Xoan's Gnoblog...

[Xoan]

Heya guys,

My real name is not Xoan, it is Clark, but I would appreciate if you called me Xoan while on here, if you ever see me at a tournament you can call me either that is cool.  I have been to college, I got my 2 year degree, and most of a 4 year double major in Business and German...  I am going back, but what I am doing with it I am not a 100% sure of yet.

I have been in the early planning stages for the last few years about opening a Cyber Cafe with a drive through, and coffee and some light food ready to go at 05:00 in the morning.  I am debating on having open internet, or charge a small fee that goes away as you go up in membership with the cafe.  This membership if I were to do it would give special benefits that are pretty cool, but unless people want me to talk about a cafe I have not even opened yet I wont go into all of that here.  I was also wanting to have a split off room with computers in it so that people could play against each other as a group or together in a raid of some sort.

I worked at a game store that had that, and it is surprising how many families showed up on off nights so that all 5 or 6 of them could play Medal of Honor or something of that nature against each other.

Because it would have great coffee something the early morning people want and the people working or studying late would also want, the place would have someone in it pretty much 21 hours a day.  This means I can not do this alone lol... which is one of the biggest reasons I have not gone farther, another being it is not a good time to open a business imo. heh

My Painting...

I have never taken a real art class in my life, so all the techniques I use are self taught or through online reading or videos.  My old boss at the game store had some ideas that he learned and taught me, but not that many really.  I tend to not go with the grain on painting, and I like to take chances, but I like nice looking models too so it is normally a balance.   I have been really rushed on my Ogre Kingdoms army, the bulk of it which is already painted was painted in 21 days, and I have a full time job, so it was some long hours.  Same with my Cryx Army I am painting up, the bulk was painted in about 34 days.  I will have pictures of both up soon, I will post them by squad and talk some about them I just want to redo my pictures.


I do have some armies I taking my time on.. I have a Chaos Space Marine army with a lot of simple conversions, and I have a Daemon Prince who is going to look nutz. I also have an Empire army which is going to take forever, since I am painting each miniature as if it were it's own person.  Yes they are in uniforms, but I am still spending a lot of time on each. Lastly I have my nids, I really have two armies of Nids.  I have one that is totally made up of old miniatures from 2nd ed of 40k, and I have no new miniatures for that army, and I have a new heavily detailed nid army with a lot of extra work done in the bases.  These nids are also painted in a lot harder way than the old nids, but I am a better painter since then too. heh

Why I Collect

I love to paint, if I could do it and make a living I am sure I would love it.   The problem is getting enough people who want to pay your prices to get started, and then to continue with out huge dry spells.  I know if I painted more often and for a reason, or was shown the hidden secret stuff that people who paint use to paint faster, I would be able to do it all easy enough and it would for sure improve my over all painting skills...  anyways, The reason I collect is to improve the gaming experience.  I do a lot role play games everything that is basically cool.  So many of the models I paint are for that, not the game I am playing per say.  An example of this would be me collecting certain models of the same race of a certain line of miniatures so that I can have that type of race or sub-race within my world.  One that I am looking at is the miniature line Otherworld, they have some different sculpts from races that I already have, and they have enough of them to make buying them worth it.  So I cold have another race of Orcs that are not the same orcs I normally use, and could shown that way...  I have some orc miniatures from a Spain company that I bought a while back.  These orcs are shorter, yet strong looking, and have lots of jewelry on them, so I have them painted a different color of skin and ornate, seeing them as some special brand of leadership that is part of a heritage that is smaller but are all elite members of some tribe.  I also have smaller orcs that look barely clothed, and I have them painted to look like a slave race to the main orcs that I have... in truth they were meant to be goblins I am sure, but they are too big for that too.

I do this with all of the main races of fantasy realm monsters and humanoids I have.  I pick a main line of miniatures I want as the core, and then build sub-cultures out from there.  So far I have a lot of miniature for Orcs, Goblins, Ogres, Lizardmen, Dwarfs, and Humans.  I am also sort of doing this with SiFi and mutants in general, but I am farther back on that.


So far I have over 2000 miniatures for DnD type games, but sadly less than that painted, due to me painting for other people... lol  or selling something to them.  I have always worked off of the idea, that if I repaint a miniature that I will like the future paint job better than the first, so if I can replace it and I get a good offer I tend to take the good offer.  I then buy back into the miniatures I sold, and plan to repaint them.  I then take the rest of the money and buy more miniatures for other areas.

