Caramon the Rabid

 My latest puttering is also my most favorite classic Chaos Champion that GW ever put out - some might know him as Chaos Champion #14, but to me he'll always be Caramon the Rabid, leader of the Skullrippers.

Badass.

Scary fella, no? His name comes from the "armies on parade" section of Realm of Chaos - Slaves to Darkness, where several champion miniatures and their warbands were painted up and given names/backstories. This Jes Goodwin sculpt was called Caramon the Rabid, and the name has stuck in my head ever since.

His original paint scheme is a bit...eclectic...

As you can see, I did keep the face on the daemon weapon green, as it seems to be traditional (just about every version of this guy I've seen has it in green).

The disturbing color for the tail is intentional.

Yay, Chaos!

Fukkit, Have Some Crazy Space Bondage Elves

 Nothing special, just most of a team of Dark Eldar Wyches for my Teams Arena of blood project. you'll see that the Hellion isn't in the picture, because I haven't figured out how I want to paint it yet...

As you can see, I was originally going to have them photographed on the AoB mat that came with White Dwarf, but my ineptitude with photography got the better of me - try as I might, they looked too yellow in the pictures! I do know that adding white helps fix this problem, so I went the shittiest route possible and slapped a white piece of plasticard in there. It helped, at least. ;)

Things leaned from this batch - 

- Sculptors really need to not put eyebrows on 28mm scale miniatures. Two of these guys had brows that I just couldn't paint as flesh and be done with it, so I did them up as hairy brows. The result is pretty awful.

- The Wych Succubus makes a great Beastmaster, what with that whip.

- Drybrushing has made it into my heart once again.

Not much else to say - no time to really figure out better pictures with school breathing down my neck. At least I got something done!

A G-g-g-g-ghost!

MRI school is hard. Only having one day off a week sucks (and I have to study on that one day off).

Here's some easy-assed ghosts.

Plastic GW spirit hosts. MASSIVE pain in the ass to assemble (which is why you only get one this time). I didn't take the highlights up to white, as I feel that it makes them look more "opaque" instead of ethereal. I used a glaze of ancient but still very good Citadel yellow ink on their upper faces and arms to give them a little glow and add some visual interest - I stole this idea from one of the blogs I follow. If it works, it works!

Late For Gnollvember

As usual, I paint something and then forget to blog it. In this case, I painted up a trio of gnolls for the "Gnollvember" thing from the Ral Partha Harag Skullsmasher and his Gnoll Raiders box set that came out in the early '90s. I didn't care much about them being gnolls (although they have become one of my favorite humanoid monsters over the years), but I was certainly excited about using them in my 2nd Edition WH40K Chaos army as a unit or two of Khornegor - that is, beastmen aligned to the Chaos god, Khorne.

Yes, I know gnolls are basically hyena-men, and hyenas are felids, not canids but work with me here...

Yep, ol' Harag has a bolt pistol. Better than the tiddly dagger he was originally waving around.

In actuality, I painted these in December instead of No(Gnoll)vember. Oh well, I don't really keep up with internet painting fads. 

25 years old, and these are still very nice miniatures. Good size, detailing that one would expect from Partha stuff; the only real letdown is the meh poses that seemed to plague the Battlesystem sets (and again, Partha in general). The gnoll box has 17 minis in it - one leader (Harag), one flind shaman (who looks like a Mardi Gras drag queen), and 15 mooks, in 3 different sculpts. As seen in the photos, I chose two in my favorite sculpt. the third is in a weird crouching, jazz-hand pose that I'm going to need to work a bit for it to look decent.

Freehand shield. No Free Willies.

I didn't like the integrated bases, so I trimmed them a bit to fit into some 32mm bases from Wrath of Kings and am fairly pleased with the result. I don't care about tournaments or any real "official" gaming, so I'm not to fussed about the size or shape. They're big enough to justify the base size, so even better. Sadly, they will never see a game of 2nd edition painted (yes, yes, I was a horrible person who used unpainted miniatures in his games) as I don't have a copy any more. Rogue Trader edition, however I do have, along with the StD book.

"Oh, ARSE!!"

Edit: Ok, so I don't know WTF I did to the format here, so this post is just gonna look weird...

Edit, edit: Forgot to mention - these are the first miniatures that I painted wearing my new reader glasses. I feel that there is a HUGE improvement in the quality of my work over the stuff done in the past year or so. It took me a while to get used to them (still not, really) which is why these gnolls took a while to finish. Wearing glasses is uncomfortable to me, but I can't argue with the results.

THESE FOOKIN' THINGS