Treeman

This is the very first Games Workshop miniature I painted.  At the time I didn’t even own GW paints, instead I had one paint brush and a set of eight bottles of acrylic paint, meant for painting models (can’t remember the brand) which  consisted of black, white, black primer, dark green (as you can see on the base of the treeman), mid brown, mid (slightly pastely) red, mid blue and yellow.  Still have some of the green and brown and almost all the red, blue and yellow.

At any rate my limited palette of paint resulted in the the colours shown.  I think it closely resembles the GW colour scheme at the time for this model despite needing to mix almost every colour, something I don’t have much of an eye for.  I did make the rookie mistake of adding white to everything for highlighting which washes out some of the colours.  Without any wash to go back over (or no real understanding at the time of how to make one) the white highlighted greens and yellows and to a lesser degree blacks and browns look a little strange.  Also my yellow which would normally have been more of a bleached bone colour is very yellow.  All in all though I’m fairly pleased with it.  Was the first time I’d drybrushed too, which was a bit of a challenge to my painting later on with only the one brush to be painting with and drybrushing.

I could fix it up now but I like to keep it this way as I do most of my models as something of a historical record of my painting skill at a given time.

I’d also just like to point out that this treeman alone has been a champion in almost every single game he has played.  He’s a killing machine and immensely durable, like a bloody flax bush.  That would be an interesting customisation.

Orc Boar Boyz

Here are six of my currently eight boar boyz.  What separates these six from the other two (well five of the really) is that they are 40K Orks.

Back at Varsity a fellow commissioned me to paint his 40K Orks.  However after I had painted his biker squad he told me he could not afford to pay me and so left me with the remaining figures.  Notably a squad of Ork Kommandos and whatever Ork boar riders were called in 40K.  These kicked around in my bitz box for many years before I turned up at a local kinda gamesday and someone offered to by my boars (not the orks mind, just the boars).  Later I managed to sell off the Ork Kommandos on Trademe (wish my infant son had pointed out then that he was interested in collecting Orks).  Anyway another year or two down the track and I decided to collect Fantasy Orcs and Goblins.  Going through my bitz box I came across these now boarless orks.  Thinking that I could luddite them down with a knife and a file and that this would be far cheaper than purchasing new boar boyz I proceeded too order six boars from games workshop through my local store.  When it came time to pay, imagine my surprise and joy at finding the boars cost only a little less than what they would have cost with their companion boyz.  Mildly irritated I stubbornly continued with my plan and these are the results.  Guns, ammo clips etc are all gone and I think they look pretty good, though a different style.  Skinny arms versus quite muscle bound regular orcs.  And yes one is actually a fantasy savage orc.  I think when I recieved them initially he was going to be the 40K equivalent of a standard bearer, or at least that’s what Brett told me.