Cleaning up my Workbench

The Workbench in July 2019

My approach in painting miniatures is simple; Paint something which attracts you the most. The advantage is that you are always highly motivated. Unfortunately, it happens that you loose your interest before a project is finished. You grab the next one or move on to a different project. Therefore, my shelf of shame with all my unfinished projects is a large one. Becoming a Daddy has made things more complicated. My painting time devides into evenings doing the night shift by taking care for our little boy. As I am mostly tired from the day my painting concentrates on doing simple work like basic colours, simple transitions with less colours like in NMM, big surfaces, bases and so on. When having some spare time on the weekend I use it for work which needs much concentration like Freehands, finelining, painting eyes and so on. As you can image I do not have much spare time on the weekends which results in an unfinished miniature accumulation. When you are following this project you already noticed that half a dozen Cold Ones are still waiting to get saddled by their missing knights. However, when I started my work on the Cold Ones some of the infantry troopers become victims of loosing interest. From time to time I continued work on them but finally two executioners and two Witch Elf stuck in the pile for getting their finish sessions. Therefore, I decided that the July will be the month to finish all that stuff from my 4th Edition Dark Elves project that stucks somewhere in my painting pipeline. Lets see what we have here:


Executioners

The Workbench in end of 2018

I started painting the first three Executioners in end of November 2018. Quickly I concentrated on one miniature which left the two unfished troopers behind. My interest then quickly changed to the Cold One Knights and I wanted to paint a test miniature of this cavalery unit. The two unfinished Executioners patiently waited for their time to come.





During that time I had some smaller painting sessions on the hoodies, base and the black leather. Finally, they waited until mid of July 2019 to see a brush again. I started with finishing the chainmail, silver and gold elements, the gems as well as some correction work on all finished parts.

The next sessions covered the axes which were a lot of fun to paint. Finally I painted the leather, base and some battle damage as well as some blood on the axes.

Finished NMM on the two new collegues

I am happy that these two maniacs have joined their collegue to sever some limbs and heads.

 


Witch Elves

These two girls waited more than half a year to get finished.The Witch Elf in defending position was the last girl from the first rank which I started painting with the two other girls from the left flank in 2018. You can see her leying around in the first executioner picture above. The latter two were quickly finished but the motivation left me to continue with this third one.








The girl with the raising swords is from the second rank and joined her later to motivate me. From time to time I spent some painting time in both but quickly concentrated on this second Witch Elf as she was much more detailed and thrilling to paint.

Again the front rank girl was left unfinished behind. I do not know why this particular Witch Elf had her difficulties motivating me to finish her. I told her story in our Tabletop-Board and some angry members put up the pressure which was necessary to get the job done.

Sometimes a whip is motivating more than hundreds of nice words!

The Witch Elves Unit so far. Ready to shed some blood

       

Dark Elf Warriors

When ever I had some spare times in the early mornings while my little boy still sleeps I had a coffee and continue to prepare some troopers for my 20 miniature Dark Elf warrior unit. It took me a while to collect these very rare metal versions of the Dark Elf Warriors. Now, I am happy that the first 10 miniatures are prepared and ready for painting. I think I am going with some red colours for this regiment.

The first Dark Elves Warriors prepare theirselves for some undercoat

Sorceress on Dark Pegasus and Plastic Sorceress on foot 

Finally, I have a small teaser for you.

Two Sorceresses on their way to lead a new wing of this army

First, the Talisman Sorceress on foot. I get this plastic miniature from ebay. It was painted ok but with very very thick layers of paint and primer. It was hell to get this miniatures stripped from the paint and to prepare her for painting. Because this girl is a bit smaller compared to the metal miniatures, I put her on a bit higher base design to cover her size. Here she comes, ready for painting.

I also prepared the mighty sorceress on black pegasus. The challenge on this miniature was to create a base which supports the impression that this beast is just jumping to fly up into the air. As you can imagine it was a lot of planning and trying to get this heavy metal miniature balanced. But see it by youself.

                                                                       Its all about Balance


I hope you like my progress. As always I am happy to read your thoughts in the comments.

