There once was an ugly duckling...

...who was the terrifying giant servant of a vengeful chaos god!

Welcome to post 150, dear readers (cue cheering, balloons, party poppers, cake and fizzy pop!), in which I once again try to persuade you that I have been doing some geeking, honest and truly. Specifically, I've been organising my workbench to undertake not one, not two, but three painting challenges. Now, you might think from recent months that the greatest challenge would be me actually picking up a paint brush (and you'd be right), but all of these tie in with my intended projects.

Challenge the first: The army muster

This is from over on the Oldhammer website and is meant to produce, by October 2014, a playable army. You are supposed to paint a tenth of your army each month, with two wild cards to allow for things like Christmas and going on holiday which rudely interrupts one's painting ambitions. This is my starting point:

There's a bunch of peasants back left, a unit of foot knights and the start of a second at the front, a cannon and crew, and, at the back, my mercenary dwarf contingent. Still in packets, or undercoated but elsewhere, I have a unit and a half of mounted knights, another cannon, more peasants etc. I plan to order more cavalry to complete the second unit of knights, crossbowmen, archers, spearmen and a third cannon. We'll see how far I get...


Challenge the second: The group Knight challenge

Another Oldhammer project, but just a single figure and one that I can shoehorn into challenge 3 to boot! Started by Asslessman on this thread, the basic idea is to choose a creature representative of your home region and to make a knight from it. Living near Bedford, the swan seemed an obvious choice, especially as I've always liked the idea of knights riding giant birds (I blame that old arcade game, Joust). This is why there was the slightly random opening to this post; behold the chaos swan!

He's behind you!

That classic chaos warrior will be the rider of the beasty

Now, obviously I need to add a putty swan beak, saddle, reins etc. but I don't think that making him/it should take more than an evening. Painting it? We'll see...


Challenge the third: Chaos narrative campaign

Up on that first picture, you might just be able to make out a chaos knight and a lovely old beastman. They are the first two members of the Tzeentch warband I rolled up for a little narrative campaign that Chris, Malc and I hope to start playing over Christmas. I have a chaos warrior and four beastmen to paint up. Surely I can manage that?

Play nicely, children.
Rab