From ColeF - Devils, Demons, And Dervishes (45 Points)

 

I am  a man with a hearty backlog of miniatures. I'm sure absolutely no one here can understand. I'm sure none of you have mountains of unopened packages of grey plastic, sprues that haven't even been clipped or graced with the touch of glue, or entire armies that sit primed and unloved.

Okay, maybe that's all of us, but I'm trying to be better, which leads me to my first ever post!

I dug deep into my pit of unpainted shame and threw some paint till I felt nice.

First we have two minis from Dungeon Saga by Mantic Minis, from way back in 2014. I brushed off the dust and painted this demon guy, and this ghostly ghost guy. Do I know their proper names? NO. Have I ever even played a SINGLE game of Dungeon Saga, a game I so desperately needed to back with all of my heart and wallet almost a decade ago? Also no.

But the minis have great depth, simple details, with not a lot of excessive bits and bobs, and I enjoyed painting them. Is it worth the 2014 Kickstarter FOMO I bought into? Please stop asking these questions, they make me uncomfortable.

Second we have a Dervish for Battletech, printed in Resin. I mostly dipped a toe into Battletech because I missed painting Sci Fi miniatures, and I must say that the official Catalyst minis, as well as the numerous STLs available online are a treat to paint, plus I get to practice edge highlighting.

Last but not least is Oloch Iconic Warpriest from Reaper, from their Pathfinder line of minis. I've had him and several other Pathfinder Pewter minis sitting on my desk for close to a decade, and they're some of my favorite sculpts, literally ever. As a result, I've always felt nervous to paint it up, as I didn't think I'd do it justice. I feel like I'll come back to him in the future and add some extra details on his back banners, but I'm calling him done for now.

Thanks for having me in this challenge and encouraging me to slay my grey. Love seeing all the submissions every day.

Cole

Points Totals

3x 28mm Assorted = 15 Points
1x 54mm Demon =  10 Points
Overdues and Returns = 20 Points

Sylvain: Great first post Cole! The colors are rich and deep and you brought out lots of volume in your miniatures. You offer a great variety of figurines and I will be looking forward to see what comes up next from your paint station.

If you cold provide a map of your progress in the library, that would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

From Barks: Army of the Dead (105 points)

A quick 21 figures here. The Dead of Dunharrow are well sculpted, with cadaverous faces and animated sculpts flowing over the ground. 

I wasn't sure how to paint these: film-accurate greenish or a more pleasing verdigris-blue tone. I did a test between two different Contrast paints over a white undercoat, then drybrushed Army Painter Spaceship Exterior. I settled on blue-grey Briar Queen Chill over green Hexwraith Flame.

Hexwraith Flame vs Briar Queen Chill, both drybrushed grey

In The Return of the King (2003), the King of the Dead has a red hue to his cloak. I painted this with Flesh Tearers Red before the same application of Contrast and drybrush as the rest. It is subtly different and I'm happy with the outcome.

Before

After Briar Queen Chill and drybrush grey

21x 28mm figures (105 points)

Lovely work on these ghostly chaps, Barks. I agree that the blue-grey works better for them than the green. The king's cloak has just enough red showing through to stand out, but not enough to overpower the colour scheme as a whole. 105 spooky points well earned.

From StuartL - A Spooktacular Entry - 40 Points

Hello again fellow challengers.

My second post today is a set of GW Nighthaunt minis. I got them as part of a starter set for Age of Sigmar that I picked up cheap a few years back. I have no intention of playing AoS, but I figured I could always use the models for something else. I painted up the Stormcast half of the box ages ago, but I have had these ghostly types sitting in my box ever since. Recently I have been watching some Youtube videos about painting minis in a more grimdark/Blanchitsu/'28' style. One of the common points for most of the tutorials was using a smaller colour palette to create a more unified look, so this was the challenge I set myself when painting these spooks. Take a look and see if you can guess how many colours were used in the painting of these minis and their bases.

