MORDHEIM, CONTRAST AND SPACE MARINES

July saw an meet-up of epic proportions when twenty or so hobbyists clashed in Helsinki in a celebration of Mordheim's 20th birthday. It was an absolute blast and the terrain and miniatures on display had to be seen to be belived. Huge thanks to Alexander Winberg for arranging this crazy endeavour, and to Mordheim's daddies Toumas Pirinen and John Blanche for participating.

I managed to play two and half games over the day and my nefarious vampire Graf Sugismund did rather well for himself (though he lost an eye in the proceedings). The last game turned into more of a moody photoshoot than a proper game when Kari, of Iron Sleet fame, brought along his nifty smoke machine. And then we had to break for dinner and beers. Lots and lots of beers.

Here's a few of my cruddy pictures from the event, but there's many more and better ones at that, at various other blogs:

Head over to Echoes of Imperium to have a look at all the participating warbands: echoesofimperium

Greg Weir has a brilliant recap of our first game over at Between the Bolter and Me: mordheim-2019-witch-hunter-games and Eric does a more general recap of the event at the same site: mordheim-2019-recap

Tammy covers our last game, among other things, over at Tears of Envy

After event I needed to do something completely different, so back I went to the good old 41st millennium. I picked up a box of Intercessor space marines and started testing various colour schemes using the contrast paints. Here's two of them:

The process is rather simple. After spraying the model black and then with either grey seer or wraithbone, I sponge the model with dark brown to add texture and battle damage. Then I drybrush the whole miniature with pure white to provide highlights. After this the contrast colour is applied (in this case gryph-charger grey). This approach works for basically any colour scheme and due to the contrast paint's translucency the drybrushed highlight is subtly visible through the basecoat.

Just painting for it's own sake was a lot of fun, but after a few random marines like these I decided to go back to my beloved Metatron marines and see if I could replicate the colour scheme using contrast paints. It turned out I could.

Contrast painted Metratron to the left, original colour scheme to the right

As there's lots of new marine stuff coming out I'll try to turn these guys into a proper army, by adding more Intercessors, a few hellblasters, a dreadnought or two and perhaps some vanguard - so there's plenty of hobbying to do.

And then we haven't even mentioned Warcry...