More snakes

This week I painted a few more bases of snakes for Warhammer Quest.  These figures are from Black Cat Bases, who have a wide range of esoteric miniatures at sensible prices.  Added to the two bases of snakes from the GW Lizardmen Cold One riders sprue that I painted a while back, that's five bases of snakes.  I think I'll add one more of the coiled snake on my next Black Cat Bases order, for a nice even 'D6' snakes encounter.

Apologies for the unformatted tall column of photos, but Blogger appears to have been 'upgraded' to remove the tools for wrapping text around & aligning images :-/

Two more rickety fences

Finished a couple more lengths of rickety fence for Ronin & Chain of Command games.  These are laser-cut ply pieces from Fenris Games, glued to large hobby lolly sticks.  The basing uses various Gale Force Nine flocks & Gamers Grass tufts.  Pictured with a pair of my Japanese peasants for scale.  I have plenty of these rural fences now.  Time to work on my more substantial Japanese walls & Sarissa Precision buildings next.

T'au Fire Warrior

I recently dusted-off an old Fire Warrior that had been languishing with the rest of my half-finished T'au collection in the attic, & painted it.  Right from the start of collecting T'au back in the early 2000s, I was certain that I wanted a turquoise-armoured force (I loved the turquoise skies from the box art of the desert-coloured T'au), but with my more limited painting skills back then, my models always ended up looking toy-like instead of grimdark.

Granted, T'au are one of the slightly less grimdark factions in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, but I want mine looking gritty.  I think I've finally achieved it, by keeping a limited palette based around GW Hawk Turquoise, mixed to varying degrees with black & grey.

I really like the muted tones that have resulted, which I think strikes a balance between 'popping' visually on the tabletop, but also being plausible as an urban scheme (I have previously attempted various urban camo & even Berlin Brigade-style block-camo on T'au, but couldn't make it work).

I think I'd go so far as to say this may be the best Warhammer 40,000 figure painting I've ever done - it's certainly not up there with the incredible work seen on many other blogs & in White Dwarf, but I'm really happy with it - I even tried zenithal highlighting for the first time.

I'm planning to try out the Black Ops rules with a few T'au & Imperial Guard miniatures at some point.

Amaxon Priestesses

This week I finished painting another Amaxon Priestess for my Lustrian Warhammer Quest collection.  I based this model on the Hasslefree Miniatures Azura Halfblood, pinning a pair of large feathers from the Games Workshop Greatswords sprue to her head, hiding her Elven ears with a pair of helmet wings (also from Hasslefree), & using Green Stuff to model a head band & top to cover her bare chest.  I think the helmet wings hint nicely at one origin story for the Amaxons of Warhammer - that they are the sole survivors of a Norse expedition of which all the men died in the jungles of Lustria, while the women created their own culture among the ruins of the Old Ones.

I'll use this figure to represent a High Priestess (worth 1900 gold) or Priestess Queen (worth 2400 gold).  Since converting this miniature, Hasslefree have released this off-the-shelf tropical sorceress, which I think I'll have to buy to represent a mid-rank Priestess Champion (1000 gold).

Pictured here is my finished High Priestess, along with the Serpent Priestess (590 gold) that I painted a few months ago.  I decided to add green warpaint to them in the end, to complete the tribal look.  In the lore, Amaxon motivation can appear fickle to outsiders, so in Warhammer Quest games, I'm thinking of having it random whether encountered Amaxons attack or aid t he players' adventuring Warriors; & they may help slay evil foes first, before then attacking the Warriors.