Gallivantes
Member
twisted moon":30wlfcct said:
Thanks. Do you mean the one in the Marauders unit?
A little bit lost, a little bit damned
- Thread starter Gallivantes
- Start date
Thanks. Do you mean the one in the Marauders unit?
twisted moon
Moderator
yes, the flag; it's a real stand out in the mixed unit. i now notice there's also a totem standard.
Gallivantes
Member
Cool yeah, it's a fun idea to play around with visually, putting standards in amongst units I mean. I like the look of the troops rallying with banner poles and icons bristling against the sky. A good look for Chaos at least.
There are plenty of examples of it in Warhammer art that I always regarded as very evocative imagery. I think it encapsulates many chaos themes nicely. Things like conquest, worship of higher powers, swagger, tribal affiliation, trophies, intimidation, magical artefacts.
Perhaps we're a bit indoctrinated by the gaming rulebooks to think of banners as a strict "one per unit, up front in the middle" affair. For good reason, keeping it nice and clear for play. But if I faced a unit carrying it's standard in the 2nd rank I personally wouldn't mind.
I like some of the undertones that can come with playing about with the default setup. A banner in the rear ranks can make a unit look eager and vicious with some of the hotheads surging ahead of command. More than one symbol can suggest a more fractioned unit. Maybe it's been assembled from more than one source resulting in some tension in the group. I find it handy for working a unit into more of a unique mini-diorama.
I can't take sole credit for my Marauder banner, the previous owner had printed the Sigmar prayer on white paper and affixed to the pole. All I did to the flag itself was apply weathering to it to fit the unit. Would make sense to apply some grafitti to deface the original prayer. Or maybe not, maybe the fact that he's in the rear ranks dragging his old disgraced and muddy banner along serves to tell his mini-story just fine.
There are plenty of examples of it in Warhammer art that I always regarded as very evocative imagery. I think it encapsulates many chaos themes nicely. Things like conquest, worship of higher powers, swagger, tribal affiliation, trophies, intimidation, magical artefacts.
Perhaps we're a bit indoctrinated by the gaming rulebooks to think of banners as a strict "one per unit, up front in the middle" affair. For good reason, keeping it nice and clear for play. But if I faced a unit carrying it's standard in the 2nd rank I personally wouldn't mind.
I like some of the undertones that can come with playing about with the default setup. A banner in the rear ranks can make a unit look eager and vicious with some of the hotheads surging ahead of command. More than one symbol can suggest a more fractioned unit. Maybe it's been assembled from more than one source resulting in some tension in the group. I find it handy for working a unit into more of a unique mini-diorama.
I can't take sole credit for my Marauder banner, the previous owner had printed the Sigmar prayer on white paper and affixed to the pole. All I did to the flag itself was apply weathering to it to fit the unit. Would make sense to apply some grafitti to deface the original prayer. Or maybe not, maybe the fact that he's in the rear ranks dragging his old disgraced and muddy banner along serves to tell his mini-story just fine.
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Gallivantes
Member
Hola, another painting update.
Three things excite me about this update
1: This post is pretty darn oldhammer in terms of model vintage.
2: Ogres. I have always been very fond of Ogres as I think mercenaries add a lot of flavour to an army. Now I have more mercenary clout than I can shake a stick at. With a couple of standard bearers and a few bossy looking characters I can also split this band up into smaller units if I like.
3: Basing. I have been experimenting a bit with the look of basing I want. I wanted something that felt rural, lush and green with a bit of damp to it; in my head it's the perfect snapshot of some sleepy hamlet of the Empire being invaded by ne'er-do-wells. I started looking at pictures of German countryside but found it a touch too sunny, neat and tidy. Hopping over to Ireland gave me something rougher, damper and moodier to work with. For me that felt more like the Old World. I attached one of my pieces of inspiration.
Three things excite me about this update
1: This post is pretty darn oldhammer in terms of model vintage.
2: Ogres. I have always been very fond of Ogres as I think mercenaries add a lot of flavour to an army. Now I have more mercenary clout than I can shake a stick at. With a couple of standard bearers and a few bossy looking characters I can also split this band up into smaller units if I like.
