For Sale - Painted Cygnar army

This army has been provisionally sold 

 

Hi folks, it's been a bit quiet on the blog front of late, I know. This is all to do with that pesky RealLife getting all over my business and my personal hobby. I am back to work now and updates will be more frequent. During this time though, I've been able to take stock of my life and changes are on the way (more on this much later when things are firm). As part of this I am also examining my hobby life and deciding what are real projects that I am both excited by and likely to complete and which have rather failed at the pilot stage and need to be abandoned. One of these is the cygnar army.

I had some fun painting it, my thesis for the project was that the Privateer Press models weren't actually as bad as I thought and that the studio paint scheme did them no favours at all. I was right. I much prefer my darker, more realistic look and think that there is some decent sculpting work among their ranges hidden under fairly unflattering bright cartoony paint. However. The more I find out about the game; the less I care about it. Somehow, it just hasn't set my hobby-heart alight with glee. For this reason I have decided to sell what I have already painted and the couple of bits that I haven't gotten around to. Here is what is in the army:

Captain Alaistair Caine

Cyclone Heavy Warjack

Grenadier Light Warjack

Hunter Light Warjack

Unpainted Ironclad Heavy Warjack

10-Man Trencher unit

Unpainted 10-Man Long Gunner unit

Journeyman Warcaster

Previously unpublished Squire (just couldn't get decent photos! Looks great in real life)

The army weighs in at 47 points (I intended to add a Trencher Officer and Sniper) when the last two units are painted and comes complete with a KR multicase with plenty of space for expansion:

So, what am I asking for this painted 35 point army with unpainted expansion to near as damnit 50? Lets figure it out:

to buy the army unpainted:

Alaister Caine: £8.95

Cyclone: £23.75

Ironclad: £23.75

Grenadier:£9.95

Hunter: £9.95

Trenchers: £36.95

Long Gunner Unit: £29.95

Journeyman Warcaster: £5.95

Squire: £5.95

KR Case: £24.99

Total unpainted: £180.14

Normally to have this painted would add £250. It represents a hell of a lot of time, the models are all weathered and lovingly based. I'm not going to ask that as I don't think that there will be a market for a £430 army. Instead I shall ask £220 in total. Yep:

Painted and based army in case:

£220 £150

BIDDING ON EBAY NOW

I will consider lower offers but do consider the £180 starting price and the time involved in painting this. It would make an awesome pressie for the Warmachiner in your life even if you are not one yourself. Please bear in mind that the price to post this 1.4kg medium parcel in the uk is £11 (assuming the post office online calculator isn't lying again). So please include this in your calculations.

Please contact me through pirate-viking-painting@hotmail.co.uk and payment could be made either by bank transfer, cheque or PayPal. I prefer bank transfer as it has no funds and doesn't require me to cash a cheque before I can post it or inflict PayPal's fees on people.

I hope the Cygnar folks can find a good home. I'll be eagerly awaiting an email from a happy adopter!

TTFN

Cygnar reinforcements stride in

My Cygnar force continues to gradually grow, today we add a new solo in the form of a Jouneyman Warcaster and another warjack with the 'jack hunting Hunter Light Warjack.

The Journeyman Warcaster is an apprentice warcaster who is learning the art of controlling the mighty warjacks on the field of battle. I deliberately painted her to look young and wide eyed. She shouldn't be a grizzled veteran just a scared kid. Sadly I was painting her at the time I started to loose some fine control in the wrist so I am going to have to go back and fix the eyes at some point.

I used the same colour palette as on Captain Cain as the combination of Vallejo English Uniform and dark brown leather along with the blue is fast becoming the army colour scheme.

The Hunter is designed to attack rival warjacks. I went for the same "furnace glow" look for the faceplate as with my other warjacks. The cygnar swan symbol on the carapace was obviously freehanded on to the figure. All the other jacks have one so I think I'll have to make sure all of them do. I kinda messed up the dimensions but that turned out to be a happy accident, extending the tail onto the helm made for a nice effect and makes it slightly different to the other warjacks.

Once again I frehanded on woodgrain to make the pressure vessel into a wooden barrel. Just underscores the transition period of the steampunk world war one that I am going for. The pressure gauges were also freehanded in.

I'm quite happy with how the axe came out. On the studio paint job it looks a tad ridiculous and I initially thought I would have to remove it and replace with a better weapon. On getting the model in my hot little hands I realised that it was simply the bright shiny steel of the studio that had made it look rubbish. Painted in a nice dark metal tone with pin washes of Vermin Brown to give it a lightly rusted feel it seems heavy and dangerous. Given that the weapon is for cleaving armour it is a decent design, the power of the swing will be focussed on a tiny area.

