Current Force gathering for action

So today I met up with one of my main opponents for a battle in which we would each be fielding 5000 points. Massive scale but it would allow me to try everything I am aiming to get in my army and my friend has recently expanded his force and it would give him a chance to try out his new options.
So to start this series of entries we will start up with some pictures of my army as it currently stands, I accept there are some half finished models but I simply ran out of time to get them all sorted out before the battle but it did provide the motivation to get a lot of painting done so that was a massive plus.

So there we go, thats the current view of the night lord army, still a long way to go but it is coming together and starting to look pretty good I think. Curze while not perfect he is looking good, definitely coming together as the commander of the force.
Still to come the opposition and the battle, I did take a lot of photo's so given that this all will have to be broken in to several posts over the coming days - I hope you will all bear with me as I slowly work my way through all of this.

Konrad Curze - Work in progress part two

I have been making more progress in an effort to try and get things ready for a upcoming battle and here are the latest shots.

I did notice as I was painting the model that there is so much detail on the model which needs to be picked out, I originally intended to do the highlighting in silver to tie it in to the rest of the army but with the shear quantity I realised it would make him look far too bright so I instead opted for bronze, it is close enough to the legion normal colours to work, it ties in to the post heresy colour scheme and generally makes it all a bit darker than it would have been.

A few bits of work on the hands, lightning claws and head and then he will be tabletop ready. Still plenty of work to do on the display base but it is definitely starting to come together and I think he will look very effective at the head of the legion.

Konrad Curze - work in progress

I have been working for the past few days on the remaining models I currently own (although I have placed an order for some more) and the main one is Curze. Since I have been making some progress with the painting I thought it would be sensible to upload some in progress shots.

 So first up we have some work being done on the base for Curze, this has been simply given a base coat and then a ink wash, I am intending to add some layers to really create the contrast between the dark crevasses and the surface. The skeleton on the base will be done in a typical bone manner although I am considering a thick coat of gore on it. Once the stonework is the right tone I can add on the two solar suxilia corpses and then a liberal layer of gore which should stand out very nicely against the light stone and the whole thing should be a great contrast to the darkness of Curze's armor.

 This section hides the connection between the display base and the gaming base, it is my intention to magnetise this connection to make the transistion between display and gaming as simple as possible.

 Here is Curze's body with very baseline painting done, he has been primed, base coated, dry brushed and then a layer of clear blue applied. After that I have added some light grey on the bass reliefs on his legs which I am intending to ink wash in a similar fashion to the stonework and then drybrush to lighter colors in the same vein.

 The remaining armor pieces have been primed and base coated, I will be adding dry brush high lights and clear blue soon before getting to work on the detail.

So that's the current position with Curze, still a hell of a lot of work to be done and for the short term I am going to be focusing on the gaming base and Curze himself, the display base can take a bit longer - I have a large game scheduled for a couple of weeks time and my aim is to get everything I can including Curze ready to field for then.

We come for you

I have been working hard to get the aerial unit of assault marines completed and following purchasing some clump foilage I have been able to make some real progress and baring some minor touch up work they are done bringing me to 20 complete assault marines.

I think this works quite well and was surprising easy to achieve. There are defintely some adjustments to the technique which I would use next time round but even not using those tweaks I feel the end product was nice evocative. The only issue is going to be transporting them since they are somewhat larger than they would otherwise be.

Rebased assault

Continuing on from yesterday I managed to get the original squad of assault marines sorted out last night and here they are.

Rebased

So I have been working for the past week or so on getting some assault marines sorted out, mainly doing some work on the unit I had allegedly completed already when I noticed the quality of the painting was not really up to scratch as well as getting them ready for rebasing.
As it stands now they are more or less painted and they are glued to the new bases, I just need to take the time to apply the water effect gore to the bases to have them done which I should have done today but I have been distracted with family matters. I did get carried away when working on the replacement bases and got the terminator ones cleaned, primed and painted and when it came to rebasing they seemed a good choice since the bases are that little bit larger to make getting the gore in the right place a little easier.

Here is the end effect of these efforts....

A little finishing work is needed on these and the librarian could do with an additional layer of water effect but the basic feel is there I believe, once I have gored up the close combat weapons and ensured there is sufficient gore on the base they should look pretty good.
The assault marines will be finished in the next couple of days unless something very strange happens and then I will get back to work on the aerial unit of jump pack guys to get them done. After that it is the command squad on their jetbikes who should look awesome when I have their bases sorted out.

With a planned massive apocalyspe battle scheduled for the summer (approximately 20,000 points per side) I have a lot of painting to get done to be ready for it, especially since I have promised myself I am only taking proper completed models with me. Therefore unless I completely lose the track you can expect more frequent updates as I try to keep myself to a painting schedule to get from the current 500 points completed to something closer to 6,000 points by the summer while trying to maintain a reasonable level of quality.