Figmentia

Not dead! Honest. Life appears to have mostly passed me by since the birth of our daughter nearly two months ago, and evenings are blurry and work days a little longer than I'd like. Despite this, somehow I've managed to end up with a cluttered WIP bench featuring;

• Twenty Space Wolves at about 80% complete ... that I'm procrastinating over
• Stormvermin test model for my friend Dizzy, as a colour scheme test piece for his Island of Blood inspired rat army
• Demon Prince scheduled to be for last month's local GW shop challenge, but deadline missed :(
• Three Elves from the original LotR boxset as colour scheme test pieces for the Elves in the Island of Blood boxset arriving shortly
• Diorama for the Golden Squig Awards on TWF
• Inquisitor scale Preacher that looked too nice to leave lying unassembled in my bitz box.

I got my Chaos Champion finished last night for entry to the local GW painting competition today. All told I am reasonably happy with him for around four-five hours of painting and while the chances of a Chaos army being started in the next year are slim, this is probably how they would end up being painted.


Wishing I'd opted for a lighter flayed skin on his fur cloak instead of the redder "fresh from the carcass" tone as I'm not sure it goes with the slightly manky feel to the fur. Perhaps too many shades of brown present on him too, but no matter ... as I'm not a fantasy player he's unlikely to be joined by a matching unit any time soon.

Quite chuffed with how the sword turned out, achieving a pleasing a gradient up and down the length (arf arf) and some of the layering on the armour and shield doesn't completely suck.

Dropped it off and feel confident having viewed some of the other entries that it won't be winning anything in a hurry as there are some excellent pieces on display already. Still ... doesn't matter much as it was enjoyable to paint and more importantly great to see so many other figures in the window too as a couple of years ago, lsast time I entered a competition there there were only about five figures, but this time there's over a dozen already!

Quick Plague Marine I painted up for a friend from the contents of the bitz box. No base, as he'll be basing it to match his existing army.

Some of the details on the Chaos Space Marines really do give me the urge to start painting up my own force. A modicum of willpower is required here or I'll be even more swamped in unpainted figures than I currently am!

I've had two Mighty Empire tiles from a White Dwarf giveaway ages ago sitting on my desk for a while. Having seen a chapknock  out quite of few of these on his blog in the space of a month, I thought it would be a doddle to get two done, but it took me longer than expected and I'm amazed he managed to get so many done in the time he did.

One side is painted up as Fantasy and the other is painted up to match our 40k board (hence the rivers of goo) with a view to maybe building a Planetary Empires campaign at some point. Quite happy with the results though, even if the water effect on the river, lakes and green goo doesn't show up on the photo. The edges have been tidied up now, but I was a little too enthused to wait until they were finished before photographing.

Not a large piece, but it was nice to have yet another item cleared off the desk and something else in the display cupboard. I'm also contemplating investing in the Planetary Empires set at a later date to get a number of these together and building a campaign around them.

Just another Rhino for the troops finished off. I've been having a reasonable degree of success getting the vehicles painted and off the workbench so it was nice to have another one out the way.

I'm slowly crawling toward having decent painted representatives on the tabletop now and it should only take another three years for the whole force to be completed at this rate!