In playtesting my most recent Lizardmen list, I discovered that I needed a few tokens to help keep track of things.
3 markers for Wyssan’s Wildform and 1 Blot “Stalker” Toad marker. I’m doing the ground starting with Stegadon Scale Green, then mixed that with some SW Heavy Body Black and then just the Heavy Body all over.
I like having skirmisher movement trays, since 8th edition Fantasy has skirmishers less skirmishy and more ranked. I’ve done these before, so it was a relatively easy task to undertake. In addition to the simple drybrushing, I did an under layer of SW Flesh Wash, Guilliman Blue and Waywatcher Green to try to bring some other tones than just grey to them.
The other difference was that I used the Vallejo Lava instead of gluing pebbles to them. So much easier, and just as nice looking. I did press a few pieces of gravel into the lava goop, to try to bring more different textures.
I think they are a little more interesting now. Still just lumps of rock though. 😛
I usually go into Astro with a lot of excitement – last year I pre-empted my usual post-Astro terrain building excitement by building some terrain in advance. This year, with a bunch of other priorities sitting over me and not a lot of 40k in my life, I was a little less into it.
Which meant that instead of adding whole new units to the orks, I just painted the flakk gun and built and printed a 24 page book for my army. >.> Here are the photos from my book, as well as a link to a compressed PDF of it – the printed version is over 20mb of PDF!
As always, click on the photos for bigger versions.
One unit of 10 shoota boyz, their power klaw nob and their trukk.
One unit of 11 slugga and choppa boyz, a power klaw nob with their trukk.
A second unit of 11 slugga and choppa boyz, their power klaw nob and their trukk!
My weirdboy.
9 burnas and a looted wagon to carry them places.
My dakkajet.
3 deffkoptas
A previously painted “trukk”. This model was originally a looted wagon with a boomgun. But the boomgun was disappointing, so I took it off and made the vehicle a trukk for a while. This year, because the vehicle already had a top hatch it was easy to paint up and magnetize the flakk gun so it fit and became an Imperial Armor Flakk Trakk!
4 meganobz and their battlewagon, with a dethrolla.
WAAAAGH!
I’ve spent a lot of time over the years on this army, and it’s nice to be able to pull it out and be assured that it’ll get some notice at tournaments. There are certainly are updates I could do to the painting – the boyz are pretty basic, someone mentioned I should light the burnas cigars (which I’d never thought of before) – but the character models are some of my best work and the tanks and plane I’m really pleased with.
Here’s the final book PDF – Dug’s Boyz – Online. I gave a copy of this to all of my opponents and the tournament organizers, and kept one for myself – 8 printed in total. Here’s a couple photos of the book, to give you an idea of what it looked like printed.
The front cover of the book – I grabbed this from the internet, it’s a wallpaper that GW put out and it fit so nicely that I had to use it.
The first page of the book. Big full colour photo of my warboss on the left, and his name and unit write-up and his stats on the right.
I’m really happy with how it worked out – I’d never used Publisher before, but it worked perfectly for what I wanted it for. I think the only downside of the book was…make sure you ask what the unit price is before you get the work done. I thought I knew what it was, because I had started getting the printing done online at Staples, but because it’s a non-standard paper size I decided to go into FedEx/Kinkos to get it done. A trainee took my order, and I assumed I knew the price. Oops.
I’m also super glad that I had the terrain lying around my house, and the photography skills to make these photos look real nice. This book was pretty big, but it was relatively easy since I knew what I was doing at almost every step!
I’ve been following this great blog recently by James Wappel. He has some absolutely fantastic painting on there, regularly, and recently a number of modelling projects as well. He’s working on a display tray for a tournament that he’s going to right now, which is a great read.
I read through most of his archives, and one of the posts was on skirmisher movement trays. I have this problem – whenever I move my skinks, I always end up breaking the laws of physics. I move one model at a time, each no more than 12 inches, and when I’m done, the unit is no longer in anything resembling a formation. Or if it is, I’ve moved several models 18 inches and cheated.
These were pretty simple to put together – most of the materials are at Michaels :). Matboard, cut with an exacto blade. Measure out your models bases with a half inch space between them. Pull apart pieces of cork as spacers and glue them down with hot glue. White glue sand down, and bingo-bango, you’ve got a movement tray. Repeat times 6.
I’m using them for 3 units of 11 skinks each right now, but I did them in groups of 3, so when I decide to play with Chameleons again I’ll be able to take units of 5 easily.
Primer was no problem, although I worried about the cork slightly…if it wasn’t actually cork…that foam stuff melts under primer. Drybrush my two greys, sprinkle a little dead grass on it. Done!
Thanks for reading!