I used to have a budding 40k Orc army, I got about 35 miniatures painted and took it to the store, of which I did not return with them, but I did get about 500 dollars worth of stuff ordered, lol,  and enough work to complete the army to pay rent for a month.  I have paid rent twice in my past with miniatures I have sold, once was needed and was totally random, the other was just a nice bonus of money and an easy of use shall I say.



I am working on getting my pictures done right for this portion of the forums, so i am building a picture box with trace paper and a frame, and then back source lighting so that it looks good.  I also am having an issue with my camera, it looks like a lens has slipped out of place and creates a line in my photos, so I need to zoom past it, or crop it out of the picture which means the model is not in the middle when I take a picture.  My camera is pretty cheep, so it has done me well. 

New Project *Irongut Bellower*

I started painting a horde unit of Ironguts, while putting them together I realized that there was no true bellower for the unit.  yes you could use a bellower arm from the blister pack, and glue a shield on the arm for some armor, but that arm would never be like the others.  You would also have to either be extremely good at modeling with green stuff to remove the extra hand and keep the shape of the hilt/shaft of the great weapon or shorten it by a hand length.  The same could be said about the Standard Bearer for the unit, it looks more like a bull than a IG unit Standard... who should be more battle harden than a normal IG.

I have started the Standard bearer and I will post pictures of that tomorrow while I am at work, but for right now here is my Bellower!  I have always seen a musician as being a special member of the unit, maybe not more marshal than any of the others, but either royalty or he has a bigger set of pipes to create sound.  With that in mind I made him slightly more broad across the chest by extending his shoulders out from their normal points. I wanted him to stand out so I took an idea I from my bull unit, which was to cut away weapons from the sword or clubs they hold and clean them up so they do not look like they are still holding something.

So he basically looks like he is yelling and running at the enemy while a simple strap holds his great weapon to his belt.







This is still a little rough, I am going to clean them up and prime it once I get some more white primer.  I am totally open to any constructive criticism and ideas that you might have about this project.

[scarecrow4560]

An interesting idea, and one that i might steal at some point ;P

One issue i have to point out is that the green stuff work isn't as smooth as it could be.  You should try smoothing it out a little so it looks more like skin.

[Ghunter]

Nice pose... He seems like he prefers smashing his enemy to pulp with his own hands rather than use the giant blade he got.

Good idea indeed !

[Xoan]

An interesting idea, and one that i might steal at some point ;P

One issue i have to point out is that the green stuff work isn't as smooth as it could be.  You should try smoothing it out a little so it looks more like skin.

yeah I know I am waiting for it to totally cure before I sand it some with some files I have that are all sorts of shapes.  One of the little adjustments you can see is not making the hands line up as they were once holding a weapon too, not only did I make them wider, I changed their angle slightly.

I am putting in an order for more GW stuff since I am not driving 240 miles to a game store later this week, so I will get some primer and start painting this model.  heh

[ecwh070]

with the right tools.. you could actually flatten/smoothen the green stuff while curing so you don't have to file too much and risk taking off some of the plastic.  Nice work there though. 

[Xoan]

New Project *Irongut Standard*

This was the second idea I had for my Ironguts since there was no true standard bearer kit for the Ironguts.  With this one I wanted to make use of his arms and still have a standard and his weapon on his body.  I grant you it is not a major change to the model, or anything with a lot of thought, but it does exactly what  was hoping it would do.










One of the things I do is with these is use a brass tube that is large enough to hold a rod that I use to pin the hilt/shaft of the weapon and standard into tight places.

[The Ultra-Mega Bob]

It looks good, but I have to ask... is he ever going to be able to hold both of those at once? :p IMO you could probably have gotten away with adding a bit of weight to the banner, so that it looked like the banner is his great weapon; the extra weapon on his belt looks good but will probably make him hard to rank up.

[Xoan]

this is the nice thing about 40 mm bases.  I also put the weapon on the right side of the model, so that it wold pass on the right side of the model behind him.  After basing dwarfs, which are extremely fat for 20 mm bases, I have learned to keep that in mind.

As for could he wield both there are two ways to look at it, either A he is part ninja and will not only be able to wield both, but will be able to strike at higher initiative, or B he will post it in his first victim and unleash his hammer of doom.  I am rooting for option B myself! 

