Breaking out the titillating pink - Bee Knight Progress

I finally got round to doing a spot of painting and decided to make a start on the Tzeentch Bee Knight I'm doing as part of the knight group challenge over at the Oldhammer forums.

I wanted to pick a really old school look for this guy, so the colours need to be pretty bright and garish. I decided to start with the Tzeentch steed and went for an approximation of an old blue horror colour scheme; striking blue fading to pink on the extremities.

Pink and blue - a classic Tzeentch colour scheme!

Time Travelling to Golden Demon 1989...

Maybe the picture goes wavy and a harp starts playing. Or perhaps you hear the sound of the TARDIS materialising. Either way, you've time-travelled back to 1989 to see the Golden Demon entries for that year. Hang on, there's no need - you just need to pick up a second-hand copy of the Fantasy Miniatures book:

Tutorial - Converting Complex Figures

Up until a couple of years ago the extent of converting I did on models was fairly minimal; a weapon swap here and there. Maybe a head swap if it wasn't too difficult. I rarely did anything complex, so there was little in the way of planning involved.

More recently I've been doing a lot more advanced conversions, in some cases involving parts from 5 or 6 different models. With that level of work and commitment to chopping up nice old lead, I've starting implementing a bit of a structured approach to converting my models, illustrated by the image below, which is a walkthrough of the process involved for one of my Gutter Runners for my Skaven Blood Bowl team:

The Curse of Poor Attention Span - My Discarded Blood Bowl Teams

I'm guessing many of us suffer from the same problems; lack of focus, short attention span and changing interests. Blood Bowl is my favourite game and I have a strong desire to make good selection of interesting and unique teams. I think I've succeeded this with a couple of my completed teams, but my ambition is always a bit greater than my completion rate. In management babble, I'm a poor completer-finisher!

Actually, the post title is probably not entirely fair - I don't generally discard projects...sometimes it just takes me a while to get round to finishing them.

So here they are then; my WIP Blood Bowl teams, in most cases left by the sideline as something else comes along:

Beekeeping Hats for Beekeeping Knights - Bee Knight Progress

Yet more greenstuff has gone into the Bee Knight, with a smidge more progress. I've now repaired the damage from all the cutting, primarily filling in the gap at the Knight's waist.

I've also created a protective veil to his beekeeping hat that I'm relatively satisfied with. What you now see is the third attempt to make this, the previous two having got me very frustrated and were subsequently discarded.

Mounting the Hive! Bee Knight Progress

I found some time last night to do some more work on my Bee Knight Champion of Tzeentch. The key areas of work were to do some of the infilling from the 'chop' stage of the model (the point where all the components are assembled, but no blending work has been done), and to do some of the structural work and assembly. Here's where I'm at:

Progress to date; pretty pleased with the overall balance and profile

My 'Bring Out Your Lead' Experience

It was with great sadness that at 1.20pm on Saturday 31st August I departed the Oldhammer 'Bring out your lead' event at Foundry. As I left, Tony Hough was in full swing talking through his fabulous portfolio, Padre was co-ordinating some dispicable pygmy action in the Rumble in the Jungle game, and the whole venue was a riot of miniatures not seen on a table-top for several decades.

Tony Hough (L) enthralls Orlygg (R)

Skaven Blood Bowl Team Retrospective - Part 1, Building the Team

Back in April 2012, I converted up a Skaven Blood Bowl player , converted from a couple of Skaven and the Chaos Star Bilerot Vomitflesh. He very quickly became known as Fat Rat; here's why:



He's not fat, just big boned!

Fat Rat started the seed of something...I decided I wanted to make a Skaven Blood Bowl team. Not just any old team you understand, but a team where every model is different and unique!

I couldn't resist getting started - Bee Knight Progress

In spite of the pile of other projects sitting on my desk, I tend to get a little distracted by anything new. That selection of components for my Bee Knight was sitting begging to have some attention, and when I found myself with a spare hour this afternoon, I broke out the modelling tools.

The concept for this figure is that he's a Tzeentch Champion, with a tame hive of enchanted bees. There will be some back story to come, but it gives you the general flavour.

The knight will be mounted on a Tzeentch creature of some kind and will be equipped with all sorts of bee paraphenalia. This is where I got to this afternoon:

Tzeentch's Bee Keeper - an Oldhammer Group Project

Over at the BLOOD forums Asslessman proposed a nice group project; the basic premise is to make a Knight with some sort of connection to the creator's background and/or location.

I happen to live in a place called Beeston. Bees appear everywhere:


Beehive on the town hall



Beekeeper statue on the high street

Starting the blog

Firstly, hello! Some of you guys may know me from the Blood Forums or perhaps Talk Fantasy Football or one of several other forums I frequent. For some years now I've been commenting on my various modelling and gaming projects in silo fashion (Blood Bowl on TFF, Inquisitor on The Conclave, Warhammer 40k on Dakka Dakka or Warseer).

It's been the rise of the Oldhammer movement, and the community on Blood forums that has really changed my attitude to how this hobby fits together. It turns out there are plenty of other folks out there who prefer old school Citadel miniatures from a broad 'golden age' ranging (depending on who you speak to) from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s. Over this period, Games Workshop set the foundations for many of the key classic tabletop games; Warhammer, Rogue Trader, Blood Bowl, Space Marine and others.

My particular interest is modelling small groups of figures; Hive gangs, Blood Bowl teams, warbands and the like, so this blog aims to chart what I do and when. I can't claim it will have any structure. it probably will have a high proportion of abandoned projects. But it might be interesting!