Tale of Four Warlords – Week #1 Progress

Last week we started our journey to collect, paint and play with our chosen forces in our Tale of Four Warlords. The first month is the hardest for most, with 500 points to get out the door. We’ve also got some of our friends on the UK Hobbyist Meetup Discord server playing along, so let’s check in on our Warmongers and see how they’re all getting on….

---

Krakendoomcool: Tale of four warlords has me going back and doing Death Guard again. I’ve had Death Guard or a Nurgle force for at least 10 years but I hadn’t painted a single new Death Guard model, at all! Contrast paints have just come out so it seemed the perfect opportunity. Rather than being daunted by the potentially labour intensive highly detailed models I’m hoping contrast paints will do some of the heavy lifting and tackle those fiddly bits.I picked 10 poxwalkers as a great and forgiving experiment with the new colours. I could literally paint each one a different colour, or diluted colour or a colour mix to see how it came out and keep the poxwalkers to boot.

There they are, my rainbow children. They are pretty bright and colourful. The brightness seems to go quite well with the bases and lends a chemical waste or radioactive feel. I went with a bright sewage for the bases using Vallejo fluorescent yellow again (along with Nurlge’s rot). I’d used this for the Helbrute about a year ago, but picked a much simpler method this time around! Next up will be some good ol’ Plague Marines.

I’m enjoying being focused on one thing. At least so far!

Warbringer: The first week has been hard work. It always is starting a new force. I wrote my list which has 17 models in and a good mix of cool models. I decided to start with some Havocs, wow these sculpts are detailed. I want this army to be a really good standard but I don’t have the time to get it 100% So I’m getting them to about 80%. They still look good and I’m happy with them but I can definitely do more.

I’ve been building as much of the models I need for the whole escalation as possible

I’ll be writing a post this week with more details on my own work to date but here are some glimpses of what I’ve got done

Ritual: I knew I needed to get a headstart on myself this month, with 26 models to paint – 6 of which being characters or elites that I wanted to spend a good chunk of time on; my work was cut out.

I’m keeping to the 80% rule for troops in this army, once I consider something 80% complete – it’s done enough and I can go back and do more later if I want.

To speed things up for myself, I started with the 10 Orlock gangers I am using as my Planetary Defence Force (Imperial Guard) for this army. I kept the theme super simple with a zenithal highlight of a couple of greys over black, this would be the only thing I would do for the boots, trousers and undershirt. The jacket, metals and leathers were then dropped in and washed with black.

After that it was just a case of a couple of details and the faces. I used a sepia ink to add some variety to the metals.

By keeping the details I was painting towards the top of the model it allowed me to largely ignore the lower halves. All in all these models only took about half an hour each; not bad.

Next up I wanted to do something similar with the Skitarii Rangers I had converted. Carrying the jacket colour over from the PDF in to the hood of my Rangers, and using the same lens colour should give the army a coherant look on the table.

This was another very quick scheme to paint, base colours of brown, metal, and the hood were just slapped down over a zenithal highlight. I washed the model all over in black and then stippled on some colours to the robes to make them leathery.

The sepia ink was pulled out again and drop straight over the silver to give the metals some variety.

Other than that it was just a case of painting the lenses, lights and the lovely hazard stripes on the wire.

Another effective and quick theme – I would have been able to do all of these in one evening, but I spent the first evening doing a test model.

This one is a little tiny bit of cheating, as I had done the body bit of the model prior to starting the Tale of Four Warlords, however I still had the head, backpack and cloak to do… I’ll paint an extra body at the end to make up for it!

This takes my progress so far this month up to 16/26 models complete, 9~/31 power level, or 120/487 points. Over half way in body count, but probably not in hours spent painting.

Next week I am aiming to get 4 more Wulfen pained, which will leave me 2 weeks to complete the 6 characters – though 3 of those are still on their way from Russia, so fingers crossed they arrive in time!

Pandora’s Bitz Box: When I agreed to join in the Tale of Four Warlords, I was not at all confident I would be able to paint up 500pts of anything in the first month. So in an effort to openly cheat a bit I told the others I would include a unit of 5 Aberrants I had already painted in the final list just in case I couldnt field enough models in the first round of games.

Unfortunatly, while they all seemed fine with that I didnt take into account that on the UK Hobbyist Discord Group, a this project would encourage a bunch of others to paint along with us. Since they wouldnt be playing games with us and you are scored on painted models… suddenly I felt like was doing THEM an injustice! So I decided to try paint up at least 500 points of models, to pay for my completed unit to be in my first 500pts. This is what I’m trying to finish by 11/08/19

As you can see this is well over 500pts and they are in varying stages of completion. I’m trying to use this as an opportunity to figure out an easy way to paint the models quickly with GW contrast paints, washes, etc… and if I have time I can go over them with details. I started by undercoating everything with GW Grey Seer Undercoat.

I have based the genestealers and just tried a “fast and loose” approach with some Talassar Blue Contrast paint.

I concentrated on the abberants mostly, trying to get them to closely match the completed unit but with the new aproaches/paints. I did all the Human like skin with Guilliman Flesh Contrast and the tyranid flesh watered down Khorne red followed by the old Leviathan purple wash. The cloth around the legs I used Blood Angels Red Contrast and the sashes with Nazdreg Yellow Contrast. the weapons so far only hav some Boltgun Metel on them. the Spines, much like the Genestealers have Talassar Blue Contrast on them, but have the extra step they lack, of a nuln oil wash over the top because the blue is a bit too bright for the rest of my tyranids.

This guy is at a very similar stage to the other Aberrants but I have drybrushed some Valejo Game Colour Squid Pink over the top of the Tyranid skin, which I think is the equivalent of the GW Changeling Pink Drybrush paint that I have, but I dont really like those drybrush paints. To be honest Im not 100% sure which one I used…

---

Everyone is doing amazingly! To finish up, let’s see how our friends on the Discord server are getting on….

That’s all folks, see you next week with another update from the Warmongers!