Painting – Daan of War

2019: The year of the pile!

Happy 2019! I’ve mentioned this in the previous post, but I’ve been trying to not buy as much warhammer the last few months and it seems to be working. Abaddon is the last model that I finished recently and that marks the absolute end of the chaos miniatures I have in my posession.

Now that that’s finished I’ve even started digging in to “The Pile”!

Trust me, this was a lot worse a couple of months ago.

To the trained eye, the pile is actually pretty well organised:

So far I’m planning to go about this project in the following order:

Terrain (Blue pile). Terrain needs to go first. Thanks to all the work I’ve done these last few years I now have a large 40k and a large Heresy army that I can perfectly use for games in their current rulesets. The only reason I never play a game at home is because I lack proper terrain. If I finish this I can not only start playing some awesome games in my own house, but I’ll be able to take better pictures with nicer backgrounds as well.
Raven Guard and Sisters of Silence (Purple pile). These are models I’ve bought a long time ago and I’ve had the idea of a RG army with a small allied SoS force for a long time now. If I get the terrain done, finishing off my Ravens and painting up some Sisters will be a great reward for me.
Skaven (Orange pile). When my Raven Guard are completely done it will be good to switch gears and start painting up my Skaven again. It’s a lot of work and a lot of it is grinding, but grinding out simple color schemes will likely be a refreshing change after working on the RG and the sisters. I need to paint 80 clanrats, a start collecting pestilens box and a random assortment of old models that either need some TLC or a more permanent storage solution.
Eldar (Red pile). I can not paint so many armies in 1 year. My solution for the Eldar is to hand them over to Scar’s Mini ature Madness. With all the money I’m not spending on warhammer this year I feel like I can afford to fix 1 problem the expensive way. I’m also really hyped for it. Owning a pro-painted 40k army that complements my chaos and has a totally different playstyle is something I’m really looking forward to.
Word Bearers and Militia (Purple again). Even the best plans do not survive contact with the enemy. Even if I somehow manage to get all of the above done before 2019 is done I will finally start working on my remaining Heresy stuff. It’s the project I’m saving for last because I want it to be a passion project. This is going to be the ultimate reward for finishing the other stuff. I will finally get to feel what it’s like to work on a single project without having something else in the back of my head that will need to get done after that. Also, so far, Heresy seems to work the best for me in terms of excitement and motivation. It’s something about the lore aspect and the long term aspect FW seems to have going with it that just really scratches my hobby itch. Hopefully I can start on these this year and actually start buying stuff again in 2020.

Scaling Down

Coming back from the madness that was september and october, I’ve spent the last couple of weeks trying to settle back down with my hobby output.

Just because I need to turn it back from 100% though, doesn’t mean I need to stop doing anything at all. I’ve just really tried to focus on 1: not buying any new stuff and 2: only painting stuff that has been on my to-do list for ages.

First I needed to get two mini’s out of the way though:

This was an ork that I bought at the local GW store for a pretty cool initiative. The idea was that each customer paint up 1 ork and add it to a waagh! I’m also pretty pleased with how my ork turned out and I tried some new things on him such as the hazard stripes.

Another project that I really wanted to finish was this character:

It’s based off of a mandrake miniature with an empire sword soldered on. I painted him up how I wanted my Elf Warlock character to look in a Dungeons and Dragons campaign I’m participating in. It’s been a long time since I got to be a player in a D&D campaign so I wanted to make sure I had a good looking miniature for my character. I also really like the mandrake miniature and I had one lying around for ages that I knew I liked, but didn’t know what to do with until now.

After that it was on to the real to-do pile:

This guy is something I bought off of a friend ages ago that wanted to get rid of his chaos stuff and has been one of the many things I had lying around the workstation. Now that he’s done I have no more nurgle stuff left on my pile and that is a nice feeling to have.

The next most urgent things on ‘the pile’ as it looks now are Abbadon (who I’ve been meaning to paint for a looong time) and a whole bunch of terrain. Since the terrain should go reasonably fast and Abbadon is only a single miniature I hope to have these finished before christmas. Right now I’m thinking it would be really nice to find a way to clear out all the 40k off of ‘the pile’ before january so that I can go into the new year only focussing on AoS and Heresy.

I’m not going to rush myself though. The whole idea was that I would take it a bit more easy from now on.

Death to the False Emperor!

September + October Hell Part 2

Right after the Gurash Wars, I threw myself into my entry for the 2018 edition of Armies on Parade. The idea behind the project was to build a display for my homebrew Renegade Chaos Warband: The Shades of Tranquil.

