Vampire Counts: Completed Army

Took some time to get some full army shots of my Vampire Counts. I do have a couple other models to finish, but this is the bulk of it.

Completed Dwarf Army

In a flourish of painting in the last couple months of the year, I managed to complete my Dwarf army. Feels good to have a fully painted force.

Dwarf Quarrelers

Just about finished up with my Dwarf army. Wrapping up with 20 Quarrelers and a Thane battle standard bearer to follow. Feels good to be completing an army.

Dwarf War Machines and Crews

Some more speed painted Dwarves here. This time I've got a couple grudge throwers, an organ gun, and a cannon. The organ gun and cannon tops can be swapped out to be either a second organ gun or a second cannon. All that's left now for my dwarves are 20 Quarrelers and a Thane BSB.

Dwarf Thunderers

Had a little bit of time to do some painting this past weekend. With most of the base coats already down from the airbrush, the brush work goes pretty fast. A lot of people don't like the Mantic Dwarves miniatures and the short beards are a big reason why. I don't really mind the beards but I must admit that this sculpt for the Thunderer/Quarreler sculpt is not that great with a lot of the detail around the head, gun/bow, and arms kind of just blending into each other without any clear definition between them. I've tried my best to try and alleviate that as much as possible with clean defined paint lines, heavy shadow, and of course carefully chosen photography angles. There is another sculpt for this model but for these 10 Thunderers, there is just the one among them. Next up in the painting queue will be some dwarf war machines and crews.

Dwarf Hammerers

It's been tough to find much time to paint lately. Life happens and miniature painting goes to the wayside. I'm still holding out hope to finish painting my collection before year's end but that is looking less likely. We'll see. If I can get a few days where all I do is paint, I can bang out a lot of work. Anyways, here's the latest finished models, 30 Dwarf Hammerers. Again, just a tabletop quality here. Went with a golden/brass armor so that between the hammers and the armor they'd be more distinguishable from the warrior models.

Finishing the Dwarves

I've switched over to Dwarves now in an attempt to get that army completely finished. I did finish a unit of Warriors/Longbeards back in March and I'm looking to finish the rest of the army. I spent a few hours on the airbrush blocking in a few of the large area base colors. This really saves on brush time later on. Here's 53 WIP dwarf models after airbrush work including 15 Hammerers, 20 Quarrelers, 10 Thunderers, 2 Organ Guns/Cannons w/ crews, and 2 Grudge Throwers with crews. Should be able to knock out these in a relatively quick manner.

Dwarves: Longbeards and Warriors Finished

Finally getting back to these after painting a fair bit of Legion models for the latest Journeyman League. In this post I did some putty work for more substantial beards on the command models and magnetized the arms on the musician and standard bearer so I could freely switch between regular warrior models and Longbeards. So, one unit of 26 Warriors all done. For most of my dwarf army and a lot of my Vampire Counts core I'll be speed painting the models with a simple base coat, wash, done with only a little highlighting on the front rank of models. This allows me to paint each model at somewhere around 30 minutes. It's not stellar painting but it looks half decent on the table top and combined with a freehand banner, I think they look alright.

Longbeards

Warriors

Dwarves: Longbeards and Warriors WIP

Been working on my Dwarves the last little bit. I was trying to think of a good way to be able to swap back and forth between using Longbeards or Warriors for my core. I decided to use a rank of 5 Warrior models to get some nice, long, putty beards to act as Longbeards. I'd use these 5 models in the front of the unit so it could be distinguished as a unit of LB rather than Warriors. I also plan to paint them slightly different than the others as well. I also magnetized the musicians and standard bearers arms so that the front rank would either be normal, shorter bearded Warriors or Longbeards with, um, longer beards. Should work out nicely I think.

Dwarf Runesmith and BEARDS!

I recently got the rest of my Dwarf army assembled and at least for the mean time was just planning on using a couple of the more unique heads of the grunts, spicing them up a bit, and using them as my characters for the army. One night I just randomly decided to try my hand at sculpting some more proper beards for these fellas as the beards on the models are a bit on the short side, which is one of the major complaints about the Mantic line of Dwarf models. For some dumb and unknown reason I decided to use the models I'd planned to use as my Runesmith and Thane battle standard bearer as guinea pigs. I almost immediately regretted this when I first put the putty in place on the models, thinking "Oh shit, these are never going to look good." However, I pressed on and with relative, surprisingly moderate effort I managed to sculpt something pretty decent. After that I couldn't wait to get one painted to see the final product. So, here's my Runesmith all finished complete with a proper, massive beard.

I managed to forget to take a before picture of this model but here's a different model with the same head so that you can see the difference with and without the added beard.

And some WIP and before and after pics