3: Basing. I have been experimenting a bit with the look of basing I want. I wanted something that felt rural, lush and green with a bit of damp to it; in my head it's the perfect snapshot of some sleepy hamlet of the Empire being invaded by ne'er-do-wells. I started looking at pictures of German countryside but found it a touch too sunny, neat and tidy. Hopping over to Ireland gave me something rougher, damper and moodier to work with. For me that felt more like the Old World. I attached one of my pieces of inspiration.
Attachments
Gallivantes
Member
Thanks Warduke and Tex,
Yes great reference or what! When I saw it I instantly thought yup, that's it
Creation how-to, simple version: Cork, plaster, pebbles, sticks, textured gel, paint and grass flock, pva glue and super glue.
Paint colours I used are dark brown, mid brown, yellowy green, bluey green, sand. Two flock colours; a darker forest green and a brighter yellow green.
Detailed step-by-step version for those who want to get more insight into the process. Do not venture further unless you have a cuppa and a comfortable seat. Skip for pic!
---------------------------------------
BUILDING.
I built the bases using cork and plaster. Crucially, I work each base over until it no longer looks like pieces of cork stacked horizontally on top of the base. This involves:
- Chipping away the edges into more natural looking earth mounds, cracks and slopes. Convex gradations, concave, furrows, steep slopes, shallow slopes. Variation, basically.
- Filling in select bits between the cork and base with plaster. It's working with slopes and transitions like the step above, but filling in positive space instead of hacking out negative space. Having a way to both add and remove shapes just makes for more flexibility as you go. Pockets of plaster are also handy for embedding some pebbles in, to look like boulders embedded in the ground. Push them down and smooth the plaster around the edges, looks like the sediment is encroaching on the stone. Another thing I get from cork and plaster is more of a fragmented clumpy earth look in some places and a smoother silt buildup in others.
- One thing I do for some bases is to slice a cork bit horizontally into two planes, deliberately at a slight bit of an angle. This makes the bases less artificial in two ways; I get both a bit of height variation and a bit of deviation from the perfect horizontal plane. Also, these flat slopes are sometimes exactly what a model needs if it's designed a bit off-kilter. The model now looks better balanced AND more in harmony with its base. Two birds with one stone.
- A note on glue: having both pva glue and superglue is handy because one dries fast and one dries slowly. Sometimes I want to fix a part RIGHT NOW, for example if I want to align the model to the cork piece in a particular way I've just mocked up and don't want to struggle to find that attractive composition if I lose it. Or if I just want a quick bond in a sub-assembly and then immediately after a slow bond to work out the rest trial-and-error. At other times I want multiple parts to be flexible for some time, for example if I have a Base-cork-cork-model stack and I want to rotationally align them all attractively. With superglue I get one shot for each bond and if I fudge a single one I fudge the whole composition. Pva glue lets me rotate and counter-rotate bits in place and avoid having parts come together in a wonky way. To some I am sure this may sound as overkill but I find it invaluable to avoid things like models awkwardly positioned, rotated or balanced.
PAINTING
- The first layer is a basecoat of a dark brown. I use craft paint for this which gives me much more mileage, i e doesn't ruin me financially as a textured base can easily suck up a lot of paint. Winsor & Newton Raw Umber, a 500 ml pot for around £10 that is going to last a long time used in this way.
- Into this I also mix a bit of pva glue to seal the cork/plaster build in a bit. Also some Winsor & Newton acrylic based Medium Grain Gel. As far as I gather you could substitute the gel for more glue and common sand/grit of your own choice. But I had some gel around and chucked it in for good measure. Besides adding a bit of texture to the remaining flat cork areas it should act as a bit of a crack filler for any seams left in the cork/plaster. The gel was more of an experiment than a must and it didn't ruin anything
- Liberal drybrush or overbrush if you will using Vallejo Beasty Brown.
- Some drybrushing and stippling using a mix of Beasty Brown with Cayman green and Sick green. Applied in select areas the base now has a bit of brown variation, mottled in varying shades of green. This makes the brown muddy ground come alive with some sense of fine scale moss, lichen and algae kind of discoloration.
- A final drybrush, with a bit of desert yellow mixed into the previous colours, applied sparingly to edges and raised areas to denote a drier state away from the wetter lower layers of the silt.
