Much like Sam's post about his Rhunish drakes, this blog post will also be a short one.
October was a busy month for me – I attended three different SBG tournaments, and batch painted over fifty models (including an entire army of Morannons and Easterlings!) – it was a pretty intense month hobby-wise!
As you'll know from Part 6, the orcs and Easterlings were painted to take to the Lord of the Imps and Battle of Unnumbered Tears events. Whilst I struggled at the Lord of the Imps, winning a single game whilst drawing one and losing the other four, I was much more successful at Unnumbered Tears, coming away with three wins and three defeats.
With that done, my attention then turned to an SBG event that I've been wanting to attend for several years, finally managing to attend this year's event – The Strider Cup! A two day doubles event where the main focus is on theme more than anything else. The Strider Cup also places emphasis on completing certain objectives to win "Strider Points" – whichever team earns the most wins the Strider Cup.
I was paired with my friend Josh for this event, and he'd slowly been working on an Army of Dale, so we decided to do the Defenders of Erebor (although without any Legendary Legion bonuses, as all Legendary Legions were banned for the event). Fortunately, I had a small collection of Iron Hills Dwarves sitting in my painting queue (and like most of my painting queue, they'd been there for some time!), so I decided to put some paint on them!
Much like my Morannon Orcs, I decided to save some time on the dwarves by using Leadbelcher Spray over a black undercoat – this instantly basecoated all of the metal areas. A quick wash of Agrax Earthshade, a drybrush of Necron Compound, and the silver metals were done! The bronze areas were basecoated with Balthasar Gold, washed with Seraphim Sepia, and then layered with Hashut Copper and Sycorax Bronze. I picked out the belts with brown, and the underclothing and weapons with black – a few highlights later and my dwarves were done!
I also painted up the command set – the mattock captain, as he's become known, is arguably one of the nicest looking models in the range and is full of character. The difference to the other dwarves is his bright red cloak – I used progressive layers of red, getting brighter with each layer, until I had a look I was happy with
Next, they needed a leader, and who better than Dain Ironfoot? Dain's gold armour and white beard really helps him stand out from the rest of the army – I also spent some time (and much of that was cursing – it's very fiddly detail!) picking out the gold filigree found in his hair braids and axe handle. The armour was basecoated in Balthasar Gold, washed with Sepia and then layered with Retributor Armour and Liberator Gold. Dain's crown was done the same way, albeit with a black wash rather than sepia.
With Dain and the dwarves done, I had a bit of spare time on my hands, so I painted up Dain's son, Thorin III Stonehelm! Another lovely model with a lot of character – I painted his armour in the same way as Dain, but went one colour further up, so I started with a basecoat of Retributor Armour, then Liberator Gold, applied a sepia wash and then highlighted it with Liberator Gold and Stormhost Silver. His hair was a bit of a challenge – bright, vibrant orange. I decided to experiment, applying a wash of Fuegan Orange over Zandri Dust, and it actually came out so well I kept it – adding a few extra highlights just to make it stand out – I now had a nice Erebor Reclaimed force ready to hit the tabletop!
So, how did the tournament go? Well, unfortunately, luck was not on our side and although we won two games, we drew one and lost three, putting us in the wooden spoon place. However, we also took home the Most Sporting prize, so we were very pleased with that!
So, with all those dwarves done, my models painted count for the year is now up to 225 models! As mentioned before, it feels great to get to this milestone, and I've also managed to complete several armies in the process (although, let's be honest – is an army ever really "complete"?). The only challenge now is: what can I paint before the end of the year?
No comments:
Post a Comment