One Plague Hulk Body and Both Sword Hands Completed

Hey, folks!

Between last Thursday and Sunday, I spent about 16 hours working on getting the body of the first of the two Forge World Nurgle Plague Hulks that I will be using as Soul Grinders completed.  Here are a variety of pictures of his body.  You'll notice that his left arm ends in a stump; this is where the "sword hand" goes, and I'll talk more about them after the body pictures.  This guy is full of fantastic details, and I hope you can pick them out in these pictures I took using my iPhone:

Then, yesterday (Monday), I was able to spend 6.5 hours working on both of the sword hands for both of the Plague Hulks.  I figured I might as well do both of them at the same time, as either one could be used interchangeably with either Plague Hulk body, so I wanted them to look as identical as possible.  Here's a picture of the two swords:

You'll notice that one of the swords has a "brace" across the "stone" blade.  That's because the good old Forge World resin sword had warped, and as I was gently trying to bend it back into place, I used just an erg or two too many of force and it snapped right in half.  I decided to use a piece of sprue that I carved up to look, well, not like sprue, and applied one section on both sides of that sword to brace it, as I was certain it would break again from just the superglue used to connect the two halves together.

I have since learned (the hard way) how to use a heat gun (thanks to Jimmy) to soften and then bend FW resin into the position I desire.  The "low" setting on Jimmy's heat gun feels about the same as the "high" setting on my wife's hair dryer, so I should be fine in the future when such situations occur again (which I know they will).  (I also know that very hot water, even hot from the tap, will accomplish the same thing and soften up the resin enough for it to be pliable and bent back into its proper shape.)

So here's what he looks like with one of the sword hands attached to the body:

Now I have to paint up the 6 legs for this bad boy, and get them assembled onto the body.  I'm going to start working on that tonight after work, and I hope I'll be able to get them all painted and assembled onto the body by, or hopefully before, this Saturday.

Here's what I've got as the recipe for painting the legs and doing the final assembly:

Plague Hulks' Legs:

  -  Paint metallic trim & blades of the Plague Hulk's legs Ironbreaker.

  - Pick out details (like Chaos Stars, rods & the balls of the legs) with Copper.

  -  Wash Ironbreaker parts with Sepia.

  -  Wash the Copper parts with Coelia Greenshade.

  -  Paint corrupted parts of the Plague Hulk's legs.

       -- Paint open sores Bugman's Glow as a base coat.

       -- Paint pustules Yellow.

       -- Wash pustules Yellow.

  -  Wash the Plague Hulk's legs with Athonian Camoshade.

       -- Layer sores with Warlock Purple.

       -- Layer sores with Emperor's Children.

       -- Dry brush sores with Bleached Bone.

       -- Wash sores with Druchii Violet.

  -  Do any additional final details of Plague Hulk's legs.

  -  Matte varnish Plague Hulk's legs.

  -  Gloss varnish open sores on Plague Hulk's legs.

  -  Assemble Plague Hulk's legs to his body.

  -  Do final touch ups of Plague Hulk after assembling legs to body, including edge highlights on the legs, the sword, the gun & the engine stacks, and anything else that might look good getting an edge highlight

  -  Add Nurglings to the legs & possibly chassis of the Plague Hulk???

       == First Plague Hulk should be complete at this point!!!

***********************************************************************

Hope you like what you see.  Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think!

July 25th Update

Here's today's entry from my painting journal.  Please let me know if you find these interesting, or if I'm going into too much detail and being tedious...

Plan for Thursday:

  -  Stay home and recover from minor oral surgery, OR...

  -  Go to Empire Games (FLGS, Mesa, AZ) and Primer 30 Plaguebearers, OR...

  -  Go to Empire and Primer one of the Plague Hulk bodies and get started painting it...

         ==>> Actual ==>> Decided to primer one of the Plague Hulks and get started on him.  

