Update IX: Age of Sigmar Fyreslayers

Hello friends, its been a while! Things have been very, very, busy for me since my last update in July. I have completed a draft of my thesis, my long-time girlfriend has moved in with me, we have moved flats, and I have entered the submission pending year of my thesis.

With all of this going on, my hobby time has been significantly curtailed, although I am now hoping that things will settle down now and I can return to painting when possible. I will certainly continue to update this site!

In the two months since my last update I have managed to continue progress on my Age of Sigmar army, and I have completed ten Dispossessed Irondrakes and five Fyreslayer Hearthguard to form a shooty elite core for my army.

For my Irondrakes I wanted to tie them into the snow theme of my Fyreslayer army. Given that they are entirely encased within their armor, I thought it would be cool to make them look as if they'd been unearthed from the ground or snow. I will have very few Dispossessed models in my army, so for their backstory I'm saying that it was a unit of long-dead dwarves from the old world who were found by my Fyreslayers frozen into the ground. The rune-priests reanimated them into a zombie-like existence in order to make use of their long-lost dwarven weaponry and allow them to continue to pursue their ancient grudges.

When it came to modelling them, I opted for an extremely simple paint scheme that was essentially only a two-color basecoat: metal for most of the model with some gold accents. I knew I could get away with this as much of the model would be covered with powdered snow and tufts, providing a sharp contrast to the basic/muted colours underneath. To give them an appropriately worn look I gave them several coats of various washes, before applying Army Painter "Poison Ivy" tufts and Vallejo "Powder Snow" over their armor to make them look suitably unearthed. I can't say enough good things about the Vallejo snow, its by far the best snow product I've ever worked with and the miniatures simply would not look the same without it. I'm very pleased with the overall effect, and almost regretted having to paint the actual colors on my Fyreslayer models afterwards!

For the Hearthguard I continued with the color-scheme I'd established for the battlesmith. The only difference being that I toned down the brightness of the orange for his beard. I still feel like the beards are a real weak-spot in my painting, as I can't seem to get any nice contrast on the orange. In hindsight I should have liked to give them white, black, or grey beards, but its a little too late for that now. Otherwise I'm happy with how they turned out, although they are fiddly models to paint and took longer than I would have liked.

For the future I have 20 Vulkite Berserkers who have been prepped for assembly, as well as a Auric Runefather on a Magmadroth and a Grimwraith Berserker. I'm thinking for the Vulkites I might try an extremely simply airbrush-heavy technique so they don't take as much time as the Hearthguard. But I'm really looking forward to working on the heros!

I am hoping that between this army and my 40k Orks I will not be tempted to produce a full GW-system army again in the future. Its just too time consuming and daunting to batch-paint large number of troops, and given my newly-limited time I am longing for a skirmish-scale painting project. I will treasure my AoS and 40k armies and continue to add to them, but I'm hoping I won't need to paint like this again.

Update VIII: Age of Sigmar & Side Projects

It's been a few months since my last update that showcased what I'd been up to lately. So here's some quick and dirty bulletpoints of how I've been spending my hobby time.


1) Completed a Trukk for my Ork 40k forces:
I managed to slam out this model fairly quickly following the completion of the Gorkanaut.

However, despite building and doing the initial airbrush work on a unit of Meganobz and Gretchin I became very burnt out with painting my 40k Orks after nearly five months of focusing on them pretty much unceasingly. So with 1000pts having been fully painted, I have put off finishing my remaining 250 points to move onto different things.

Furthermore the campaign I was running went on a hiatus as I think many of us became frustrated with the clunkiness of the 40k ruleset. I will certainly be holding onto my lovely orks in anticipation of the new 40k edition that will appear in the next 6-9 months. I'm very much hoping for a streamlined AoS-like update that will bring us all back to the table.

2) Create a female Chaos Space Marine  Raptor squad as a painting side-project.

Having finished my extended article on the sexism inherent to miniature wargaming sculptures I decided it only fitting that I create a small squad of female space marines to transgress the sculpting norms.

The conversion process itself was very straightforward, I just switched out the Space Marine heads with the heroic-scale female head sculpts from Statuesque Miniatures found here. Given how androgynous a properly armed combatant looks, I think it ended up being quite convincing.

The above squad leader was a fairly extensive conversion of the Chaos Aspiring Champion. It was one I'd been intending to do for a while and I'm quite happy with how it turned out.

Unfortunately I've yet to get around to painting them as Age of Sigmar swooped in shortly after undercoating them and began to monopolize my hobby time.

3) I have started an Age of Sigmar force: Fyreslayers!

On a whim I ended up participating in a game of Warhammer Quest: Silver Tower which I was surprised to discover I actually enjoyed enormously. It's a really fun, light, and well-designed game and I'm looking forward to picking up a copy in the future.

Shortly on the heels of that, a friend of mine from Element Games decided we should both try out Age of Sigmar and we ended up having an absolute blast. As mentioned above my gaming group has become somewhat disillusioned with the 40k ruleset and AoS is its polar opposite in terms of how quickly and smoothly the fighting goes.

It was admittedly a very one-sided affair, and I was crushed quite convincingly. I played my roomate's Ogre force while he played Stormcast and it became very apparent early on that our wild guesswork for the relative army strengths was off by a wide margin. Yet with the General's Handbook coming out this month we expect that the Pitched Battle point system will alleviate most of our worries in this department. The game itself was still a ton of fun and extremely intuitive.

As a result most of my 40k campaign group are making the leap over to AoS, and I have settled on an Order Alliance to be my starting point. Specifically, I liked the look of the new Fyreslayers models (I wanted to work with as much modern plastics I could) and consequently dove into a test model for some uniquely-colored forces.

Without further ado I present my Fyreslayers color scheme:

Nordic Papa Smurf.

The Verdigras was done with nihilakh oxide, a new GW technical paint that was far easier than the products I worked with on my converted Big Mek, highly recommended!

This guy was very quick and a lot of fun to paint. I've already purchased and assembled about fifteen figures to start a small AoS force, and I'm looking forward to expanding onwards and upwards. Rest assured there will be regular updates to follow!