Tale of OG Gamers - High Elves

[fatolaf]

Matt
I love it, especially the green stuff gags!

[Dave]

Paedophilia, there are few better areas on which to base your comedy.

Great ramble err Blog

[jackhoneysett]

I wholeheartedly agree that Shakeaway is awesome. Aero mint is my current favourite.

As for the rest of the blog, totally bonkers. Love it!

[cunningmatt]

I wholeheartedly agree that Shakeaway is awesome.

Phew! I'm glad someone else has heard of Shakeaway, it was beginning to look like I was talking absolute drivel.   

[cunningmatt]

Wednesday 22nd September

Ok so it's the time of the week that's more eagerly awaited than the Pope's visit to the UK is on Richard Dawkins kitchen calendar, yep it's my weekly update on the progress of my High Elves. We're currently 73% of the way through the month (or 22 days for those of you who use more conventional standards for time measurement) and I'm reasonably pleased with my progress I seem to be on good course to complete this month's 200 points. After looking at some of the other blogs in this series I noticed some people haven't even started painting yet, I'm not sure if this makes me feel smug that I'm so far ahead or jealous that you have a reasonable chance of painting so much in such a short space of time - I'm nothing if not an easily distracted painter, as I'm sure I'll discuss at some point in the future in this blog (there's 10 months of this drivel to write after all).

As you may be beginning to fathom after 3 weeks of these blogs, my mind is about as organised as the Indian Commonwealth Games (sorry was that a ceiling tile dropping past my head?) and after reading last week's entry I realised that, despite doing more painting than in any of the previous weeks, I actually spoke it about less in my blog than in any of the previous weeks. So in effort to overcome this I thought I'd talk a little bit more about how I go about painting my models.

Last week I showed you Stage 1 of the painting of Smoggy's Sea Guard generally I paint my rank-and-file in 3-4 stages, with most colours simply being a base, midcoat and then a highlight, with the fourth stage reserved for possible extra washing, secondary highlights and details such as eyes, gems and basing plus a little touch up here and there. For character models or larger models (such as monsters) this is generally extended to 5-6 stages with an extra colour in between base and midcoat and again between midcoat and highlight (invariably a 1:1 mix of those two colours).

If you look closely at last week's pictures of Stage 1, you'll notice that my basecoat is much like the performance by those two chav girls on The X Factor a few weeks back, namely poorly applied, sloppy, offensive and if you stare at the picture long enough you'll probably want to punch something. No matter how hard I try to be neat I generally find the basecoat ends up in a mess, unless I paint everything with a fine detail brush, which would mean I'd have as much chance of finishing my 200 points by October as they would have finish the Indian Commonwealth Village by October - oops already done a topical gag about that! So the procedure for all the time I've been painting had been to basecoat the models with a larger brush, not worrying too much about the slops and spills and then to spend an inordinate amount of time neatening up the colours with a fine detail brush before moving on. Generally this seemed to double the time it took to paint the models because it was as fiddly as trying to find the end of a roll of selotape whilst having your head immersed in treacle, and about as tedious as watching Loose Women, which generally meant I put off doing it and got easily distracted. Then divine inspiration struck me (much like when Christine Bleakley couldn't decide whether to leave The One Show then realised she'd be getting paid about two million pounds more at ITV) when whilst painting my Beastmen army earlier this year I realised that virtually all the mess at the basecoat stage could be tidied up with the midcoat (this probably halved the amount of time I spent painting Core units). Generally most of any colour area, bar the deep recesses will be recovered at the midcoat stage, and the deep recesses are the areas least likely to have a splatter of the wrong colour on anyway, as they are recessed, so hey presto I just ignore the mess and carry on regardless. Obviously a mini neatening stage is still need at the end to tidy up those stray flecks of paint, and with characters it might be worth a neatening step after every stage, but generally a lot of time was saved, and with time now being of the essence this was good. Any how the point of all this blather, which before you moan is about painting (shocking I know), is that you should hopefully notice in the photos of the later stages of Smoggy's Sea Guard that the painting should look neater so that by the time the final fleck of paint is applied it will look like a masterpiece painting by one of the great Renaissance painters of the time - well it would if my camera wasn't operating at one tenth of a megapixel. Bless it, it's an old camera, and it's not helped by the fact I cracked the view screen when I fell over trying to board the Autopia ride at Disneyland Paris and I ended up sitting on it - sad but true.

Anyway on that bomb shell it's time for my camera to shine as it's time for this week in pictures, everybody's favourite part of the blog (because it is easier to skim through and pretend you've read it).