Got my bony protrusion in my jaw taken care of this morning, and it wasn't as bad as the Doc told me it would be yesterday, but it still hurts like hell and hurts to talk and swallow.  So I headed out to Empire around 2:00 PM & assumed a leisurely pace, getting my paints organized for the Hulk & Plaguebearers that I'll probably work on after I get the first Hulk finished.  The primer job worked out pretty well, despite it being 97F and a tad humid.  

It was a slow but productive night. I spent quite a while examining the Plague Hulk's body & chassis, working out a plan of attack & getting it written down on my iPad.  I got all the metal parts painted Ironbreaker, including the underside of the chassis, and various stuff that's embedded in fleshy folds across the body proper.  Then I got the gaping wounds, open sores, and mouth & tongue painted with a base coat of Bugman's Glow in preparation for further grossification, in the same manner that I did my Great Unclean One, so a variety of purples, pinks, some Bleached Bone highlights and Druchii Violet washing will come later there. 

Then I got the gun barrel and smokestacks at the rear of the Hulk also painted Bugman's Glow, as these have the same texture and appearance of the gun barrels and barrel of goo on the back of the GUO.  I'll have to consult my notes from when I painted the GUO to see what I'll be doing to these parts next, but I think it involves some Athonian Camoshade washing when I wash the body itself, and then later gloss varnishing after the matte varnish spray, much later in the process.  

I'm feeling a bit better in my mouth, with the help of some Vicodin, but I'm back to eating soft foods, mostly yogurt, & frozen custard, courtesy of Culver's across the street from Empire Games.  I made it an early night so I could catch up on sleep & get an early start tomorrow (Friday) so I can jet out to Empire after my last meeting of the day ends at 4:00 PM.  Next steps tomorrow evening will be...

Plague Hulk Body - Next Steps:

   -  Paint the corrugated pipes on the gun and "engine", and the trim & rods (???) on the underside of the chassis, and anything else that would benefit from it, with Copper.

   -  Paint pustules with thinned Yellow.

   -  Wash the pustule areas with Yellow wash. 

   -  Paint the vomit issuing forth from the PH's mouth an appropriate sickly color, probably mixing Yellow with Rotting Flesh.

   -  Wash the Copper parts with thinned Coelia Greenshade.

   -  Wash the Ironbreaker parts with Sepia.

   -  Dunk the entire PH in water & Wash the Plague Hulk's Body with Athonian Camoshade, trying to not saturate the metal parts completely with this wash (but washing the gun and smokestacks).

   -  Layer the guts and open sores with varying degrees of Warlock Purple and Emperor's Children Pink. Wash with Druchii Violet or Carroburg Crimson, highlight with Pink & Bleached Bone & wash some more, in the same manner as was done on the GUO, until satisfied.

   -  Paint the mouth & tongue area Pink & wash with Crimson, then highlight with Pink & Bleached Bone & wash some more until it looks appropriate, possibly using Bloodletter glaze as a last step.

   -  Touch up the pustules with more Yellow paint & wash.

   -  Apply various Nurgly washes to vary the coloring across the body.

   -  Pick out any amazing details the Plague Hulk's body that I might have missed, such as the little gauge on his back, the various little bugs & worms crawling all over his body & intestines, the occasional fly, etc.

   -  Do any obvious edge highlighting that may be required to the body.

   -  Matte varnish the Plague Hulk's body.

   -  Gloss varnish the appropriate parts of the Plague Hulk's body.

Sounds like a lot, and the list will probably evolve and morph as I actually do things, but that's the recipe as it stands right now.   And, to be realistc, I probably won't get it all done in one evening's work, but with the family out of town & no work the next day, I should be able to get quite a bit knocked off this task list.  Some things go faster than others, but there's going to be time spent waiting for major areas that have received a wash treatment to dry before I'll want to pick up the model again, and some steps are iterative, like the gaping wounds, and their results develop organically until they get to be "just right". If I can get to the point where I give the model it's first full wash of Athonian Camoshade before the end of the evening, I'll be happy, and should be able to get the rest done with a full day's work on Saturday.

After the body, I still have all the legs, and the hand holding the sword to get painted, and then get the legs assembled onto the body.  Then this sucker will be "done"...

