Army List

Blasphemy!  I've been done since the 13th of October.  I want to see a finished tag next to my name as well!  Blasphemy!  Blaspheme I say!  Ok, false outrage aside, our mega-battle was bloody awesome.  We had some hilariously memorable events such as a Pit of Shades NOT killing a  Chaos Dwarf sorcerer on a Lammasu, yet the Lammasu and the rider were killed in the same magic phase by Creeping Death.  Booyah!
Anyways, seeing as how this is our final blog for Paint or Die II, I figure I might as well offer some more insight into what to do when doing a painting challenge of any kind (and really, Paint or Die is just one massive painting challenge).  In fact, let me give you the top ten things about doing painting challenges.  Without further ado, let’s count them down.

#10. Painting it all the night before is not the way to do it.  You'll probably burn yourself out.
#9. Flat colours are bad, so is extra highlighting.  If you can do the same effect with drybrushing and inking, do that!
#8. Budget your time!  If you do one squad a week or one model a day, you'll be fine.  Know how much time you have and set a timeline.   Setting milestones and dates for when you'll accomplish them will help motivate you to get things done by that time. 
#7. If taunting your fellow painters, make sure it's all done in good spirits, but make sure that you aren't in jeopardy first!  Nothing makes you look like a chump more than taunting them, and then not finishing yourself.
#6. Start early, finish early.  It makes crunch time much more relaxing.

...OK, and now the top five's.

Alright, so this may be very similar to last week's, but here we go!  So, as was like last week, absolutely no progress has been made on..well, anything really.  I have managed to build up a 1k point high elf army using the new book..in fact, two lists, both 1k points.  One uses two of the new White Lion chariots (which, if I have to say, are absolutely gorgeous models), and the other utilizes the fury of the Dragon Mage of Caledor (another gorgeous sculpt, Trish Morrison did a fantastic job on it!).  Now, how these lists are going to play out, I know not yet, as I'm still in the building process.  Well, the first list is done, the second one is still in the works!

Speaking of dragons, I can't wait to see how well the Dragon Mages will perform in the wizards duel this upcoming Saturday.  They may not have access to the most anti-magic gear, but, they are incredibly potent as fighters, which is what will set them apart from other mages in a game like that I think.   A mage who doesn't belong to Chaos, who can actually fight.  Well, in actuality, the dragon does the fighting, while the mage sits on top and uses ‘Flaming sword of Rhuin’, which is still good.  Either way, I have a feeling that they're going to kick some serious tail.  However, it still needs to be fully built and whatnot first. 

Now, with the holidays shaping up, I'm slowly building up a 3k point Black Legion army which I will be utilizing to play a rather spectacular Apocalypse game.  The Tzeentch Hellhammer is well on its way, and the Brass Scorpion is all but finished.  Abaddon is readying his horde and the Black Legion will be opposing the Lord of Macragge, Marneus Calgar, and his Ultramarines.  If you are reading this Chad, which I know you are, Abaddon is ready, and his horde will be coming!
Until next time!

Alright.  So with yet another week passed, I can successfully say that the amount of actual painting done, yet again, has been zilch.  I have however, built an Eldar Bonesinger, a direct exclusive Techmarine and a venerable dreadnought.  The Warp Fire Engine (the Tzeentchian Baneblade) is still under construction as Tzeentch is not done warping the machine to his own ends as of yet.  Suffice to say, it will have lots of tentacles.  That may suit Slaanesh just a tad more, but Tzeentch is altering the tank to his own means while Slaanesh is just sitting back at the moment and waiting on his servants.  Although I said I wasn't going to do another Space Marine army, the thought of having 6 drop podding venerable dreadnoughts led by a direct services only Techmarine was too much to pass up, and as such, that's going to be one of the armies that I'll be doing.

 Now, as far as paint bet #2 is coming along in the store, well...I have dwarf legs on a stand.  I'm not sure on the exact number of them, but there are quite a few of them.  I really should just paint some war machines.  Then again, I really should write a list before I try to paint it.   Ah well, such is the way I approach things. 