Ps Thanks for the input though, stuff like that is easy to forget and what not.

[Thunder lord klement]

If you ever had trouble ranking them up (with more weapon slung ideas) you could always lash it to his back, then position the model on the front of the base. Also another idea I throught for an IG banner was just to have some length of cloth hanging from the GW shaft. But looking good, I love slinging odd bits to give character or WYSIWYG to my models. I always have problems with making it look like it's attatched instead of just glued on, and the little strap looks quite good, but maybe a little to weedy to hold such a mighty weapon?
TLK 

[spartacus]

Heh i was just workin on my BSB before i seen this, think im gonna have to break him up just to put this pose on him haha, pro idea for a banner bearer though

[Xoan]

I took a Vacation...

So I went to Valhalla, which is an event hosted by Blue Table Painting, I got to see their studio and where they paint first hand as well as meet all of them.  I have to say that I think they are a good group of people, who enjoy the niche they have crafted for themselves.  Shawn the owner, is a mixed bag imo.  I think he is a fair boss, but a stressed out.  However,  one who has a very improved way of showing it compared to 95% of the bosses I have met in my life.  However, he keeps good people around him, and has good advisors imo.

BTW Valhalla was a lot of fun.  I would rank the first time going there to the first time going to Gen Con, or at least very close 2nd that is...  Gen Con is hard to equal.  While was there I got to play a group game with the owner of Battle Foam (Romeo), and a personality from 40k Radio (Kyle).  It was a group game CSM vs a SM battle group invading CSM space.  It was a lot of fun and CSM squeaked out a win on the last round.

I also played my very old school nids which are all 2nd ed models, heh, against a beautiful army painted by BTP.  It is the Salamander Army that is painted to a level 5/6 level across the board.  I wont go into how much it costs for that, but lets say he could have got something very nice for what he paid for it.  This player also took the Best Space Marine player award for the US or something.  Our game ended on the 7th turn, which is bad for Nids... I was winning turn 5 and turn 6, but I lost steam on turn 7 and could not keep him out of position long enough.

I played my Ogres against BTP's Rainforest Wood Elfs, which if you do not know, doesn't have a single ranked up type troop in the army.  It is all fast cav with bows and two with spears.  It does however, have 2 normal treemen and 1 ancient treeman.  If those three get a combo charge off they will eat the lunch of a smaller unit.  I ended up losing by 500 points, because I could not catch the units that were dancing around.

I played another game with my Nids, this time against  Butt Angels.  WoW they can strip paint off a pole if you know what I mean.  Every model has jump packs including the ones in the raven which also has a dread in it too.  The board did not help me at all, it was covered in trenches, like the lines were being over run and  you are both in the trenches.  But he jumps from area to area keeping away from rough terrain.  I had to pay movement going up and through it...  I lost that fight because he was a tad cheesy, and it was not a good scenario for me, but he was a good sport and was not rude.  He has a youtube channel but I can not think of the channel right now. 

I also played a game with my Cryx it was a huge 50 point game.  It took for ever, and I am an extremely new player to that game.  I was playing against these horde were wolves that teleport around and to each other.  They could turn into ghosts and do a lot of things that were annoying.  However, the player was great, and showed me a lot of what they could do.  After like 4 hours and stopping for dinner for a bit, we stopped at a point when he was going to win, but I had not lost my War Caster yet, and because I lasted so long, I feel I got a morale victory. hehe

[Xoan]

The Future of my Ogres

My next project I am doing though is taking my Ogre's I have not painted and get them painted to the same level of the ones I have gotten done.  I also want to round out my units the way I want, I have 16 Ironguts painted, I really want two units of 9 painted with full command, and to take that total number of Ironguts to 22 in hopes that they will lift the restrictions on how many Ironguts I can have in a unit.  I also want to get 22 Bulls with hand weapon and fist spike, 22 Bulls with Ogre Clubs and open hand which I have modeled 8 so far.  I want to get all these painted and ready to go.

Then I want to go back and super detail all of them with tatoos, and extra details i might have missed.  I did paint 2500 pts of ogres in 21 days for a GT, so I am sure there is some improvement I can do to them.  Once I get that done, over the next few months I want to continue to add to my Ogres, I want about 6 Maneaters, 2 hunters with kitties, another Butcher which will become a Slaughtermaster, and a Two Weapon Tyrant/Bruiser hoping for a good two weapon magic item in the future book.  As far as units go, the only other think I might look into is getting more Gnoblar Trappers and maybe some Gnoblar Fighters...  I also hear thing about rhinox riders which makes me eager too.