If you go far back enough on this blog you’ll see that this army was started way back in 2010 and 8 years later it’s only gotten bigger and better. It’s been through 3 edition changes and I can honestly say that I’m still proud of how I’ve painted and built the whole thing. That’s basically why I wanted to take Armies on Parade this year and really celebrate how amazing and cool this force is.

In the end I got the Best Theme award which was nice and I was just really happy to have respectfully finished this project and army.

The next weekend though, I had to reshift my focus completely again as we were going to the Scale Model Challenge again. Before I went there I apparently didn’t have enough hobby on my plate since I spent the friday evening playing an awesome Heresy game against Koen for the campaign (which is still going strong):

I enjoyed being able to use my Knight for the first time in a heresy game but I unfortunately can’t stand up to rapier batteries and I lost the Knight without it getting into combat at all. The battle was fun though and it was cool to make an appearance in my own campaign for a change.

Next day was time for the SMC!

So, there you have it. In between all the happenings of the past months I also spent time helping Stephan build and paint this awesome table. Stephan, Dirk and me added our armies on top of it as well as some terrain pieces and to be honest I was really proud again of our achievement.

Pictured above are me, Stephan and Dirk from left to right. Below is the only mini that I painted especially for the display. I really felt that I needed a cool centerpiece in between Stephan’s stardrake and Dirk’s flying cow. I’m glad I painted it in the end, but I won’t deny that it took a lot more work than I anticipated. Probably because it’s really a mini that you really want to do your best on and can’t leave hanging with a simply ‘ok’ paintjob.

Now below here are a lot of pictures, but since it’s such a big board I’m going to not care about making this a long post and just show everything.

With that out of the way I’ll leave this with only a few more cool images from our neighbouring club at the SMC who brought along an INSANE mordheim table:

The table was so awesome I can’t even explain it properly with just these images. Basically EVERYTHING on the table can be taken apart in floors which means that your mini’s can literally enter and walk around each house in that city. You can even remove entire houses to see what’s underneath. You can even use some of the fucking SEWERS! The witch hunter warband pictured above is my own and I’m really glad I brought them along just so I could have a chance to play on such an amazing table.

Needless to say though, after so much hobby I forced myself to take a break for a while so expect the next post to contain a lot less material, but hopefully a bit more short and sweet stuff. I’m using my break from events and stuff now to get some bits done that I wouldn’t normally have time for and Horned Rat knows I have enough of that stuff lying around, so I won’t be parched for material on this blog just yet.

So until next time and…

Death to the False Emperor!
Glory to the Horned Rat!
Victory or Death!

House Pyke

My summer hobby break has continued somewhat during the last month. Despite very little activity on my personal projects however, I do finally have some cool things to post about.

First up: I finally finished my Imperial Knight!

It took me a long time to finally fix all the transfers, but I’m really happy with it now. The pike designs were custom transfers that I ordered quite a while ago at Fallout Hobbies and it’s nice to see they turned out well. I also tried to include some water effect on the base for the first time.

Another thing that I’ve started up last month is a brand new Horus Heresy campaign called ‘The Knights of Dies Veneris’.

It’s supposed to become a year long campaign where I get to write a lot of stories about everyone’s battles while at the same time things stay pretty casual and people can drop in and out, only having to play 1 game a month. I’ve wanted to do something like this for a long time, so I’m glad I finally had the time to set things in motion. I had a lot of fun writing the stories for the campaign, so if you like to read it might be worth checking out the blog posts on the club website.

As for my own games, I did manage to play a few here and there. Here are some cool pics from a 40k game against Koen’s Knight list and some images from a really cool heresy game against Peter’s Iron Warriors:

This sunday I’ll be participating in another Bloodstorm Age of Sigmar event. I’ve entered a list with several new models I still need to paint for my Skaven army, but with the 120 clanrats out of the way I feel confident I’ll be able to get it done. Next week I’ll probably post some pics from that event and discuss some of the upcoming stuff in October.

120 Clanrats

The reason for the lack of blog posts in the past month is that I had to think of it like this: “If I have time to write a blog post, I have time to paint some clanrats.”

The mentality that I had to be in for the past couple of weeks was insane. In the last post I made on the subject I showed my doomwheel and had just started work on my Stormfiends. So since that post I still had literally one hundred clanrats to paint, a warp lightning cannon, an abomination and 3 stormfiends. I simply had to give up on all of my other free time activities in order to finish it all in time.

In this post though, I’m glad to announce that I did it. Despite having to replace the abomination with 6 jezzails and having to stay up until 3 am the night before the tournament, I managed to paint every single model to a nice tabletop standard.

