Painted Plague Drones (part 1)

This lot are Plague Drones, which as you probably have guessed from the ‘Plague’ in the name are part of the Nurgle contingent of my Chaos Daemon army for Warhammer 40,000. Like the rest of the Nurgle forces their main draw is being inefficient to kill with almost any weapon in the game, but this unit is slightly unusual in being quite mobile to boot. I’ve had a bit of success throwing them down the other army’s throat as soon as possible to buy a bit of time while the Plaguebearers slog across the board and clog up objectives. One almost downside to the Plague Drones is that they have several wounds. This might not seem like a problem but in an army that gets such a benefit from resilience, it seems like a waste to give the big guns on the other side of the board something to shoot at. Or, to put it another way, I love it when the giant death cannon facing me is forced to ‘waste’ it’s shot by doing nothing more than vapourising a single Plaguebearer (and sometimes not even that considering the invulnerable save and Disgustingly Resilient rule).

I’ve mixed up the two skin colours from the other Nurgle Daemons here, with the mounts in green and the riders in brown. I agonised for a while about how to do the carapace and wings and eventually decided to keep them a bit duller to better contrast with the green of the flies’ bodies. I’m still not completely happy with that look but the rest of them are pretty much right where I was aiming so I’ll consider that a good outcome. Transporting these is proving to be a bit tricky as they’re covered in spiky, sticky-out bits; luckily half the games they’ve played in have been at my house.

Next on the painting table: Swamp Horror.

Painted Nurglings (part 1)

These glorious, cute little piles of goo are Nurglings, part of my ongoing Chaos Daemons project. As befits tiny creatures on a battlefield filled with tanks, superhumans and wizards, Nurglings are quite easy to kill and don’t do much damage. However they are quite cheap, very un-threatening, fairly inefficient to kill and can sit on objectives like champions while the rest of my army goes about the business of fighting.

Despite how amusing I find Nurglings, I decided to keep it as simple as possible when painting them. So it was a simple green wash over white undercoat, then pick out the mankiest bits in pink. I did consider giving a couple of the individual Nurglings a different colour just to liven them up a bit but getting into their backs with the paintbrush looked to be a bit awkward. Overall I’m pleased with how they look considering the effort needed to complete them.

Next on the painting table: Plague Drones

Painted Plaguebearers (part 1)

Here are the first ten Plaguebearers for my Chaos Daemon army. They fulfil my troops choice and appear to be fairly effective so I guess I’ll eventually end up with quite a few of them. In particular, the main benefit that Plaguebearers bring is being really inefficient to kill so I want to maximise that by taking the full-size unit of 30 so that they can maintain the benefit of their -1 to hit ability for as long as possible. When it comes to actually killing stuff, Plaguebearers are not my first choice. But they excel at sitting on objectives and not dying very fast, so usually I punt them onto an objective and / or ram them down the throat of something that specialises in massive single target damage and just let them grind it out over a few turns.

In contrast to the Poxbringer, I wanted this (first, perhaps of several) unit of Plaguebearers to sport green skin. As with the Poxbringer, I did this by applying two layers of Biel-Tan Green wash over a white undercoat. I deliberately kept to a minimal approach for detailing the miniatures since I expect to end up with 30, 60 or even more of these in my army, so most of the smaller spots / boils / etc on their bodies were not specifically picked out. I like the way that the green skin and bone weapons work together.

Next on the painting table: Nurglings.

Painted Poxbringer

This is a Poxbringer, the first miniature in a fledgling Chaos Daemon army for Warhammer 40,000 (and Age of Sigmar, at least in theory). In the time since I last played the game, all the Heralds have been renamed into something more silly and copyright-able; in this case the Poxbringer would previously have been a Herald of Nurgle. It’s a pretty cheap HQ choice and mainly benefits me by increasing the strength of other nearby Nurgle units and occasionally contributing some damage or similar with a psychic power. The few times I’ve been desperate enough to commit the Poxbringer to close combat have gone pretty poorly so I generally aim to keep it behind a big blob of Plaguebearers.

Furycat and I got the itch to play GW games again after a rather long break so we’ve been dipping in with 500 and 1000 point games between combination of my Daemons, his Space Marines and Gary’s Space Wolves. You can read a bit about his initial thoughts here: link. So far 8th edition has been quite entertaining, being fairly smooth on rules interactions and at least tolerably balanced (by GW standards). The missions are the main let down as we’re playing with the scenarios from the main rule book but I understand that there are alternative options available for us to research.

I’m splitting the skin tone of the Nurgle units between green and brown; as can clearly be seen the Poxbringer got brown. I’ve been trying a new approach of working mainly with washes for the bulk of the miniature, so in this case I started from a white undercoat and went straight in with two washes of Seraphim Sepia. Everything else is done in the ‘normal’ way; i.e. with paint first. I like the way that the purple guts contrast with the skin, but the bone of the weapon and tree / antler (?) thing sticking out of the Poxbringer’s back is probably a bit too close in tone. I couldn’t think of a clever way to fix that since I want to keep those bony colours consistent even for when I get to the units with green skin and so it needs to be something both slightly naturalistic and contrasting with green. Even with that, I like the result and feel that the Poxbringer will be a good start to my Chaos Daemons. One down, potentially hundreds still to go!

Next on the painting table: Plaguebearers.

Painted Blue Horrors

These are Blue Horrors, part of the Chaos Daemons faction I’m gradually working on for Warhammer 40K. I’m kind of doing these in the wrong order since one would normally start with Pink Horrors (which I don’t even own yet) then they split into two smaller, weaker Blue Horrors instead of dying. The Blues then split themselves into a pair of Brimstone Horrors upon their deaths. They can all be bought and fielded separately too so there is no need to always put Pink Horrors in the army list. I’m not really sure how best to use the Blue Horrors though. If I just want cheap body blockers and tarpits then Brimstones seem to be way to go, whereas Pink Horrors are the option if I actually want them to achieve anything.

