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Sunday 22 May 2016

Skinks with javelins


Last week I painted-up 'D6' Lizardmen Skinks with (poisoned) javelins, for Warhammer QuestI went with a fairly 'official' colour-scheme, albeit with a slightly more neon tetra look (& also inspired by some of the more garish lizards & snakes on Attenborough's 'Life in Cold Blood'), as I think it looks so good on these figures, especially in contrast with jungle scenery & the gold.  I'm certain the Games Workshop colour scheme was inspired by the famous Aztec double-headed serpent artifact.

About seven years ago (when I last GMed a Warhammer Quest group), I finally gave up on 28mm-scale dungeoneering when I made the classic mistake of assuming £7.20 was the price of three Skaven Poison Wind Globadiers from Games Workshop (not reading the small print of "1 figure included").  At the time I threw my hands up in the air & lamented that I'd never be able to afford to populate my WQ dungeons with additional Monsters at the ever-rising GW prices (Globadiers are just a low-level foe).

This led to my (currently on-hold) 15mm-scale Warhammer Quest project... I'm pleased with how my tiny scratch-built dungeon tiles turned-out, but despite the excellently-sculpted 15mm-scale figures, this scale feels a bit lacking at times in terms of detail for this type of gaming.


Since my last foray with actual WQ gaming, I've become a lot more savvy with using alternate miniatures suppliers, & ebaying GW miniatures.  This, combined with the fact that I'm a huge fan of dinosaurs & Aztec/Mayan history means that I've wanted to collect some Lizardmen for a very long time (but never actually fancied playing Warhammer Fantasy Battles).  I like the traditional Old World setting in Warhammer, but there's always been something about Lustria (Mesoamerica/South America) for me - Aztec-dinosaurs (some of them riding bigger dinosaurs!), pirates, zombie-pirates, Amaxon tribes, & Empire conquistadors in a tropical jungle swarming with deadly creatures is a real winning fluff combination!  So I decided collecting a Lustria-themed Monster collection for 28mm-scale WQ was the perfect excuse to purchases a few packages of Lizardmen (mostly still intact plastic sprues) from ebay.  The Lustria setting was catered for back in the day by official GW rules, & there are still plenty of dedicated websites for WQ with stats, quests & so on - e.g. Warhammer Quest Chronicles.

These Skinks are the first of these figures that I've painted-up.  It's been a while since I assembled models from sprues, & I'd forgotten how lush the selection of options can be.  These GW Skinks are one of the better sprues, with some nice poses & interesting details, & I really enjoyed painting them, as well as doing the basing using various Gale Force Nine flocks, static grass, Gamer's Grass tufts, & snippets of plastic aquarium foliage.  I did agonise a lot over whether to base them more dungeon-generic (flagstones), but in the end they just look so good with the blatant Lustria theme that I went with that.  Being obsessive, this does mean that I'll have to acquire a new set of 2D6 Giant Spiders etc to put on jungle bases though  :-s

Addendum:  I noticed by a weird coincidence that GW released their reboot of Warhammer Quest last week - Warhammer Quest: Silver Tower.  Sadly it is set in their new post-apocalyptic Warhammer: Age of Sigmar universe (more psychedelic & OTT WQ, with new mechanisms. Ogres are now 'Ogroids', whilst the Elf is an 'Aelf' etc...), wheras I will be sticking firmly to the slightly tongue-in-cheek 'Oldhammer' universe, & ignoring AoS.

6 comments:

  1. These are brilliant, love the colours.

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  2. If this is D6 skinks, then you're not rolling the dice when we get monster cards.

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    1. Haha, probably best if you roll the dice then, especially when it comes to Kroxigor etc...

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    1. Thanks for your interest. I'm hoping to paint some more Lizardmen soon, so will take some stage-by-stage photos.

      For now, here's a description of how I painted these:
      I undercoated in brown because I find it a better base than black or white, especially when you want the colours to be bright. I then painted the whole figure in GW Hawk Turquoise, followed by 4 stages of drybrushing, adding a little more white to the Hawk Turquoise at each stage. I gave the belly & underside of the tail the brightest finish. Then I moved on to the armoured scales, which I painted in a 2:1 ratio mix of GW Midnight Blue & Enchanted Blue. I then applied a 1:1 Midnight Blue/black thin wash to the armoured scales area to pick out the recesses better. Then I highlighted the scales with a 1:1 Midnight Blue/Enchanted Blue mix, followed by another stage of highlighting with an Enchanted Blue/white mix.

      I painted the head fin in the same colours as the scales, using wet blending with the darkest hues at the base, & the lightest at the tip. The head fan was painted using GW Red Gore highlighted with GW Blood Red along the edges.

      The gold details began as a 1:1 GW Tin Bitz/Shining Gold mix, highlighted with Shining Gold, then a little GW Burnished Gold on the extreme edges.

      The wood of the weapons are a base coat of 2:1 GW Bestial Brown/black, drybrushed with a Bestial Brown/Desert Yellow mix to suggest the grain.

      I paint the business ends of my Lizardmen weapons as volcanic glass, highlighted with a black/Ultramarine Blue/grey mix, finished with a gloss varnish of 'Ardcoat or similar.

      The finishing touch are the eyes, which I painted Burning Orange, followed by Sunburst Yellow in the centre, & finally a small dot of Sunburst Yellow/white mix as a glint in the middle.

      Hope that helps!

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