How to paint Skaven - efficiently!

I am back from our Gaming Day (much fun, big success - expect photos soon) and back from my trip to Ingolstadt. On the menu today: Painting Skaven without going nuts.

I've painted quite a number of Skaven and still consider myself sane. You may now ask: How did I do that? The answer lies in spray painting the model with brown instead of black or white and to paint a lot of models at once. Also, you might consider ordering some seasons of your favorite TV show from Amazon (I always recommend The Big Bang Theory) before you start - because it's still not magic and will take a while ;-)

Spray painting your Skaven brown will reduce the paint time dramatically

Alas, I can only provide you with a written guide. But I plan to do a step by step guide in the future (since you can never have enough rats on the table), so you can see how easily this can be done:

1. Build your Skaven
2. Use sand and glue or textured paint, e.g. those from the Vallejo range to cover the base
3. Spray Paint your Skaven with brown paint. I suggest Army Painter's Leather Brown
4. Paint everything on the model with its base colour (e.g. metal parts with Chainmail, cloth with Scab Red, skin with Elf Flesh etc.)
5. Wash the whole model (e.g. skin with Ogryn Flesh wash, red and brown parts and the base with Devlan Mud wash, everything else with Badab Black wash)
6. Let the miniature dry and drybrush every part from the model with a brighter colour than you used in step 4 (e.g. red parts with Blood Red, metal parts with Mithril Silver etc.)
7. Finish the details on each miniature
8. Decorate the base if you want to

The reason this way is great is because brown is a perfect basic colour for almost every other colour, especially for red, skin tones, and brown obviously. So you'll need much fewer layers of paint until the miniature is done. I hope this helps. Do you know other ways to stay sane while painting hundreds of Skaven?

Saturday is Gaming Day

I am really looking forward to the Gaming Day in Pleiskirchen tomorrow. Our Local Gaming Club Die Grüne Horde (The Green Horde) is going to host this event, which isn't going to be any form of tournament. Instead, we want to host a broad selection of games where people can look into those games they don't play themselves and explain those they play to others. Right now, there is going to be Warhammer 40.000, Warhammer Fantasy, Flames of War, Infinity, Aeronautica Imperialis, Descent, Warhammer Invasion, Chaos in the Old World, Dystopian Wars, my friend and his father's custom historical board game and several others I certainly forgot.

Knowing myself, I am going to take a lot of photos which you all get to see next week.


PS: After the event, I'm directly going to Ingolstadt to visit my girlfriends relatives. So, most likely there aren't going to be new articles until Tuesday.

Daemon Prince of Chaos (W.I.P.)

I hope you enjoyed your weekend and found all your Easter eggs!

Today, I want to show you my Daemon Prince of Chaos. I've built this guy about two years ago and didn't paint him much over the time. Maybe that's because the model is definitely going to be the army's centerpiece and I don't want to mess this up. I'm telling you how to build the metal Daemon Prince because I don't like the new plastic version of the model which looks too much like a cartoon figure to me.

My winged Daemon Prince

Here is what you need to build a metal winged Daemon Prince of Chaos, spiced with some hints for building the miniature:

• Metal Daemon Prince of Chaos
• Metal Wings from the Greater Daemon of Tzeentch
• Green Stuff for the hood and to fill the gap between shoulders and wings
• Important: The wings need to be pinned to the Daemon Prince miniature. Without pinning and probably a lot of green stuff, the prince won't be winged for long ;-)

Apart from pinning the wings to the miniature, building a Daemon Prince like this one is pretty straightforward. Still, I can't decide if I'm going to paint him in the colours of my Dire Wolves or in the colours of the Death Guard legion I'm about to start building this year. My Dire Wolves are linked to the Space Wolves chapter, so I'd rather go with the concept of many great leaders, i.e. a lot of mighty Chaos Lords and Sorcerers. With his angelic wings and the moody hood, I find that this Daemon Prince would go well with a Death Guard army. What do you think?

Tutorial: Fiery Daemon Sword

Today, my Soul Grinder is going to be in the centre of attention, or to be exact, its sword. People sometimes ask me how I did the fire effect and it's not that difficult at all.

