Media - our house - Page 9 | virtualwolf.org

A photo of a game of Warhammer Underworlds. There are two rectangular boards with hex tiles on them, the art on the boards looks like the inside of a cave, and there's two pieces of scenery in the two blocked hexes, one is a giant set of yellow crystals and the other is a massive horned skull. Closest to the camera are the four vampires of the Crimson Court, they have pale blue skin and red cloaks, with blood dripping from their weapons and the corners of their mouths. On the other side of the board are the Gorechosen of Dromm, a three-fighter warband consisting of very large meaty-looking warriors in large red armour.

Another game of Warhammer Underworlds, @yayKM took the Gorechosen of Dromm again and after last game I realised that horde warbands really don't work against the Gorechosen so I went for the undead majesty of the vampires of the Crimson Court. It wasn't looking great for the vampires at the end of Turn 2, but a couple of lucky rolls on my part meant the game ended up with none of my vampires dead, all three of the Gorechosen wiped off the board, and I ended up winning 14-8.

our house darkroom gaming warhammer underworlds direchasm the crimson court nethermaze gorechosen of dromm

Posted on 17 February 2024, 16:04

A photo of a small scruffy blonde dog lying in a dog bed, with a blue blanket that's balled up in part to the same height as his head, and his head resting on top of the ball.

We got this furry little scruffball ten years ago today! I washed his blankets today, @yayKM made his bed all nice and flat, and he had to completely ball up the blanket and make a headrest instead.

beanie our house dog darkroom

Posted on 16 February 2024, 23:46

A photo of two of the sections of the wall terrain from Into The Dark. It looks very steampunk with lots of pipes and skulls and both are painted the lower colour being a dark metallic blue and further up the wall it fades into a lighter copper colour. The section on the left looks almost unfinished compared to the one on the right, that looks a lot more "lived in".

Also after our last game of Kill Team (https://virtualwolf.org/media/posts/2542), I decided I wanted to add a bit of extra pizzazz to my Into The Dark terrain because it looked a bit dull next to my friend's set that he put a fair bit more effort into. One of the things he did that I particularly liked was adding hazard stripes to all the walls above where the doors are, because it's VERY easy to miss the fact that there's a door there and suddenly your opponent opens one right next to one of your operatives and you're like "...oh, shit." Very happy with my hand-painting efforts for the hazard stripes here, I also did some drybrushing with silver (I had done zero drybrushing at all until this point) and used the MIG brand rust pigment to add some extra grime and wear, and it looks mint. Left is before, right is after. Now I just have approximately twelve million more pieces of this terrain to do. 😅

our house kill team games workshop painting terrain into the dark

Posted on 12 February 2024, 21:51

A photo of a Plague Marine from Warhammer 40,000. He's in huge khaki green standard-issue huge Space Marine armour with bronze-coloured edging in places, but because he's one of Nurgle's chosen he's all corrupted and mutated: there's a GIANT mouth with huge teeth right across the entirety of the chest and abdomen of his armour with a metal pipe coming from his shoulder and going into the side of the mouth, and the two very large knives (honestly, they're more like short swords) he's wielding have skin-coloured spines growing out of them in places.

A photo of three Plague Marines in a line. They're all in the same general khaki green armour, but the one on the left is fairly dull-looking without too much highlighting since it was my old regular-paints painting technique where the highlighting was done with drybrushing. The one in the middle has come out a brighter green because the underlying primed colour is brighter and also it's the newer "Militarum Green" Contrast paint so the primed colour has a lot more effect on the finished product. And finally we have the one in the previous photo with the two knives that has much more emphasised shadows and much punchier highlights thanks to the zenithal highlight and manual highlighting.

After our last game of Kill Team (https://virtualwolf.org/media/posts/2542) I figured I should probably paint up my Plague Marine who has the double plague knives because he's a beast in close combat and against Genestealers my ranged Marines weren't super-useful. I re-primed him using a zenithal highlight and got him fully painted this weekend, and am very happy with how he came out! There's zero drybrushing except on the sand on the base, it's entirely Contrast paints and manual highlighting. I also realised that I've been painting Plague Marines long enough that I have essentially the three stages of evolution of my painting technique. On the left in the second photo is one of my first Plague Marines from nearly six years ago now, using regular paints which looks fine but takes so long. In the middle is my second batch from eighteen months ago where I was using Contrast paints to greatly speed things up, but still had a plain white undercoat and the highlighting was still done by way of drybrushing. And on the right is this latest guy, with the full zenithal undercoat and manual highlighting!

our house darkroom kill team games workshop painting death guard

Posted on 11 February 2024, 21:49

A selfie of me, a white man with a short red beard and receeding hairline, wearing head-mounted set of magnifying eyeglasses. The headset itself is white and the lenses are a single piece of almost sunglasses-shaped hard plastic that attaches to the front of the headset and can be moved forwards or backwards. My eyes look freakishly large because I'm looking directly through the lenses at the camera.

