While our next Mighty Empires campaign isn't until mid January it certainly is currently on everyone's mind. Looking for a club night event to run that somehow went in tandem with the numerous store events running between now and the end of year. Anthony and I put our heads together and came up with this event. If you read White Dwarf you may have notice an ongoing series called "The tale of 4 gamers" where 4 guys start new 40K army's from scratch paint them and play a series of games along the way until they have completed full armies and the games they play along the way form a mini-campaign. We are going to expand on this idea and bring into our Mighty Empires campaign full swing.
Bill and I both have the played the same army going on 4 campaigns now, (Empire and VC respectively) so for us changing armies was a priority, most the rest of the gang switches on a pretty regular basis and as long as you only run the army once, no problem. The bigger issue for the guys with Army ADD...(don't we all have that to an extent? LOL, I have the making of FIVE WFB armies myself) is the painting.
I hate playing against unpainted models...one- its often confusing keeping tabs on whose who when everyone is grey plastic or pewter and two- once you start playing tourney's like I do where everyone is painted, going back to unpainted is just a drag.
Hence the Painting Challenge: Over the next two months 7 of us (hopefully 8) are taking either new armies from scratch or using unpainted armies we have recently started working on. Every two weeks we will meet bringing our freshly painted blocks of 500 points out to club night and play a series of escalating matches. 500 pts. 1000pts, 1500 pts, 2000pts by the 2000 point round we are playing our newly painted armies just in time for the new campaign. The tie-in is that in all these escalating games points are recorded and will be used to purchase bonuses in the next campaign!. What these "bonuses" are is TBA...and while the wont be game breaking they will make it worth your while to participate. In the next couple months I'd like to feature all of the participants in so they can show off what they are working..I'm be talking pictures of all them and some of the guys will be participating directly!
First up is Bill and he sent me some photos earlier today of some awesome looking Dryads from his new Wood Elf army. After a long stint with Vampire Counts...you couldn't go wrong in trying to change things up by switching to Woodies!... so without further adieu...Here's Bill:
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Plastic Legions 1st ever guest article!!!
Greetings Plastic Legions readers, if you have been following the blog here you may recognize me as one of the regular players in our Mighty Empires Campaigns (Go Vampire Counts!) Well after 4 solid campaigns of playing the undead I finally decided it was time for a change. Seeing as we are taking a short break from the campaign we figured this would be a great time to work on new armies for the next campaign…I'm sure John will fill you all in with our painting challenge. Anyway I have had a bunch of Wood Elves sitting around gathering dust, so this should be the perfect time to get them completed.
1st up is a 12 man (or should that be 12 stick?) unit of Dryads. I really like these models and I wanted to do them justice. Also I'm a huge fan of Autumnal color schemes. So obviously you can see where I drew my inspiration from.
They are really simple, Reddish brown with multiple washes of Sepia and Devlin Mud. But I felt that they were missing the blazing autumn color that I so love… So I picked up a bag of Woodland Scenics clump foliage "fall mix" and proceeded to layer it onto the dryads. This stuff can be described as dyed shredded sponge. I took clumps and shredded them up even further, then dipped them in white PVA glue and stuck them to Dryads. Really couldn't be simpler, and I personally like the effect.
Over all I think it turned out pretty good, a little concerned about the brightness of the foliage against the darkness of the unit, hopefully it won't look to unrealistic.
Comments and Critques are welcome.
Be sure to check back for more guest articles as *hopefully* I will be documenting the growth of this Wood Elves force all the way up to 2000 pts.
Thanks,
Bill
6 comments:
Heh, who ever painted those Dryads did a horrible job, its very sloppy...
All joking aside, I am getting excited about starting something new, and I would like to again thank John for getting this all together.
P.S. sorry about the quality of these pics, as the army progresses hopefully I get some higher quality pictures for your vewing pleasure
I wouldn't be concerned with the brightness of the foliage. It looks pretty much like I would expect autumn trees to look like at their peak of color.
If you're *really* worried, maybe you could try staining some foliage with brown inks. (Probably better to test this before gluing them on figures.)
I think they look great as they are, though.
They do look pretty damn sweet in person... I think part of your concern about the foliage might be the painted/not painted divide... Even though the colors are complimentary, paint just looks different from any kind of colored material, something about the way light reflects off of the pigments. You might try just dullcoating it, see if that affects the visual effect, or give the foliage a quick drybrush of a similar color, fiery orange or a medium yellow, that will break up the surface without darkening them especially. They are the spirits of the forest, after all, I'd expect them to be almost hyper-real compared to the non-sentient trees, brighter greens in spring, brighter colors in fall, and looking even more stark in winter.
I feel bad about all these multi-posts, but I can't find an edit button on Blogger...
Bill, one more comment on your photos, I think just adding a background would do wonders, the first photo is kind of hard to read... Just putting a piece of printer paper behind the figs did wonders for my photos, and I know your camera is a hell of a lot nicer than mine is.
Thanks for the comments,
I may try adding a very light wash to the foliage, or a dry brush. I'll test with the next batch I have coming up. As far as the pics go, yea these aren't very good quality I was just taking a couple quick snapshot to have material for this post. I'll do more of the "setup" for the next batch.
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