December 8, 2006

Well here we are at the end of the contest. I was successful…barely. I ended up staying up until 5:00AM the night before the tournament in order to finish things off to a standard that I was happy with. So I didn’t end up being a casualty after all. While I may have been a bit tired the day of the tournament it was an absolute blast. All three games were great, and so were my opponents. I played against Meaghan (one of my regulars in Burlington) and her Wood Elves, Ash’s pretty little knights and Mr. Jay Griffith’s Goblin Horde. My army performed alright, Stampy the mammoth was a freaking machine. He is the king of all that is awesome. In the three games that I played he killed two units of Goblins, and scared off another, he killed a Treeman and a dragon, and terrified two units of knights. He never died, although he did run off the board once – apparently the only thing that scares a mammoth is a unit of puppy dogs running underfoot. In the end I had a ton of fun, I ended up being in second place overall and won the ‘Best Presentation’ award – Yay!

So now that I have a brand new 2000 point army what do I do next? Well I am planning on expanding on it. I am planning on adding some new units like Sabretusk riders (which will count as Chaos knights) and maybe some armoured warriors (using Teutogen Guard) and a chariot. I also plan on fancying up Stampy with some add-ons like extra banners, the big lord-throne and drummer that comes with it, and a removable diorama crew that I can set in there when the unit is mounted, but remove when they deploy. I’m also going to make him a custom carrying case using foam that I bought at a local foam-distributor. Let’s face it he deserves to ride in style.

So thanks to all those who read along, and congrats to all my fellow bloggers that finished. I had a blast and look forward to the next big event!

November 24, 2006

I missed posting last week because I had a pretty awful cold that kept me in bed for about three days straight. You'd think with getting a couple of extra 'sick days' off I'd have gotten more done but I just couldn't muster up my painting genes. So here I am - last week before the big day and I have plenty to do. I am proud to say that I haven't cut corners, I have a tough week ahead, but if everything goes to schedule I'll be able to finish (that's right you lot! Stop the parade plans and don't count on me for one of your battle forces!).

I have done a lot of work - and I'm not in this little predicament because I slacked off. I realize that I am here because I set myself some pretty tough goals - especially given the type of painter I am (slow!). Had I really stopped to think about what this contest would entail I may have chosen a different army list (I am the only person to not use a lord choice). I also only took three characters when I could have taken four, and I didn't use as many magic items as I probably could have gotten away with (start warming up the violin boys! –editor). Instead I went ahead and made the army that I wanted to PLAY with. I would have found it much easier on myself had I just made a quick army list for the contest then upgraded it later on.

But you know what? I'm happy with what I've done. I took the hard route, and (hopefully) I'll be victorious regardless - and I'll have an army that isn't just characters and bolt throwers, you know who you are (cou-Ryan Z-gh!), or that is the smallest Orc & Gobbo army ever (cough-Mill cough-son!). There I've gone and thrown out a couple of insults - now to back them up. Paint brush Away!

November 10, 2006

Well here I am with only about three and a half weeks left – and I AM IN TROUBLE! Yes mark me down as a potential fatality! I have finally kicked myself into a painting groove, but it may be too little to late. I need to paint an average of 24 infantry a week to complete my goal – which given the fact that I usually need around an hour plus each means that each week I’ll have to commit somewhere between 24-35 hours to painting. Now before all of the other participants drool and decide which battleforce they want bear in mind that I am certainly not giving up. I will triumph! After all, heroes are born in difficult circumstances. Would we know who Sigmar is if humanity hadn’t been in peril? No, I will rise above the odds and emerge the victor…in fact…I wonder which battleforces I should take…

A word about army presentation:
Having painted many, many armies in my time I have come across a few little kernels of good advice for those attempting to achieve a very nice looking army. Regardless of your level of skill when it comes to painting bear these points in mind.

• Consistency, consistency, consistency. Keep a nice theme throughout the army. Use the same colour pallet on the entire army. Now you can obviously paint different models different colours, but keep to the same group of 5-10 colours.

• Banners. Banners are one of the most eye-catching pieces in an army. I tend to spend as much time on each banner as I can. Even if you aren’t the king of free-hand painting and have a difficult time painting symbols you can make a nice looking banner. Even a simple flag using alternating colours can look great (try using real country flags as examples like France and Germany). Don’t forget about consistency, keep use similar colours on the flags too.

• Bases. I made a discovery a while ago that making fancy bases really catches the eye of onlookers. Since then I’ve always given my armies nice looking, interesting bases. Try setting the army in a climate that suits the army like snow, jungle or desert. Also it looks good to have debris scattered on bases like rocks, bones, fallen weaponry and logs. If you’ve never done any interesting bases before feel free to pop by your local Games Workshop for advice!

Well that’s it for me, back to the grindstone – Thanks for the break, I needed it!