With the Hunter painted I am getting close to my first goal of a 50 point army. Trying to decide between another warjack (the Ironclad) or the unit of Long Gunners next. It is probably going to be the Gunners as they are the next "big" job (as Warmachine goes, just wait for the first Night Goblin update to see a BIG job). Anyhow, that will be later in the week so...

TTFN

100 Posts! Warmachine Trenchers

Whoa! All of a sudden there are a century of posts on Pirate Viking Painting, thanks to all of you for sticking with me and I am looking forward to the next hundred. As a linked thing we currently have 90 followers, in honour of our 100th post I am announcing that there will be a prize draw for followers when we hit our 100th follower. So if you haven't already done so follow the blog to be in with a chance of winning. The prize will be a your choice of character model (from your collection I'm afraid, can't afford to buy you a model!) painted for free by me and posted to wherever you are!

So what is the subject of our centenial post? Warmachine Trenchers:

The Trenchers one of two "massed" (as massed as Warmachine gets) infantry units planned for my Cygnar army, the other is Long Gunners. I wanted these guys to fit in with the colour scheme for Captain Caine:

Which I characterise as Steampunk Great War. The colour scheme is based around Vallejo English Uniform, with khaki straps and brown leather. A tip for anyone making these models is that the join between the backpack and body is terrible, a tiny contact area and an ill fitting sculpt. The solution is to use green stuff as a pad to improve the fit. The adhesive properties of the green stuff allow the backpack to stick and the flexible putty forms a perfect join.

As an experiment to celebrate the 100th post I decided to try something new, a step by step animation of how I painted these figures:

Click on the image to load the gif file, it is a fairly large one but give it time, best plan is to right click and "save target as" then open the file. The only view you can't see is the back so I've included a pic of the cool backpack and leather trenchcoat:

Something I am very happy about is the way the bases are looking en masse. Makes the extra work worthwhile, something I would not do to a mass army system but for a skirmish system like Warmachine it is perfect. When the bases are all together they do look just like a forest floor, just how I wanted it.

That's all for today folks, here's to post 101 and the future. Remember, when we hit 100 followers someone will win something cool looking!

TTFN

Warcaster Alaistair Caine

It's all go around here isn't it? Last night I sat down to start my Warcaster (the Captain version of Alaistair Caine) and found to my astonishment 4 1/2 hours later that he was finished. He is a lovely model to paint and so there was nothing else to do but share him with the world. So here he is!

I was partially using the good Captain to figure out the colour scheme that will be applied to all of the infantrymen in the Cygnar army. I am loving the steampunk world war I vibe that most of the Cygnar infantry have and so decided to embrace it. Thus his clothing (zoom in on the chest and neckerchief for the easiest view!) was painted in the classic British khaki drab that was used throughout both world wars. The specific colour is Vallejo English Uniform shaded with a thinned Devlan Mud Wash and highlighted with increasing mixes of English Uniform and Kommando Khaki. I knew that the armour plates would be chipped blue and the coat would be brown leather so this left me with a head scratcher for the coat lining. I didn't want to use the English Uniform again as this would cause the coat to blur with the clothing. I also did not want to use a dark blue as that would look too opulent and spoil the soldier look he had going. In the end I chose a neutral grey to avoid adding another hue to the pallete. Trouble was, there was a LOT of coat lining and the grey made it look boring. To kill this problem I added some freehand decoration to the lining in a lighter grey.

Phase two was the coat leather. I wanted it to look well cared for but a little battered. To get that dark brown leather shade I first basecoated the coat in Scorched Brown, a wash of Badab Black gave me the deep shadows. Highlights were built up back from Scorched Brown through mixes of Scorched Brown and Vomit Brown to A Scorched/Vomit Brown mix with Kommando Khaki added for the worn edges. I'm dead chuffed with the finish of the leather so this is going to be "Cygnar Leather" for the army! The blue metal componants were next following my usual Cygnar Blue of a Necron Abyss basecoat followed by Regal Blue, Regal plus Enchanted Blue mixes, Enchanted Blue and an Enchanted Blue and Space Wolves Grey edge highlight. The whole thing washed down with Asurman Blue to give a rich dark blue.