Anyway, the Blue Horrors were pleasingly fast and simple to paint up to my satisfaction. The whole lot got painted blue all over (the clue is in the name, after all) then I picked out the weapons and jewellery in silver. I chose silver since it provided a nicer contrast to the skin than bronze. Finally I picked out the flames, tongues and teeth to brighten the lot of them up. I’m quite happy with the results, especially considering the amount of time expended on them.

Next on the painting table: Troll Axer.

Painted Brimstone Horrors

My good friend Gareth had a bit of a hankering to get back into Warhammer 40K, and so I agreed to join him. I do have some Harlequins to use but I realised that since I already have pretty much one of each kit that exists for that force, it would be hard to expand much. We might not go to big games anyway, but I took the opportunity for a new project anyway. After some discussion, I have ended up with Chaos Daemons, and my recent birthday present included a box of Blue Horrors and Brimstone Horrors.

I don’t even think that Brimstone Horrors were in the game or the story the last time I touched Warhammer 40K, but they seem like quite cute little chaps. They are dirt cheap (the ten pictured barely cost more than a single Space Marine) and have stats to match. I guess that their main purpose is to get in the way and hopefully soak up some bullets intended for bigger and more dangerous part of my army.

As befits a unit of probably the cheapest models in the game, I didn’t spend too long on this lot. A yellow coat was followed by orange on most of the raised parts and then red on the highest sections and the tips of the flames that the Brimstone Horrors are made up of. I then picked out the eyes and teeth, mainly because otherwise they looked a little too much like they were only fire (i.e. and not little imps) at a distance.

Next on the painting table: Troll Impaler.

Harlequins family photo

Here are a couple of photos of my complete Harlequin family so far. I’m pretty sure that this is not even a legal force in 8th ed Warhammer 40,000, so if I want to take them out to play with others then I’ll need to collect some more. I’m not sure whether that’s likely to happen any time soon so I have plenty of time to consider how to continue the paint scheme with any future miniatures.

Overall I am very happy with the coherent look of the force when they’re all together like this. It’s quite satisfying to finally complete a project.

Painted Harlequin Starweaver

This is the last part of my current Harlequin collection to get a paint job, the Starweaver. This miniature is one of the reasons that I bought Harlequins in the first place; I’m just a huge fan of vehicle sculpts with riders hanging off the side. The main function of the Starweaver appears to be transporting the Harlequin Troupes around without having them shot by small-arms on their way across the board. In practice what happens to me is that the Starweaver is blown up by anti-materiel weapons, then small-arms kill off all the now-disembarked riders. Probably this is more an indication of how good I am at Warhammer 40,000 than any indictment of the Harlequins in general or the Starweaver in particular.

The paint scheme was intended to match well with the rest of the Harlequins I’ve painted. The crew received the same treatment as the Harlequin Troupe who will ride in it, and the Starweaver itself has ended up looking like a bigger version of the Skyweavers. If I get more Harlequins I’m not sure whether to stick with the same scheme entirely (seems fitting to have an army coherently attired) or mix it up a bit (since these are space-elf dancers who’ve mastered the mysteries of the universe but still choose to walk up to their enemies and shank them personally). Anyway, I had a good time putting these bits together here; the crew were done separately and then glued onto the painted Starweaver right at the end of the process.

Here are a couple of close ups of the crew… or possibly the crew and a random rider who thought it would be fun to hold onto the side of a speeding hovercraft-thing.  I’m pleased to see that the gunner has subscribed to the classic Warhammer 40,00 meme of ‘Drive me closer! I want to hit them with my sword!’.

I’ll get the rest of the band together in the next couple of days for a family photo.

Next on the painting table: Dronbot Remotes.

Painted Harlequin Skyweavers

I finally got down to business and polished off this pair of Skyweavers for my Warhammer 40K Harlequins. As usual, I don’t play enough to know any deep tactical tricks so I just tend to have them zooming around taking shots of opportunity at anything that I think they can take down with Shuriken Cannons. They are fast enough that usually I can get them into range to shoot anything I want, though most things in Warhammer 40K seem to have such enourmous gun ranges that unless we played in a squash court there would always be a viable target.

The riders got the same treatment as my Harlequin Troupe, with black and white undersuits and red coats. I struggled quite a bit with the jetbikes themselves as I didn’t want them to be the main attraction, rather I hoped that they’d be a little bit muted and have attention drawn to the crew. Obviously ‘muted’ is a relative term in the case of Harlequins. In the end I was very happy with the results and the dynamism of the riders was really part of what drew me to pick up Harlequins in the first place. I have only a Starweaver left to paint now from my initial buy-in but I did promise my son that I’d match his Necron purchases in order to have similarly sized armies so maybe there is more coming after that.

Here are two bonus images with a different lighting to show the close-up of the riders.

Next on the painting table: Datsue Ba.

Painted Shadowseer

This is a Shadowseer for my Harlequins. As far as I can tell they are supposed to mainly work as a wizard, but there is a certain element of supporting my own units passively too. In general I’ve found that she just walks around slightly behind the Harlequin Troupes and makes them a bit more annoying to deal with.

I deviated from the paint scheme of the other Harlequins by avoiding red and using purple instead. Hopefully this will make her stand out a bit on the table top as otherwise I worry that the whole army looks a bit same-y from the other side of the board. On the other hand, perhaps that would be helpful instead of having my son shoot her every time we play!

Next on the painting table: Carrion Emissary