November 3, 2006

It is down to crunch time, and I’ve had to make myself a very (VERY!) rigid schedule to ensure that I finish on time. I took Chris Little’s advice that he posted in his first blog and switched a pile of my completed Marauders to regimental bases. He’s absolutely right; these are a life saver for big units. I find I prefer to paint the models separately then transfer them to the regiment bases, as it can be tough to paint in between the figures when they’re already glued next to each other.

Now I’d like to turn some attention to characters. Characters can make or break an army, and their selection is very important. Here are some pointers when deciding which characters to take, and what to equip them with.

• The General is the most important character in your army. Make sure you know what your army’s needs are when deciding what to do with your general. For example, Goblins, Skaven and even The Empire need leadership. If you give your general a monstrous mount it will likely take him away from the troops, voiding any leadership bonus they’ll offer your troops. However a Chaos army doesn’t usually need help with leadership so you are free to make him a killing machine that can run around on his own.

• Wizards are also very important. In an average 2000 point battle each side usually has between 3-4 levels of magic. I find it’s best to decide whether or not you want to compete in the magic phase. If I decide to compete I’ll take at least two level 2 wizards or a level 4 wizard. If not, I only take a single level one wizard with dispel scrolls. If you only have one low level wizard in a game it is very unlikely you’ll ever get a spell off, so why bother upgrading him to level two? A level one wizard will do just as much for you as a level 2 when it comes to dispelling, and he’ll cost 35 points less!

• Once your General and Wizards are taken care of you can move on filler characters. First you must address your needs. Do you even need another character? Don’t feel like you need to take the maximum when it comes to characters. Characters cost a lot of points, and often you could have an entire regiment for the same points cost as an extra character. Some reasons to take filler characters are: adding extra combat strength to a vulnerable unit, taking a battle standard to help keep the army from fleeing (and under the new rules to give you an additional +1 to your combat resolution), taking a specialty character like the Ogre Hunter, the Dark Elf Assassin or the Dwarf/Empire Engineers to take advantage of their special rules.

• Equipping heroes can be as tricky as picking them. Make sure to only equip them with necessary equipment. Don’t bother giving them equipment that will likely never be used or needed. You don’t have to fill all the possible points in magic items either! Don’t bother taking bound spells if you aren’t taking many wizards – they’ll never work. When deciding what magic weapons or armour to use, check out the option for normal weapons/armour too. Is it worth taking the Sword of Might (+1S) when you could take a halberd or great weapon for fewer points? Don’t forget about the common magic items!

• One last piece of advice, if you happen to have a few points left over, back up the magic weapons or armour of your general. There are a lot of spells or abilities that can destroy magic items, and having a back-up weapon is smart if you have left over points that would be put to waste otherwise.

October 27, 2006

As soon as I spouted off my clever conspiracy theory my bitz order arrived and all the HQ folks begin posting images and blogs. Was I crazy and overreacting…or are they responding to my claims in an effort to cover up their miss-doings?

But on to things of a different nature: My Mammoth is ready for battle! Woohoo! My lumbering beast of war, sacker of cities, crusher of heroes (named ‘Stampy’), can now trample, stamp and gore my way to victory! I have given Mr Kraatz the honour of being the first to reap my wrath, and once we get a bit closer to finishing this challenge we’ll get in a test game before the big show on December 2.

For Stampy’s colour scheme I went with the same fur colour as the warhounds. His skin is darker, and I used Dark Flesh, Terracotta and Tanned Flesh. I wanted a dried, cold wood colour for the howdah, and (inspired by my backyard fence) decided to use Graveyard Earth mixed with Codex Grey. At some point in the future I’ll add some trimmings and banners and things to the howdah to fancy it up a bit. In fact while my Mammoth IS finished there are many things I plan to do to it in the future. It’s the kind of model that you can keep going back to, to add details and improvements. At some point I’ll likely add warpaint, banners and chains. I also have plans to make removable scenic dioramas of the crew. When the howdah is full I will place trays of scenic Viking passengers in it, and when it is empty I remove them. I plan to make the great stepped throne removable as well (which is why you don’t see it in the pictures at the moment – because I don’t have my lord riding the beast).

The Mammoth was great fun to work with, and I can’t wait to get him on the battlefield. To be honest I probably spent too much time on him for this contest, and will now need to step up the pace to get my regular troops done as well.

TRAMPLE! STAMP! AND GORE!

October 19, 2006

Beware fellow bloggers and onlookers; I believe I have uncovered a conspiracy! I believe that several participants in this ‘friendly’ contest are in fact in cahoots and are nothing more than villainous participants in the ‘Great Games Workshop HQ Conspiracy!’ A plan so vile and underhanded that it has ensnared both myself and other innocent redshirts driving us to paint or suffer the consequences. This plan was most likely masterminded by the super villain Jay Griffiths (just look at his headshot – isn’t he a little bit TOO happy? And what’s with his odds? It’s almost like they know that he’ll succeed…). Allow me to elaborate:

Exhibit #1: My bitz order still hasn’t arrived. Without my order I don’t have much to work on for the army. I am picturing all of the head office folks sitting around a pile of bitz orders meant to be sent to us retail guys laughing manically.

