The Last of the Ulgumgi

Greetings!

A while ago I managed to finish all the remaining units I had planned for my Ulgumgi army: two new heroes, 10 Huntsmen and 5 Fenrir Riders. With them done, I have finished yet another army project of mine.

Here are some pretty photos of the newcomers!

Groupshot of the reinforcements. The typical rust-and-leather look of the Ulgumgi is evident in these chaps as well, and the red gems on their bases tie them nicely into the rest of the army.

Spells Without End

Greetings!

As a part of my Miniature Collection Inventory I tallied up my non-fighter miniatures as well. You know, the neutral ones. I'm speaking of Endless Spells, of course!

I bought the Endless Spells box a healthy while after it was released, managing to snatch myself one of the last copies my local game store had on their shelves. I got to painting them almost straight away, as they will be useful in nearly all my armies and I will gladly share them with my opponent if they'd like to tap into these incarnations of wild magic as well.

Some of the spells I painted according to the box art, the stuff I already liked the look of. A couple of them got their scheme from the accompanying Malign Sorcery rulebook, in which some of the spells had brilliant art that was cooler than their suggested paint schemes, in my opinion. The rest had their colours either improvised or inspired by some astounding painters out there in the wider world! (Copied from a googled image)

Show Me What You've Got

Greetings!

Today's post is a special one. There's never been anything like it on the blog before. Ever.

What is it, then? A complete assortment of statistics about my miniature collection, of course!

Over the course of two days I took out every single box, bag and crate that I use to store miniatures, to record the number of armies and models I currently have in my entire collection. I also made a note of every miniature that I've finished out of this collection, with Painted-Percentages for the total as well as for each army individually. I compiled all this data into an Excel-sheet, from which I then created some diagrams for you to look at.

Here it is, the cold, hard truth. I currently own 1457 (yes, fourteen hundred and fifty-seven) individual miniatures. Each base holding any number of models (like the Anvil of Doom) was counted as a single miniature, although I keep my war machines and their crews separate, so a Cannon with three crew would still equal four miniatures. Simple!

Painting and Preparations

Greetings!

It's been over a month since the last post, I know. My studies got in the way momentarily and disturbed my hobby life, and although I was able to get in a few games here and there, I haven't had time to write battlereports of them. Fortunately that is now in the past and y'all will have lots to read on your holidays as I catch up with my battlereport output!

But first, I have something to show you. I recently got some Citadel Contrast paints in the hopes of this new technological advancement speeding up my backlog, and guess what... it actually works.

Take a look at these Highborn Spearmen / Dreadspears I finished just yesterday:

That's 30 Spearmen with two command groups to allow me splitting the unit (and because I have another 20 Spearmen already painted that have to command). I worked on this unit a couple of hours a night over a week, and some days were too busy to have me paint at all. Yet the unit still got finished a lot faster than I anticipated; trust me, I know. I just painted 40 Highborn Archers with regular paints before these ones. Ungh!

I'm very happy with how the unit turned out. The colours are bright and clean, shadows and highlights are good tabletop quality but on larger surfaces like the shield you still get some natural variation in the saturation of the colour, making it look like the shield was actually covered with a painted cloth of whatever.

The recipe was deceptively simple. Wraithbone base coat for warm colours, Celestra Grey for cold ones. Then you just splash on the colours of your choice: warm on warm and cold on cold. Add some texture to the base and boom. Unit done.

I also tried my hand at a third Bolt Thrower. The war machine itself is mostly regular paints, but the crew and the bolts are almost all Contrast (except metallics). I didn't have a large enough base for the Bolt Thrower to get all the extra flags and ammunition on it, so I decided to give the bonus goodies to the crew.

Works fine, in my opinion. I just didn't want to leave out such evocative bits from the unit. So, with this post the blog is back on track, with several battlereports, campaign finales and Warhammer Roleplay content on the way.

Make sure to pop by every now and then on your holdays. Until then!

Painthammer Quest: Layers over Hammerhal

Greetings!

Since I got a colleague of mine into trying out Warhammer Quest: Shadows over Hammerhal a while back, I decided to see throught the painting of the box's miniatures. So here comes a collection of painted heroes, adversaries and the big baddie!

The Ulgumgi - Instahammer 2019

Greetings!

I am both happy and wistful to post about the end of 2019 Tales of Instahammer. Happy, because my Ulgumgi are now in good condition and I can focus on other projects. Wistful, because the event was so much fun over the six months, planning conversions and exploring the theme I had set for my army!