Here’s some WIP shots of the stormfiends and a picture from the army display at the event itself:

As for the event itself, it was a lot of fun to see so many well painted AoS armies at a Dutch tournament. With 21 players (if I remember correctly) it was the biggest AoS event in the Netherlands so far.

The first game I played was a bye against an amazing Stormcast Eternal army that had been painted to look like weathered statues. It was great fun and because it was a bye game, we both threw competition out the window and focussed on having a fun game with lots of combat.

The second game was against a good friend who also brought his Stormcasts along. This game started out extremely epic with two classic battlelines staring eachother down, but quickly turned into a slaughter. As it appeared I had made some tactical errors with my brand new force, which were compounded by being on the recieving end of a double-turn. The game was still pretty fun despite the one sided result and it gave me some much needed experience.

The third game was against sylvaneth. This game was a lot more balanced casualty-wise as I applied some lessons from the second game and used some pretty effective screening tactics. The scenario and the mobility of the sylvaneth put me at a severe disadvantage however and I lost the game at 2 against 6 vp’s. My opponent was a chill guy though and it was a really fun game. He also obviously put a lot of effort in his painting which was also cool to see.

Once again I can’t overstate how happy I am to have finished my Skaven army finally and being able to use it at the event was the cherry on top. Next post might have some heresy or 40k in it again or perhaps even an abomination?

Glory to The Horned Rat!

The Race is On!

Past few weeks I’ve been spending my hobby time on Skaven again!

I’m participating in the Bloodstorm Age of Sigmar tournament on the 9th of June and I’ll need a 2000 points army to do it. So far my little Skaven horde has not really taken off and I’m about a 100 clanrats short of a solid battleline.

Since I’ve been mentioning a necessity for painted Skaven, Dirk was so amazing as to help me out with an awesome Arch-Warlock for my birthday:

I only needed to spend a little time repainting the base and this bad-ass was good to go! Squeeking of going: The first thing on the list of stuff to get ready was a model that’s been haunting me for over 5 years.

This was a chore to paint, but I’m oh so glad I finally got it done. Finishing a model that you’ve been dreading in, like, forever is an amazing feeling and sometimes very necessary to regain confidence in an army project.

The next things on the table are 3 stormfiends and after that it’s clanrats, clanrats, clanrats. I wasn’t lying that I’d need to do a 100 if I want a solid battleline so despite that being a daunting number, I’m going to have to give it an honest go.

I’m also playing and participating in a narrative 40k campaign that I’ve started to write some fiction for. I’m not sure if I want to post the fiction as a part of this blog or create a full seperate blog for it.

I’ll update this post as soon as I’ve figured it out.

Glory to the Horned Rat!

2017 In Review Part 2

Welcome back to DaanofWar’s 2017 hobby highlights!

Part 1 left us just before the big wedding. The wedding was great. We had to take an enormous ammount of pictures, sit in chairs, sign papers, eat loads of stuff and party our asses off. Here’s a picture of me and my wife making an attempt at posing for a photo:

So, with all that nonsense out of the way I finally had some time to paint my warhams again:

As can be seen in the images above, I put my Raven Guard on hold for a while and continued the work to rebase my entire Chaos Space Marine army. The new edition of Warhammer 40k was just released and we were going to kick off a campaign at the GameForce, so I really wanted to give my ‘good-old’ chaos marines a bit of love and attention. I had good hopes that they might be viable again with the new rules and I was pretty hyped to see if my old army could come back with a vengeance.

Having rebased most of my marines: This is a shot of my first 500pts battle against Naut’s Grey Knights. Not only did I instantly learn that Grey Knights are pretty good in the new edition, but units of 20 marines die waaay too easily to morale checks. Never again.

During the rest of the campaign I started noticing the pattern that I was not only losing a lot of the games, but that I was also losing them fast. Most of my games were over by turn 3. Also, the hope I had for my chaos army catching a break rules-wise this edition were shattered when it turned out that not only was the core of my army (my 40+ chaos marines with bolters) not very points efficient, but they also lost the option to take an extra close combat weapon. This made my entire army a lot less viable as I found myself stuck with a lot of units that did not excel in any of the 3 main phases of the game.

With each new game I played each month I realised more and more that I needed to do a lot more than rebasing to salvage my chaos army in 8th edition. All of this got me a bit down about the new edition, so I wasn’t that sad when ForgeWorld announced that the Horus Heresy would be staying with 7th edition and I could happily continue working at my Raven Guard again.

Above is the first model that I did when I started working on my RG again. Pretty happy with it and a nice change of pace from the drop pods and the storm eagle that I still had to finish.

