Blood for the Blood God!

Strange circumstances compel me to put together a Warhammer scenario, of all things, using second-edition rules. As I'm going for a low-level, low-points feel, I need low-end minions of chaos to go along with some beastmen. I thought this Copplestone half-orc and his fellows would make perfect chaos thugs, and here we are.

 

The King in Yellow - in Fimo!

 Quite possibly my son's most horrifying effort yet!

Celtic Miniatures orc boar rider

 This chap's a 3D-printed miniature from Celtic Miniatures. I've painted very few 3D-printed figures, but this orc was an absolute pleasure to paint and - especially - prepare (almost no clean-up was needed).

Minifigs pig-faced orc

 

Here's a Minifigs pig-faced orc I painted up in a sort of comic-book style (heavy blacklining in ink). I'm quite pleased with it; I see this style as the best way to get the most out of the wonderful old Minfigs ranges, which have quite spare and shallow detail. 

This fellow's not quite finished; I need to touch up some of the highlights on his jerkin and perhaps add a sigil of some sort to his chest and backplates. I may well change the base to a slightly less textured surface.

The Cult grows futher ...

 The Cult of the Possessed has achieved starting-warband status: a magister with two daggers, a Possessed with the Scorpion Tail mutation, a mutant with Great Claw and club, and a brace of beastmen with heavy armour and two-handed weapons, for exactly 500 crowns. The darksouls with flail and two-handed weapon are waiting in the wings.

The Cult grows ...

 Two new recruits for the Cult of the Possessed: another beastman and a Possessed with the Scorpion Tail and (possibly) Spines mutations.

Minimalism in miniature: the start of a Cult of the Possessed

I've long been interested in speed-painting miniatures and finding ways to achieve striking effects with minimal effort. Recently, I've been inspired by the Instagram accounts of Standingforms, 1988chewit and Gardens of Hecate. In very different ways, all three achieve spectacular effects with judicious and consistent use of colour.

As I've been playing quite a bit of Mordheim recently with friends and my kids, I wanted to get some quick warbands to introduce some of that game's more characteristic factions: in particular, the Cult of the Possessed. I decided to go with figures that were swiftly and minimally drybrushed in near monochrome, apart from two colourful areas: their weapons and their heads.

This minimalist scheme has two key functions: it allows me to get the miniatures done quickly; and it should make them entirely distinctive on the tabletop. We'll be playing some multiplayer games in the coming months, so I want this particular cult to be umistakeable.

The scheme involves abandoning realism entirely. There's no reason for the weapons to be green (apart from perhaps a hint of verdigris over bronze - but that wouldn't explain the hafts), and there's no diagetic logic behind the red heads and headgear. But besides creating coherence, the abandonment of realism helps, perhaps, to suggest that this warband inhabits - as Cormac McCarthy put it - "regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools".

Oh my god, said the witch hunter ...