Now, however, the Ulgumgi have gathered in great numbers for a family portret. Only 20 Hirdmen and 20 Huntsmen remain unpainted, and I'll fix that soon as well.

Behold the descendants of the Lost Battalion!

Hammer Time

Greetings!

Just a quick update on my Tales of Instahammer 2019 project, the Ulgumgi army. This month was themed "The Hammer", with the intention of participants adding something of beautiful creation or terrible destruction to their armies. Well, my take on "The Hammer" was this:

Ulgumgi Shaman

Greetings!

This month is labelled Magic in the Tales of Instahammer 2019 project; anything or anyone with any connection to magic should be brought up to join the army at this point. I picked up a Necromancer kit, cracked open my bitz box and set to work...

...and ended up with an Ulgumgi Shaman!

Shaman Ronga is an old and disrespected spellcaster in the Ulgumgi society. He summons aethyric energies to aid the hirds in battle, but all he gets in return are wary gazes and muttered insults. Only selected few know of his origins, which are said to be wreathed in darkness and misery: his back is hunched, his eyes have been covered with bands of rusty iron and he carries an ancient grimoire on his belt that he's unable to read anymore.

Myrkrvollr Holdfast

 Greetings!

Remember this amazing piece of art drawn by Baron Klatz during the Twilight Prince campaign? It depicts strange tower constructions found by a Puffington scout in the shadowy forests of Ulgu, the Realm in which an entire regiment of imperial soldiers was lost during the campaign.

A ramshackle tower pieced together from all available resources, including old wargear and banners of the lost regiment. The scout didn't live long enough to tell the tale of these towers himself, but one of his colleagues found him dead on the forest floor with a crumpled piece of parchment in one cold hand. It turned out to be a rough sketch of these constructions, ready to be taken back to the Puffington Empire for closer inspection.

Well guess what, I took such a liking to Klatz's sketch of the Ulgumgi Towers that I decided to give it some additional dimensions...

Tales of Instahammer: February

Greetings!

February has come and gone, and my Ulgumgi army has obtained some vanguard units to bolster its numbers.

First of all, I added a unit of Ash-Revenants: vengeful souls of incinerated Freeguild Greatswords from the Battle of Twinpoints that have been trapped in the Ulgu forests for decades.

Secondly, I added a Myrkrvollr Shade: an Ulgumgi assassin that stalks the shadowy paths crisscrossing the woodlands of Ulgu, striking down unsuspecting travellers and nosy intruders.

Tales of Instahammer: January

Greetings!

The first month of the Tales of Instahammer community event is nearing its end, meaning that it is now time to show off what I have accomplished so far.

The first month was all about getting your warband started, hence the theme Making an Impact. My impact was a unit of 10 Ulgumgi Trappers, a unit of 10 Ulgumgi Hirdmen and one of the army's heroes, an Ulgumgi Thegn!

That easily checks out the minimm requirement of one unit and one hero. I also completed the Secret Challenge for January by painting a standard bearer and taking a groupshot of the lot by the end of month.

Here they are in all their glory!

Tales of Instahammer 2019

Greetings!

Time has come for me to announce one of my first new projects this year: the Tales of Instahammer 2019. I joined this amazing hobby event to feel the grand power of community inspiration and pressure, which I hope will see me building myself a new finished army by the end of June.

So, what is my Instahammer project? A brand new Order army, of course, with Sylvaneth and Free Peoples units combining to make up a totally useless but extremely thematic force for me to play some sweet narrative games with.

Right. And the theme?

Some of you might recall the events of the recent Twilight Prince campaign. My army represented the Breuer's Regiment of the Grand Army of the Puffington Empire, which got drawn into a perilous quest to seek and defeat a Slaaneshi daemon trapped in the woodlands of Uglu. Led by a cold Gunmaster and a power-hungry Battlemage, the valiant freeguilders fought their way through many bloody battlegrounds to reach their destination, only to find a duardin army blocking their way right at the end of their arduous journey. Urged by these two warmongers, the soldiers attacked the duardin and were mercilessly slaughtered at the Battle of Twinpoints. The human officers were left at the mercy of their surviving miseld underlings by the duardin Thanes, who didn't see the wretches worthy of their attention.

This is a story of what happened afterwards.

