Painting Challenge Casualties Bonus Round

Curt has gotten all the content for the Painting Challenge Casualties Bonus Round sorted out and posted up. There are some truly inspired entries as participants interpret the theme in their own unique ways. I encourage you to pop over and see for yourself some of the wonderful creativity on show. How Curt gets this stuff organised and posted in such short time is beyond me. He deserves a massive pat on the back!

For myself I've taken a bit of an easy road this time as I've got other things going on. Still, I'm quite pleased with how this Flames of War objective marker came out. It's a destroyed Italian tank - a M14/41 Carri Armato. I'm not usually much into these kinds of items but this has been quite fun and will dress up our table quite well, especially as I seem to turn a lot of teeny tiny working tanks into pretty much this same thing. :-)

Cheers,

Millsy

More Assault Marines for 40K

Just a quickie today...

This is another addition to my 40K space marines, in this case a squad of five metal body assault marines. The sergeant had a power fist but I cut that off with my shiny new Dremel and gave him a power sword instead.  The idea is that I by removing the power fist he can be busted down to private as required. That way I can field these as a squad of five or merge them with my other squad of five for a super-sized ten man assault machine.

Cheers,
Millsy

Sir Thomas Tyldesley's Regiment of Horse

These have been up on the painting challenge blog for a day or two now so it's time to show em off here too...

Sir Thomas Tyldesley was a stout Royalist and long term supporter of King Charles and was present at Edgehill. He raised regiments of foote, horse and dragoons. He continued to fight through all three civil wars and at times served under Prince Rupert. He never once surrendered to the evil crop headed rebels and his light was only extinguished in 1651 when we was finally killed in action at the Battle of Wigan Lane.
Today his memory lives on through re-enactment by Sir Thomas Tyldesley's Regiment of Foote.

These are Renegade Miniatures from their lovely ECW range which is unfortunately currently unavailable. Luckily I bought enough to make two units well before that happened. The remaining figs are currently also in progress and should appear here presently. These paint up a treat, with plenty of prominent detail and nice poses in the riders. The command are particularly nice with nice chunky sashes and a Dutch coat for the trumpeter. If I have a gripe at all it's that the horse poses are very similar with the exception of the head position. Still, it's a minor quibble and they rank up well.

I've painted these in my usual style - horses with a black undercoat and riders with white undercoat.
The black base gives plenty of help with the reins, etc. on the horses and also a nice dark coat colour for the various browns and greys. I love painting horses and tend to go a bit mad for variety but the result is worth the effort. The riders are base coated in a variety of colours before a combination of dip and inks for shading with highligts to finish off.

Next up, Rupert's Lifeguard AND Regiment of Horse.

Cheers,
Millsy

150 followers!

Just a quick note to welcome MIK, David, James Mishler and Prufrock who has the dubious honour of becoming our 150th follower. Welcome aboard all and thanks for joining us!

D&D Catacombs Map

Having had so much fun with my first dungeon map I really couldn't wait to do the second level. Having drawn up the basic sketch on Saturday night I got really annoyed when my felt pens ran out last night and I couldn't finish it! Guess where I rushed off to today at lunch? Yep, the pen shop... :-)

So here we have The Catacombs...

Entry is via the stairs from level one on the south east corner. These lead into the dressed stone areas with the shelves for the bodies. You can also get down from above by falling through the large trap door or into the well over the river (coloured grey), neither of which would be preferred! The rest of the map is natural caves, populated with the usual sloping passages, bottomless crevasses, choking narrows and an ancient statue to some forgotten god. Exit to the surface is via the tunnel to the south west.

I'm having so much fun I've decided to turn this into a fully fledged D&D module for starting characters, full of cliches and homages. Stay tuned.

Cheers,
Millsy

Mucking about with D&D maps

We've been running an original D&D campaign for our group on a Friday night on and off for a few months now. So far we've played two B Series modules and have just started a third with me acting as DM again.

This week I've been wandering about the web have have found a number of wonderful sites with loads of lovely home-brew dungeon maps. I decided to have a go at drawing a map myself for a break from relentlessly wielding the paint brush.

Here's my first effort....

It owes a LOT to the maps and style of +Ed Allen, a lovely gent whose rules we've used for years for skirmish games and whose Ruminations of a Geek blog is superb. Ed's Hobby Hovel web site was a treasure trove of all sorts of gaming goodness way back before blogging was even conceived.

The map consists of nine rooms of dark and gloomy rough cut stone, tricked out with all the usual goodness like secret doors, barred gates and stairs to an as-yet unmapped lower level.

I'm already getting a significant itch to turn it into a small module for entry level characters, complete with all the appropriate fluff, fonts and cheesy artwork. Now if only I could make it smell right too...

Cheers,
Millsy

Bonus Round - Angelicus Mechanicus Command Squad

This is my entry for the Heroes bonus round on Curt's painting challenge - a complete command squad for my growing 40K divergent Space Marine chapter. Don't forget to head over and vote for your favourite entries.

The squad includes a Commander, Librarian, Techmarine, Apothecary, Standard Bearer and Veteran Sergeant. They are all the older style metal models with plastic arms, weapons and jet packs as required. I've given some of the lower ranked marines non-standard jet packs to represent the mechanicus theme.

The banner is bespoke, made using iconography from the web. As it's a divergent chapter GW have never produced anything official so I made my own in Photoshop. It shows the Adeptus Mechanicus skull crest, surmounted by the dual Dark Angel / Blood Angel chapter icons, above the Legio Mechanicus name.
The black side stripes have a low key text pattern, repeating the Legio Mechanicus name over and over for a little extra interest. All the icons are of course copyright GW.

The setting is my "bug planet" terrain, made from corks, ecalyptus gum nuts and other bits and pieces.
Just the kind of place you'd find a nasty xeno threat that needs to be expunged.

I've been holding off on painting these as I knew they would take a LOT of work. I also wanted to make sure I gave them the best finish possible so I didn't attempt them till I had the colours and force theme down to a fine art. I'm pretty happy with them overall.

Cheers,
Millsy