Another reason for needing to hurry with my Raven Guard was the upcoming Scale Model Challenge. As you may remember from last year, the Scale Model Challenge is a fairly large miniature painting convention that’s right next door for me and since we had such a blast visiting last year I managed to get us a spot for the club for 2017. The idea we had to wow the crowds was to try and display the sheer ammount of Heresy we have going on at our local club by building a giant Isstvan V display board.

Here’s some work in progress pics of how we built the board:

Thanks to a lot of help from friends we managed to finish the table just in time for the SMC and with all of our armies on top it turned out to be a roaring succes:

Also, to finish my big 3000 point Raven Guard project in style, I took the second half of the army (the part that I painted this year) to Armies on Parade at the Warhammer store in Eindhoven:

I was super proud to have finally finished everything after almost 2 years of working on it and my efforts were rewarded by a nice gold pin for Best Army Theme.

The final thing that I went to in 2017 was the first Gurash Wars event in November. First time I went to a narrative e Horus Heresy event and it was a blast. It was a long way to travel, but it was worth it to take part in the ongoing story and see a lot of cool new Heresy armies. Here are a few impressions of the event:

So that was pretty much it for me in 2017. A lot more has happened so far in 2018 though, so I’ll save all of that for the next post.

Victory or Death!

Migration + 2017 In Review Part 1

Hello and welcome to my brand new WordPress site!

I’ve decided to start blogging again after a year away from my old blog (daan-of-war.blogspot.com). Making the transfer from Blogger to WordPress has been in my mind for a lot longer, but converting all my old posts had always seemed way too much work. Not any more though and I’m proud to say that I’ve been able to save my 7 years of sporadic content!

The last post I made on the blogger blog left me at the cusp of 2017 which I had declared to be the year of my Raven Guard. I also mentioned my Chaos Space Marines and how I was in the process of rebasing them. So, for the sake of keeping track of my hobby, I’ll kick off this new blog with a 2 part report of what I’ve been up to for 2017 and the first part of 2018. So pour yourself some tea and kick back because it’s going to be a long one.

I’ll start off by mentioning briefly that, outside of the hobby, 2017 has been defined for me by getting married halfway through (30th June). This meant that I spent most of the first half of the year in preparation of this outrageous event and didn’t always get much hobby done.

To compensate for lack of hobby we had a wedding invitation image made that at least implies that we spend time painting.

Despite the stressful times, I did manage to see through the Horus Heresy campaign we had going; playing the final few games and culminating the year-long event in a second megabattle:

This was my final regular heresy game (2750 points I guess) against Naut’s fantastic Alpha Legion. Don’t remember much of it, but I most likely lost this battle. You can see that my Mor Deythan were not even painted at this time.

Here are my Ravens during the final 3k per person megabattle. Due to the arangement of tables and sides, the megabattle wound up mainly pitting me against Naut (again) while we had minimal dealings with the world eaters and mechanicum to our left. This was a bit of a pity, but since Joyce couldn’t be around for the whole day I got to control her awesome Word Eaters for a while.

I really like this picture of Joyce’s World Eater force with her awesomely commisioned Legio Audax warhound titan forming up the center. Props to Scar’s Miniature Madness for this amazing piece (not to mention Joyce’s own amazing work on her 45 assault marines!).

Here’s Naut’s cool Alpharius Conversion that I just had to take a picture of.

Overview of the entire megabattle. It was pretty epic.

After the megabattle, I spent the next few months focussed on the impending wedding and getting into rumour arguments with people about the launch of 8th edition Warhammer 40k. Speaking of which: It’s almost been an entire year and I still don’t really know how to feel about it. More on 8th ed in the next post, but around the time of release I wasn’t truly captured by the hype, yet also not as down and out about it either. I was also really glad that they kept the Heresy in 7th after the death of Alan Bligh (long shall he be remembered and his absence felt). To distract myself from buying new stuff in the preparation of a costly wedding I spent the time I had painting and playing my Ravens.

This is a shot from a pick-up game I played against Dirk. Dirk was bummed about his army’s performance in the campaign, but somehow managed to wipe me clean off the table when it appeared my army was no match for an Acastus Knight Titan, Quad Mortars and a Medusa.

And this is what I was left with right before the wedding. My 3k army almost completely painted. Only 2 Drop Pods, A Storm Eagle and Corax himself left to go.

It feels good to be blogging again and I hope the new WordPress website works out. I have a lot more images for the next post so hopefully until then!

Victory or Death!

