2018 - a new year, new challenges, more hobby

Time to return to the blog... In many ways 2017 brought me a lot of new hobby experiences. Primarily while painting Eldar. The small force I started back in early 2015 has turned into a proper army, and since 8th edition dropped in Spring 2017 I have been gaming and adding to the army. By the end if the year I finally feel that I have both the relevant bitzbox content, knowledge of the range and experience to work more freely with the Aeldari aesthetics.

For 2018 the Aeldari army will become more themed towards gaming in the Thorn Moons setting developed by the ironsleet crew. More menacing and alien. Here is a late 2017 conversion: A warlock based on Harlequin and Drukhari plastics.

Also, in late 2017, GW offered me to review some upcoming stuff starting with the new Greater Daemon of Nurgle. Pretty awesome! Initially I sketched this up. This is the beginning of a project that I am sure will take a lot of time, but will be extremely rewarding and fun to do. Trying to "break" the scale of the model to make him even bigger. Lets see if I can make it work. I'll have to start hunting for Epic models or maybe some Warmaster minis... Projects like these mutate during the creative process and I am really excited to see how this one will end up!

Finally, at the very end of 2017 I got back in touch with a bunch of old hobby friends, and I really hope that 2018 will continue on that great vibe. I hope that 2018 will bring lots of painting, gaming and lots of chances to meet fellow hobbyists.

Pilgrym sketch, the forgotten Oak

I showed this on IRON SLEET about a month back, so I thought I ought to show it here as well. My concept sketch for the main model in my Pilgrym warband.

An ancient oak having grown through a church organ and afterwards whithered along with the surroundings. Brought to life with tech and psychic energy the tree now serves as a vehicle for the driver - permanently fused into the bizarre "tree instrument".

BTW, here is the initial sketch, which showed up in the corner of a bigger drawing. You might just see the outline of the man - "the composer" - worked into the tree trunk.

 Fiction for the character can be found in the post on IRONSLEET.com.

Sketches - shield designs

Two pages of sketches elaborating on various ideas for shield designs:

I am particular fond of the ones portraying shark jaws and skeletal snakes.
Certain geeks among the readers might also recognize a particular GW shield design from around 1999.

New inks + sketch

Having recently purchased some W&N inks I wanted to try out the combination of these inks, white paint, black pen, and pencil work. The works of Master Blanchitsu serves as inspirations but I also had a certain assassin from the mid-1990s French movie "City of Lost Children" in mind.

A beast master assassin during full assault assisting the armies of the Imperium and control his beasts of death. The inks were surprisingly nice to work with!

wizpimp40Ksketch

The sketch that partially got me into bringing my writing and process ponderings into the public. A quick drawing to get ideas on converting the new plastic wizards from GW released Summer 2011:

Lady on the right has been converted and painted already, the servo-skull colector on the right is halfway converted, while a conversion based on the recently released plastic Nurgle Lord is the current painting project.

For the mentioned Nurgle Lord I wanted to play with the massiveness of the miniature. To both contradict and underline this I changed the bulky standing pose into a disturbing floating daemonhost: