Blog Resurrection of an Army

Ooo, really like the stone on yours! Did you start with a grey as dark as I have?

 

Really nicely painted gold, you did justice to all the little details, even the little flame-tongues coming out of the lizard heads on the sides!

 

What color did you use for the skinks crest? That orange is ridiculously smooth

 

Averland Sunset with a Fuegan Orange shade overtop. I've since don some fold highlights/flat areas with Yriel Yellow, which I think might have been a little too bright. Want to get their eyes, mouths and gold bits done before posting another update though.

 

Torsos all painted up!



Just got to paint the arms and glue them on, then do the same for the shields!

You'll likely notice that the skink on the left has had the paint over his shoulder stumps filed away. That's for the arms. If I have any advice to give from this whole process, it's to glue arms before painting (the generally accepted rule that I decided to challenge because I'm not a clever man). What I would still advise that I have done is doing shield separately, though; the flat tabs that go above and below the hand are easy to file clean, won't be noticed much of the time, and fit to places that generally won't be a problem. This goes double on Skinks, given that to fit shields you're going to be snipping hand weapons or javelins anyway, so there'll be exposed plastic for them regardless.

 

Progress on the arms is underway!... And has hit a little snag, in that now I feel like I'm actually not awful at painting, drybrushing fleshy arms just looks all wrong. Too scratchy, not broad enough or too broad, and trying to water down dry paints to use them as layer paints turns out to result in them not behaving quite as well.

So long story short, I'll be picking up some Balthasar Blue to replace my Skink Blue before I finish off the unit.

On the side of progress, however, I've cleaned up all the troop's shoulder stumps so that I can fix the arms on when they're painted, and I've pulled together the newest twenty-four, the old and really awfully painted twelve, and a couple of spares and stand-ins from a Stegadon to make a full ranked-up horde of forty!



Yes, the front rank has a grand total of two of the new skinks. Unlike Saurus, they don't rank up automatically, and given that when I assembled the old twelve Skinks could only be skirmishers who didn't have to rank up, I didn't pay much mind to it. Now I'm lucky that half of them can stand behind other Skinks. Points of interest;

• I took into account the arm-thrusting-forward-with-javelin bits and where they'll sit, as they're easily going to be one of the harder bits to accommodate. I somehow only have 23 javelins to go between 24 skinks, so I've got to make them count.
• The old unit leader is stood at the back facing backwards because I've already designated one of the new skinks as the unit leader. Given that the old boy can't rank up and will be losing the macuahitl anyway, he's currently just filling in. His body style is easier to rank up anyway, due to the more upright stance. This does mean I'll need at least one more javelin arm, though.
• The skink who's obviously going to be the standard bearer isn't actually going to be a part of this unit, as he's already destined for the Stegadon in the army. He will, however, be replaced by an almost identical skink in the same position.
• The other skink going in the front rank is the musician, currently equipped with the mouthpiece of a great blowgun/sunfire thrower. I'll turn int into some sort of hunting horn at some point; current idea is to use some of the snake bits from either the Bastilodon's Arc of Sotek or the extra bits from Saurus Knights to make it look like a snake horn. One will be realistic, the other goofy as heck, but given the Lizardmen's style of iconography, maybe the Knight version would work better. We'll see.
• Some of the old twelve will want rebasing, and their current bases are very slightly larger than the new 24's. Some filing will likely commence, but I'll still need to buy bases for the redesignated Steg crew.
• Similarly, the old leader and some of the old twelve need new javelins, which I'm fresh out of. The old leader will also most probably need a new shield, as will the redesignated Steg crew and two skinks who're actually going on the steg, totally seven shields more than I have. Thank goodness people are always trying to make money off of their spare bits on Ebay! Managed to find a seller with a slight surplus of everything. Including a spare leader-style skink, which would forgo needing to rework the old leader. He might not make it back in after all...

So once new paint, spare bits and paint stripper have been allocated, there's nothing left in the way of a forty-skink horde! Being able to plop them down anywhere, plop a Stegadon with a Skink Alpha behind them and have them bonus move into range of a mass javelin attack should be fun!

 

That's a lot of skinks , good luck painting them all!

 

Thanks for the advice, I'm on the home stretch for them now though; I've pretty much only got gold bits on the shields left to do!

 

Dear, so much stuff to paint at once indeed!! Congrats I could never have the patience to paint such a huge unit at the same time.

 

Well, on the last day of the month deadline, the shields were handed out and the left arms were attached! Let's see how the unit's looking!



Maybe there's hope for Charybdis' entourage yet! They certainly won't be winning any awards, but they'll make a solid and dependable battleline. I'll be looking into basing them later, but it likely won't be anything too special.

Up next, we're going to take a look at the unit of Saurus, which given their complete mixture of weaponry, might be split into two units and intermingled with some new blood. Stay tuned!