Kind Regards,
GeOrc

Miniature Preparation and Basing

View on my workbench while cleaning and basing Dark Elf Warriors and Executioners

I spent quite some time in the preparition for some new 4th/5th Edition Dark Elves units. I will take the chance to speak about some of my basic steps in front of painting a miniature. The general miniature preparation comprised the removal of mold lines and sanding. The basing I describe here will focus on joint bases able to display a scenery while also consisting of individual bases for each miniature.

Dark Elves Cold One Knight unit with a consistent basing

Miniature Preparation
I use three tools for the miniature preparation, a pliers for removing a miniature from the casting frame, a pincer, a sharp knife to remove the mold line and sanding paper (graining size 400-600) to get everything smooth and even.

Tools I use for cleaning miniatures

First I remove bigger crap like casted inflow and air channels from the miniature using the pincer. The pincer should have one flat side to get as close to the miniature as possible. Additionally a good pincer has a pointy tip that helps to get into the last corner of the miniature.
Next I clean the mold line useing a sharp knife. For my painting technique it is important to remove it  as completely as possible as the very thin paint layer allows to see irregularities in the surface easily. Therefore, I took a lot of time to clean the miniature properly. You should know that the mold line goes one time around the whole model. There is need to remove it everywhere. Always check the mold line from different angles as I can become invisible when you start to reduce it. Also clean the whole area and try to reestablish the area you are carving on. Be sure that you use a sharp blade. If your blade is damaged if can add a lot of scratches to your surface, sometimes even more worse than the mold line.
Then I use the sanding paper to smoothen the surface and to get rid of smaller scratches. The sanding also help to see if the mold line was removed properly. If the mold line is very small or in case of newer plastics sanding only can be sufficient to clean the miniature.


Assembling

After all parts are cleaned I glue most of the miniature together. It always helps to realize a stringent light situation on a miniature when it is in one piece and based. However, sometimes an assembled miniature can be difficult to paint as some areas can’t be reached for painting. Therefore I keep riders and mounts as well as shields separately in the majority of cases. In the other Hand I try to assemble a miniature as complete as possible.






Basing
Most of my bases start the same way. To leave the given base surface I add an irregular 2 mm cork layer which allow me to enlarge the base surface when needed and to get an irregular surface. The Cork layer also helps to link different bases as I do often to cover the individual bases in a unit.

Bases with cork layer get an Milliput layer for closing the surface

I use cork because of its irregular edge looking like a stony structure. Because I need only the edge and do not want the surface structure I close the latter by adding a thin layer of miliput. I also add this layer of putty on the remaining areas of the original base. I let everything dry and the start to structure the base. For the high elf ruins I created here I add different structures:

Temple ground

Here I used ready to use plates from Juweela. These were glued using PVA glue on the surface. Make sure to put them in a diagonal way or with some angle and avoid an orientation at the original base. When everything is dried use a pincer to remove the overlaying parts of the plates. Then I add bird sand to cover edges and remaining plain areas.






Stone path
Here I used some bigger structures based on GW basing material. You can use these in their original form or make a mold of these and cast them with gypsum. Here I used the latter. I enlarged the stone path pattern by adding a layer of miliput. As soon as the smooth layer starts drying I carved the stone structure into it using sculpting tools and a needle. Before completely dried I smoothed the whole sculpting to give it its finish look. Again I used bird sand to cover the edges and remaining areas.




Bigger ruins

For the General on Cold One as well as for the Warhydra base I created a scenic base of a fallen high elf architecture. On one hand I used casted gypsum copies of GW architecture and on the other hand I created some own architecture by carving it completely by myself from a bit of gypsum. For the latter I do a design on paper first which is transferred on styrofoam sheets which I used to create a mold. I cut out the shape to create the rough negative which is then casted with gypsum. Then the details are carved into the still humid gypsum using sculpting and carving tools.
In parallel I created the rough shape and final surface of the base using cork layers. Then the bigger pieces were glued on this armature. I used Juweela stones to create more wall fragments and used them for wall debris. After the stones were glued in place I filled the gaps and covered the surface with Milliput. Again I glued birdsand on the surface for creation of finer structures. I used a birdsand mix with more bigger stones around bigger stones and debris. An other mix with more sand amount I used for the plain and free areas.