Like I said, please let me know if you find this level of detail interesting, or whether you'd prefer that I go back to just posting an entry when a major milestone has been met, such as getting the Plague Hulk's body completed. 

July 24th Update

I write in my Valhalla painting journal on my iPad every night after working on stuff, which is most nights.  I do this on my iPad late at night, and I can't post blog entries on the Safari browser, so haven't bothered trying to keep those of you interested in my daily doings up to date with daily updates, instead waiting until I've achieved some milestone and have pictures to make a significant post.

However, I noticed that Google has a mobile Blogger app, so I decided to install it and give it a try.  Here goes...

Wednesday:

Plan:

  -  Either continue building Plaguebearers, OR

  -  Play a 2,000 point game against Mike's Eldar.

         ==>> Actual =>> Mike was a no-show (is this the week he's in San Francisco?), so I banged out the other 20 Plaguebearers & got them built in a very nice variety of combinations of legs, bellies, arms & heads, and a nice assortment of poses, too, if I do say so myself...

Now I have to get them primed, but I'm not sure I'm going to dive right into them just yet.  I might treat myself to tackling one of the Plague Hulks next as a change of pace, being such a large model (as opposed to all the infantry I've been doing lately).  All of the models I originally planned for that I'll need at Valhalla are built, except for attaching the legs to the Hulks, which I'll do after I've got everything painted (legs & body).  (Also, I'd like to do a proper Nurgle Biker Lord to lead my Death Guard, and have worked that into the revised schedule...)

However, I couldn't stand what was going on in my mouth any more, so I went to the oral surgeon this afternoon to have him look at the bony protrusion where my tooth was extracted a month ago, and which has been rubbing against the underside of my tongue on that left side for about 4 or 5 days now.  He said that the gums would grow over it in time, but if it was really bothering me, he would make an incision, file down the bone & sew it back up.  

It really is bugging me, as it's painful and has become difficult to swallow and even talk, but I didn't want him to do it right then.  I have an important meeting at 8:30 in the morning (Thursday) that I need to be alert for, and I knew that after his ministrations I'd be in a lot of pain, would probably have a bad night, and be doped up on Vicodin in the morning.  So I scheduled an appointment for 10:00 AM tomorrow (Thursday) morning, and will likely be out of commission for at least a day, which really sucks, because my wife and daughter are both out of town until some time Sunday night, and this is a perfect opportunity to get a bunch of work done without worrying about being away from the family for a long time each night (and all day Saturday), and/or getting bitched at for it.  

Will have to see how I feel tomorrow after the surgery and some rest, and whether I need too much Vicodin to ease the pain to be comfortable with driving to my FLGS & back.  Thankfully the pressure to get as much done as possible has let up some with the change from going to Valhalla in August to going in October, but I can't let up too much, and besides, I'll just be bored out of my mind laying around the house.  If I'm OK to drive, I'll go, but if I have to hit the Vicodin hard just to survive (I don't do pain well), I'll just hang out at home and catch up on my codex fluff reading...

Hopefully at worst I'll just have to stay home tomorrow evening, and can get back to it Friday after work...  

We'll see...  Stay tuned...

Hold the Phone... Change of Plans...

I have a problem.  A big one.

I can't go to Blue Table Painting's Valhalla in August this year.

The problem stems from a conflict with getting my oldest daughter back to college.  Her school is starting their Fall semester later than they had been the previous 2 years, which we just found out about this past weekend.  The wife and I worked through all the available options, and it came down to either my youngest daughter would have to miss 3 or 4 days of high school (she'll be a Junior this year) as she'd have to go with my wife, or she would have to be home alone for a few days.  Neither of these are acceptable options (at least not to us).

So, there's no way for me to go to Valhalla in August this year.

However...

I will be going to Valhalla in October of this year, instead.

Yay!

I knew when my wife and I were trying to work out the details of trying to get me to Valhalla that there were no more suites available (which is what I had reserved for August), and that even if there were, the October prices were higher than the August prices.

