Teutonics, and most of the helms are easily modified to remove the Teutonic ornamentation. I have not yet picked up the newly release Templar and Sergeant kits yet, but definitely look forward to them. One thing I have found in assembly is the need to give a bit a forethought on the ranking of the horses due to the tails of the first rank interfering with the horse heads in the second rank. The models are just a touch on the long side for the 25x50 cav bases, but that can be remedied easily by placement.

Prometheus......

I only go to one or two movies a year at the theatre, I generally hate crowds and dislike most people so a 10 am Matinee on Sunday was perfect for me, a whole half dozen people sitting in large capacity room was just my speed.  I'm a huge fan of Ridley Scott's.  I love his scifi and period type movies especially, because they are always visually stunning.  This movie certainly did not disappoint in the visuals, as it explored the awesome Giger art from the creation of Alien.  This in my opinion was a much needed movie for the Alien franchise and went a long ways to the explaining of Giger's art, must say I want more.  Would not mind seeing a movie regarding these makers.  Michael Fassbender was awesome, much like Lance Henrikson's was in Alien.  I really know very little of what he has done in the past, with the exception of Centurion.  Good stuff.....

Some new Warriors of Chaos Additions....

Been awhile since I updated my Warriors of Chaos army.  I needed a break from building Vikings, so I thought I would assemble some new warriors.  At Adepticon Alex Akers gave me some of the new Battle Road Games' heads sculpted by Navvarro over at the Mr. Bug Man blog.  So on the left I used one of those heads on the GW Warrior Champion model.  I'm planning to add just a scraggly bit of hair to the head, but it does have this cool mutated look to it that I'm after.

Then I picked up another Avatars of War lord, been so long that I worked on this army that I forgot I had one already, so to make it look different I added a MaxMini Black Lotus head, that matches my one unit of Chaos Knights.  And then again at Adepticon I picked up an Enigma Morphus model.  After looking at the Enigma model I decided it needed a head swap, dug through a bits box and found a spare head.  Then I decided it needed a skull on one of the post-like back banner things, so I used a Secret Weapons skull bit for that.  I find it funny looking at the size of all three of these models, I think everyone is beginning to exceed what can be done on 25mm bases. 

I have a bunch of warriors and marauders prime coated and ready for paint.  Plan to paint some of them soon inbetween painting countless Vikings.  Speaking of which I'm building the banner men currently along with another unit.  As I was looking for standards I remembered some nice ones in the Fire Forge kit, which got me into building some of their knights.  So I have a little bit of GS work to do on the standards and to finish off the skirmishers and a few other Vikings, so while I do that I will build the Khorne beastman for the Crossover project with the Lost In the Warp blog, in which I believe James managed to convince the Butcher's Bill in joining up in the creation process of a Nurgle Beastman. 

So lots going on, its not just all racing this summer, although I am doing a lot of that, next up me driving a Vintage Go-Kart that is as old as I am.  And yes people were shorter back then, and I'm not all that tall.  The Vintage Bug kart has a rather cramping affect on a person.....

Old Stuff Wednesday - June - Wargor - Let There Be War 4

I never really used this model all that much in my gaming.  It is a shame as its an old OOP Wargor that has a lot of character.  I like it so much that I bought a second one and painted it up to be used in my Mutant Marauders, warriors of chaos army.

One of the many things that I like are the arm bands and wrist gauntlet.  The casting was not the best, and I did make some very subtle changes to the model.

 This is one of my favorite skin tones for beastmen.  It actually starts out as GW Scorched Brown.  I also think the decapitated head turned out nice and pale, definitely drained of fluids.  What's chaos without some decpitations.

Until next time....cuz I have Old Stuff.