PotM: Mortis Engine

How you doing lads, this is Eto and today is the first day of the month which means it's time for another episode of Painting of the Month (PotM), a series where we'll nominate a unit at the start of the month and by the time it's the first day of the following month we'll showcase those units. For February's episode I had chosen to paint Vampire Counts Mortis Engine and I gotta tell you, it was something different!



At the beginning I was a bit skeptical how I’d actually approach this quite massive.. beast.. machine.. thing. I decided to go with the same style with the spirit horde holding the massive bone construction, as my Spirit Hosts; light grey and blue with white highlights.



After I was done with the ghostly parts I had to tackle down the Mortis Engine itself. I really liked the idea how they described the reliquary being inside a cage of fused bone, so I made the joints as obscure as possible. The reliquary itself and the stairs leading to it, as well as the half skeletons on fire were a lot of fun to paint as they offered something of a contrast to the bone parts.



The corpsemaster and the book infront of him got me stuck for a quite a while. Eventually I decided to go with black robe to slightly blend him in. I didn’t want to add more contrasting colors to the model by making his robes stand out too much. The blasphemous tome ended up with some scribbles, latin words and blood splatters on it.



Finally I added the banshees on top of the construct and they’re pretty much hanging there by happy thoughts and wishful thinking. GW has a tendency to sometimes make models where some parts defy the laws of physics.



I really enjoyed painting this model, and I’d go as far as saying that I only spent 1/3 of the time painting it, and 2/3 of the month wondering what color combinations would work out best. Surprisingly, it was pretty easy to construct even though the total amount of bits in this model is a whopping 90 parts. Eventually it turned out pretty neat, staying true to the rest of my army’s color theme (pictures for those will be added later).

For March episode of PotM I’ll be painting a pack of Ghouls for my Vampire Counts army.

So that pretty much wraps it up for today’s episode of PotM. If you have questions or comments feel free to drop them in the comments section below, and subscribe to our blog if you want to hear more! I’ll see you guys in the next episode, this is Eto signing off.

Time trial: Marauder horseman

Howdy fellas. This time I'm tackling miniatures from a bit different point of view. You see I had quite a long lazy period in painting and in that time only a few minis ever end up finished. Nowadays I'm more active. Getting the painting routine up and running is not easy, at least not for me. I was struggling with my new Mordheim warband (pictures come later) for a quite some time. Painting was hard, it seemed as I wasn't as skilled and fast painter as I used to be. Lack of routine, I know. With my Mordheim warband I just started gluing pieces to together and then painting. This might be perfectly okay to most people but not for me. I quickly lost interest to the warband because of the lack of planning I usually do with new minis. That got me thinking. With good planning and preparation, how fast could you paint a tabletop-quality mini? Enter the Raakhafargar the Humourless, Champion of the smallest northern village and the Incinerator of three, yes three, outhouses. Raakhafargar had recently suffered a minor flu and sees this as a sign from gods. He is planning to make a big deal with Nurgle next tuesday.

The fella in question is marauder horseman from my vast collection of unpainted miniatures. Picking up the parts and cleaning up the mouldlines took about 15 minutes.

Horse took about 30 minutes to finish. Decent tabletop-quality at least on my standard. Not perfect, but that wasn't the point.

Raakhafargar himself took about an hour to finish and I spent about half hour making small corrections and basing the model. So my marauder took total of 2,5 hours to finish. Not bad I thought. Lesson for me was this: Make plans. Paint on daily basis and with coherency. With groups try to apply the same colour to every mini before moving on to next one. Don't get stuck with hard or boring stages of your miniartures. The result is usually worth the trouble.

PotM: Now you're a Devastator, brother!

Good evening all. Here's Tatu with some brand new PotM(Painting of the Month) stuff. I'm adding some more firepower to my Raven Guard strike force with a squad of Devastators. These fellas are armed with multi-purpose missile launchers to counter all sorts of threats. Anti-air is the key to success in the current edition so the squad got some hot new flakk-missiles from armory. The squad has a dedicated transport, a Razorback, which I have painted some months earlier.

And here's the whole strike force so far.

During february I'm painting a tactical squad with Rhino transport. Also my force seriously lacks the punch in close combat so I need fix that thing real soon. This is Tatu, signing out.

PotM: Skeleton warriors regiment

What’s up people this is Eto and today is the first day of the month which means it’s time for an episode of Painting of the Month (PotM), a series where we’ll nominate a unit at the start of the month and by the time it’s first day of the following month we’ll showcase those units. For this episode I decided to add another 20 skeleton warriors to my Vampire Counts army, armed with spears and a full command group. Now as you can see from the pictures below we’re talking about the old school bunch of skellies here, which I have to say I find somehow more charismatic with their wonky legs and downright weird hand structures.

20 new skeleton warriors ready to kick ass and send bones flying

Like the rest of the army I wanted to have a nice, solid and coherent bunch of undead warriors so I used the same shield ornament for whole regiment. I also made the spear points stick up high for the 1^st, 3^rd and 4^th row as to further bring up the idea of being led by one eternal will of the Vampire general. 2^nd rank has their spears in between 1^st row to make it look like they’re ready to take an enemy charge upfront. 

 

As for the command group, I always paint one even though I rarely use champion or musician with skeletons. Old school painter me always wants to have an option for WYSIWYG. I’ve always enjoyed painting banners as you can put your imagination and skills to the test and really come up with a nice detail for otherwise regular and boring units. 

Hanged man, or a skeleton rather

For the February’s episode of PotM I’ll be choosing Vampire counts Mortis Engine.

So that’s pretty much it for today’s episode of PotM. If you have questions or comments feel free to drop them in the comments section below, and subscribing to our blog would be much appreciated. I’ll see you guys in the next episode, this is Eto signing off.

++Heresy grows from idleness++

Hey what’s up people, it has been ages since the last update! Whole crew here has had a lot of things going on and we apologize for the lack of content. However, we’re back on our feet and got some great news for everyone! This Friday 1^st of February we’re going to launch a whole new serie called Painting of the Month (PotM).

The idea started somewhere back in December 2012 after having a sudden realization of having literally hundreds of unpainted minis just lying around everywhere. So we struck up a deal, PotM. Now the way this works is quite simple, we nominate a unit, regiment, monster, warband, vehicle or whatever that we’ll paint and by the time the month changes that said selection of minis should be ready for a showcase.

So stay tuned for the first episode of PotM starting this Friday, 1^st of February!