I also knew that there was only one Drop Pod left for October, and therein lay the other problem:  I was not going to Valhalla alone.  My good friend, John, was also going to the August Valhalla.  What we had worked out was that I reserved a suite at August Valhalla, and for an additional $50 the BTP folks were going to provide an additional twin bed to the suite.  The suite already comes with 2 event passes, so I was going to pay a little more and take the queen/king bed in the suite, and John was going to take the added-on twin bed, and then we'd only have to share a private bathroom with each other and not two other people, as would be the case in a Drop Pod.  This worked out to be only $50 more for John than being in a Drop Pod with 3 other people, and $450 less for me from my original plan of getting a "captain's quarters" private room (these are smaller than the suites, but share a bathroom with at least one other private room).

But I the last time I'd checked the BTP store's website, there was only one Drop Pod slot left in October, and I wasn't even sure that was still available.  Dilemma.  Either John or I would have to downgrade to an event pass and get a room in a hotel in nearby Heber City, UT (about 15 minutes away from the Valhalla site), and since the problem with not being able to go to Valhalla in August was mine, I didn't feel right about asking John to take the off-the-premises room, so that meant that I'd have to get an event pass and get a room in Heber City.  And, I'd have a significant balance with BTP, as I was pretty sure they wouldn't issue a refund for the difference in what I'd paid and the price of just and event pass (although I wasn't certain of this).

So, I emailed my contact at BTP, Shannon, on this past Sunday night, and explained the situation to her, and asked if there were any suites that had become available, or whether there was more than one Drop Pod left for October.  To my amazement and delight, she replied within a few hours saying that someone had just exchanged their October Drop Pod reservation for an August one, and there were, in fact, just 2 Drop Pod beds available, and that she would hold them for me!

Huzzzah!

Unfortunately, there are no suites available at this time, and there is someone ahead of us who has requested a suite should one become available, but we're 2nd on the list should a suite become available.  (And even at the higher October prices, splitting the cost of a suite plus the extra twin bed would be less expensive than the cost of each of our Drop Pod spots.)

Also, unfortunately, John and I will each need to pony up another $250 each to cover the cost of accommodations that are not as good as we'd been expecting, but, this may be a blessing in disguise.  Why?  Because it means that I can let up on my helter-skelter schedule of painting every spare moment I have, step back, take a breather, maybe get a few games in, and get everything I wanted to get painted done in time for October, plus be able to do a few extra things, like build, convert and paint a proper Nurgle Biker Lord to lead my Death Guard, rather than the Night Lords Biker that I currently use.

So, the journey continues, albeit with a minor speed bump.  I figure I'm not going to be spending much time in my room at Valhalla as it is, and it kinda sucks that I have to pay more for less, but I've still earned enough from writing for Seeking Alpha that I've covered these costs, and then some, and I can slow down a bit and get everything done that needs to get done before heading off to the Wasatch Mountains in October.

All's well that ends well...

:-)

Nine Plague Toads (Beasts of Nurgle) Completed in 6 Days!

Hey, Folks!  I got all 9 of my Forge World Nurgle Plague Toads (which I'm going to be using as Beasts of Nurgle in my games of 40K) completed in just 6 elapsed days over 8 calendar days (wasn't able to work on them 2 of the days from Sunday, July 14th thru this past Sunday, July 21st).  Total time spent on getting them built, primed, painted, based and varnished was 24 work hours.

I really love these little guys!  They have such great attitude, and are much better models than the GW plastic Beast of Nurgle, which to me just looks like a giant turd.  Plus, there's only one GW plastic model, and who ever runs just one of these things?  As you can see from the picture above, I've based them so that I can run as a unit of 5 (green base edges) and a unit of 4 (brown base edges).

Another thing that's a plus in the Forge World Plague Toads' favor over the GW Plastic Beast of Nurgle model is that if you can get a large enough FW order put together so that you get free shipping, these little guys come out to just about the same cost per Toad as a single plastic Beast model (in my case a little less; depends on the exchange rate at the time you buy).  The GW plastic Beast is $24.75, plus tax, while at GBP43.00 for three different poses (no tax), each Toad comes out to around $22.00 apiece, give or take.  And even if you can't find enough buddies to put together a GBP250 order to get the free shipping and end up having to pay the (outrageous) 15% shipping charge, they still come out to about $25 apiece.  So, for me and my money, the FW Plague Toads were the only way to go.