I am also going to wait to see if they do another sculpt for the named models in Ogre Kingdoms, and if they do a Scrappie in Finecast like I hear.  I am pretty sure that by the time I am done buying Ogres I will have nearly 6k in points of Ogres. lol

There is a company in Omaha, NE that sells tokens, templates, and other useful tools to fit exactly what you are wanting to use them for.  I can see me getting a token set for the new spell list, and wound makers so that I can keep track of who has how many wounds done to them.

If anyone has some good techniques on how to paint tattoos  either on video or written I am open to ideas.  I have ideas, but it is an area I have little experience so far, so I am going to research before I do it and practice as well.  Another thing I am interested in is how hard it is to paint pants, I see a lot of us do it, and I am considering some sort of pattern, but I do not want it to take way from the rest of the miniature.

So for the first part of this project I am going to need 1 box of Ironguts and 5 boxes of Bulls after you figure command groups.  I am going to want to run them in two squads or as a death star, who know once the next book comes out, it might be worth running them as two deathstars or as a total of 4 large painful units.  The reason why I am wanting to paint them all together before jumping to another project is the skin is a unique blend of colors that might be hard to repeat in the future.  (blue wash, Yellow dry brush, and Bone White dry brush, and highlights)  Then I am using two reds to make blood splatter, and using both a mat, and a clear gloss finish to give contrast between dry skin and moist splatters of blood.

Anyways, more to come soon.

[Xoan]

An example of a group of miniatures I want to expand on model wise and create sub-groups for, is the Tomb King army and the minions army for Hordes.  For the Hordes side, I am looking at racial models that match the main groups of the Tomb King special models.  Mostly the Dog, Bird, and Crocodile headed models, there are some nice matches in the Hordes line.  I know the mythical history about these avatars, but I would use them differently in my RPG game.

I would treat them as avatars to 3 siblings, that come from an ancient race of humanoids, that were there when magic was raw and  without controls.  I would make the Bird be the older brother, who was exiled from the family for theft and an uncontrolled greed.  I would give him the bird head, and require any of follows with intellect to have a need to scavenge, and to horde objects they find in layers with a view to the sky.  I would also say that say that he still keeps a watchful eye on his siblings to this day, though they do not enjoy his presence and actively kill any of his follows.

I would make the Dog be the loyal sister who has a false since of honor when it comes to protecting the idea of a perfect family, and has gone estranged taking on a belief that is far crazier than any of the other siblings.  This idea could be that living creatures take part in their lives, and emotion change opinions from day to day.  Thus one day your friend might want the very best for you, and the next day plot against you, so her answer is to find when someone is filled with an emotion that either she shares or believe is the honest emotion that they feel, and then she has that person killed and turned into a creature of intellect or if it was a failed processes into a mindless undead so they would not have to suffer anymore.   Perfection is in the dead, could be her motto, if one were to look deep into her sick belief system that has become twisted over the many years.

Lastly is could be a step brother, who was from another mother out of wedlock.  He would not have a family centre care for any of this, and would have huge raging issues with anyone from this time.  He would rather be left a lone and tend to his own fantasy of not existing as he did and does to this day.  He would have broken the family a part and driven a great wedge into those who survived, and could be a large part of why the ancient race fell from the graces of those who gave them power.  He would be actively be seeking them out still, with crocodiles searching water ways to a way into their life so he can wreck that aspect once he is there.


The way I would use these great powers is like this, imagine if you will, 3 sociopaths that have large amounts of magical powers and no confines on how to use it.   after hundreds of years, they turned on each other, and destroyed the races that was always really small for no real gain or power grab.  They went at each other so hard that it was the main reason for the destruction of all magic on this plane.  That those who bless this planet with magic stopped giving that blessing, and it was many years later and another story lol before Humans rediscovered magic.

... So some day I will have a small Tomb King army with several of the special choices with the animal features, and a fairly big minions army from Hordes to help group each of the su-bgroups I have kind of set plans for in my home made game world I have designed.