If you guessed 4 colours, you are correct. All of these models were painted in the entirety in various blends of Vallejo Ivory, Hull Red, Heavy Goldbrown and Black Grey. At times I mixed in some Matt Medium to get a bit of transparency, but there are no other paints used here. It was certainly a fun little challenge to try, figuring out how to make different shades and colours with a very limited set of original paints took some doing. The bulk of the ghosts was done by drybrushing a mix of Heavy Goldbrown and Ivory over the top of the figures, adding more and more ivory until the top of the mini got a pure Ivory drybrush. 

So, for 8x 28mm minis, I am going to ask my minion for 40 points for my score.

The models and the bases have a fair number of skulls between them, 26 by my count, so those will be added to my Skull Duel total.

Skullz Total: 104

Your minimalist pallet paid off handsomely on these horrors Stuart.  I don't speak GW, but the flying ghost things in the first pictures look like something that I could use in my RPGs.  And the hunchback dead horse thingy playing at the drum is the stuff of nightmares.  Once again I will delegate the Skull inventory.

From TomG - The Tomb - 25pts

A last minute reminder from a great friend that I'd stopped posting anything for my challenge entries, dragged me out of a malaise that I had slipped in to worry the last round of UK lockdown. Fittingly the post I had started to create was for the "The Tomb" challenge chamber. 

For this challenge I had dredged up this ghostly Guildball player, from a limited run team that was produced before the game was canned. Each player in the team represented a character that had died in the game lore, allowing a fantastic array of figures, including this one of Blackheart.

Painted using the Hexwraith paint from GW, this ghostly finish was achieved quickly, then came the fun job of getting the tomb stone painted up, which again was some simple drybrushing for a satisfying image. 

I hope you all like this miniature who scores me 25 points, with 5 from him being a 28mm miniature and 20 points from the challenge entry. 

TomG

From StuartL - A Miscellany at Graveyard Beach - 251 Points

Hello all,

Recently work has been irregular, unpredictable and generally taking up far too much time that could be spent on more valuable things like painting minis. Between working online, meetings and other such time consuming things, actually being able to sit down and paint for any length of time has become a bit of a novelty. Similarly, since I have been spending too much time in front of my PC for work, I haven't really felt like sitting down and typing out comments for every post on the challenge recently. My apologies to everyone. I do try to look at everyone's work, there have been some great entries in the past few weeks. So if I didn't comment on your submission, I apologise. 

Which brings me to this post. Rather than submit several entries over a couple of days, I have put them all together into one submission to save some time and effort.

First of all, here are some Weird World War II US Rocket Infantry.

The models are from the Dust Tactics game. I bought into the game heavily when Fantasy Flight was running it, as it was available from Amazon here in Japan at a reasonable price. Sadly, FF decided to drop the game, and then there were a series of debacles with Battlefront and the designer of the game running a kickstarter. The models are that soft kind of plastic that a lot of board game makers favour, but they look pretty good when given a lick of paint.

For five 28mm minis, these should add 25 Points to my total. And, as WWW2 is a new genre from me for this challenge, they add a Squirrel point to my tally too.

Earlier in the challenge, I painted up 5 old GW Lizardmen Skinks. Since then I dug out a bunch more of them from the hobby stash and painted them up too.

Here we have 42 of the old minis, still on their square bases. On the minis posted earlier, I had used a green wash on the skin, but on this batch I went with brown. After comparing the two, I find that the brown gives a much nicer shading to the figures and makes them look more natural. (As far as fictional sentient lizard folk go). I'll probably revisit the first batch at some point with a brown wash.

For 42x 28mm minis, these add 210 Points to my total and to my GW side duel as well.

When visiting my local dollar (100 yen actually, but it's roughly the same) store a week or so ago, I found some bags of plastic palm trees that looked like they were a reasonable size. I picked up five bags and brought them home to see how they would look as terrain.