I had seen these little monsters while cruising the FW website before, but what made me go for them when I realized how bad ass Beasts of Nurgle could be in the new Daemons codex was the battle report in the March White Dwarf, which featured Plague Toads as stand-ins for Beasts of Nurgle.  After seeing those pictures, I was sold on them!

And even with only 3 sculpts, there's so much you can do with them when you paint them to give you more variety that I have no problem running multiples of the same sculpt in the same unit.

And, being Nurgle, I mostly used washes, and very little paint, to get them to come out like this.  That, and a lot of imagination, plus some input, suggestions and help from bystanders and friends at my FLGS.

So, I can't wait to get a game in with my Daemons at some point to see how they actually perform.  Still more Daemons to paint to get ready for Valhalla, but I'm continuing to make progress!

I hope you like these little buggers.  As always, thanks for taking the time to read this, and please leave a comment below before you go!

7 Autocannon Havocs Completed Last Saturday - CSMs Completed for Valhalla!

Hey, folks.

Just wanted to let you know that I got the 7 Night Lords Autocannon Havocs completed this past Saturday, July 13th, 2013.  This took the better part of a full week to complete, but I'm happy with the results and to finally get these guys done.

That means that the Chaos Space Marines portion of my goal for getting painted armies ready for August Valhalla is complete!

When I left my FLGS last Saturday, I was a little bummed out, as I had planned on painting 5 more Night Lords Havocs, 3 with Missile Launchers and 2 Aspiring Champions, but these 7 Autocannon Havocs took me about two days longer than I'd anticpated they would to complete.  That meant that the remaining 5 would take longer than I'd planned for them, up to and probably a full week, and that would put me way behind schedule, whereby I might not get enough of my Daemons painted in time to really play them the way I'd like to at Valhalla.  I managed to get a base coat of Kantor Blue on the remaining 5 Havocs Saturday night after I'd finished the 7 Autocannon Havocs, but even that took longer than I'd expected.

However, as I was trying to get to sleep last Saturday night, I had an epiphany:  I had added the 3 Missile Launchers as a stretch goal a few weeks ago, and I had two perfectly good Aspiring Champions that I could use in lieu of the 2 Havoc-specific ones that I had built to go with these forces.  The only problem with the two existing ACs is that they have power swords, but I feel that it's easier to say "I didn't pay the points for those power swords, so we'll just treat them as chainswords" than it is to say "That model actually has X, even though it's not modeled on it" when playing a friendly game.

So, to my great relief, I decided to make finishing the 5 remaining Havocs a stretch goal, and to declare that after three months of nearly constant work in the evenings and on Saturdays, my Chaos Space Marines forces that I plan on taking to and playing at Valhalla are finally completed!

So, onward and forward!  I spent a few hours on Sunday assembling the remaining 6 Forge World Plague Toads that I'll be using as Beasts of Nurgle, but couldn't get any work done Monday as I had to pick my wife up at the airport that evening.  Last night, Tuesday, I managed to get these little guys primed white before the daily monsoon hit the Phoenix East Valley, and finished putting the legs and wings on the second batch of Plague Drones, plus getting the Plaguebearer riders for this second batch of Drones completely built.  All in all, a very good, albeit long evening of work.  Tonight I plan on starting to paint and wash the 6 Plague Toads that I primed last night, and get the final details of the first batch of Drones (stingers, horns, weapons on the Plaguebearers) finished while waiting for some of that wash to dry so I can press on with working on the Toads.