The High Elves are on their way.  At least  I would like to think so anyways.  There has been building.  Much with the building.  Although so far, it's been everything but core units that I've been building up.  Characters, lion chariots, dragon princes, silver helms, bolt throwers..whatever that isn't core!  In the end, I find myself always going back to the same play style as when I play with my Eldar, small specialized units instead of massive unwieldy blocks, even in Fantasy.  Alas, such is the way I do things, max sized units are a point of question for me as I don't believe in their effectiveness over the use of properly utilized smaller units, but!  There are merits to both.  I really can't wait for some of these events that we're going to be running...dragon painting contest, arcane duel!  Oh my.  Dragons.  And sentence fragments.  Speaking of Dragons, the new High Elf Dragon is simply gorgeous.  I can't wait to get my own to build up and have soar into battle with my high elves. 

Until next time, I will most likely be...still building, unless I actually start painting, it all depends.  But if I can find the motivation....1 day is all it'll take!

An update!  Now, I'm not exactly sure what I want to say here given how uneventful this week has been.  By uneventful, I mean that it's been completely and utterly...well, I haven't done anything.  Now that my paint or die army is indeed complete my painting attention has turned to a few things.  In fact, it's turned towards Chaos, fantasy and LotR. 

So lets recap, paint or die is done.  Next on my list of stuff to paint is a Brass Scorpion of Khorne for the Formation Painting Contest this upcoming Saturday, November 10th.  I've decided to finally not do SENMM on a model that big because it makes it look like it's made of rock instead of metal.  So!  Yay!  Another huge model where I'm using 90% metallics.  Fantastic.  At least it'll be easy to get it looking the way I want.  The thousand sons...still have not been touched.  They're primed!  But that's it.  My Eldar have also seen a few new additions with a second farseer and more Warlocks for that seer council that'll be ready for Apocalypse. 

Now, with the new High Elves that are coming out, I've got my hands on an army deal that I'm working on doing up right now.  So far, a pair of lions pulling a chariot have been assembled, as have 2 skinny spell casting elves and a noble as well.  I'm really liking the models that are coming out, and I can't wait until I can start working on those dragons.  Speaking of Dragon's, drop on by this Saturday, in addition to the formation painting contest, we'll be doing up the Dragon conversion contest too, with the coolest dragon conversion winning a new High Elf Army book, and after seeing that army in action in the latest issue of white dwarf, I can't wait to get my hands on the book so that my High Elves can see new life. 

So paint bet #2 is under way, with my dwarves in LotR starting to get underway.  This time, what's on the line is 2 high elf lion chariots.  So I'm going to be hoping that I get those guys all done up fast enough so that I can get 2 more lion chariots out of the 4 I'm going to have in my army.   Game on!

 Man, these high elves are just in time for Christmas, and with Orks coming in soon, there are going to be some very happy waaghers around.  I can see it now...elves and orks...all in one place...and the blood shed that will ensue when  the high elves bring their sorcery and take it up against the mighty Ork warboss leading a waagh across the galaxy from the outer fringes of the galaxy, and going towards Terra...

Well, this week was an eventful one.  The Battle Tour was AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!  Not much quite compares to the atmosphere and the energy that was at the end of the tour.  Salamaders pulled it out!  I found it awesome that Cory Burns can win a scream off by himself.  But it was totally awesome.  I say that the MVP of the match goes to the Blood Raven's landspeeder that DID NOT DIE.  At one point, it had a 10 man devastator squad with 4 plasma cannons shooting at it, 3 whirlwinds, a 10-man tactical squad with a missile launcher and a flamer, as well as a single marine with a meltagun.  It lost 2 weapons.  That was it.  Hope you guys can make it out to more battle tours because they are SO MUCH FUN. 
 
As far as the Thousand sons are coming along, nothing.  But, the Baneblade is well on it's way, as well as the Brass Scorpion.  The Scorpion is coming along very nicely and is going to be done for the formation painting contest on the 10th of November.  The Baneblade, I'm going to be trying to pull it out for the contest on November 3rd.  Time to bunker down and paint it up, maybe I'll pull out the same thing like I did with my Grey Knights and do an all-night-day-week-paint-a-thon.  Haha!  Making up words.