 

Been a little while , but progress has (slowly) been being made! The Beast from the East hit at the start of the month, making buying Methylated Spirits to clean down the Saurus a bit tricky. However, I did eventually get out, and also bought all the paints I'll be needing, and a Start Collecting box to boot!

Anyway, the Methylated Spirits cleaning. Well...

There are probably a few things I did wrong, but this was with a soak-scrub-soak-scrub method, which was recommended. Not getting literally all the paint is understandable; it's not easy to get a toothbrush at anything behind the legs. Unfortunately, these Saurus are the really old lighter grey plastic, and they've come out of the cleaning a little soft and bendy... Shouldn't be an issue so long as I'm careful with them, though, and what paint remains doesn't obscure detail too much, so a spray of a new undercoat ought to remove most of the pain.

Speaking of undercoating, the twelve new warriors from the SC box have been assembled, sans shields which I'll be doing separately again. Spare bits from them and the Knights sprues will also be used to get the whole of the old unit equipped with clubs, instead of a clubs/spears/it-broke-off-in-a-zombie's-ribcage assortment. The warrior above is using one of the Knights weapons, as is the old Squad leader in the background, now with a club a little bigger than hisd old one. He's playing second in command now, though, as one of the new reinforcements has taken his place in the command role.

It wasn't an easy decision to make, but the prevalence of teleportation tactics in play in AoS required a fresh perspective, and training the old leader to re-orient his troops was proving difficult. The Standard Bearer's been replaced and armed normally too, as a somewhat bendy standard that already needed an upheaval wasn't inspiring much hope in anyone. To the older Saurus' joy, though, the musician of their squad is staying, and hasn't been altered or reassigned beyond a new drumstick (his old one has beaten in too many exposed skulls, it seems).

I'll give cleaning the old boys a second go, and then it's on to painting!

 

Reinforcements have arrived!

48 Saurus Warriors and 40 Temple Guard, each with two command units. That works well for my ongoing plans, as I only need to source another four warriors from somewhere to have a total of 80 - one unit of 40 with spears, and two of 20 with clubs. Should work pretty well in AoS if I decide to run a Sunclaw host at any point. The forty guard, meanwhile, can be split into two groups of 20 easily, or for 8E/9th age, can form a unit of 36 around a Slann (dropping one of the command teams and one extra guy) while still counting as a horde.

Pretty happy with these models; some of them need a little repairing and altering, and I'm going to be rearming a few of the Warriors for my own reasons, but the majority are perfectly good! Guards don't rank up brilliantly, but it's easy enough to make them work, especially since I got them at a significant discount (£1 per model is about what the Warriors would normally cost, but isn't even a half of what guard do!)

I likely won't be buying more models for quite a while, now, as these are going to take a lot of work to get board ready.

Speaking of which, the weather's taken a significant turn for the warmer now that the Beast from the East has passed and we've hit the turn of Spring, so sitting outside and scrubbing the paint off of the oldest warriors shouldn't be dreadful. The guys from the Get Started box are all fully undercoated, and I'll be painting them up soon!

 

Also, as an added curiosity, was the box all of these models was delivered in;

Perfect fit for the purchase, but how many people have one of these just lying around? Have I bought straight from the Old Ones...?

 

Older than my involvement in the hobby, yeah. Whoever the seller of this inordinate number of lizards is, I think he's been a fan of them for a long time, which makes me wonder why he decided to sell them all.

Also, had a look at the Kroaknado strategy, the Balewind Vortex as a warscroll, and it's representation as a model. Having one sometime after I buff my army's casting potential definitely seems like a good idea, better even than an Astrolith Bearer for the wizard involved, but the official model? A giant floating Chaos Emblem for the Slann? I somehow think not. So working back from the fact that it's got a lot of circular elements, and that it gives similar buffs as the Astrolith Bearer, I've very quickly thought this up;

Those are both stock images ofc, and I'd never got to this level of detail, but you get the idea. Cut out the skulls on the base and fit something in their place to look like the Astrolith/Mayan Calendar, paint up the Whirlwind of Disembodied Screamers in a dark purple/black colour and speckle with white dots to look like a bit twisting column of spacestuff, and completely replace the top section with an engraved dias, something like a circular version of the Stegadon's howdah. Attach a few more spare bitz from various sprues (like banners and icons) just to make it clear that yes, this is an official GW product at its core, and we're golden! A much more faction-friendly version of the Vortex.

I might see what I can do in Blender, actually. I'm an absolute novice, but getting something printed and gluing it on would be easier than try to sculpt that much greenstuff or scratch-build from plasticard or foam. Could even do some other faction designs, if it turns out to be easy enough.

 

OH MAN. I think that's one of the first GW boxes I ever bought. Bought it with a friend when I was 10 or 11… That brings back memories

(And NO i don't have the privilege of having my seat in the Old Ones' council…)