It Came From the Woods

Our next club painting competition is this Friday, and the theme this time is a unit of miniatures for either Warhammer Fantasy, 40K, or Flames of War.

Since I've been toying around with beastmen lately, and had already started building a unit of them, I decided to submit them for the competition, since the conversion and sculpting work had already been done, so for once I could just concentrate on the painting.

With the new edition of Warhammer Fantasy that came out this summer sort of pushing the game towards larger masses of troops, I had begun to think of a better way of doing things. I hate painting lots of the same miniature and I also hate having to spend an hour of prep time before and after each game putting away each miniature of a 40 man unit. When I played at a GT tournament with my zombie horde army (120+ zombie miniatures) I spent all of my time in between games setting up all my zombies into units.

So I decided to do 'thematic bases', where I put cool thematic elements in place of some of the models in the unit, and also combine bases to make large blocks which each contain several different bases. So this 40 man unit of beastman for instance, only has 12 different pieces which need to be put together on the table or in a movement tray, rather than having to line up 40 different beastman models.

Another reason was that for some armies, the idea of orderly looking ranks doesn't work for me. High Elves, Empire, Dwarves, and Bretonnians I can see in neat little ranks. Beastmen and zombies not so much. My thematic bases give more of the appearance of an unruly mob of beastmen stomping through the woods toward their prey. The two trees are mostly wire built with clay used to flesh them out and green stuff for the bark detailing.

The beastmen themselves are a box from the previous edition which contained a mix of gors and the smaller ungors. Again, I prefer idea of the mixed unit to separate units, so I used all of them together to form the unit.

The first thing I did was the trees, taking them from black coat, to basecoat of scorched brown, to drybrushes of bestial brown, to bestial brown mixed with bleached bone. The dead decrepit tree I painted in more gray and green tones. I did the trees first because I figured I wouldn't need to worry about getting paint on the beastmen while I did them. There are more details I plan on doing later, but the main body of work on the trees was done before I started working on the rest of the unit.

Using a recent White Dwarf article on painting beastmen for reference, I started working on the beastmen themselves, giving them a Tallarn Flesh skin coat and a scorched brown coat on their fur.

I did a Vermin Fur drybrush on the fur and then washed the fur with Devlan Mud and the skin with Ogre Flesh.

I did a final drybrush of Bestial Brown/Bleached Bone on the fur and a Tallarn Flesh highlight on the skin, followed by a further highlight of Tallarn Flesh/Bleached Bone.

Metals I started with Boltgun Metal, washed with Bedab Black, highlighted with Chainmail, and extreme highlighted with Mithril Silver. I went back and blended more Boltgun Metal in on the weapons because I wasn't satisfied with how they were looking. I'm going to do a little more weathering effects later on. Gold I did with a Shining Gold coat, followed by Chestnut Ink wash, and a final highlight of Burnished Gold.

Hooves I did with a very dark grey mix of Chaos Black and Skull White, then a Denab Stone extreme highlight.

I wanted some color in there with all of the browns, so for the hafts of the weapons, I did Scorched Brown/Dark Angels Green with a Bestial Brown/Dark Angels Green drybrush.

The belts were Bestial Brown/Chaos Black with a Graveyard Earth highlight.

The wrappings were Snakebite Leather with Bleached Bone highlight followed by a Devlan Mud Wash.
The loincloths were a mix of Knarloc Green and Camo Green, washed with Bedab Black, and given multiple highlights of the original coat with an increasing amount of Bleached Bone mixed in.

Horns were done with a Scorched Brown basecoat followed by Bestial Brown, Tausept Ochre, Bleached Bone, and Skull White.

Bones and skulls were Snakebite Leather followed by a Bubonic Brown drybrush and a final Bleached Bone drybrush.

Teeth were Bleached Bone, followed by a Red Ink wash and a drybrush of Skull White.

I've done the bases with a Graveyard Earth/Scorched Brown/Chaos Black coat followed by a Graveyard Earth drybrush. There are now just some fun extra details on the miniatures if I want to do them, some work on the sorcerer character, thematic scenery like the large boulder and deadfall and then basing stuff and details on the trees.

This is kind of a weird feeling for me because it's so close to being done with 3 days to go till the day of the competition. It's a good thing I've got so much packing to get done or I wouldn't know what to do with myself!