At this point in time, if I can keep on this schedule and don't suffer any unforeseeable delays, I will get all 9 Plague Toads, all 6 Plague Drones, at least 20 more Plaguebearers, and at least one Forge World Nurgle Plague Hulk (which I will use as a Soul Grinder) completed in time for Valhalla.  With a bit of luck, I'll get the second Plague Hulk finished, as well, although I might need to rope a friend or two into helping out with the Hulks in order to get them done before I have to leave for UT on August 25th.  I don't want to go that route, as I prefer to paint all of my stuff myself (with a few notable exceptions, which I will cover in a future post), but push might come to shove and I might have to swallow my pride and get a bit of last-minute help.

Anyway, that's the most recent news.  Sorry it's taken me so long to get this post up (since last Saturday), but I've been busy with work and a bit under the weather.  But, only 2.5 hours left in this work day, and then I'll be able to head out to my FLGS and get cracking on those Toads!

Stay tuned, and as always, please feel free to leave a comment!

J.D.

Models Completed As Of Friday, July 5th

Models Completed To Date:

·         20 Plaguebearers – 8 Days of Work – March 29^th thru April 5^th.
·         Great Unclean One (Forge World Nurgle Daemon Prince) – 3 Days/16.5 Hours of Work – April 11^th thru April 13^th.
·         28 Death Guard Plague Marines – 77 Hours of Work – April 18^th thru May 25^th.
·         2 Nurgle Heldrakes – 57 Hours over the course of 12 non-consecutive Days of Work – May 25^th thru June 13^th.
·         5 Nurgle Chaos Spawn – 16 Hours of Work – June 15^th thru June 22^nd.
·         1 Night Lords Autocannon Havoc – 4 Hours of Work – July 4^th thru July 5^th.

Currently Underway:

·         6 Night Lords Autocannon Havocs.
·         3 Night Lords Missile Launcher Havocs.
·         2 Night Lords Havoc Aspiring Champions.

Night Lords Havoc Test Model Completed

I was on vacation the better part of the last 2 weeks, so wasn't able to get any painting done for 11 days. However, I was able to work on a test model for my Night Lords Havocs which will be part of my Chaos Space Marine forces going to Valhalla on July 4th and 5th, and got him completed. Being a test model, it took quite a bit of time to actually get him done, as I had to wait for various stages to dry before going on to the next stage.

When I got to Empire on the morning of the 4th, it also took me a while to get back into the swing of painting. So, to get me going, I wrote up a recipe of the steps that I thought I'd need to go through in order to get each of the Havocs finished. That gave me an idea of what steps I needed to take, and in what order, and allowed me to get a lot of the details worked out.

Now that I have the test model completed, that recipe has gone through a few modifications and clarifications, and a few steps have been rearranged, but here's what it currently looks like:

== Organize models into as even number of groups of the same type(s) of models, and do the following steps to each group, coming back to the top after each group is done with these steps to start the next group through the cycle:

·         Drill out barrel tip of gun with hobby knife (plastic) or pin vise (metal).
·         Base coat all armor sections Kantor Blue.
·         Paint trim, shoulder pads & wings on heads & NL emblems, etc, with a base coat of Averland Sunset (Yellow).
·         Paint trim, shoulder pads & wings on heads & NL emblems, etc, with a layer coat of Auric Armour Gold.
·         Wash Gold with Druchii Violet.
·         Paint Autocannon & certain details on backpack & armor (e.g. Leg joints, pipes on helmet & armor, etc) with a base coat of Ironbreaker.
·         Touch up Blue areas with Kantor Blue after applying Gold, & then touch up Gold (& Ironbreaker) as needed if I got some Blue where it shouldn't be.
·         Pick out details on Autocannon with Hashut Copper.
·         Highlight armor areas with Lothern Blue.
·         Wash blue areas with Drakenhof Nightshade.
·         Paint eyes with White.
·         Paint skulls & any other appropriate things with a base coat of Mephiston Red.
·         Layer skulls & other red places with Evil Sunz Scarlet.
·         Wash red areas & eyes with Carroburg Crimson.
·         Wash Autocannon & metal "pipes" on backpacks, leg joints, etc, with Sepia.
·         Glaze red areas (except eyes!) with Bloodletter.
·         Highlight trim & other gold areas with a hard edge of Gold.
·         Highlight Autocannon with a hard edge of Ironbreaker.
·         Highlight Autocannon with a hard edge of Hashut Copper.
·         Clean up White (pink) around eyes with Kantor Blue.
·         Highlight armor areas with Kantor Blue???
·         Highlight armor areas with Lothern Blue???
·         Do any touch ups.
·         Paint lightning.
-- Make jagged, descending lines of Enchanted Blue (can't remember the name of the modern equivalent) across the right shoulder pads & down legs, front and back (one each facing), trying to vary it up a bit, using the Standard brush, with the tip flattened out.