My eyesight is definitely still very good, but I _do_ need extra magnification when I'm painting eyeballs on my miniatures because they're so damn tiny (the best technique is to paint the whole eyeball black, then put a white dot at the very left and right so you just have the black in the middle looking like the pupil). I've had a magnifying glass on a arm attached to the side of my painting table for a few years and it helps but even with that I've been finding it tricky, it doesn't quite magnify enough without ending up with the end of the paintbrush awkwardly close to the magnifying glass. A friend has a set of those headset magnifying thingies, so I looked at a bunch and bought a set for myself, from https://visionaidmagnifier.com. It's got a couple of LEDs in it and there was the choice of a USB-rechargeable one or a 3x AAA battery one, so I went with the latter since I'm very unlikely to need any additional lighting given how brightly lit my painting table is. The handiest bit is that it comes with five different magnification strengths and you can easily swap them out, change the angle, and move them closer or further away from your eyes.

our house selfie me darkroom portrait mode painting

Posted on 11 February 2024, 14:57

A photo of two fully-painted Space Marine miniatures with bare heads standing next to each other. The left is holding her boltgun in front of like she's standing on guard, and the base is a sort of desert rocky-looking texture/colour. The one on the right is a much deeper richer red, far closer to the colour of blood, and she has a pistol held in one hand and is in the middle of throwing a grenade with the other. Her base looks like really thick mud and it's splattered half-way up to the knees so it looks like she's been really tromping around a battlefield.

Earlier this week I painted one of my converted Space Marines as a test to make sure the colour scheme worked, and man am I glad I did only one as test because I hate it. 😫 Despite deciding to paint them in Blood Angels colours and using the Contrast paint called "Blood Angels Red", there's FAR too much orange in that colour, I don't like how the backpack came out with it being black, and I don't like the base either (I DID do an absolutely bang-up job her face though, particularly the eye). I did a second one and finished it tonight (the one on the right) using my trusty old Flesh Tearers Red, painting the backpack the same colour, and using the muddy terrain texture, and it looks SO much better. Definitely going to use that for the rest of them.

our house darkroom kill team games workshop painting space marines

Posted on 10 February 2024, 21:51

A photo of a Warhammer Underworlds game board. It has hex tiles on it, and the artwork looks like the bottom of a forest with gnarled roots everywhere. Closest to the camera are the Exiled Dead, a warband of seven miniatures consisting of six zombies and the zombiemaster Deintalos. Four of the have very Frankenstein-esque metal poles coming out of them like they're being animated by electricity, the fifth is more upright and has armour and a halberd, and the sixth is crouched down low to the ground. Deintalos is wearing a flowing purple robe and carrying a staff. On the other side of the board are the Gorechosen of Dromm, a three-fighter warband consisting of very large meaty-looking warriors in large red armour.

A close-up of the Gorehulk, a very large miniature that looks like he's been partially transformed into a demon with massive muscular arms and shoulders and a huge set of horns sprouting from both his head and behind his shoulders. His right arm pulled back like he's about to punch the absolutely living shit out of something. Surrounding him are four of my zombies.

@yayKM and I played our first 1v1 game of Warhammer Underworlds in quite a while this afternoon, @yayKM with the Gorechosen of Dromm versus my Exiled Dead! It started out well for the Exiled Dead in the first turn, I killed The Gorehulk and was up 3-0 glory, but it absolutely fell apart after that even despite some very lucky rolling on my part. I scored _zero_ more glory until I killed Herax in the second-last activation of the whole game, and scored one objective worth one single glory at the very end of the game. There were other objectives I might have been able to score, but @yayKM managed to kill the exact person in the exact spot that I needed them to be in in order to score them. >_< The final score was 11-5, oof.

our house darkroom games workshop warhammer underworlds harrowdeep nethermaze the exiled dead gorechosen of dromm

Posted on 10 February 2024, 16:34

A photo of five Assault Intercessor Space Marines. They're all wearing standard massive Space Marine armour with big shoulder pads, and they all look like they're mid-stride. They've got pistols and chainswords, and the one on the left has a grenade in her hand and looks like she's about to lob it. None of them have helmets and they've all got either mohawks or very short cropped hair and various cybernetic implants.