On Friday we got to Stage 2 of the painting of Smoggy's Sea Guard, here's a couple of snaps and an update on the colours used (see Stage 1 on the previous week's entry for the base colours).

Smoggy's Sea Guard – Stage 2




Base: *NO CHANGE*
Leather: Wash with Badab Black
Robes and Shield: Layered with 1:2 Astronomican Grey : Skull White
Armour Edging: Layered with Ice Blue
Silver Metal: Wash with Badab Black
Spear and Bow: Layered with Graveyard Earth
Dragon: Layered with Blood Red
Sea: Layered at top, and waves painted lower down with 1:1 Enchanted Blue : Dark Angels Green
Gold Metal: Basecoated (over the Tin Bitz) with Shining Gold
Hair: Vomit Brown – washed with Ogryn Flesh. Dheneb Stone – washed with Badab Black. Calthan Brown – washed with Badab Black
Flesh: Layered with Elf Flesh
Pennants and Arrow Quivers: Layered with Golden Yellow
Seaweed: Layered with 1:1 Enchanted Blue : Dark Angels Green
Shells: Layered with Bleached Bone

The astute amongst you may have noticed that the method for the shield and seaweed is quite similar to the method on the Island of Blood painting guide on the Games Workshop website – this is entirely true, they copied me*..., even though I'm writing it up after they published it.

*for legal reasons I should point out they didn't copy me.

Here's some group shots so you can see the unit as a whole:




On Saturday to celebrate the reaching of Stage 2 I went and bought myself a Shakeaway!!



You'd have thought with all the publicity I'm doing for them painting my army the Shakeaway colours I'd have at least not got my drink for free, but apparently according to the shop assistant this wasn't good enough reason (the cheek of it).

Incidentally for those of you interested I choose the French Fancy (sometimes known as Fondant Fancy) flavour – French Fancies are those cakes which consist of a cube of foam with a small blob of, what one can only presume is, fire retardant foam on then iced in a colour of stripey icing so bright it wouldn't look out of place on Lady Gaga's dress.

Ok so I've gone about Shakeaway a bit too much, I promise next week there won't be a single mention, honest, possibly.

Sunday was a very exciting day, I promised it last week, yes painting on the road! As I set off with Smoggy's Sea Guard to the sunshine paradise of Wilsden Green, well it was sunnier there than Clapham on the day.

I am fortunate to own one of the quite nifty Fast Attack Bags from Games Workshop - I'm sure Ol will be able to get you one if you ask him very nicely (when I say "get" you may have to pay for it, maybe "supply" would be a better choice of words). I got mine as a well thought out Christmas present from the parents and it's actually surprisingly useful – the padded area holds a reasonable number of infantry models all safely tucked away (it does struggle with anything bigger than cavalry though):



Then there's some elastic straps which hold paintbrushes, glue, clippers and a selection of paints the right way up minimising spills...



...unfortunately there's never enough spaces for paints as you need, so invariably you throw the remaining paints in the bottom of the bag increasing the chance of a spill and making the whole thing rather pointless – much like a sign I genuinely saw in Boots this week, which read Eye Appointments Available Tomorrow* and underneath read *subject to availability – which surely means that "eye appointments might be available tomorrow, or at any other time, why not check at the desk there's no way this poster can know for sure" – i.e. utterly pointless, though the small print was so small you couldn't read it unless you didn't need an eye test, so perhaps the sign was a way of checking if people needed their glasses changing based on whether they noticed the small print which makes the sign irrelevant – I've gone off topic again haven't I?

The other good thing about the Fast Attack bag is there is very little Games Workshop branding on it, which is very helpful if like me you keep boarding tubes packed full of Chelsea fans who are likely to point and mock (this isn't a slur on Chelsea fans in particular, I just happen to pass through Fulham Broadway station at the wrong time remarkably often).

The reason I went to Wilsden Green is for a painting session with my friend, who is commonly known by me as Mr Shakey Shakey (no connection to Shakeaway) due to his rather unsteady hands during the painting process as you can see.




This combined with his scatter gun approach to painting means that his Wood Elf army consists of lots of part finished models, as you can see here there's Way Watchers, Glade Riders and Warhawk Riders scattered across the table in various stages of completion.



Hopefully Mr Shakey Shakey can get his army finished soon, in the mean time all I can show you is an artist's impression of what it might look like when finished.



Sadly as we know Wood Elves are pretty pants in 8th edition, so here's an artist's impression of what it will probably look like by turn 2.



Mr Shakey Shakey shouldn't worry as he probably won't have finished his army until 9th edition. Thanks there to our resident 4 year old artist.