-- Go over everything in your path, as Night Lords lightning is not painted on their armour, it is corruscating over their whole bodies constantly. Emphasize variety across models, and try to avoid curves in favor of jagged changes in direction, always progressing downward and branching & forking out, like the opposite flow that the tributaries of a river would look like as they collect into the larger body of the river. (Keep in mind that lightning "flows" from the ground up, too, and not always from the sky downwards, which can help provide some of that much needed diversity from model to model.)

--  Go over these lines with the lighter Lothern Blue using the Detail brush, making sure the paint is "thin-but-not-too-wet", and making sure not to cover all the Kantor Blue, but staying somewhat between the lines, with some straggles and off-shoots.

-- Go over these with a very, very thin, jagged line of White using the tip of the Detail brush, also thin but not too wet, and use a very light touch; sometimes lightly "stroking" the tip of the brush with paint that has dried slightly & the hairs have separated slightly, like a "scratching" effect, but leaving very thin traces of White. It's OK to have some small gaps in the White, and for the White to go "off the path" here and there, and to have little forks and barbs. - Base coat base with Warboss Green, straight from the pot & heavily.

== Batch complete

 -- Go back to first step in recipe and repeat with next batch, until you have all the batches finished to this point; then...

= Once all the groups of models that have gone through all of the above steps, assemble models into small groups suitable for varnishing, and:...

·         Matte varnish in groups until all done.
·         Flock bases of all models in one batch with green static grass (using watered down Elmer's glue).
·         Gloss varnish lightning & eyes of all models as one batch.
·         Touch up edge of any bases with Warboss Green, if necessary.

== Should be finished with all of the Havocs at this point...

As referrenced, there are two "batches" of Havocs that will be painted in order to keep my sanity but give one step enough time to dry on the first model of a batch by the time I've finished with the last model of the batch. Since I used one of the 7 Autocannon Havocs as a test model, there are 6 Autocannon Havocs left, three with the large, Cadian Autocannon and three with the "standard" CSM Autocannon. These 6 are Batch 1, while the three Missile Launcher Havocs and two Havoc Aspiring Champions are Batch 2, consisting of 5 models.

Between last Thursday and Friday it took me a total of about 4 hours of work time to paint up the test model. I figure the remaining models will take about 3.5 hours total each. Here are some pictures of the test model:

I was able to get the first Batch of 6 Autocannon base coated with Kantor Blue Saturday (not the most productive Saturday I've had), and three and a half of these got a base coat of Averland Sunset last night (Monday).

My wife and daughter left for a week in New York City this morning, so I've got all my evenings this week and all this weekend to spend working on getting this first Batch of 6 finished up, and as much of the second Batch of 5 done as possible. With any luck (and not too many distractions) I should be able to get the first Batch finished by the end of Wednesday night, but they might spill into Thursday. Then assuming I can get at least 5 hours of painting in on Thursday & Friday nights, I should have this last Batch of 5 finished by Saturday, or Sunday at the latest. However, I might need to do the basing, matte varnishing, flocking & gloss varnishing on Sunday, and it might possibly take Monday night, too, but I hope not, as I have to make a day trip to Santa Clara, CA on Monday, and I'm usually beat by the time I get back to the airport.

Then, my wife comes home some time on Tuesday, so I might not be able to paint again until Wednesday evening. By that time I hope to have all of the Havocs finshed, and have started working on the Plague Toads that I will be using as Beasts of Nurgle.

That's the plan, anyways! We'll see how it goes...

As always, please feel free to post a comment below...