A sword of fire will draw attention to your model.

So, here is the step by step guide to painting a fiery daemon sword:

1. Paint the burning part of the sword entirely white.
2. Strongly drybrush this part of the sword with a yellow paint, leaving a few white spots visible.
3. Drybrush this part of the sword with an orange paint.
4. Lightly drybrush this part of the sword with a red paint (note: the more steps you take, i.e. the more you blend the colours while going from white to red, the finer the effect will look afterwards) 
5. Now drybrush this part of the sword really lightly with a black paint.
6. Assuming you already painted the metal part of the sword: Strongly drybrush the area between the fire and the metal part of the sword to give it a charred look.

Have fun trying this on your own Soul Grinder or daemonic weapon! But you could just as easily use this method to paint any fire on any other model. Here are two pictures of the complete model which didn't quite fit into my improvised cardboard photo box:

Watch this: Wil Wheaton's "Table Top"

I highly recommend you to watch the first episode of Table Top by Wil Wheaton:

Wil Wheaton and guests, Sean Plott (host of “Day9TV”, a Starcraft II dedicated webcast on how to be a better gamer), Grant Imahara (host of Discovery Channel’s “Mythbusters”), and Jenna Busch (geek blogger, writer and host) play Small World!

The show is really entertaining as well as helpful to understand the game mechanics of Small World. I can hardly wait to watch the upcoming episodes.

Children of the Horned Rat

Quuuiiiieeeeeek! Hide your children! The Skaven are invading our lands! Well, okay, miniature Skaven at least. But nonetheless evil and spiky (yes, ouch) little creatures that I learned to love since my friends gave me a box of Clan Rats as a birthday present in 2010. I bought an Island of Blood box not long after this. Today, I'm going to show you the first decent pictures I was able to make of this army. Expect a quick painting tutorial in the near future.

Weapon Teams are the reason I am collecting Skaven. Mischievous rats yielding heavy weaponry with the Warhammer Fantasy equivalent of uranium ammunition? Lovely! But I'm still waiting for Games Workshop or Warhammer Forge to release a proper model for the Ratling Gun (I'm rather unimpressed by the current version).

The Skaven Master Moulder and the Warlock Engineer are nice miniatures. I love to paint warpstone and warpstonish cables - so, yeah, I loved painting those two a lot.

Rat Ogres are great miniatures! I love their look and the possibilities to convert them are endless (trust me, as a chaos player I know what I'm talking about).

Death Guard Paint Scheme

I've been longing to do a Nurgle themed army ever since I got in contact with the wargaming hobby. Neither can I really tell why I haven't done one yet - okay, maybe because almost every army has a certain appeal to me - nor do I exactly know why I want to start one right now. Maybe it is because the whispers about a new Codex: Chaos Legions are getting louder or because I almost never used my green paints. I don't know, but I want one.

But if I was to start a Death Guard/Nurgle Daemon army, then I wanted to know what I had to expect while painting it. I am a slooow painter, so I need an easy but effective paint scheme. I tried to remember some tutorials I once read about painting Death Guard armour (might have been from Warseer - don't know which one it was), grabbed a spare miniature and came up with this:

1. Prime the miniature with a white spray primer (black primer might be too dark)
2. Paint the whole armour of the miniature with bubonic brown until it is evenly covered (don't leave any white spots on the armour). You could also airbrush the miniature and save some time.
3. Wash the miniature with Thrakka Green (don't save on colour here).
4. Wash the miniature with Gryphonne Sepia (again, don't be greedy with the wash)
5. Lightly drybrush the miniature with Rotting Flesh.

It is really easy to do and the result looks good (if you're into the Nurgle look).

After steps 3 and 4 you are going to have to white a while until the wash is dry. It is good to know this beforehand and I recommend you to do several miniatures at once, thus optimising the whole painting process.

When finished, all you need to do is paint the details. I am going to do another tutorial on this, when I have actually started with my Death Guard army (maybe this summer). Until then, expect a few posts in which I am going to look for possible bitz and miniatures for this army.