Meet the Ulgumgi, a bloodline of humans living in Ulgu which branched off of the Puffington Empire that fateful day the Breuer's Regiment was defeated. The survivors of the army scattered into the dark woodlands of Ulgu after dealing harsh judgement upon the leaders who led them to fight an allied race. No-one yet knows what actually happened to the regiment's officers, but none of them have been seen ever since.

Speedpainted Levies

Greetings!

Before going on into the two new maps I've made and the narrative skirmish campaign that's coming up, let me show you some speedpainted Svedonnians I managed to finish some time ago.

Here they are, 24 Met-at-Arms from Momminiaturas, painted so fast and easy I almost feel ashamed (almost!):

Well, what's the technique then? These two pics must seem like nothing more than the usual sloppy paintjobs my blog's filled to the brim with. Oh, but believe me, the time I spent on these chaps doesn't warrant quality like this at all!

Let's take a closer look, shall we?

As you can see there is texture on the tabards and shields of these pesky peasants, just like it should be. What's special about them is that I only applied one thinthinthin coat of each colour. No layering, no highlights, no drybrushing.

Step by step:

 First I basecoated them all Abaddon Black. Then, I took the largest brush I have and went wild with some Dawnstone, making sure I made all the details more visible from the plain black.

 Second, I took up some White Scar and drybrushed all models again, this time taking care to use a vertical motion so that this lighter colour only caught the areas where light would hit (brushing down across the model, top to bottom, then lifting the brush back up and repeating).

 Third, I gave the regiment a heavy wash of Nuln Oil, followed bya drubrush of White Scar as in Step 2 above.

Lastly, after all these messy layers of blacks, greys and whites, we have the lighting already done on the entire regiment! The highest parts and bumbs of the models are white/light grey while the deepest crevasses remain black/dark grey.

Then I picked the main colours I wanted to use: Caledor Sky, Yriel Yellow, Mournfang Brown, XV-88 and Ironbreaker. I thinned each one generously on a wet palette and applied them carefully to the models of the regiment, so that the previously done lighting effects show through.

The skin of the Men-at-Arms was done by simply applying two layers of Reikland Fleshshade over the lighting effects. This is a messy technique and the results might not please everyone's eye, but it is an extremely fast way to get your endless masses of mooks to an acceptable tabletop standard within a reasonable time.

That's all for now, next we'll take a look at one of the new maps!

Medieval Muster

Greetings!

I thought that in between my many battle reports and maps you'd like to see how I'm doing on the painting table these days. Recently I've been hammering out my Svedonnia collection as there's a narrative map campaign coming up for them, and I need as many of them as possible to defend their homeland. Yes, the campaign is supposed to take place on Svedonnian soil!

Here are some units I've managed to paint up in a couple of weeks:

A Damsel and an Enchantress (which is actually just a mounted Damsel with a glued-on horn) ready to bestow protection upon the valiant knights of Svedonnia. To make them stand out from the crowd I took time to make their colours more magical/brighter than the rest of the army, to mark their position high above the mere mortals trudging in the mud with a sword in hand. I really liked painting their hair, though, as it gave me an opportunity to use some stronger colours in contrast to the dominant blue.

Strengthening the Sentinels

Evening!

After I finished painting the first batch of my Scarlet Sentinels warrior chamber of Stormcast Eternals, they have not been seen in this blog that much. Not at all, actually. Now that is about to change: I have fairly recently finished painting 10 Liberators, with custom Grandhammers!

"Custom-what?", you're asking. Let me show you!

Here they are in all their glory, 10 Liberators with Prime and two Grandhammers (and an additional Prime if I ever need 2 units of 5 men). These are all models from the Age of Sigmar starter set, so they're monopose and armed with shields and warhammers. They bear the colours of my own Warrior Chamber: the Scarlet Sentinels, and as such their livery is dark red, purple, gold and steel. They stand upon the flagstones of an Order settlement, just like my Freeguild, to bind these two armies together in their background narrative.

I mentioned they were Easy-to-Build models from the starter set. What about those Grandhammers? I scratch-built them myself.

Puffington Irregulars

Greetings!

Recently I've been working on a massive regiment of 50 Freeguild Militia. Believe it or not, now they're all done.

Sergeant Kelner, the commanding officer of the regiment

Sir Gilbert, an old knight and trusted mentor of the hot-headed sergeant

Puffington Irregulars, a motley lot of variably voluntary warriors from the free city of Puffington

Yup, that's 50 unique armed men built from a couple of boxes of good ol' Empire Free Companies and tons of Freeguild bits. I have to say it did take a while to assemble them in batches of 10, then painting them in batches of 10 and finally making cobblestone bases for each of them in one batch of 50 25mm round bases. Whew!