[edit] It crossed my mind after I wrote this.  Yes in my fantasy world I do have some symbols that are not by mistake, you might of seen a back story between these three major evils in my world.  I am talking about the 7 major sins in most religions, so here they all are: (Greed) is the eldest brother, (Pride) is the protective sister, (envy) is the Step Brother, (Lust) is a Vampire who is trying to control political world and leads a shadow council, (Wrath) is a ancient dragon that wakes ever 700 years or so to try and kill every dwarf she can find, (glut) is the earth bound god of the Orcs who literally lives within the Grand Orc Chieftain, and  (Sloth) is a disease ridden mortal who can not die, and has a cult that believes in blessings of disease.

[Hragged]

All the Otherworld miniatures I've bought so far have been fantastic, they make some cool stuff.

You were at Valhalla? I've watched the vids on YouTube, looks like great fun!

Here's an easy little guide to painting tattoos: http://www.wiltrichs.com/tutorials/painting-tattoos/

[Xoan]

All the Otherworld miniatures I've bought so far have been fantastic, they make some cool stuff.

You were at Valhalla? I've watched the vids on YouTube, looks like great fun!

Here's an easy little guide to painting tattoos: http://www.wiltrichs.com/tutorials/painting-tattoos/

Yeah I was the cryx player, and the Ogre player if you watch them all from that time.

Thanks for the link I am going to look at that now.

[thegoss84]

Xoan
It was cool to see you there at Valhalla.  I was the guy who just came up on the Saturday for a little bit of the afternoon.   We talked ogres for a little while.  You're army looked great in person, I hope you get some pictures on here to show off your Ogres. 

[Xoan]

Xoan
It was cool to see you there at Valhalla.  I was the guy who just came up on the Saturday for a little bit of the afternoon.   We talked ogres for a little while.  You're army looked great in person, I hope you get some pictures on here to show off your Ogres.

That is very cool, I wish I would have known that at that point.    I am still working on getting nice pictures done on my ogres.  I bought some goose-neck lamps, and I am starting a photo box with either trace paper on the box or between the light source and the miniature.  Glare is annoying me, and holding my pictures back imo.  Another thing that is holding my pictures back is the very good for the price cannon camera I bought a few years back.  The issue is one of the lens has slipped and puts a line across my pictures when I am at a certain zoom... or really unless I am totally zoomed out.  I normally use normal zoom and make sure the line is not on the miniature and then crop it out, but that is not giving me the pictures I want either.

My goal is to get a new camera soon so I do not have this hassle. Anyways, here are some pictures from Valhalla and some of my army early on and to the midway point.   I am going to do some tattoos on them before I consider them finished.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Pictures from Valhalla

Sorry if these seem a little whited out, the room was fairly dark and would randomly dim... I believe the 10 sources of a light switch has that problem and they were set to save energy.























I will start getting some better pictures of my army soon, but my next post will have some from the work I have already done.

[Xoan]

This is what I have Painted so far...
2   Bull Champions
2   Bull Bellowers
1   Bull Standard
6   Bulls with Fist Weapon and Hand Weapon
1   Irongut Champion
14 Ironguts
2   Gorgers
1   Scrappy
2   Butcher/Slaughtermasters
1   BSB
1   Bruiser/Tyrant
8   Gnoblar Trappers

Left to Paint, but owned...
8   Leadbelchters
10 Bulls with Ogre Club and Open Hand
1   Bull Standards
1   Irongut Champion
1   Irongut Standard (almost done)
1   Irongut Bellower (almost done)
3   Ironguts



here is a picture when I first got my army and starting basing it all.  If you look closely you will see two standard bearers in the Ironguts units... that was before I made special models for the Ironguts that look like they use 2 handed weapons.













This is what it all looked like before I even opened my paint.  The bases were a fair bit of work by themselves compared to the normal sand and static grass imo.  I stippled on sealing cock to create a mud effect, and pushed into the still wet sealant the cork stones so that the mud went up around the rock like it might look in nature.  This is most of what I have now, there are some I got after, and my tyrant which was in greenstuff when I took this picture.

I think I want to take a tell a story with each type of model or group of models, and do some progression pictures a long the way, so I will have those in future pictures once I get some tattoos done.

[just-josh]

This is probably one of the most refreshing blogs I've read on here for a while. I like the balance between picture posts and text, and I honestly cannot wait for more

JJ

[Xoan]

@ Just-Josh  Thanks you, I try to talk about why I do things.  I find it is just as much for me as it is for those who read it...  speaking for myself years down the line that is.  every once in a while I find a video I made of a video game I played, when I was in the peek of doing something right and it makes me smile and remember possible a better time.