They are a still a little on the small side perhaps and a bit rough around the edges, but good enough for the gaming table. The pirate figure in the picture is just there to give a sense of scale. I have since gone back to the shop and bought up the rest of their stock, so I should have enough of these to make a reasonable amount of scatter terrain.

The trees fill a roughly 3" by 3" by 4" area of the table, or roughly 1/6th of a terrain cube, so should score me 3 Points.

Finally, the part of my entry related to the Graveyard Beach section of the Chambers of Challenge. Some Pirate Ghosts.

These five spooky scoundrels are from Reaper's Bones line of minis and are cast in a translucent green plastic. I quite liked the look of it as it was, so I painted up the scenic bases and weaponry on the figures, but left the bodies and clothing more or less untouched.

To try to give them a bit more definition, I added a thin coat of Vallejo Transparent Green to the 'skin' areas of the figure. It doesn't show up in the pictures very well, but I think it helps.

Each of these undead pirates has a skull on their base (their own perhaps?) as well as a mix of flotsam and wreckage. 

As for points, I am not sure how to score these. As 28mm minis, they should come in at 25 points, but large parts of them are deliberately unpainted. So perhaps scoring them at half the usual rate? That should get me 13 Points, rounded up. If one of the minions disagrees, they can alter my score as necessary. I believe there was some mention of bonus points for the chamber if the undead had a nautical theme? There are also 5 Skullz for my side duel.

So, in total this submission should get me 251 Points, which I believe puts me over my target for the challenge with three weeks remaining.

My running Duels totals:

GW Points - 1016

Skullz - 456

Squirrels - 18

From Dallas: Midlam Ghost in the Graveyard Beach (25 points)

Fresh off the teleporter at the Graveyard Beach... gotta say this entry is much more "graveyard" than "beach".

It's a Ghost from Midlam Miniatures! I painted him in essentially greyscale, but did use GW Leadbelcher and Nuln Oil for the steel bits on his helmet, chainmail and sword. The rest was worked up from a base of Mechanicus Standard Grey with different tones on the different bits of him.

Casting Room cleric attempts to turn the Ghost... hope that cleric's a high enough level to give him a chance!

Next I'm off to the Adventurer's Landing to actually paint a (gasp) boat!!!

Stay safe all!
 

From JamieM - More ghostly going’s on (150 points)

Nice and quick this post, 30 more chainrasps for Age of Sigmar.

I needed more of these for reinforcements as my son managed to paint up his stormcast force and they smashed me in the games we've played so far.

Sadly, this lot didn't help me much and they were properly duffed up in the first game we played with them!

Normal ghostly colours and rusty weapons.

I must admit that I'm not entirely sure whether these are the 30 I most recently painted, as having had a game they got mixed in with the 10 I'd already painted, but you can trust me that I've painted 30 more :)

Nice and easy, 30 28mm figures for 150 points.

I need to now get a move on with My snowlord's peak submission before time runs out!

From DaveD - Nice a simple does the trick - 150 pts to the good!

571 pts for the day - i so need to crack the whip!! call yourselves painters .. 

From IannickM - Gggg-ghosts!!!!!!! (17pts)

This week we have the start of my Undead Oldhammer project with three Ethereal creatures, making up my Ethereal Host.

I got tempted by the latest fad and did that green Ethereal effect. I've always been puzzled by how to do proper ghosts and well this is the best look I've seen. For all the sh*t I give GW for many of their new models, I have to admit their new technical paints and washes are superb products. In this case, I used Nihilakh Oxide mixed with Lahmian medium over an Ionrach Skin base and then highlighted with Ionrach skin and Deepkin Flesh. It's pretty rare actually that I use almost exclusively GW paints on a figure, my paints of choice being Foundry and Andreas.

For a very first try with no tests beforehand I am quite happy with my results! I wanted the Host to tie together so all three figures were painted the same way. Yeah, my Wraith ain't black, big deal.