Priming
I used a two component undercoat for priming. For that I prime first with black primer and second with white primer. this way of priming combines the advantage of a light undercoat helping to intensify colour saturation with a rough surface helping to work with thinned colours needed for qualitative blending.  

The black undercoat should be a thin but closed layer. If necessary use thinned Chaos or Abbadon Black and a brush to get a closed layer. When everything is dried use white primer to add a kind of dusty second layer. It is importat that this layer is not closed as the first one. The miniature appears greyish and dusty.

So far my way to prepare miniatures for painting. Let me know what you think in the comments.

Kind Regards,
GeOrc 

Executioners

The first time I came across the unreleased executioners was when studying the Beastiary of the 5th Warhammer Fantasy Edition.

Dark Elves Army as shown in the 5. Edition Bestiary

 

Dark Elves Battle Force

I quickly realized a second pictures showing these miniatures as part of a small Dark Elves battleforce charging some Dwarfs in a Scenario example. I never forget my call at Mail Order UK trying to order these miniatures as well as some other miniatures featured in the armybook but without a counterpart in the shops. My disappointment was boundless when realizing that these miniatures were never released. I got some more snippets of information about the executiones when I came across Richard "Orclord" Hales Stuff of Legends Website. Surprisingly, the Executioniers had a release, even if this was a short one. You were able to get them on the US Games Day in 1999 together with the unreleased Warhydra. Well, I thought then I keep my eyes and ears open and try to get them when the time is right. In the meantime I got the chance to get a look on the Executioners, the hydra as well as on the unreleased Sorcerer in real life. In  autumn 2000 I joined Harald and Natalie Bussing to the DUZI Event, where Harald led his impressive Dark Elves Army in a 4000 points tournament battle. He showed the best of their Dark Elves collection, which also includes a unit of Executioners lovely painted by Jennifer Haley. Additionally, the unit includes a beautifully converted command group from her consisting of a Champion, a musician and a standard bearer.

   

Executioner unit from the collection of Harald & Natalie Bussing, painted by Jennifer Haley

Shortly after this event I found an offer on Bartertown, a trading site where it was also possible to get hard to find Tabletop miniatures. The offer was about 40 executioners and 1 warhydra. The guy prefered to sell the whole bunch of miniatures with some discount or splitted in two equal batches.

However it was hell of a lot of money, that´s because the offer was still available. I get that deal and my girlfriend of that time nearly killed me. I thought to take them all and to refinance the deal later by selling some of the minis. In the end that never happend. My army was 40 Executioners richer and I was poor but more than happy!


The miniatures

There exist eight different executioner miniatures. As common for that time two miniatures base on one identical basic armature. Two basic poses exist with axe holded vertical or hold diagonal in front. The axe blades vary by a round or square blade design. Characteristic for the miniatures are their hoddies which were more or less decorated and their corded bracers. The minatures also carry a lot of bags and very detailed front decoration.

Executioners as shown on the SOL website

 
I painted a bunch of these miniatures in the past for my 5th Edition army. For the painting I decided for a mix of the dark painting scheme from Jennifer Haley as well as the Games Workshop colour scheme. Additionally, I converted my Champion the same way Jennifer Haley did.

Executioners painted in 00/01

It is a nice looking unit, but the paint job did not highlight all the beautiful details, these miniatures have. As I started to rework through my 4th/5th Edition Dark Elves I also decided to paint a unit of Executioners, because I am very interested in seeing how the unit will look when painted with my skills from today. Therefore, I started the preparations to get a unit ready for painting. Here you can see this unit containing one copy of each available Executioner. The unit was reinforced by a generic command crew consisting of a musician and a standard bearer. All miniatures were prepared very qualitatively to remove properly all mold lines. Then I have based them on a temple ruin scenery underlining they temple affiliation. The central Executioner with the biggest blade was again used to display the Champion of the unit. His base was designed in a way that it is interchangable with the already painted Dark Elves Champion which should alow to lead this unit alternatively. However, I would love to rebuild the Jennifer Haley Command Crew but also to sculpt my very own from scratch. But these will be different projects.

New Executioner unit ready for painting 2018

  

Here they go. I can´t wait to see them painted. Stay tuned
Kind Regards,
GeOrc