A photo of five regular Intercessor Space Marines wearing much the same armour as the Assault Intercessors. These ones are armed with very large two-handed bolt rifles, two are pointing the rifles and yelling like they're in the middle of laying down a hail of fire, the sergeant is holding hers upright just by the grip and is pointing with her other hand, the fourth is standing there like she's keeping watch, and the final one has a pair of grenades in one hand and looks like she's just about to throw them. They're also all bare-headed with cybernetic implants.

Yesssss, got my converted all-women Intercession squad assembled and undercoated! Extremely stoked at how well these have come out, in particular the one from each squad with the grenades since none of the sculpts actually have them holding grenades (one of the operatives for the Assault Intercessors is specifically a grenadier and I wanted to make it obvious which one that was, and if I don't take her I'd be taking the regular Intercessor with grenade as an added equipment). I even went to the level of detail of chopping off the grip from one of the spare holsters and fitting it properly onto the empty pistol holster that the grenade-lady from the Assault Intercessors has, since she's holding a grenade instead of a pistol. I also chopped off all the helmets and attached them to the belts of every single one of them, to show that they still HAVE their helmets, they're just too cool to wear them. 😛 I'm going to paint them in Blood Angels colours, mostly because the red and black scheme is quite striking and I've never painted Blood Angels before.

our house darkroom kill team games workshop painting space marines

Posted on 31 January 2024, 20:16

A photo of our dining table with a Warhammer Quest game set up on it. There's lots of cards and dice everywhere, and in middle are a bunch of variously-shaped tiles connected together that look like the inside of a set of buildings. There's four hero miniatures at the right (one huge ogre wielding a giant mace, a nobleman with a sword and ye olde-style pistol, a elven woman with long braided hair aiming a bow, and a old man in a robe carrying a staff and some books) plus four groups of hostile miniatures at various points on the board (two separate groups of three bat swarms, a skeleton warrior holding a bardiche, and a very large Mongolian-dress zombie thing with a huge axe).

A closeup photo of the Kosargi Night Guard (the big Mongolian-dressed zombie with the axe) and three of the bat swarms behind him, with all four of the heroes arrayed around it.

@yayKM and I started a new campaign of Warhammer Quest with the last four heroes this afternoon! @yayKM went with the two heavy hitters and so I took Qulathis the Exile and Octren Glimscry who are are much more fragile but can still deal a reasonable amount of damage. We began with a Scavenge journey in order to start gearing up early, there were a few rough moments and some terrible early rolling, but we actually managed to get all four heroes inspired—which we've never done before—and ended up with some good equipment out of it! Lore-wise the location we started out in was the Ven Alten estate, Ven Alten being the family of one of the heroes @yayKM is playing. And pleasingly, with the rest of the zombies and bats fully painted, we didn't need to resort to ANY unpainted miniatures at all!

our house darkroom gaming games workshop warhammer quest

Posted on 26 January 2024, 19:26

A photo of seven hunched-over rotting zombies. They've got the standard-issue zombie decaying clothes, but all three have part of the lids of the coffins they were in on their backs, which are attached to them by way of stakes driven through the top of the lid and through their chests. They also have tree roots growing through their bodies. The bases are all done up to look like fresh wet mud, which is splattered part-way up their legs so it looks like they've been slogging through it.

A photo of three bases of bat swarms mid-flight, all flying around ruined stone columns. The middle one has clearly visible fangs and is FAR larger than the others.

I'm definitely closing in on the end of my Warhammer Quest project, I've finished the rest of the deadwalkers and the bats! Only thirteen miniatures left to go out of the sixty-odd in the box. Really happy with this second batch of deadwalkers, I didn't do any drybrushing at all except for the robes and instead just highlighted everything manually. It comes out a lot more strikingly.

our house darkroom games workshop painting warhammer quest

Posted on 24 January 2024, 19:49