FLOCKING
- First layer is the dark forest green kind of flock. I applied this more randomly than with a set methodology and it worked out fine. If you put it on a flat surface and leave the cracks earthy it will look like a fresher fissure, perhaps some earth clumps dislodged by a bit of flooding or ground that is so damp that grass prefers to grow on top of the dirt lumps than in the soggy furrows. If you do the inverse and put grass in the cracks and leave the earth tones on the raised slabs it looks more like dirty ground that has tufts sprouting from cracks and crevices where it likes to grow. I used both and got nice variations from it.
- I used a 50/50 water/pva mix, and quite sparingly applied, in the areas I flocked. More of a small dot followed by stippling of even smaller dots than large solid clumps of glue. If you go for heavy solid pva glue blobs you get quite a heavy coverage of clearly delineated grass bits which feels more artificial and covers up most of the ground paint. By being frugal with the glue I got a nice falloff of grass growth and the paint shades underneath interacting more with the grass.
- The very final step was a light spotting of the brighter yellowy flock. Used very sparingly I put these in two places. First at whatever spots looked highest and driest. Secondly in some places where I had covered the largest areas of dark flock to break up the monotony with a couple of brighter tufts.
- A final note on flocking was to vary the ratios on each base. This gives you a nice effect when a larger unit is lined up. I find this approach very useful to break monotony and make the basing come alive. Some bases got more grass coverage than others and half don't even have the bright flock applied at all. The underlying paintjob is very forgiving for leaving larger areas unflocked. It's quite hard to resist putting bright flock and a dramatic ground feature on each base when you see how good it did one, but the reward comes when you put the whole unit together. Out of twenty-one bases, only two have a stick log and one has a pebble. In my opinion this looks nicer than if each base had logs and pebbles. If you do want logs and pebbles on all bases, perhaps to emulate a forest floor and not the muddy field I was aiming for I would apply the same principle, but use another feature - a colourful plant perhaps.
I felt so guilty for this wall of text I amended another shot. This is me being all clever using forward thinking and whatnot. See, some of the guys look a bit larger and meaner and have some red spot colours so they'll look good along my two other long-term army projects: Orcs and Khorne. Here they are.
Yes great reference or what! When I saw it I instantly thought yup, that's it
Creation how-to, simple version: Cork, plaster, pebbles, sticks, textured gel, paint and grass flock, pva glue and super glue.
Paint colours I used are dark brown, mid brown, yellowy green, bluey green, sand. Two flock colours; a darker forest green and a brighter yellow green.
Detailed step-by-step version for those who want to get more insight into the process. Do not venture further unless you have a cuppa and a comfortable seat. Skip for pic!
---------------------------------------
BUILDING.
I built the bases using cork and plaster. Crucially, I work each base over until it no longer looks like pieces of cork stacked horizontally on top of the base. This involves:
- Chipping away the edges into more natural looking earth mounds, cracks and slopes. Convex gradations, concave, furrows, steep slopes, shallow slopes. Variation, basically.
- Filling in select bits between the cork and base with plaster. It's working with slopes and transitions like the step above, but filling in positive space instead of hacking out negative space. Having a way to both add and remove shapes just makes for more flexibility as you go. Pockets of plaster are also handy for embedding some pebbles in, to look like boulders embedded in the ground. Push them down and smooth the plaster around the edges, looks like the sediment is encroaching on the stone. Another thing I get from cork and plaster is more of a fragmented clumpy earth look in some places and a smoother silt buildup in others.
- One thing I do for some bases is to slice a cork bit horizontally into two planes, deliberately at a slight bit of an angle. This makes the bases less artificial in two ways; I get both a bit of height variation and a bit of deviation from the perfect horizontal plane. Also, these flat slopes are sometimes exactly what a model needs if it's designed a bit off-kilter. The model now looks better balanced AND more in harmony with its base. Two birds with one stone.
