From the Depths of the Past

Get ready... This is a big one!

A while back, long before I started this blog, I use to make Warhammer Fantasy armies. I never played a single game of Warhammer, I just made the armies because I liked to paint the figures. I would keep them for a while and then I would sell them.

I did take pics of the things I made and they were put on the Lead Adventure Forum and other places. Unfortunately, all the images were stored on Photobucket when it was free. I had no intention of paying for storage when the service changed so those pics will be lost forever and won't appear where I first posted them. Fortunately I did manage to save the majority of the photo's and those ones are now saved in my dropbox.

So, just for the sake of it, here are some of my old, not published here previously, pics. Many of the troops are very much kit-bashed and converted. In some cases I completely made the models from scratch because I couldn't find what I wanted.

Wood Elves

 These ones were my first & favorite Warhammer army. I sold them because I was out of work and waiting for my Vet Affairs payments to start (following the financial horrors of a divorce!). I would have liked to keep these guys and considering my current fantasy project it's a shame, because I'd really like to get many of these figures back. Oh well...

I made this tree guy from scratch because I couldn't find a huge and intimidating treeman at the time. 

This guy stood about 10" tall.

I lost all of the pics of the rank and file troops, as well as all the pics of the Forest Dragon. It's a shame because they were really very nice.

Dark Elves

I made these just because I could. I wanted to try something with more significant conversions. They look nice and I saved a lot more pics of these. The dragon is the GW forest dragon. I actually used a different dragon for the Wood Elves. Lots of kit-bashing here.

The only figure I have left over out of all of these pics is that little red imp thing. And I don't know why.

I wish I could get another of these dragons. Does GW still make them?

Chaos

I wanted to make something outrageous. So I decided to make this army. I wanted to make something that no one had ever seen before. I checked out many, many models and they just didn't look the way I wanted them to look because they all looked too tame. Things are different now but back when I made this army the figures just weren't available so I made a lot of these myself.

I wanted this army to look nasty and vile. I based it on the cenobites from Clive Barker's Hellraiser, but staying within the restrictions placed by the Warhammer game world. This army disturbed some people and it was while I made it that I discovered I had a knack for sculpting. You can see the components of many of the different kits I used to make these guys.

 I only have "in-progress" photo's of some of the things I made.

"The Box. You opened it and we came..."

This thing was big. It was my pregnant Nurgle Soul Grinder. The stomach was made using clear resin with a little deformed baby toy stuck into it. The rest of the model was built around this. It took a long lime to make and took a lot of greenstuff. I hope somebody still has it.

Dave the Dire Avenger for for scale.

Thank you for my indulgence. Soon I'll dig up the 40K things that I did long ago and post them too.

Cheers.,

IanKH

If You Go Down to the Woods...

I really am on a roll at the moment. I've recently started listening to audio books while I paint. I started with free You Tube offerings but I've since graduated to Audible. What this means is that I sit down to paint, put on the current book and get totally lost for a few hours. This is why I'm painting so much at this time. Currently I've been listening to Imagica by Clive Barker.

So what's happening in the woods that's so important today? Well I've painted a bunch of forest creatures. I'm still aiming at a creating a Faerie Army and these figures will be a part of it. The idea is to create something along the lines of a Brian Froud's famous illustrations. I've been a fan of his work since the early 80's. Combine that with The Dark Crystal, Hieronymus Bosch, Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword and even Julian May's Many Coloured Land and you have some idea what I'm hoping to achieve. High Fantasy in all of it's glorious, colourful, outrageous variation.

One day.

But not this day! Today, I have a troll. Not just any troll, apparently this is The Troll King! Because that's what it said on the web site. He's another Reaper Bones figure. I'm pretty sure that I can officially consider myself as a Bones convert. This figure is big. Even crouched as it is, it still stands about 60mm tall. I had to reinforce his legs by drilling into the stand and up into his legs. I then inserted some brass rod into the hole and it holds his legs much firmer.

These next figures are from Eureka and I only bought a couple to see how they came out. I'm very happy with them and I'll definitely be getting more. The fauns are just fauns as far as I know (and that's what I call them anyhow). The centaur is titled The Centaur King (lots of kings today...). I added his spear, which is from a design that I sculpted for the Moorcock Vulture Legion. I think it really suits this model. The range has a bunch of different fauns as well as centaurs. I'm looking forward to getting some more of these, I really like their simplicity and clean lines.

And, because they looked like an easy thing to do I painted a couple of Ghouls/Zombies/Dead Things. These are "official" D&D figures. They're okay and they took very little time to paint. I might get a few more. Unfortunately, I think these are the only two poses. They're nothing to get excited about but they look okay and they'll do the job.

P.S. The blue things hanging out of the mouths are their tongues. I don't know why I made them blue. I just did.