Anyways, lol let me show my picture setup, tell me what you all think.  I am using two lights currently with trace paper over the bulb area, so you do not get direct light that can change colors and ad something that is not.  I am still using my camera which takes good pictures all the way zoomed out, or not zoomed at all which I find both do not work with miniatures very well.  That means that I have to crop the miniatures, so that there isn't this line running through them, as you might see in some of my broad picture shots.  I am going to get a camera soon, I just want to look around so I can use the same stuff I am currently using for the pictures and power source.

I know my August Pledge does not have a Dwarf in it, but I have a miniature I bought a long time ago for the look of it on the website.  I have wanted to paint it for a while, but I did not want to do an injustice so I waited on it.  This week I could not get it out of my mind, I started to think about the colors I wanted to use, the techniques I wanted to use, what each layer of the paint would be... so I painted a Dwarf. heh

If I have not said yet in this blog, my Dwarf army is the largest army I have hands down.  I have over 400 miniatures for GW Dwarfs which sort of makes me want to cry a little as I think how much that cost to buy. Dwarfs are the worse dollar wise imo in the game to get into.  Either war machines cost you 35 a pop, or 25 man units of the important dwarfs cost 140 dollars and that is for a small size unit imo.  I love them though... I just need to get them painted, heh


Here is the Dwarf Lord I was talking about.








Looking at it, the trace paper seems to turned it very brown almost though... I am not sure I am done figuring this all out yet.     Well I will redo the pictures tomorrow without the paper and see what looks better.

[Sandals]

Do you know what those Construct things in the photos are? They look pretty awesome, I'd like to see if I can get some. I imagine he was using them as Treemen?

[Xoan]

Do you know what those Construct things in the photos are? They look pretty awesome, I'd like to see if I can get some. I imagine he was using them as Treemen?

Those are from Hordes with slight alterations to them.

I just made an order through GW webstore since  sadly I live so far away from a real game store.  Here is what I got though.

White Primer (always need more it seems)
OK Thundertusk/Stonehorn
OK Firebelly
OK Mournfang Cav
X2 OK Scrappy (new model)
OK Rule Book (Hellas YeaH)
OK Magic Deck

you are limited to 5 fine cast per order, so I went with 1 of the main new stuff, and two of a sure thing being the scrappy.  Now my very nicely painted metal scrappy I have with sit in a vault never to be touched again... lol  ... mostly so it wont break again.

I am sure this wont ship until the 3, but that is ok, I got lots to paint until then.

[Xoan]

Ok I found out where the brown lighting was coming from, it is the bulbs I am using, they give off a strange slight brown lighting.  I am going to see about better lighting in a bit, and I will get it back to my setup rather than my normal spot which has too much glare when I use gloss sealant.

Here is some better pictures of my Dwarf though, and a sneak peek at my Irongut Bellower with some paint on, I had a thought when I got to about 80% done painting it, so I have added in a dwarf head and beard basically as a trophy.  The greenstuff is now dry, so I am going to finish painting him.  Also there is a nice look at some simple Tattoos I have done on him as well.











I am not the best when it comes to greenstuff, I have shied away from it in the past, so it is pretty new to me too fyi.  I am getting better though each time I use it.   

[Xoan]

I am still sorting out the light issue with my pictures, so I am taking some pictures that will work find, but due to glare on gloss covered models I am waiting to take some pictures.  Ogres and my new mini-project should be fine until I get this sorted, but I will be posting pictures of my Warmachine Cryx army once I get it sorted.  I am painting all the Thralls and Mechinthralls with a brush paint gloss on the skin giving it a slimy look to it.  more on that laters though!

I fubbed up though, so I do not have my finished Ogres in photobucket tonight, those pictures are sitting in a file on my desktop at home sadly, I forgot to upload them before I went to work.  I have both my repositioned Standard Bearer and Bellower for my Ironguts unit done, and they look pretty bad ass imo.

I am also several days out to get my new Ogre Kingdom book, and I want to look at the tattoos they have in there before I start painting tattoos on the rest of my army.  That means I need to keep painting something, and I have a lot to paint.  I talked a bit ago about playing a lot of DnD, and the miniatures I buy are for that in mind, well I have a lot that I have passed on painting because I wanted either a better than I could do at that time paint job, or because I didn't have time to put onto that project.

