Theatre of War

Wargaming is a bulky hobby, and if you area reading this blog the odds are good that you have played at least one game of Warhammer 40k at some point in your career. What is the bare minimum for a decent game of 40k, enough to make the entire table top experience aesthetically pleasing. The two main components being armies of course, fully painted and based to a reasonable standard. I'm generally one of those tiresome bores that will get annoyed about facing bare plastic on the table, this of course is a sliding level of annoyance depending on how much of the rest of the army is painted. But the armies are the main reason for being, everything else is a stage on which these two actors take part in a swirling melee. However, if the stage is neglected, then the final view of the player of the tabletop may not be as immersive as this hobby was intended.

The terrain is one of the most frequently under developed aspects of the experience, often being mismatched, underbuilt, underpainted and generally lackluster in presentation. I personally find that if this aspect is neglected it can take almost as much out of the experience. The worst factor in this, when mismatched terrain. This can result a decidedly odd looking battlefield at the best of times, bleak and uninspiring at worst.  It doesn't make a lot of sense to litter a green fields with densely packed industrial ruins, not unless you go to the trouble of dressing them up in vines and overgrowth to imply the passage of time slowly subsuming the ruins as nature reasserts itself. Likewise trees in the middle of an industrial estate seems out of place, unless you are grouping it like a public park in the middle of a futuristic industrial hellworld. To summarize, theme and consistency make the best tables. It helps enhance the story of the unfolding clash and sets up those game book art vistas, that is of course both of the armies are fully painted.

To get a decent table going time and money need to be sunk into the hobby, and that is on top of any miniatures. The quantities of paints and utilities needed also tend to be far more than most minis, which only exacerbate the financial requirements of a good board of terrain.
The alternative to investment is to have your battles at your FLGS, which may or may not be your local games workshop. I am fortunate enough to have an excellent FLGS nearby with an extensive range of terrain and plenty of table space. However, this is not always an option, so and you may find yourself a slave to opening hours and the whims of your fellow gamers if this is your venue of choice. However, still cheaper than building a board. However I'd like the flexibility to do both as needed, home after all, is where all my things are and I like it there.

So, this was a long lead in to what I've been painting, which is a lot of Games Workshop terrain. It has been burning a hole on my to-do shelf and I've finally made the jump to burl through it at as fast a pace as I can managed. To be honest I find I've been dropping my standards and attention to detail in order to get it across my desk. At the time of writing I've knocked off a lot of the smaller stuff, and I'm now facing down the larger sets of ruins. To help me get through it I've found myself pulling a smattering of different projects off the shelf and prepping them for a paint job. I do worry that this is I'm going to find myself in a situation where I have a dozen different projects in a halfway state, a state that I would prefer never to get into again.

Terrain

I don't normally do a massive assembly run like I did with this batch of projects, but terrain does make itself uniquely suited for doing it due to the need to paint the terrain in a slightly unified fashion. Also the fierce Australian summer is in retreat and more and more days are falling into the temperature range that allow for comfortable airbrush sessions on my balcony. So I'd like to have all of it ready to go for when a I get a particularly good day to paint.

Most of the work is fairly simple and requires no real finesse to accomplish. For these trees I layered up the trunks, painted the mushroom clusters khaki, washed the lot of it with Agrax, then drybrushed the at layer with VMC Buff. The alien flora I painted with whatever I had lying around in my crate of VMC, washed it and drybrushed it with whatever colour I felt appropriate. Overall the effect is good enough for table top.

Actual machinery and buildings are a far greater challenge than plants as you have to be a bit more precise with the painting. However, for the sake of expediency I chose to pick a primary colour, a secondary to accent it, and a few parts for metallics. This keeps the time needed for basecoating down, as the largest coat can go down with an airbrush and the secondaries aren't much in terms of surface area. Once that was all done, with a few drybursh highlighting passes to taste, I used a sponge technique to beat up the metal components to add a chipped, scratched and well worn technique. While I did not do the best job with this technique it was good enough to add some interest to the model. Finally, a gloss coat of floor polish down, then I went to town on them with my AK enamels, adding and taking away to taste with a variety of colours until I was happy with the result.

Minis

The last of the Kill Teams went by pretty quickly, overall I think I hit a high tabletop standard with all of them, and it was nice to try my brushwork on a wide variety of the GW catalog, rather than batching painting wave after wave of either Space Marines or Guardsmen.

For the Genestealer Cult I got a chance to use wash painting for a project larger than a single miniature. Overall I'm extremely happy with the finish and the ease that it went down. I'm thinking about using this technique for some Heresy era Imperial Fists at some point.

I did try to produce some tutorials while doing my Ad-Mech and stream my painting as well. I ended up dumping the footage on youtube without much post production work. I didn't much feel like editing it, and the camera work wasn't that great to begin with. So bare minimum effort, but in future I'll try to edit these down more, two hours of paint streaming is not that interesting.

For my Deathwatch I took this opportunity to do another tutorial on painting flesh. This time I experimented with the camera and did a commentary pass after the filming was complete. While the quality was significantly better, and edited down to be watchable, it was still not quite up to a good standard. Howqever this is all the effort I'm willing to put in right now as this is not my job, nor do I care about monetization.

Finally, Monty here is my first part of my next Moments in History piece. Surprisingly quick and easy to do to be honest, as it is a technique that relies a lot on manual shades applied with a brush rather than an overall wash, so drying time tends not to be an issue. Unfortunately I'm not thrilled with working on Rommel right now, so we'll see how long he remains on my painting desk. That is pretty much everything for now, I'll see you in a month or two.