The Wraith is from Foundry's (now carried by their sister company Warmonger) fantasy Undead range, and I will admit preferring it to Citadel Oldhammer Wraith. It's huge, and I find the chains and the skeleton very evocative of what a Wraith is. It also looks like a 150pts creature in Warhammer.

Then we have two ghosts to round up the Host. One is an absolute classic and maybe my favourite undead model from the Oldhammer (79-92) era. He was originally sold as a "Headless Ghost", part of the Night Horrors range. I love how he came out, and had a ton of fun painting him.

The last ghost is obviously from the same range as the Wraith, a smaller version. He's the add-on figure I painted on the last day of the month. It's a cute figure and I will use it as another Ghost.

I used round bases as it seemed more evocative of the wandering nature of ghosts and ethereals in Warhammer.


Fine prints : 2x28mm Ghosts : 10pts
1x40mm Wraith : 7pts
17pts

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Sc-c-c-arry! Not sure why but I feel like screaming "yikes Scoob, lets get out of here" and then running in and out of the room... Maybe I just need to take my medication. Lovely work on these, this is a colour scheme that looks excellent but I have never mastered so I'm suitably impressed. 17 points it is. 
Lee

From BillA - Undead for a Dark Night (20 points)

Tonight being the winter solstice - the longest, darkest night of the year, and one on which some might claim the veil between this world and the next is thinnest, I thought it fitting to open up my participation in this year's Painting Challenge with a quartet of undead from Reaper which I'd bought and primed back in September but hadn't gotten around to. 

First up is Reaper DHL#02224, "Armored Zombie," sculpted by Bob Ridolfi and originally released some time around 1998, I think:

Next, Reaper DHL#02104, "Plague Zombie," again by the talented Mr. Ridolfi and probably originating around the same time as the Armored Zombie.

Next, DHL#02157, "Undead Awakening," another Ridolfi sculpt (what can I say, I'm a huge fan of Bob Ridolfi's undead figures.  Somehow he can put a ton of character into a bare skull!).  This figure was packed with a separate tombstone which is in my bits box for a later time. 

Finally, DHL#02105, "Labella DeMornay," in this instance listed solely as a wraith but that name will later be applied to a number of miniatures specified as Banshees by Reaper.  She was given a heavy drybrush of Reaper's new "Spectral White" (which has a slightly purple tinge to it) over a black basecoat, given an all-over wash of Citadel "Drakenhof Nightshade," a dark blue ink, and once that was dry I began building up layers of "Druchii Violet" wash, giving the bottoms of her sleeves and her robes from about the waist down darker and darker layers of purple as I got closer to the base.  I then gave the top half of her another drybrushing of Spectral White, lightening my brush strokes as I got into the purple areas. 

I have no idea what I'm going to use these figures for yet, though all would be useful in Frostgrave, certainly, and the zombies might find a home as well in my undead Dragon Rampant army. 

Four 28mm figures should give put me on the board with 20 points. 

__________________________________________

Great work Bill! 

The zombies are all terrific (that armoured fellow has an especially Old Skool look about him), but I think the Banshee is my favourite of the batch. I like the purple to 'fright white' effect you've done on her - nice looking effect.

These four nasties will give you 20 points for your climb up the points roster. Well done!

From Barks: Warriors of Middle Earth (192 points)

I acquired the most recent expansion for the excellent epic boardgame War of the Ring. These were a quick paint job that I'm happy with.

Dead Men of Dunharrow

Dunlendings

Giant Spiders

Corsairs of Umbar

Giant Eagles

Ents

There are eight of each, and the humans are 20mm and they're all similarly sized, so 48x4 = 192.

From Ray

Surprisingly I've not heard of the game. The figures do look pretty cool though. I do like the Dead men of Dunharrow, that's a great shade of Dead green!
192 points coming your way!