- A note on glue: having both pva glue and superglue is handy because one dries fast and one dries slowly. Sometimes I want to fix a part RIGHT NOW, for example if I want to align the model to the cork piece in a particular way I've just mocked up and don't want to struggle to find that attractive composition if I lose it. Or if I just want a quick bond in a sub-assembly and then immediately after a slow bond to work out the rest trial-and-error. At other times I want multiple parts to be flexible for some time, for example if I have a Base-cork-cork-model stack and I want to rotationally align them all attractively. With superglue I get one shot for each bond and if I fudge a single one I fudge the whole composition. Pva glue lets me rotate and counter-rotate bits in place and avoid having parts come together in a wonky way. To some I am sure this may sound as overkill but I find it invaluable to avoid things like models awkwardly positioned, rotated or balanced.
PAINTING
- The first layer is a basecoat of a dark brown. I use craft paint for this which gives me much more mileage, i e doesn't ruin me financially as a textured base can easily suck up a lot of paint. Winsor & Newton Raw Umber, a 500 ml pot for around £10 that is going to last a long time used in this way.
- Into this I also mix a bit of pva glue to seal the cork/plaster build in a bit. Also some Winsor & Newton acrylic based Medium Grain Gel. As far as I gather you could substitute the gel for more glue and common sand/grit of your own choice. But I had some gel around and chucked it in for good measure. Besides adding a bit of texture to the remaining flat cork areas it should act as a bit of a crack filler for any seams left in the cork/plaster. The gel was more of an experiment than a must and it didn't ruin anything
- Liberal drybrush or overbrush if you will using Vallejo Beasty Brown.
- Some drybrushing and stippling using a mix of Beasty Brown with Cayman green and Sick green. Applied in select areas the base now has a bit of brown variation, mottled in varying shades of green. This makes the brown muddy ground come alive with some sense of fine scale moss, lichen and algae kind of discoloration.
- A final drybrush, with a bit of desert yellow mixed into the previous colours, applied sparingly to edges and raised areas to denote a drier state away from the wetter lower layers of the silt.
FLOCKING
- First layer is the dark forest green kind of flock. I applied this more randomly than with a set methodology and it worked out fine. If you put it on a flat surface and leave the cracks earthy it will look like a fresher fissure, perhaps some earth clumps dislodged by a bit of flooding or ground that is so damp that grass prefers to grow on top of the dirt lumps than in the soggy furrows. If you do the inverse and put grass in the cracks and leave the earth tones on the raised slabs it looks more like dirty ground that has tufts sprouting from cracks and crevices where it likes to grow. I used both and got nice variations from it.
- I used a 50/50 water/pva mix, and quite sparingly applied, in the areas I flocked. More of a small dot followed by stippling of even smaller dots than large solid clumps of glue. If you go for heavy solid pva glue blobs you get quite a heavy coverage of clearly delineated grass bits which feels more artificial and covers up most of the ground paint. By being frugal with the glue I got a nice falloff of grass growth and the paint shades underneath interacting more with the grass.
- The very final step was a light spotting of the brighter yellowy flock. Used very sparingly I put these in two places. First at whatever spots looked highest and driest. Secondly in some places where I had covered the largest areas of dark flock to break up the monotony with a couple of brighter tufts.
- A final note on flocking was to vary the ratios on each base. This gives you a nice effect when a larger unit is lined up. I find this approach very useful to break monotony and make the basing come alive. Some bases got more grass coverage than others and half don't even have the bright flock applied at all. The underlying paintjob is very forgiving for leaving larger areas unflocked. It's quite hard to resist putting bright flock and a dramatic ground feature on each base when you see how good it did one, but the reward comes when you put the whole unit together. Out of twenty-one bases, only two have a stick log and one has a pebble. In my opinion this looks nicer than if each base had logs and pebbles. If you do want logs and pebbles on all bases, perhaps to emulate a forest floor and not the muddy field I was aiming for I would apply the same principle, but use another feature - a colourful plant perhaps.
I felt so guilty for this wall of text I amended another shot. This is me being all clever using forward thinking and whatnot. See, some of the guys look a bit larger and meaner and have some red spot colours so they'll look good along my two other long-term army projects: Orcs and Khorne. Here they are.
Attachments
inchmurrin
Member
As usual great concept and execution and even flexibility for army building - or are you being economical?
Gallivantes
Member
Thanks Inchmurrin
Heh, am I economical? I dunno, the setup came about for other reasons but the outcome was economical I suppose.