Speaking of November, high elf events!  I'm completely looking forward to the monster mash that'll be happening.  Dragon conversion contest on the 10th...!  Flyers duking it out on the 17th...!  Mages duking it out on the 24th.....!  Oh man, I'm totally going to be doing up 2 Dragon Mages of Caledor (thanks for the Dragon's Travis!).  High elves..!  My bank account is going to hate me.

So I have to tell this story because I forgot to in my last update.  I was painting up those Grey Knights (who are now finished, but I didn't think they would be when this happened) and I had the case sitting on a chair about 3 feet off the ground.  Little did I know that as I was taking the reclusive Marines from Titan out of the case to paint, that their power armour would be put to the ultimate test.  Somehow, the Thunderhawk that they were on (the case) decided that it did not want to stay in orbit and took a plunge off the chair.  Miraculously, out of the 32 power armour Grey Knights, the 6 Terminators, and the Grand Master, only 2 Grey Knights in power armour failed their armour save and required an arm put back on.  The rest, all dusted off their power armour and kept on plugging away.  Anyways, I figured I'd share that for a bit of fun.

So as far as that goes, they're done.  As far as other things go though, I've got that Tzeentch list well on it's way and coming as well.  Every model is built and primed, and just awaiting the brush.   I'm hoping to have that 1700pt list done as well for December 1st.  But, that aside, I'm also working on a Tzeentch Baneblade which is giving me a few more headaches right now than I was anticipating, but nonetheless, it is being done so that it can be part of the Baneblade painting contest that we're doing on the 3rd of November.  Now, what would a Tzeentchian Baneblade look like.

After I have finished that I will be completing the Brass Scorpion for the Formation Painting contest on the 10th of November, and as much as I would like to say that the Brass Scorpion is close to completion, it's far from it.  I'm still uncertain if I can do the daunting task of painting the entire thing with SENMMs, but here’s hoping I can, because I'm still on a hiatus from using metallic paints.  Although I may just buckle down and use metallic paints.  Large scale models done with SENMM can look very impressive, but they either look really good, or really bad, and I would not be doing the model any justice if I went with a very bad paint scheme. 

My Chaos and my Grey Knights are both throwing out a challenge to anyone who feels that they can take them on.  So anyone who feels that they are up to the challenge, bring an army up to the 'shwa and lets get it on!

So here's a list of what's been done the past few weeks:

 - Pay part of Ryan's Gamer's Edition: not done yet, but atleast it's been fronted!
 - Buy Ryan, Travis, and Rob 3 baneblades each: Don't need to do that!
 - Get 3 Baneblades from Ryan, Travis, and Rob: Situation..uncertain.
 - Apocalypse Launch Party: Hell yeah, it was good!
 - Paint Brass Scorpion for Apocalypse Formation Painting contest on November 10th:   Slowly but surely!
 - Paint Chaos Baneblade for Baneblade Painting Contest on November 3rd: Took it home today to start.
 - Paint up a Khazad'um army: ......I refuse to work with metallic paints for atleast this next week.
 - Paint up new Dark Elf list: Building up all the corsairs...there's a lot of them, although there are more  black guard!
 - Paint 25k point Chaos Army:  Still in the building process.

Wow, that's a pretty hefty checklist.  I can't exactly remember when today started and ended, but the timeline goes something like this.  Wake up at 8am to go to work,  paint Grey Knights from 10:30pm to 8:15am, go to work and start 3 hours early (out of work uniform!) at 9am, stay until 8:15pm for the invitation only after hours innaugural Apocalypse game at the shwa.  Somewhere in there, I finished up the entire Grey Knights army.  But, if you guys think that we're not insane?  Think again!  There's going to be another paint bet.  That's right.  Another one.  Not sure how many guys are going to want in on this one, but this is going to be bigger and better than before.  I'm finally going to get to paint chaos!  In fact, I'm going to be painting my tzeentch.  Maybe I'll do my Khazad'um army instead, but we'll see.  The terms have still yet to be agreed on, lets get on that Travis.
 