The base is a lovely modelled stone-effect piece included with the kit. I painted it in fairly muted shades (Charadon Granite highlighted with increasing mixes of Charadon and Fortress Grey and with a Badab Black and Devlan Mud mixed wash to bind all the layers together. I toyed with adding worn paint to the Cygnar swan and background but decided that it would start to overwhelm the model if I did that and prevent it from fitting in with the Thornwood theme I had going. Instead I added some overgrowing ivy and blown dead leaves to the piece to give it that "ruin in the Thornwood" feel. I have since stuck him with the two warjacks and the bases match nicely.

I decided to push myself with the face. Annoyingly the camera hasn't captured the face as crisply as I would have liked but I hope you can get an impression of what I have done. Yes, he does have blue eyes. I may have lost my mind. Sadly, until I can scrape together the cash for the Trencher box set that is it for Warmachine for now. Just time to remind everyone that we are on Facebook and Twitter and have a Flickr account too, you can find them all on the right of this post. Plus we are available for hire! Check out the "Hire" page on the top right, I guarantee we are more affordable than you might think! Till next time.

TTFN

Cygnar marches on!

Bet you thought I'd forgotten about Warmachine huh? Been a while since I posted the Cyclone but here is the next member of the Cygnar force, a Grenadier Light Warjack:

Grenadier 'jacks are designed to work alongside Trencher infantry in the field. They provide fire support and help with entrenchments and fortifications. They are a very compact design in comparison to the heavier warjacks and consequently a little smaller as well:

Painting the Grenadier proceeded in an identical manner to the Cyclone so I shall leave you to get the basic information from the older post and will focus on areas of interest within this model.

I have kept the furnace glow thing for the face and the Cygnarite runes denoting it's class on the pauldrons. The gun looked to be a mini steam generating cannon and so I painted in a steam gauge and made sure that there was light rusting around any area where steam would escape. I initially painted the hose in a rubbery colour before checking myself and remembering that rubber was a fairly late invention and oiled leather was used in the early Victorian period that the very steampunk Warmachine seems to emulate. I therefore repainted the section in my usual leather tone of Dark Flesh with a Devlan Mud wash.

The back of the model is just lovely, the little pouches emphasise the connection that the 'jack has with the men that work with it (Trenchers can reload the Grenadier's cannon for faster firing). The barrel has no texture applied to it and I suspect it was intended to be metal. The design of the ends though screamed wood to me and so I applied wood grain to the barrel. Took a while but looks quite charming. Verdigrised copper piping and oily joints finished off the figure and it was time to get to the basing.

Time for a little plug here I think. The bases for both the warjacks were finished off with leaf litter from Antenociti's Workshop. This store is a treasure trove of wonderful products and I own a bunch of them. The poison ivy tufts that also adorn the bases come from here too but you can get them from Army Painter. The logs were sticks picked up from around the woods in Candlestone, South Wales. I was camping there and noticed that a lot of the thinner sticks branched and broke in scale to represent logs. Half an hour of busy collecting later I had a tupperware box full of scale logs. Then I saw Woodland Scenics selling boxes with a tenth of the amount I had gathered as "deadfall" for £4! How I laughed...

I also went back and "leafed" the base of the cyclone too. This sort of attention to the bases takes quite some time and I would baulk at doing it for a Warhammer army. A Warmachine force though is generally smaller than most of my Warhammer units so a little more effort is justified I think. Next on the workbench for Warmachine is Captain Alaistair Caine. He'll be the first "normal" person I paint from the Iron Kingdoms, it's all been steam driven robots till now. Sadly he has to wait for a bit because with only 29 models to paint for my Blood Angels to hit 4000 points and the end of that project for good I am focused on them. Till next time

TTFN

Cygnar Cyclone

This is my first ever Warmachine figure! I'm starting a Cygnar army and thought I would roll the heavy metal off the production lines first:

It's a Cygnar Cyclone heavy warjack, it is in Privateer Press' odd plastic - closer to resin than normal plastic. Assembly is not overly problematic (although the usual superglue annoyances apply) I wound up pinning the arms as I didn't trust the joins too well. Now it is no secret that I am not fond of the style that Privateer use to paint their models. Its kinda nineties GW, lots of overly bright colours and clean armies. To say that this doesn't fit with my style is understating the issue a bit! I resolved to try and paint a recognisably "Cygnar" warjack but in my style.