Exhibit#2: The GW head office employees that are participating in the blog have entered the fewest entries and images. Why is this? I believe it is because of one of three reasons: A) They are trying to keep the rest of us in the dark so that they can secretly enter an already complete army! B) They are attempting to keep the rest of us unaware of their progress to confuse us! C) They are cleverly spending their time painting while the rest of us take pictures and enter blogs about unlikely conspiracy theories!

Exhibit#3: Working at HQ could have given them all a head start since they would have known about this contest earlier than the rest of us! Maybe they’ve been working on their armies for months only to spring this contest on us at the last moment!

Exhibit#4: Jay Griffiths, Ryan Z, Kris Aubin and Cory Burns all work at HQ, and none of them are to be trusted, and they all have an insatiable lust for Battleforces!

With such foes it will be difficult to succeed, but fear not for I will be victorious, and my Mammoth will punish them at the tournament! Speaking of the mammoth, he’s almost done and I’ll have pictures online for you next week! Back to the good fight I go!

October 13, 2006

Hey what do you know the website’s up and running! Looking good too I might add. I think that I should win something for best headshot… it takes guts to wear a hat like that! Paul Millson’s picture is good too – almost too good… Paul is actually an ugly green goblin in real life, but the Canadian White Dwarf team is excellent with Photoshop.

This past week I really didn’t get much done at all. I need to get on the ball, because like others in this bet my wife will not tolerate my failure. I see that Mr. Burns has given me 1 in 5 odds of failure, and unless I can bet on myself failing, thus winning more than 18 Battleforces worth of money I’d better try to win. Since I haven’t done much this week to brag about, I’ll talk about the two units of Chaos Warhounds that I completed last week.

The Veldings keep large packs of hunting hounds, bred from the largest dogs they can find. When driven to raiding neighboring settlements, the Veldings will always capture any large dogs they can find along with the rest of the worthy plunder. This results in (after centuries of breeding the largest dogs available) the Velding Mastiff, a powerful canine the size of a pony, which is unflinchingly in its loyalty to its tribe. Its excellent nose and powerful hindquarters make the Velding Mastiff the perfect hunting dog.

Making the Velding Mastiff:
The Velding Mastiff counts as a Chaos Warhound. Since I didn’t want to use the actual Warhound models (let’s face it they are rather evil if not dead looking) I had to find another dog model. There are several good dog models in the GW range like Dire Wolves, the Mordheim Witch Hunter dogs and the old 40K Leman Russ hounds. I decided to go with the new Orion Hounds from the wood elf range. These dogs had the shaggy look that I wanted, and I could easily believe that they lived in a cold northern climate. The only problem was that I needed 12 dogs, and there are only two poses. To add a bit of variety to the dogs I decided to have a few of them carrying dead creatures that they caught hunting. I used the Bretonnian Men-at-Arms sprue, which has all sorts of extra little creatures to have hanging from the peasants’ belts, like rats, rabbits and birds.

To make this conversion use the following parts:

9947020405707 Orion Hound 1

9947020405708 Orion Hound 2

9947020405709 Orion Hound Legs

99380203002 Bretonnian Men-at-Arms Sprue

And don’t forget a bit of Green Stuff!

September 28, 2006

Hello and welcome to my painting challenge blog! I’m Jay, and I work at the Burlington store. I just moved here from Ottawa where I worked for the past three years at the Bayshore store (shout-out to all my pals at Bayshore, St Laurent and on Deepspace!). Somehow I have been tricked into joining in this painting madness. But, how could I do otherwise when Mr. Chris Kraatz (also in the painting challenge) approached me and Paul with the question: “Are you men?” We answered that we thought so, to which he replied “No no no, I mean are you real men?” We said ‘yes’ and he then told us about this painting challenge. Well what else could we do with our manhood at stake but join in the insanity? So here I am painting like a madman hoping to avoid the dreaded punishment that failure brings with it.

I have decided to build a Viking army, which will be represented by using the Chaos Marauders rules. My Vikings are savage barbarians from Norsca, all raiders and hunters. I wanted to make them more like a tribe of Vikings than followers of Chaos, so I will not use any Chaos symbols in the army. They are not an evil tribe, although they do raid and pillage, but are more neutral. The tribe is known as the ‘Veldings.’

Yes, I am going to include my new baby, one of the fantastic Forgeworld War mammoths (check them out at www.forgeworld.co.uk). I can’t wait to sink my paintbrush into this beautiful kit.

So far I have assembled the Mammoth, and painted 15 Marauders…I need to get a move on! Next week I’ll talk about the Velding’s storyline, and I’ll discuss the paint scheme.