My Dragon Ogre Shaggoth is one that I had not had a chance to paint yet.  Back when I was getting ready for a 'Ard Boyz semi finals, I was at a cross roads with my dwarfs I had.  They had just made some changes to dwarfs that made them less playable, and pissed me off once again about yoking the Dwarfs over the barrel they were bending them over by their beards.  So I was looking at other armies, and I had played against Beastmen in the past, and thought that might be random enough to give me a chance, and I knew how to play against Beastmen so I knew what to look out for with them.  When I play Fantasy I look at it like a chess game, and try and figure out the reasoning for why someone does something, and look to see how it works out for them.

So I setup to buy some Dragon Ogre Shaggoths, and I was running two in my army, and it was a very important part of the army.  So when only one came in, and I was short one, I bought one at the store I was going to, and used that one... so I had 3 Dragon Ogre Shaggoths.  I thought to myself as a way to rationalize it, well the Beastmen army book was the next one to come out, I will just use them there, and I am sure they will get a named one, so I will modify it into that...  Sadly the new beastmen book did not have Dragon Ogre Shaggoths. lol

So once again either through trade or mistakenly buying them, I am slowly building a Warriors of Chaos Army.  I have several of the heroes and wizards, and now I have both Dogs of War Ogres, and Dragon Ogre Shaggotsh, I basically need troops to finish the army.

The thing about Dragon Ogre Shaggoths is that they come with great weapons, and in 7th ed the Warriors' one was far weaker than the Beastmen one.  The Beastmen traded a point of strength for a point of toughness.  I would gladly trade wounding on 2+ and a -5 on the armor save for wounding on 2+ and a -4 on the armor save, if it meant that all those models out there that were strength 4 needed 6s to wound me rather than 5s.  In 8th it is not as important since you can buff toughness, but it still was a thing to me.  I did not see a reason to run a higher initiative model like the Dragon Ogre Shaggoth with a great weapon when he was base strength 6, it seems like a waste to me so I wanted to take the two weapon option so that he could attack one more time, and be at initiative.

So I took one of the Dragon Ogre Shaggoth great weapons and cut the axe head off the weapon.  My thoughts on that was to turn it into the Stormlord Shaggoth that is a named guy in WoC, but I  never got around to it sadly, I did turn it into a Jabbersclythe for my Beastmen army, I will show pictures of that too in this post.  The two weapon Dragon Ogre Shaggoth sat in a miniature case for nearly 2 years,  until I unpackaged it before I went to Valhalla and thought man I really want to get that painted some day.

Which leads us to this post, I am taking some pictures of it bare metal, and I will keep a photo log of each step a long the way, and discuss it as I go.  I have a Youtube Channel as well, and I want to do a V-Blog about painting it as well, but those videos might take a bit to get up.  My desktop is not working properly and my Laptop which is a mac doesn't want to run PMB files.  So I need to find away around this issue.


Anyways, here is my Draggon Ogre Shaggoth...










Ok a Jabbersclythe for those who have not read the Beastmen or played against them in the past, is described as a many armed fiend, with a 12 inch ranged attack (its tongue), it has a Aura of Insanity, it has flight, and is a large Daemon.  There is no model for it sadly, and not even a sketch of it, so I had to go totally off it description to make this model.










It is completely solid btw, and weighs about 5lbs, lol, you can also pick it up by its wings or what ever.  This was one of my very first attempts to use Greenstuff, and it was not a small process.  The base model is a Dragon Ogre Shaggoth, the wings an the arms are from an older game I used to play called Chronopia, the model was in the Devout army, and the model was called a Soulflayer, and the other bits are from Tyranids. 


I will post more as I go, I hope you enjoyed these pictures, and what not I know it was a trip down memory lane for me. hehe

[just-josh]

I completely agree on the point of Dwarves being the worst army cash/model ratio, and can be a killer to get an army together. But, I do believe there are few armies who look better when arrayed on a gaming table.

The Dwarf Lord is very well painted, and the second set of photos do him justice. He is very well shaded, and he has a real sense of gritty, dark, and grim determination. Nice model

The Jabberslythe is brilliant, and is a model that I've been wanting to convert up for pretty much since the book came out, but have never had the inspiration. Yours is brilliantly executed, and I think it perfectly matches the books description.

JJ