I should point out that painting with someone else invariably leads to a lot more painting being done than solo sessions, primarily as I don't have the TV on for company, which can be quite distracting, and the other person generally is motivating enough to keep you painting when you start to get bored. I would highly recommend it, maybe an OG Painting session could kick off? And here's another painting tip, bits of board to mount your units on for quick batch painting...



...generally this helps me whiz through rank and file models, painting the colour across the whole board, here I've used Celebrity Kappa Board – it's been on telly don't you know! But any bits of thick card would suffice.

Sadly other than pictures of someone else's dining table I have no snaps of Wilsden Green itself, I'll have to leave it to your imagination – maybe more holiday style snaps on the next leg of the tour.

And by Wednesday, that's today (if I finish writing this blog by midnight), Stage 3 was mostly complete on Smoggy's Sea Guard, thanks to Sunday's efforts. Here's all the useful colour info.

Smoggy's Sea Guard – Stage 3




Base: *NO CHANGE*
Leather: Highlighted with Beastial Brown
Robes and Shield: Layered with Skull White, sometimes a second coat used for good coverage especially on large areas.
Armour Edging: Highlighted with 1:1 Ice Blue : Skull White
Silver Metal: Highlighted with Mithril Silver
Spear and Bow: Layered with watered down Bleached Bone (to give a uneven wood grain effect)
Dragon: Highlighted with Blazing Orange, then with Vomit Brown.
Sea: Layered at top most and on waves with 1:1:1 Enchanted Blue : Dark Angels Green : Space Wolves Grey
Gold Metal: Washed with Gryphonne Sepia
Hair: Vomit Brown – highlighted with Vomit Brown. Dheneb Stone – highlighted with Bleached Bone. Calthan Brown – highlighted with Snakebite Leather
Flesh: Washed with watered down Ogryn Flesh
Pennants and Arrow Quivers: Layered with Sunburst Yellow
Seaweed: Layered with 1:1:1 Enchanted Blue : Dark Angels Green : Bleached Bone
Shells: Highlighted with Skull White

Sorry there's no group shots I haven't quite finished the last bit of Stage 3 on all the models, I was too busy ranting on Radio 1 about how the BBC haven't paid me, until I realised like Chris Moyles that no one cares (and incidentally I don't work for the BBC).

And then to cap off Wednesday my porn arrived (as my flat mate refers to it), what he means is this month's White Dwarf – which despite the undoubted attractiveness of the White Dwarf team I can exclusively reveal has never been used in the traditional sense of porn, by any one in the world ever (except weirdos). I sat down for a quick read with two Weetabix (or technically two Sainsbury's Wholewheat Biscuits – I'm quite cheap and proud), and I can recommend Weetabix as a tasty but healthy post work snack that won't ruin dinner.



I shan't reveal too much, don't want to spoil the read for you, but it's full of High Elves hence my excitement. And reveals that they're re-releasing classic Lothern Sea Guard models (as well as a new High Elf Hero) which don't look too bad should I want a second unit of the Lothern Sea Guard – though they are a little pricey so may have to wait until a day when I'm in a good mood, or have robbed the local Cash n' Carry – whichever comes first, probably the Cash n' Carry.

And that my friends is this week over, sadly no Mixing Pants this week (I know I promised last week, but I haven't done any, maybe next week!). Next week does promise to see the finish of Smoggy's Sea Guard, more painting on the road and the preparation of Month 2's miniatures including a trip under my bed (yes the much talked about under the bed), oh and no mention's of Shakeaway, I promise – I can't wait. Until then I bid you good week, I hope your dice always roll 6s and you never have to paint yellow – seriously it's a bitch!

[maelzch]

Entertaining as always matt! Agreed on yellow being a bad colour to paint, slightly regretting having chosen it for my empire horde army scheme!

[Undead Dan]

Great rambly blog, looks like the start of a great new High Elf army!

A friend of mine managed Shakeaway in Kingston for a couple of years. If you've ever wondered what a degree in geology from Imperial College gets you, there's your answer.

[cunningmatt]

A friend of mine managed Shakeaway in Kingston for a couple of years. If you've ever wondered what a degree in geology from Imperial College gets you, there's your answer.

I have a degree from Imperial College too (not in Geology mind) does that mean I can manage a Shakeaway? That is the best news I've had all week, maybe all month! 

[fatolaf]

Great update matey, loving your   , sorry, the 4 year old's artwork....

[cunningmatt]

Great update matey, loving your   , sorry, the 4 year old's artwork....

Ssshh... I don't think anyone's noticed!