Right now, I'm staring at the baneblade thinking whether to convert it into a plaguereaper or not.  While putting shoulder pads, heads, and backpacks on thousand sons.  I love my  converted thousand sons, I'm looking to have this  Chaos army fully painted up by the time December 1st rolls around too.  Well, maybe not 25k points of it...but atleast the 1700.   Rock and roll.  My words of advice for what not to do during a paint bet: don't ever procrastinate, or else you'll pull an all-nighter the day before the Apocalypse launch day.  For now, that's that...I'm going to go pass out in a chair and forget about metallic paints for a while now!

So here we are, coming down to crunch time.  With the paint bet at the 'shwa store coming to an end this upcoming week, I'm looking at rocking it out and just sitting down and finishing the Grey Knights.  Now, that being said, I had decided to NMM a brass scorpion and I did up an Abaddon conversion using the plastic Chaos Terminator lord kit.  On top of that, I built up more of the Thousand Son’s bodies using Dark Angels veteran kits and am just waiting for my bitz to come in so that I can finish them.
Now, what does painting Chaos have to do with painting Grey Knights?  I don't know.  In fact, painting Chaos is not painting Grey Knights, neither is painting up a Khazad'um army, a Dwarf army and an Orcs and Goblins army for fantasy, more Dark Elves for fantasy, 5 different Chaos armies (yes, that's right 5), scratch building Obliterators out of terminators, and working on a mini-Chaos Warhound Titan.  None of that has anything to do with painting Grey Knights.  Wonderful.  This is how productive the past 3 weeks have been.  Plus, with the Baneblades coming out, it's not helping matters any.
In fact, with the Baneblade coming out, I want to build it on launch day so that I can do my Plaguereaper conversion for the Baneblade painting contest we'll be having on November 3rd.  Plus, I need to really finish my Brass Scorpion so that I can have it there for the formation painting contest on November 10th.  ARGH!!!!!!  I just had to pick one of the most difficult techniques to do too.  Non-metallic metals for all the metallic bits of the Brass Scorpion...which is...almost all of it.  Fantastic.  I put myself into these positions a lot!
Anyways, I'm going to have to finish it this week and ignore everything else for at least a week so that I can buckle down and get those Grey Knights done.  With the next few days looking packed, I'm not sure how much time I'm going to have, if any, but one way or the other, those Grey Knights will prevail in the race! 
Either way, I'm definitely going to be done before December 1st.  See you guys at the finish line, I'll keep you guys updated!

Ok!  So...my original plan was to get some more painting done and have everything finished by now.  Clearly, that isn't the case.  With the past week going by so quickly, absolutely zero painting has been done.  I had intended on finishing it all, but life has a mysterious manner of taking up time, not that I mind really, I'm virtually done, and all I really need is another 2 or 3 days at it to be done. 

Except for that dreadnought.  Ok, so I have to rant a bit about the dreadnought.  I sent in the forge world order, it came in and the body is mismolded by a good 3/4 of an inch!  It's not even salvageable!  Which means, I have to wait for another 5 weeks before it comes in!  5 weeks!  I'll be done 3 armies in that time (actually, I probably won't because my Chaos is going to be SENMM which means in those 5 weeks, I'll have......1 squad done..that's assuming I get my bitz order in and it comes in with good time!).  Let me give you an idea of what this bitz order is looking like: 27 thousand sons shoulder pads, 24 thousand son heads, 3 thousand son sorcerer backpacks, 4 doom siren backpacks, 4 blastmasters, 12 sonic blasters, sevora and severina.  I'm looking forward to all the conversion work that I'll get a chance to do and.......Damnit all!  I really should have just done Chaos for this.

