Blood for the Blood God!!

Wow, it's been 2 months since my last post! Apologies to my readers, but all kinds of real life issues got in the way of my painting and blogging, especially a nice water leak and the subsequent discovery that my shower had been leaking for some time without our knowledge and thus had to be replaced, along with the bathroom floor! Yeah, the joys of owning a house. Anyways, I shall not bore you further with such trivials (but oh so expensive) details of my life, so back to miniature talk.

To this point my Chaos force has been made up of worshipers of Chaos in all its undivided glory. My plan was to create to create a core of Chaos undivided troops, and then I could add contingents of worshipers of the Chaos gods. My army is a dark and brooding undivided force and as previously mentioned I plan to include equally dark and twisted Nurgle and Khorne contingents to it.

So after working hard on the undivided troops, it was time for a first diversion and so I started working on some Chaos God's specific units. The first such regiment is a unit of Khorne warriors; crazed and bloodthirsty warriors who like to kill, maim and spill blood. As a child Khorne was my least favourite Chaos God, mostly because I thought he was too "cliche", too easy. But when I started collecting back the Champions of all four Gods, I gave Khorne figures a second look and they quickly grew on me. I especially like the figure I used to represent my Champion, Arkil Gorefury (the one with the juggernaut head obviously), he's a fantastic figure (although they are all pretty awesome).

The unit is made-up mostly of Khorne champions designed by the master Jes Goodwin in the 80s as part of the massive and now iconic Citadel Realm of Chaos range. There is also a few Citadel chaos warriors (and a single Marauder chaos warriors) from the same era which style fitted Khorne and which I really liked, like that crazed cleaver wielding warrior in the last row. I wanted a unit clad in dark red, and I had to experiment a lot to find the perfect recipe, red being a notorious bitch of a colour to paint and highlight well. To blend the unit with the rest of my army,  I went with dark green as a secondary colour, and picked details in the "poison green" (bright green) which I have use throughout my Chaos force. I also got to experience the forgotten joy of ranking-up a unit made-up of mostly champions. The current set-up is the only one that works!

I painted these guys in small batches of three, since they are unique and characterful sculpts which don't lend themselves well to mass production.

That cleaver wielding one, so violently weird

I chose to give the warriors without helmets African skin tones; I thought it worked really well with the look of the unit and colour scheme. It also happens I recently discovered, while painting a biblical army, that I really enjoy painting black skin!

The lone Marauder miniatures (3rd from the left)

The standard bearer is a conversion, I cut the sword he was carrying and replaced it with a pole. I'm quite happy with the whole figure and the standard; I haven't painted a standard in literally 20 years and mostly I got the bloody and dirty look I wanted. In my youth I wanted to use chains to decorate my banners like I would see in White Dwarf but never did it, so 25 years later I did not miss that chance! I find it looks as good as it did in the 80s!  

Arkil Gorefury and his cadre of maniacs

Awesome sculpt, so full of details

This regiment should look pretty good as elites in my Chaos army, and they were well worth the effort. They look much better in the flesh too, damn red is also a pain to photograph right!

Yesterday I started cleaning and assembling a very special unit. Call it unfinished business...the Piece de Resistance of my army.  And I'm going to take my sweet ass time on them!

Chaos Warriors

The most feared of all Chaotic humans are those who openly devote their lives to its worship. Amongst them are Warrior of Chaos, human warriors who have sold their souls in return for strength and power. Those who make such a bargain are tragic figures for they know that they will gain immense powers, but only a fool could hope to survive unscathed. The Warrior of Chaos enjoys a meteoric rise to glory, followed, more often than not, by a swift collapse into bestiality and madness.

Can't really do a proper Chaos army without Chaos Warriors, now can we? 

The Chaos Warriors of the 3rd edition really represented what Chaos Warriors are supposed to be; diverse, mutated and wearing twisted full plate armour. Key word here being diverse. I can't help but laugh at the new all-identical Chaos Warriors of GW. Hmm...Anyways I digress...I see these guys as the undisputed kings of the battlefield. Sure, the knights are more glamorous, but real warriors fight on foot!
I have no idea how many individual Chaos Warriors were produced from the mid 80s to the early 90s, but there is a lot (and I mean a lot) of choice available!

One of many pages of Chaos Warriors made in the 80s

I'm not into collecting them all or anything like that. I like most of them, so really I just try to get my hands on as many as I can! I'd like one day to have at least a small unit of Warriors from each Chaos god, plus one unit of undivided warriors. To do this I like to mix warriors and champions in the same units, to create varied units with no duplicates.

The grinning warrior is one of my all-time favourite

Not surprisingly for those following my progress, I painted my first unit as Undivided Chaos Warriors. Most of the models are warriors or champions from the Citadel Realm of Chaos ranges, although one is a Marauder models. It's a shame really Marauder only ever produced three chaos warriors (see left picture).

 Most of the figures below were from my old collection, and most were horribly painted and needed a good Simple Green bath before I could start working on them. Makes me proud to see them finally having a proper paint job after all those years wasting away in a box. 

I kept to the green and black colour scheme of my Chaos army, although going for a slightly less vivid green than the Chaos Dwarfs. At 15 Warriors, its definitely a very big (and expensive!) unit for Warhammer 3rd edition, but the bigger size will work well if I want to play other recent editions or other fantasy rule sets. I might also use them as Marauder instead of Warriors when playing the 3rd edition. And, well, big units do look pretty good!

The blackened armour was created using chainmail drybrush on black, followed by a wash of badab black. The brass parts on the armour were done by successive sepia and black washes over a chainmail base. Most details were picked up using my standard 3 layer technique, often followed by a glaze or wash to bring out the details.

As for the rest of my army, I will add a banner later after making some tests.

 

Painting this unit allowed me to paint one of the most iconic Chaos Champion figure, the Champion in bone armour. Man he looks the part! The imagination these guys had in the 80s, amazing. And of course, I also got to paint the Marauder grinning warrior.

Up until now everything I have shown in this blog was painted in the last 9 months. It was originally posted on my historical blog but I thought it was logical to post them here for all my new readers to see. From this point forward, we will move on to newly painted stuff. My Beastmen should be first on that list. I varnished them yesterday and I expect to take some pics in the coming days. 

Also expect in the coming weeks some posts on army building, my want list and collecting efforts, and a current inventory of my Chaos collection.