Like many Oldhammerers, I am in the teaching profession. Subsequently, I have just started the long six week holiday that is our reward for putting up with 'experts' in our field like Michael Gove telling us how we should be doing our job. With just under three weeks until the Oldhammer Weekend kicks off painting in the Orlygg household is starting to build towards an industrial scale. I plan to get a large part of the Slanneshi army I have been planning for sometime completed, and this involves finishing off a thug regiment, a chaos warrior regiment and a unit of mounted chaos warriors all of whom will serve the pleasure god.
The image above shows off my latest banner, painted for the thug regiment I mentioned before. Its a simple printer paper job attached with flaps to a wire frame. Things were a little different with this one, as the actual banner pole had to be extended as I cut it too short. I used brass wire to create two coil ties to hold the pieces together before running superglue down inside the joins. The result is really rather strong. The banner is different in style form my previous efforts as I attempted to show a figure rather than a face or geometric symbols. To this end, I did a little research into tapestries used by Christian groups here in the UK as well as the USA. Their work was often stylized and out of proportion but it run a cord with what I was wanting to achieve, after all, these followers would be intelligent and worshipful, despite being depraved, and would no doubt want to reflect their god well. I just copied the design I found and merged ideas from John Blanche's drawing of Slannesh from Slaves to Darkness.
The actual model is a quick conversion of the chaos thug with two pistols. I simply cut away one of the arms and replaced it with a tentacle with the wire pole supported through the base and secure with greenstuff underneath. I really went to town on the skin as I felt that I wasn't really going far enough with the 'chaotic' element behind this range of models. After all, the original add for Slaves to Darkness said 'chaos thugs any colour you like' or some such.
These two models are actually quite rare in my collection. Actual models that I owned in the 1980s that survived the two major culls I had to do with my collection to keep myself afloat financially in years gone past. They have sat at the bottom of my chaos thug collection bag ever since and I was pleased to get them finally painted up for my modern forces. They must have both been painted and stripped three or four times over the years. They also served as warm up models as I haven't had much time for miniature painting over the last few hectic weeks of school. I am always surprised about how quickly techniques fall away if you don't remain in constant practice, so perhaps one day these two will see the paint stripper once again and be met with a fresh coat of paint.
I finished these three models last night and I must say I really enjoyed painting them, though I must admit to finding some of the effects I created challenging at the time. Still, I am quite happy with the overall look of this little group, especially when I had finished the varied shield designs. The miniature in the centre if worthy of note as it was bought for me by my HLTA at school (that's my classroom teaching assistant for those of you not in the know) after learning about my blog. He was badly damaged when he arrived in my possession and needed quite a bit of repair work as both his horns and shield spike had been badly cut away. Patient repair work with greenstuff restored him to new and here he is ready for service. I haven't had a chance to show him to her yet but I plan to take the miniature into school next term.
For the shield designs I wanted to move away from just doing variants of the ogre face design. So, I explored a little bit into symbols used by other painters when dealing with Slannesh. All contain work on a theme, the Slannesh symbol, and follow the set of colours I had been using to bring coherency to force, namely pastel pink, green and blue.
Right, back to the painting desk for me. I need to finish off the champion model for this unit (as well as sprucing up some of the older thug models in my collection for their paint jobs are in need of a bit of TLC in places) as well as finishing off the test piece for the unit of mounted chaos warriors. Hopefully, you will see an update soon!
Orlygg.