I had already done the red ogres when I acquired the rest, which I decided to paint up in more neutral team colours, ogres "vanilla" palette. Browns, greys. I realised mixing them all together kind of worked, it brought some interesting colour splashes, size variation and skin tones to the bigger unit. I thought it made them into more of a rag-tag crew, more of a melding of ogre bands from different places. It fits my vision of them as nomadic swords-for-hire so there was no tradeoff in my mind, only win.
The rest was just a matter of making sure I didn't add something to break the setup. As I got to basing I went with an identical theme so I can now use them together, or apart. Thrifty is my middle name
Heh, am I economical? I dunno, the setup came about for other reasons but the outcome was economical I suppose.
I had already done the red ogres when I acquired the rest, which I decided to paint up in more neutral team colours, ogres "vanilla" palette. Browns, greys. I realised mixing them all together kind of worked, it brought some interesting colour splashes, size variation and skin tones to the bigger unit. I thought it made them into more of a rag-tag crew, more of a melding of ogre bands from different places. It fits my vision of them as nomadic swords-for-hire so there was no tradeoff in my mind, only win.
The rest was just a matter of making sure I didn't add something to break the setup. As I got to basing I went with an identical theme so I can now use them together, or apart. Thrifty is my middle name
Gallivantes
Member
Here's the step-by-step of my basing procedure in image form.
1st/leftmost are my building materials. I also use bark a lot in my basing, just so happened I didn't use any for the ogres.
2nd base is an unpainted assembly using the cork, plaster, bark and pebbles. Note the scuffing/sloping of the cork edges. There is a rather large flat area on top which is for a rather chunky model. Once fixed it will mostly obscure the flat area, otherwise I would have worked this bit more like the edges.
3rd step are painted, pre-flock. I didn't include the W&N Raw Umber pot in the shot because it was too big but the first pot corresponds to it, Vallejo Charred Brown. The rest of the paints are for the mid brown overbrush and subsequent tonal variation.
4th step are flocked, you can see the two flocks I used to the right.
Hey presto, voila, sim sa la bim et cetera. Easy bases.
1st/leftmost are my building materials. I also use bark a lot in my basing, just so happened I didn't use any for the ogres.
2nd base is an unpainted assembly using the cork, plaster, bark and pebbles. Note the scuffing/sloping of the cork edges. There is a rather large flat area on top which is for a rather chunky model. Once fixed it will mostly obscure the flat area, otherwise I would have worked this bit more like the edges.
3rd step are painted, pre-flock. I didn't include the W&N Raw Umber pot in the shot because it was too big but the first pot corresponds to it, Vallejo Charred Brown. The rest of the paints are for the mid brown overbrush and subsequent tonal variation.
4th step are flocked, you can see the two flocks I used to the right.
Hey presto, voila, sim sa la bim et cetera. Easy bases.
Attachments
WARDUKE
Member
Wonderful! Thank you.
Two follow-up questions:
In using the cork, do you usually have to pin the model to the actual plastic base to get it to stay in place?
For applying the static grass, do you use anything to get it to stand up (I have tried "puffer" applicators, but did not have much luck)?
Thanks again!
Two follow-up questions:
In using the cork, do you usually have to pin the model to the actual plastic base to get it to stay in place?
For applying the static grass, do you use anything to get it to stand up (I have tried "puffer" applicators, but did not have much luck)?
Thanks again!
Gallivantes
Member
No problem at all Warduke.
I often pin models unless they have a good bottom contact area, in which case I may settle for a healthy application of pva glue. This may not be the most secure bond possible but it feels quite adequate to me and there's a reason for leaving it at that. I like the idea of being able to dismantle a model in the future without busting a vein in my forehead, an idea fostered from trying to dislodge a superglue join from hell a time or two, nearly pulling a muscle, using every swear word I know and damaging the model in the process. So my idea of a perfect glue bond is not the best humanity can accomplish but as good as it needs to be, then heartily avoid the overkill if I can.
Then again obviously you want the bond to withstand whatever treatment you have in store for it. I am not actively gaming now so perhaps the way I do it wouldn't suffice in some cases - who knows. And how you use your minis I obviously don't know, so factor that in.
