Friday, September 2, 2011

Grey Knights: DaBoyz GT 2011 Project Army T-7 Weeks




Well... this was one of those "good news, bad news" weeks.

The good news:  We're having a boy!
The bad news:  "Honey, the washing machine is broken and I need to do 4 loads of laundry!"

The good news:  I got a lot of work done on terrain for 2 of the 6 tables I volunteered to provide at this year's GT.
The bad news:  I didn't get as much painting done as I wanted.

Here's what I did accomplish:



Terminator with halberd

Nice OSL huh?  I'm loving the orange glow on the bodies from the force weapons.  It's kinda fun to do too.

Terminator with hammer
You'll notice that the armor looks white on the top of the model and grey down by the feet (duh).  This is partially from the lighting, but the white armor plates are actually blended to light and then medium grey to add a dramatic lighting effect.  I think I did such a good job that it looks like the figure is casting shadows on its own lower areas.

Terminator with sword
This was one of the first GK I painted.  This week I went back and shaded the whites up top down to greys on the legs to match the new terminators.  The brighter colors on the sword are new and I added the orange OSL glow down on the body.


The good news:  I've done tons of thinking and planning for future articles and content.  Don't worry, I'll still be writing about the nids.  GK are my focus right now for the GT in two months, but so many people have already done so much blogging about GK, I'm not going to come up with valuable commentary that hasn't already been beaten to death.  Maybe I'll do some GK articles if I end up near the top at the GT, otherwise it's back to the bugs in November.  I'm actually thinking nids will be my competitive (LOL) army and GK will be my comp army for local tournaments.  As such, my GK collection is limited to a 2,000pt list with no redundant units.  My bugs total well over 4,000pts and I can field most good units in duplicate or triplicate.
The bad news:  There's less than 2 months until DaBoyz GT, and I've entered my panicked hobby mode where every free minute literally goes into painting, basing, or building terrain.  As such, my blog content sucks, I apologize and appreciate those who are still reading despite my stalling blog.  I went through a similar phase before the ATC in May so my long-time readers know updates are going to be sparse for the next 7 weeks.  I still promise to do one army update per week on my GK's and their batreps from the GT.

I have also been working a lot on terrain this week to meet my 6 table quota.  Here's a sneak preview of my newest concept (with my current GK force).
Welcome to the tidal jungle!
My concept is an ocean moon orbiting a massive planet in a system with an ultraviolet star.  The gravity of the massive planet creates immense tidal shifts over 20 feet.  The orbit and rotation of the moon is such that the huge tidal changes last 6 months each; high tide and low.  The flora has evolved to survive 6 months under water and 6 months above.  The plant-like life forms have developed neon chlorophyll to better harvest the ultraviolet light of the star and most species have developed poisons and/or predatorial characteristics to survive long periods of pure darkness.  The table is designed to be played with the water as open (very shallow) with area terrain defined by flora clusters, or to treat the water as difficult terrain and the area terrain as dangerous.  My plan is to make signs for each table with simple and advanced suggested treatments of the terrain.

I'll show the full table sometime next week.  The local shop may run a GT primer tournament and I wanted to finish one new table for that event.

In other GT news, some of us local guys formed up a team for the ATC style Team Event.  I'm pretty excited for this as I think team events in general are always more fun for me than singles.  The team event however, is 2000pts (the GT is 1850) and no comp (the GT has a heavy comp rubric).  As such, I'm still on the fence as to which army I should play (I know you guys would love to see more nid action).  After we sign up our team, they should have 8 or so teams, so this is looking to be a great weekend.  If any of my readers are within traveling distance of Rochester, NY I highly recommend coming up October 21st-23rd for DaBoyz GT.  It's a top notch event with great terrain and fun missions.  They're bumping the main event up to 6 rounds this year and the team event is 3, so grab some friends and come for a great weekend of 9 games.  Two of the local guys, Jay W. and Shaun K. are also on the American ETC team so you can chat them up about their trip to Switzerland this year.  Also, don't forget the best general at DaBoyz GT 2011 earns a spot on USA's 2012 ETC team!

5 comments:

  1. Oh that's nice :)

    Great concepts. Looking forward to seeing the army and tables finished. Keep up the good work!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for the kind words guys. My inspiration for the OSL came from a New Zealand hobbyist called Nuclealosaur on dakka. He's also on CMON and Facebook and is developing a large following.

    Andy ~ Check out his BA with OSL:
    http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/387857.page

    He uses an airbrush which I'm setting up, but don't have the time to perfect before the GT. I do my OSL with dry brushing. I paint the model fully as normal, then dry brush orange on all the sides facing the force weapon. Then I dry brush yellow over the orange, but only on the higher points. Sometimes you can hold the model with the weapon closest to your eye and see which faces should be hit with the OSL light.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I really like that you're emphasizing the shading over the highlighting on these guys. Looking at real life objects, the shadows always dominate the image much more than the highlights, but Miniature Painting has for some reason* been dominated by the concept of massive highlighting for years.

    The shading you're doing here really adds a great sense of depth and brings out all the detail without the ridiculous over the top highlights that always kill my suspension of disbelief. Well done!

    *I blame Mike McVey.

    ReplyDelete
  4. They look beautiful but you'll never get them done. Time to go back to the bugasaurs!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Hah thanks. The bugs will get their love soon enough. I'm actually having a hard time giving all my attention to the GKs because I keep thinking up new Nid lists and want to test them.

    ReplyDelete