Sunday, February 26, 2012

Mantic Dwarfs

A few pics of the Mantic dwarfs assembled. I did some conversion work to the dwarf warriors so that the majority of them could be wielding hammers (great weapons).






The Dip (February 2012)

     I had been brain storming ideas on how I wanted to go about painting up my army and I did a ton of research on different techniques and came across dipping. If done well it can produce some very nice results with less work. So I started experimenting with this technique. I picked up a can of Minwax polyshades in Antique Walnut Satin. Then I primed up some old minis I had lying around in white. Then I painted them up with an array of different colors in order to test the polyshade on different colors and see what kind of results I could come up with.

I tried the pliers, dip, and shake method and after seeing the minis dry I concluded that I didn't get enough of the dip off but I could see the potential if done a little better.


Friday, February 17, 2012

Lots of Paintin' but not much Playin'

     It’s been tough to find players, especially fantasy players. I did find a guy that played mostly 40k. He had enough minis for the both of us. I played his blood angels and proxied them as space marines while he played his Tyranid army. I spent some time learning 40k and even picked up about a 1000 pts worth of space marines off ebay. We also got in a small game of fantasy with the Undead and Dwarf miniatures I had from Mhorgoth’s Revenge. Well, my games with this guy were short lived and after awhile he never called my back and we haven't played a game since spring. 










test mini for space marine color scheme



         

Thursday, February 16, 2012

Expanding the Forces (February 2012)

     In between occasionally putting more paint to my dwarfs, I spent a fair bit of time hitting the internet and forums for painting tips and tricks as well as trying to find some local people to play some games with. During my many hours of lurking around internet forums and such, I came across a game company called Mantic that was started a few years back by ex Games Workshop employees. The company had a great line of miniatures ranging from Elves to Dwarfs, Orcs, and Undead. They were producing these minis for their own in house fantasy war game, "Kings of War" and also their answer to 40k, "Warpath". The game systems are essentially a simpler and more straightforward version of Warhammer fantasy and 40k but different enough to stand on their own. The big appeal though was the minis themselves were a fraction of the cost of Games Workshop miniatures. I was finding that some people were starting to use Mantic's range of miniatures to play Warhammer. The only real drawback being that you couldn't really use Mantic's range at an official GW tournament or event. After doing a fair bit of research about them, I pulled the trigger and purchased Mantic's 2 player boxed set for Kings of War called Mhorgoth's Revenge for $52 shipped! SUCH a good value! It was a win/win for me as the two armies it contained were dwarfs which I could add to my miniatures from Battle for Skull Pass and the other, Undead. I have always loved Vampires, Zombies, and horror in general. The idea of starting a Vampire Counts army for Warhammer sounded like a very fun endeavor.
     With the purchase of Mhorgoth's Revenge, I decided to start a plog (painting log) on Carpe Noctem forums(vampirecounts.net). I found a lot of useful info on this site regarding vampire counts and I thought it would be fun to chronicle my Vampire Counts army from the beginning.


Oh man, I got my work cut out for me. 114 miniatures to assemble and paint!

Skellies

ZOMBIES!!!!!