I wanted a rich blue as a base and so brought up the colour from a basecoat of Regal Blue over Necron Abyss. Highlighting proceeded by gradually adding Enchanted Blue to Regal Blue until the colour was pure Enchanted Blue. Final highlights were added with Enchanted Blue and a spot of Space Wolves Grey. I used probably ten intermediate layers to get a smooth blend. Finally a Asurman Blue glaze bound the layers together and deepened the colour. I added chips and dings to the lower surfaces (that infantry can reach with swords and bayonettes) by first painting the chips in the final blue highlight, then in the centre of the bigger scratches I painted a Scorched Brown and Chaos Black mix. Finally I painted a tiny scratch of Boltgun Metal into the centre of the dark scratch. This gave a nice "deep" look to the scratches and dings. The face mask I wanted to paint as though lit by fires from within. The only way to do this is loads of highlighting up to yellow-white, shading back down to red with glazes and rehighlighting. Its a pain but it is the only way. Looks cool though.

The power plant on the back is one of my favourite parts of the model. I painted the same hot glow in the slits of the furnace door, used verdigrised copper for piping and generally made everything look dirty and sooty. This is a steam powered robot after all! To fit in with that image I checked out lots of steam locamotive reference and mixed a metallic shade to give that heavy worn iron look. It's basically Boltgun Metal and Black, drybrushed very lightly with Boltgun Metal and shaded back down with first Badab Black and then a thin glaze of Devlan Mud. This gives that nice "heavy" feel to the metal that I was after.

A better shot of the piping, copper is one of those colours that is flaming hard to mix. So I cheat and just buy Vallejo's Hammered Copper (essentially it is the old Citadel Beaten Copper). A basecoat of this gets highlighted by the addition of a little Mithril Silver. The verdigris is a new colour to me, Vallejo's Scurf Green. I used to use a mixture of Orkhide Shade and Skull White which sort of matched the old Scaley Green (I don't blame Citadel for canning it, I literally only used it for oxidising copper). The internet informed me that Scurf Green is basically the same thing and so I'm back in the oxidising business! Thin streaks were pulled down from joins and faded first with water and then with a glaze of Hammered Copper to reduce the impact.

Top down shot to show off a few things, first, the Cygnar swan (took me an embarrassingly long time to connect Cygnar and Swan to Cygnid... i.e. swans...) which was freehanded from a pdf sheet of icons that Privateer gave Bell of Lost Souls. Secondly the rust. I wanted some rain run-off rust streaks. Not rusted to hell, just subtly weathered. This was achieved in a similar way to the copper, a mix of Dark Flesh and Vermin Brown (two key constituents of Jeff Rust) was thinned and applied to the lower edges of anywhere I wanted to pull a rust streak, I then pulled thin streaks down from the reservoir of paint and feathered them out with a dampened brush. I finished the weathering with very selective washes of a mix of Bestial Brown and Graveyard Earth to show accumulated muck.

The final thing that the top-down shows nicely is the basing. I wanted to go to town on these. I am unfamiliar with the big rounded lip Privateer bases and felt that they leant themselves to a more "cabinet" than "tabletop" look than my usual style. Hence I resolved to put extra effort into basing the Cygnar army to make each a mini diorama. Deciding to base the army in the Thornwood Forest I figured a woodland theme would suit them nicely. I built up the contours of the base with layers of superglue and sand and painted this in a nice earthy leafmold brown (Bestial basecoat over Calthan, Devlan Mud wash, gentle drybrush of Vomit Brown). I then scoured the back yard for weeds and pulled them up until I had found a nice branch-like root. This got cleaned up, sealed in PVA and applied to the base. I then added the twisting sticks and weeds you can see. Believe it or not, this is actually pencil shavings from an electric sharpener we have. These were pva'd down and all the wood was basecoated Graveyard Earth. Layers of washes followed to define the colours, all the brown and green ones were used. Finally I added spots of PVA and applied two colours of static grass (Scorched Grass and Glade Grass) to add a little more realism. Believe it or not I am not done yet. Anetoceti do a lovely leaf litter flock that I am getting my hot little hands on soon and will be adding that to finish the woodland feel.

One last picture to show off the chipping and scoring around the arms of the warjack (it fights other 'Jacks by punching them after all).

All in all I was thoroughly pleased with my first Warmachine fig. I had been put off in the past by Privateer's painting style which I think does their figures no favours at all. Having finally seen some in the flesh ( at Firestorm Games in Cardiff ) I was impressed enough to give them a go! I don't think Warmachine will ever overtake Warhammer and 40k in my affections but it is nice to have another feel of models to paint and nicer still to be a complete novice at something! That hasn't happened for eighteen years or so. Nice feeling! Anyway, must return to the grindstone. I am churning out the last of the basic Death Korps (determined to have the bulk finished by the start of April so I can enjoy painting the characters and weird bits before the deadline of the end of April). Pics when they are done of course, till then:

TTFN