Dust Vultures on Parade

Last post left off right before I went to armies on parade. Well, I didn’t win anything except the participation pin, but I was damn proud of how my army looked either way. A lot of work has gone into the Dust Vultures and having a nice board to display them on is an awesome treat. It was clear from the winners though, that if I aim to accomplish anything next year I’m definately going to need to build some big terrain pieces for the display board.

Not a lot to say about it really. Besides the fact that I’m damn proud of the achievement.

Joyce’s army did a lot better than mine and came in fourth place! Rightly so, knowing the ammount of work that went into these 54 dryads, 3 tree lords, drycha, 6 kurnoth hunters and 10 tree revenants.

The week after AoP had me getting ready for another Heresy Battle again. Once again I faced Michael and his Blood Angels/Dark Angels that were proxied as Iron Warrriors. I can’t even complain against the proxying anymore either as I was forced to use some proxies myself when I just couldn’t get my terminator squad completed in time and had to use my chaos terminators.

Footslogging for the win!The mission that we played was adapted from a standard HH mission which basically involved a lot of trenches, low difficult terrain and hills. Infiltrate units were not allowed to deploy via infiltrate and we earned points for claiming either deployment zones and no man’s land with troops and heavy support units. Right from the start I had secretly given up on this battle seeing as I had lost my infiltrate advantage and was going to be forced to footslog my way across the board.

After turn 3 things looked a lot better I was forced to admit.

Despite my desperations before the game, things actually went surprisingly well. I made good progress along the board and, thanks to a scenario rule that gave outnumbered units rampage, the low numbers of the guys that got into combat really worked to my advantage. At the end of the battle I earned the same number of victory points as my opponent and only lost because of First Blood.

The next couple of weeks I will be concentrating on painting up as much Raven Guard marines as I can. I’ve done lots of assembling and have so far assembled and basecoated all the infantry that I need for the entire army. The only things I need to assemble after this are Corax and my Blackwing flyer, but hopefully I’ll also have some new painted units to show when the next post comes around.

Because I’m dumb, I’ve decided to spend some time on a kill team unit for the local club and an Exalted Deathbringer for a painting competition as well. Will have to make up for lost time this month if I plan to finish these in time as well.

Here’s a shot of the Mordheim campaign that’s been going on at the GameForce. My guys got absolutely massacred in their first outing, but managed to scrounge up a wyrdstone piece all the same.

Victory or Death!

Drop Pod Hell

The past month I’ve been spending most of my time doing drop pods.

Man these things are rough. Not only are they hard to paint on the outside, but they’re twice as much work on the inside as well!

They’re so much work that I still didn’t manage to complete my army in time for the game I had scheduled at Koen’s place:

How things looked after my first turn: one plasma marine got hot and the rest of the army did nothing.

The game itself went really bad dice-wise for me and the first two turns resulted in a lot of dead marines on my side, starting me off with a big disadvantage. The turns afterwards only got worse and I only managed to take out the mortars in the end of the game. My only hope and plan to salvage the game was to destroy the two objectives in one fell strike of my deathstorm drop pod, but even that was not to be as my dice failed me again. I damaged one of the objectives with it, while my dark furies finished off another one in turn 5. In hindsight I should have used my newly assembled mor deythan to take out one of the objectives, but since I’ve never used snipers before I was stumbling around a lot with their deployment and usage.

At this halfway point it is evident that my army has been thoroughly chipped away. Hah!

Despite my low rolls the game was pretty fun and it was nice to play on Koen’s well painted table with all the cool terrain. Koen’s attic (where we played) was stuffed to the brim with 40k and 30k stuff and keeps, so far, the largest private collection of painted citadel miniatures I’ve ever seen in my life.

The weekend afterwards I didn’t do much painting either as I spent my sunday at the Scale Model Challenge. This is an amazing event that’s practically next door to me and definately worth checking out for any miniature fan. Here’s a video (in dutch) from the event where you can see some of the highlights from the painting competition the event is best known for:

Then, for the last two weeks I finally got my inspiration for the title of this blog post. As I was trying to finish most of my raven guard for the Armies on Parade event I got overambitious and set my
goals way too high, hoping to finish all four drop pods that are going to be in the final army. Just painting 2 of those bastards (along with my display board) almost got the best of me.

I started out trying to paint the ‘pods with a drybrush technique, but this turned out to be really ugly as you can probably see in this image. I’ll try and get some better pictures tomorrow, but just going with the edge highlights proved to be the better option in the end.

So, once I’m done making this post I’m going to go to sleep and prepare myself for displaying what I’ve got so far for my ravens at the Armies on Parade event. I’ll do a proper report on it next week when I’ve also had my next Horus Heresy campaign battle.

Wish me luck!

Victory or Death!