Completed Desert Table Sees Some Action

So I never completed my 2012 challenge goals. As I am moving towards a new challenge to be unveiled on Sunday, I should really finish the previous ones off!

The desert table has been complete for awhile, but it has been a matter of getting some pictures together to log the completion here. Well that day has come, here are the completed board pictures, along with a few days of gaming on them. They are holding up well, though they don't always line up perfectly.

I still have some terrain pieces to finish for them, but they will be done more as a group project. Overall I am pretty happy with the boards. They were not difficult, nor that time consuming to make. I may make some additions in the future, like some pits or river features.

I've already posted my Cryx, Gators, and Dystopian wars, so I am almost done with the challenge. This leaves posting pics of my Shadow Crows, and the completion of my Descent miniatures as the last goals from the previous challenge. Only a few models to go!

Gators Wave 2

My second wave of gators represented filling out choices that I did not have with my initial set. Adding in Rask as my likely caster to have with Barnabus, I wanted to get some of the non-gator elements ready. They all follow the theme of having lost their left eye's during some sort of Blindwater Congregation ritual. I did not want to overstate this though, so the modeling doesn't always call attention to it. Caliban and one of the goblins simply have masks with the left eye pieces closed up, while rask and another goblin have patches. The Swamp horror apparently doesn't care, or was a recent convert due to its open bloody eye socket.

Rask was a lot of fun to make. I really wanted a different pose, and this one ended up being very natural to convert to. It was relatively easy to remove his gun and replace it with a wire frame of the tree. I made a wire frame of the gun handle connected to the removed gun, and used pliers to close his pointing hand grip around it. I then greenstuffed a passable tree and pistolgrip, and an eye patch. You can see more of the WIP from the previous post. Painting-wise, I struggled for a while on what colors to make him. I had been moving towards the greygreen as seen on the base-lip as my standard basecoat, and decided to work with that. I washed his fins towards a much darker blue-green, but eventually built up the layers to be much brighter. I remembered my experiments with glaze medium, and it worked very well to get brighter highlights. His armors were done in a new purchase of blackmetal, which I am liking a lot. I may be using it on my newer Tau reinforcements.

The Swamp Horror was definitely a horror to convert. I had the misfortune of getting two of the same halves of the tentacles, and being too impatient to get replacements I modified the set to work on the other side. This meant a million hours of filing to make the mouth fit. I've talked about this in the previous post, but the painting is new! I started with some purple and pink basecoats, and got a little worried that it would be way off the feel of the rest of the army. I decided to try for an oily black latex kind of look for the skin, and something more earthy/bone for the chitin. It worked much better than I could have hoped for, and halfway through it was no longer a chore but a great paint sessions to work on all the little folds and tentacles. I painted the Ryan with a few muted Cygnar colors, and gloss coated the whole thing a few times. I also experimented with my new blood source of Tamiya clear red, and it works very well. All I can say is bring on a minions Gargantuan version for me to paint!

In addition to these models, my second wave efforts were also to finish up my accessories for the army. One thing in particular at the back of my mind was to make a movement tray that would both transport my stuff, and look good in my display case. I will go into the build on a seperate post, but here it is in it's completed glory!

I also finished off 3 more 5" swamps for Barnabus to sling around. More gameplay with them have definitely required 3-4 to operate without picking old ones up that still have models on them. I experimented with how much wash, and adding water-effects. I will probably resin over the water ripples, they didnt come out very well.

Thats that! On to a break for some Tau, and then Wave 3 and Wave 4 of my Gators! You can see some of them already have some greenstuff work on them in the display board picture, but I still have a long way to go before they are ready for paint. Below are some more shots of the completed wave 2 stuff!

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A start to Blindwater Gators

With the coming escalation over at JBL, I have decided to complete my existing gator force, and flesh it out into a full army. This has been a fun army to work on, especially getting them down into some custom bases from Secret Weapon. The swamp bases are great, but I will probably be making my own to keep costs down on the rest of the army. I knew I wanted the grimy swamp theme to carry over into the gators, keeping them muddy and green also means they won't really stand out much.

I decided to go for some conversions to make them a bit more interesting in places, and also to use blood as a way to make things more interesting. I took the idea from another gator player to make all of my units missing an eye, as some sort of initiation ritual into the Blindwater Congregation. I will continue this theme to newer models as well, even other warcasters.

I also made use of some bits to armor up the gator posse. The posse is very bare bones for cool heavy infantry models. I took some Ogre Kingdom gauntlets and dremelled them into chest plates. These were added with some Chaos warrior shoulder pads, and connected together with some belt straps out of greenstuff. To top it off, I made the Bokur a bit more intimidating by modding his staff into a banner, and giving him some orky metal icon as a modified helmet. I think the helmet works pretty well, though it borders on silly.

Wrongeye and Snapjaw were my first paintjobs, and they were a lot of fun. I turned WE's hat patch into a playing card, and used an in joke for his bottle (Duck 31 being a fake vodka we have joked about from the Duck card in the game Hex Hex.) Snapjaw was fun to paint, if a little more plain. He is doing double duty as my wrastler at the moment.

My initial blood attempts haven't been too great, and I am planning on redoing some of them with a new technique. At worst they look like tomato juice, and at best like blueberries... Having read a few more tutorials I should be able to get a much more convincing effect.

Between Barnabus and the Blindwater effects, gators can put out a lot of swampy water templates. Rather than just have little cutouts, I decided to get some real swamps to drop down. I was able to cut the circles from 3mm wood with my CNC Shapeoko, and then sculpted in detail on top of it. The end result is some great swamps that could be used as terrain in their own right. The only problem with this is that the larger templates dissapear on my next turn, so I need enough to be able to cast new ones and move off of the older ones to take them out of play. I think it is a mild inconvenience for the sake of cooler looking battles.

Next up on the list is a swamp horror that I bought on the cheap. I was very disappointed with how small he was for a heavy warbeast, so I've been working to convert him into a more threatening pose. I could not think of a good way to give him height, so I dropped him into the swamp a bit more. I also made use of my last Black 13th member (who are coincidentally also very small compared to normal Warmachine scale. This works to my advantage as it makes the horror appear a bit larger in comparison.. I hope.) I am in the process of greenstuffing, but it is going faster than I expected.

Another posse and feralgeist are also on deck, and plenty more to come as well. Rask and Maelok will be joining in, along with a few more friends.

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