Speaking of Chaos, with the conclusion of our Renegade Rampage, time to look forward a bit to Apocalypse.  Now, part of the grand scheme is to make a huge inquisition army, but more to the point, there's going to be a massive chaos horde coming during Apocalypse.  Tzeentch and Slaanesh are slowly finding their way of corrupting the Inquisition and even Khorne is sneaking it's way into there slowly.  Mmmm....Terminators, spawn, land raiders, brass scorpions.....
Gah.  At this rate, my Grey Knights will never be done.  But they will persevere!  They must...I don't want to owe Baneblades...and I will not! But the lure of Chaos..and the Apocalypse...launch party, Baneblade painting contest, formation painting contest...it's all too much to handle! 

Until next time!

Ok!  So I've decided on how I'm going to do my paint scheme and everything has been redone in that manner, starting with a coat of chainmail, followed by a black ink wash, and then chainmail highlights on the armour.  Nothing too terribly fancy. Then using a combination of ink washes to giving a faint inner glow effect.  Easy.
 
I still think I should have done non-metallic metals on the entire army instead of using metallic paints, or...as I recently picked up, SENMM (sky-earth non-metallic metals).  I love trying to make things more difficult on myself, but at least I'll have a brand new challenge when I do my Chaos army(my entire Thousand Sons army will be done in SENMM).  It'll be time consuming, but that's ok though, because the finished product will be well worth it.  Plus, the end effect will look completely different from my Grey Knights. 

Blast!  There I go thinking about my Chaos again.  I don't think this is going to end.  It will be a constant struggle for dominance between my Grey Knights and my Chaos to see which army will get done.  The Grey Knights are going to have to triumph, if not for their sake, for the sake of my wallet, but I'm looking to get the Chaos done all in time for December 1st as well.  Plus with the codex launch tournament that went on today and the Rise to Daemonhood happening next Saturday, I don't know how I'm going to get any work done on my Grey Knights.  But somehow!  It shall happen.  

Fully customizable plastic kits, amazingly nice metal models, brand new book.....Argh!  Must..resist..lure..of..Chaos....at least for...another few weeks....!

Blasts!  Tzeentch and Slaanesh are attempting to halt my progress with my Grey Knights!  Both are attempting to switch me over to the dark side.  Oh well, I most definitely already am on the dark side, this is just a blip in the darkness that is called Chaos.  I'm so tempted to change armies on the spot, but I absolutely shouldn't do that.  I want that Gamers Edition for the bet we're running at the 'shwa store and putting myself a month and a half behind schedule wouldn't be a good idea.  Chaos is so tempting though!  My second army of choice behind my beloved Eldar!
No matter, the Grey Knights will press on.  Travel time, Chaos, and life aside, they shall be done, and both baneblades and a gamers edition shall be mine!  Anyways, I'll be doing most of my painting for the Paint or Die before my shifts a little at a time.  I figure I can keep on track that way if I make sure I do atleast part of a model a day.
 
Plus, with all the new Chaos events that are coming up, it would've been nice to not only have been painting up the Chaos army as both Paint or Die, but also for the store paint bet, and to showcase the new models.  Such is life though!  But now that I think about it, codex launch tournament, rise to daemonhood, renegade rampage...I should have done Chaos.....

Phew, what a week..or few.  All the Grey knights are built, primed and have the first layer of metal on them.  My only uncertainty is if I want to be using starting with boltgun, doing details and then inking, or if I want to start bright and shade down.  So that bit of deliberation is going underway, thankfully, it's easy enough to fix. 

I have to say, I was initially going to do the entire army with NMM (non-metal metals), then I decided it would take too long.   That was before I remembered how much of a pain it is for me to hilight metallics...and unfortunately, I came to that realization after I already put the metallics on.  Ah well, c'est la vie.  That's not a concern at the moment though, as things are going right on track and I'm looking at finishing up atleast 2 squads by next week and hopefully having the dreadnought in so I can assemble it as well. 

So while staring down an army of guys who all demand to be character painted, and the travel times of GO transit (7 hours total each day, booyah..it's too bad I can't set up a paint station on the go bus), things are progressing as expected and I'm looking to be done by the first week of October so that I can get some more baneblades before the end of Paint or Die, if things keep on going as planned, there should be no problems hitting that date.  Until next time, remember, nobody expects the Inquisi..oh bugger!