Sometimes models like the ogres have a 3mm peg in the foot, then I drill a corresponding hole in the cork and glue it in place. I am testing the bond integrity right now in my hands and I get the feeling it is very adequate for being knocked about a gaming table without coming loose. Some of my ogres came with cast bases and I simply glued that large contact area on the cork without pinning of any sort. Some Minotaurs I have of comparable size to the ogres have no foot peg and a very small hoof contact area so they are pinned all the way through bark, cork and plastic base. Many ways to tackle it.
Bottom line is I don't have a fast answer for you but encourage you to consider the weight, contact area and usage you have in store for it. I am always ready to drill and pin every joint I come across, I have my pin vise and wire are quick draw ready. I would rather put that minute or five in on a model I spend much more time building and painting than to see it come apart later. But there are many cases which I don't use it too, and I am happy to take that tedium out if it seems like overkill.
Hope that helps.
I often pin models unless they have a good bottom contact area, in which case I may settle for a healthy application of pva glue. This may not be the most secure bond possible but it feels quite adequate to me and there's a reason for leaving it at that. I like the idea of being able to dismantle a model in the future without busting a vein in my forehead, an idea fostered from trying to dislodge a superglue join from hell a time or two, nearly pulling a muscle, using every swear word I know and damaging the model in the process. So my idea of a perfect glue bond is not the best humanity can accomplish but as good as it needs to be, then heartily avoid the overkill if I can.
Then again obviously you want the bond to withstand whatever treatment you have in store for it. I am not actively gaming now so perhaps the way I do it wouldn't suffice in some cases - who knows. And how you use your minis I obviously don't know, so factor that in.
Sometimes models like the ogres have a 3mm peg in the foot, then I drill a corresponding hole in the cork and glue it in place. I am testing the bond integrity right now in my hands and I get the feeling it is very adequate for being knocked about a gaming table without coming loose. Some of my ogres came with cast bases and I simply glued that large contact area on the cork without pinning of any sort. Some Minotaurs I have of comparable size to the ogres have no foot peg and a very small hoof contact area so they are pinned all the way through bark, cork and plastic base. Many ways to tackle it.
Bottom line is I don't have a fast answer for you but encourage you to consider the weight, contact area and usage you have in store for it. I am always ready to drill and pin every joint I come across, I have my pin vise and wire are quick draw ready. I would rather put that minute or five in on a model I spend much more time building and painting than to see it come apart later. But there are many cases which I don't use it too, and I am happy to take that tedium out if it seems like overkill.
Hope that helps.
Gallivantes
Member
The grass question:
No I use no static applicator or any other tool. I just sprinkle it on, or dip the model in the flock tub and waft it over til it covers. But I saw a noticeable difference in this regard in some cases where I knew I had pushed on a flock clump with more force; I recommend using very gentle pressure (or none at all, just sprinkle it on) if you want to avoid that flat look.
No I use no static applicator or any other tool. I just sprinkle it on, or dip the model in the flock tub and waft it over til it covers. But I saw a noticeable difference in this regard in some cases where I knew I had pushed on a flock clump with more force; I recommend using very gentle pressure (or none at all, just sprinkle it on) if you want to avoid that flat look.
Gallivantes
Member
Mr Papafakis
Member
Top stuff! A very angry looking mob of Minotaur's indeed
Sent from my SM-N910G using Tapatalk
Sent from my SM-N910G using Tapatalk
Gallivantes
Member
Not too long ago I posted my Chaos Hound and Handlers unit build here. Some of the dogs had been painted and the Ogre handler just needed a few touchups so I got that sorted and based them up, giving me a small hound unit done and dusted.
I got a little shove in this direction after reading VonKortez post about Animal Handlers in 3rd ed. (VonKortez thread here http://forum.oldhammer.org.uk/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=9967)
I dropped one on his head as I was painting the base and he broke a tooth. At first I cursed my luck and then I realised he looked all badass with his broken tooth. He is now "Stumpy".
I got a little shove in this direction after reading VonKortez post about Animal Handlers in 3rd ed. (VonKortez thread here http://forum.oldhammer.org.uk/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=9967)
I dropped one on his head as I was painting the base and he broke a tooth. At first I cursed my luck and then I realised he looked all badass with his broken tooth. He is now "Stumpy".
Attachments
Plaiecivile
Member
Impressive how that last picture with the background looks natural, top job!