Want to have a peek at the process of how this regiment came to be? Read on, then...

The Tribe Grows...

Heya!

Although life and campaigning in the Flamescar Plateau have both taken a lot of my time, I've managed to get some work done on the Sunsplitterz. I painted up two units of Big Stabbas and have now begun to work on a mob of 10 Arrowboys, which upon completion will give me a Kunnin' Rukk to play with!

A fearsome bunch! They already claimed the life of a Great Unclean One at the Battle at the Vitriolic Swamps, thus showing the Mortal Realms that they're worth their salt.

Some more pics for eye-candy, more can be found in the blog's Instagram feed:

Arrowboys coming up, ready to swell the ranks of the growing Rukk!

Regimental Rebasing

Greetings!

It's been a while since my last post but now I'm back on track with an assortment things to show you. Although I'm still working on my newest Path to Glory report, I thought it'd be nice to let you see how my army projects are coming along!

Since my order of hundreds of 25mm round bases arrived I've been working hard to re-base my old Empire models from squares to rounds. Who once were the ill-fated and grim conscripts of the 14th Talabheim State Regiment have now been transformed into the stalwart defenders of the Mortal Realms as proud members of the Puffington Host!

Swordsmen, Handgunners, Spearmen & Greatswords

Witch Hunter, Bright Wizard, Warrior Priest, Engineer, Warrior Priest & Freeguild General

Freeguild General on Warhorse, Freeguild General with Stately War Banner & two war machine crews

As all the models are varnished I have no way of changing the colour scheme more to my current liking, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. This Empire force was my first real Warhammer army (as in, I had only owned some separate models before) so perhaps it is for the best to leave it as it is. At least I can easily see how the level of my painting skills has slowly increased over the years!

I simply cut, sawed and pried each and every square base from the models and quickly painted up some new ones to glue them on. The workload seemed enormous at first, but in the end it was quite a fast and simple operation. I really like how the round bases change the general look of the models, giving them all some individuality rather than just making them bricks in a wall.

What I did to the bases was also very simple. Simple is the keyword I designated for this army project, as I have many armies on my plate and this one will have to be as speed-assembled, speed-painted and speed-based as possible.

First I took a wide square-tipped brush and slapped some flagstones onto the bases with Dawnstone, adding a few details with Gehenna's Gold (sewers, ornate swirls...) and Sotek Green (mosaic, coloured flagstones...) to break up the monotone black-and-gray a bit. Lastly I washed it all over generously with Nuln Oil, and the bases were done!

They don't look that great when inspected up close, but they do the job when there are 100+ models on the table and you just want to get on with the project.

I also added a couple of new heroes to the army's ranks to bolster them for the new age of warfare they're about to enter. A couple of evenings' speedpainting resulted in two Freeguild Generals and two allied Battlemages!

Not the greatest of my paintjobs but I'm happy with the result. As I only have limited time on my hands and there are loads of projects to do, I opted to go with a very simple palette and a bit less finishing touches than my heroes would normally receive. It feels oddly good to get things done in so little time and to leave some small details less detailed in order to finish the model sooner... I feel like I've actually accomplished something. Perhaps I've finally broken out of the perfectionist's cage, that infernal loop of doing and redoing things to get it all nice and perfect?

Nah, that's not possible.

Speaking of swelling the ranks of my army, I recently acquired 50 old Empire Militia models from various different sources. All unpainted, most unassembled, some still in their sprues. I have untold amounts of Empire bits and pieces in my bitz box, so I decided to go crazy with it. Taking out all my unused human arms, heads, weapons and shields, I assembled 10 models at a time while making sure each one was different from the others before moving on to the next batch of 10. I went through all 50 models by slapping on parts from multiple kits like Handgunners, Greatswords, State Troops, Outriders, Knights, Pistoliers, war machine crews...

I ended up having a nice company of armed men kitted with various tools of war: pistols, axes, clubs, swords, crossbows, hunting bows, blunderbusses, halberds, pikes, knives and so forth. I really like how they look as a unit. They're not a coherent and uniformly armed fighting force, but a mixed bunch of irregulars who fight for their homes in the ranks of the Freeguild Militia.

Here are a few pics of the unit before I started painting them. They're all on squares for the duration of the painting, but as soon as all 50 have been speedpainted through I'll put them on those rounds bases they deserve.