Boom! Crack! Bang! No, that’s not the sound of Halloween fireworks, it’s the sound of 5 chaos dwarf blunderbusses shooting their load into their unfortunate opponents. Thanks for coming back to Hammer the Backlog, the weekly warhammer miniature painting and accountability blog, in which I try to paint my 25 year backlog of hoarded plastic, white metal and resin miniatures before the slavers of the Dawi-Zharr come and drag me away for a short life of suffering in the underground slave pens of Zharr-Naggrund.
Let’s start this week, as every week, with another look at the scorecard.
SCORECARD
Unlike the blasted and barren plains of the dark lands, everything is shiny and green again this week. There was an ever so slight change of plans necessitated by a lack of shields, but nothing that caused any delays. The original plan this week was to paint the front rank of the blunderbuss warriors, but the leader model has a shield peg and I realised I had run out of shields. That would also mean no shields for the next three weeks of bull centaurs. So a slight rearrangement later and I painted five rank and file this week, while also 3D printing enough shields that I will have a couple of spares / choices for the rest of this project.
In fairness though, any excuse to break out the old 3d printer!
THIS WEEK’S MODELS
This week’s models were another five of Fabelzels’s fabulous evil dwarf blunderbuss warriors. I know I’ve said it practically every week, but these things pretty much paint themselves, the detail and sculpting is just that good.
The faces, in particular, are so deeply sculpted and yet so natural that even though they probably look like I spend ages on them, they are really only about 10 minutes of work each. He is the general method, without pictures sadly as I only thought of this after the fact. I might arrange some pictures for next week if there is interest.
Wraitbone base coat
Full coverage with Fireslayer Flesh
Darken the eyes with Black Templar
Cadian Fleshtone to cover any rough spots, hide any mistakes or splashes.
Glaze a very thin coat of Volupus Pink over the nose, as rough as you like. More irregular and splotchy is probably better.
A big wash of Magos Purple around the eyes, focussed on the baggy bags.
A dab of Shyish Purple at the nostrils and right under the eyes.
A light highlight of Kislev Flesh.
A dab of Pallid Wych flesh on the highest of highlights.
The faces are just so craggy and characterful that a lot of the subtlety is picked up by the contrast paints, and the roughness and contrast of the sparse highlights gives them a great evil look. I certainly wouldn’t use this method on, say, a Bretonnian Damsel!
I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before, but I love these models. The amount and depth of the detail in them is exactly what I want from my models. One of the choices that I had to make was consistency versus randomness. I have obviously settled on the colour scheme of red, black, blue and gold for the warriors, with the occasional cream embellishment for horns and skulls. The decision was whether to mix the colours around or to have them feel standardised. If I have the same model 3 times, do I give them all a gold skull, or do I give one a gold skull, one a silver skull and one a skull skull? In the end I went with a standard look.
In a way I feel that Chaos Dwarfs aren’t really that chaotic. They are more lawful evil, to use the DnD term, so it feels better to have them look somewhat organised.
Next week is going to be a fun week, with one more gunner, a characterful hammer wielding warrior who is doing double duty as a unit leader and the first of my new, in-scale Bull Centaurs! Very exciting!
IT WAS MY BIRTHDAY
Last week was my birthday, and one of the gifts I received from my lovely lady was 6 5th edition metal Kroxigors! What a lady! It doesn’t count as breaking the rules if it is a gift, right?
With my starter set lizards, the command groups and champions I gathered for the Wrath of Tlaxtlan battle report, the Slann Mage Priest I recently couldn’t resist on GW’s made to order service and now these 6 big boys, I definitely have a fully functional, realistic and characterful 1,000 point 5th edition Lizardman army. Now I just need to get the frog and the big lizards painted and they can have a pretty nicely matched battle with my brand new Chaos Dwarfs. When they are also painted. This hobby, eh?
I think that is more than enough from me for another week.
Hope to see you again in seven days for some more evil craggly short bois!
Good egggs!
Hammer the Backlog 
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