Reminder: October Army List Challenge

A quick reminder that the October army list challenge can be found by following this link. Will your forces be able to recover the cache from a Death World?

Chariot of Tzeentch, Part III -- Painted

Chariot of Tzeentch, Part II -- Herald and Disk

For the actual herald and his disk, I wanted something that was in keeping with the older Realms of Chaos stuff -- a disk that was more like a circular flying creature than a screamer or a floating (unintelligent) platform. To create my vision, I used a standard 40mm circular base and got to work with a whole load of milliput (greenstuff).As can be seen, the disk has a mouth sculpted at the front (pure greenstuff) coupled with a pair of peering eyes either side of it sourced from circular globes that come as part of the chaos spawn boxed set. At the sides of the disk, I added a couple of protrubers: a pair of horns from the chaos spawn set and a metal pair of Keeper of Secrets horns that come with one of the alternate heads on the Keeper.

The herald itself is a standard pink horror of Tzeentch. The arms of the horror have all been drilled and pinned however. For the outer arms, I decided that I wanted them to be spread to either side of the miniature: they are ultimately going to be holding some reins that will attach to the screamers on the decorative base of the whole chariot.
Although the other arms were all standard, I did add one additional arm that comes out of the pink horror's mouth! This arm is a pointing arm and adds to the chaotic (random) appearance of the daemon. Additionally, when I paint the chariot, this arm is going to be blue, to be in keeping with my earlier miniatures colour scheme.

The final additions consisted of placing a rune of Tzeentch in the centre of the disk near to where the herald is standing; adding some swirls (with a crafting tool) around the rune and stretching to the outside of the disk; and adding a magnet to the underside of the disk (buried in the milliput) to help with both balance (i.e. low centre of gravity) and attaching chains that the herald will use to "drive" the chariot with. I'll show the painted result of this conversion soon.

Chariot of Tzeentch, Part I -- Assembling the Base

Over the next few posts, I'll be writing up my scratch-built Herald of Tzeentch on a chariot that I built a while back and took to a recent tournament with me. For the chariot of Tzeentch, I wanted to build a convincing looking pink horror being pulled along on a disk by a pair of screamers. To this end, I started to build a base for the herald from scratch.
For the base, I simply used a thick rectangular cut of black plasticard and added a layer of textured (white) plasticard on top. From therein, it was a case of thinking about how the chariot might be constructed. I knew that I wanted to have two screamers on the base, so I thought about some ruins. My previous work with the Hirst Arts range came in handy here: I cast several pillars from their range and added them to three corners of the build. On one of these pillars, I wanted to rest a screamer. On the rear pair (as pictured above), I wanted to (somehow!) rest the disk and herald.

The second screamer was going to be a problem though. In the end, I elected simply to drill in to the plasticard base and insert a flying base stand for the second screamer to rest upon. That way, I could take the screamer off for transport and also use it on a different flying base as an individual screamer as required.

For the rest of the base, I scattered around a large number of debris items and fine, small grit to be suggestive of some ancient temple ruins.
The second picture shows how the screamers fit in with the base in the grand scheme of things. They rest toward the front of the rectangular base, with one balancing on the intact pillar.

In the next part, I'll detail the herald itself and how I solved where it would fit in to the scenic base I'd built. If I'd have been thinking more clearly about this, I might have build the herald FIRST, rather than the scenic base...

The Girl with the Blue Hair

A little addition to my daemonettes today: a girl with blue hair and some work on converting a base.

The miniature is a standard plastic daemonette, but on the base, I placed her on top of a wrecked rhino door (painted in a dull green colour) alongside some general detritus: a wire mesh and a loop of twisted florist wire. The base gives a wrecked city feeling to the daemonette that offsets from the blue of the hair.

Painting the daemonette began with the exposed flesh regions: base coating in a light brown colour, inking in chestnut and then steadily working the colour up toward a more bleached bone plus denheb stone mix highlight. With the flesh painted, I tackled the clothing and hair next -- this time choosing blue as the contrast colour. After inking the recesses in a dark blue stain, I gently drybrushed the vestments with silver to suggest a shiny corset. The hair on the other hand was painted up to space wolf grey using steady highlights.

The fine details were painted on last: including the white eyes and the tattoos on the right thigh and Slaanesh symbol on the forehead. Overall, I'm pleased with the outcome of both the paint work and the base on which the miniature is situated. The daemon is really offset well by the base in this case with the contrasting colours doing all the work for me.

October Army List Challenge

Overview.
On a forested death world, not too dissimilar to Barbarus, lies an ancient cache. The Mechanicum suggest that it might be components of a STC. The Eldar think its a huge source of wraithbone. But the atmosphere of the planet is too thick and poisonous to be sure that the intelligence is correct. Your team must go to the surface in person and recover the cache. But others are bound to be doing the same.

Rules.
(1) Design a 1000 points (standard mission) strike-force army from any codex to explore the surface of the death world and claim the objective. You can expect other teams of similar points value to be trying to do the same.
(2) The action takes place on a death world. At the end of every game turn, all members of your team will take an automatic S2 hit as the acrid atmosphere takes its toll. Additionally, all vehicles will take an automatic a glancing hit as the acid eats in to their hulls.
(3) The death world is heavily forested by acid-resistant plants. Line of sights are going to be small range! There may also be wandering monsters to take care of.
(4) Post your army lists as a comment to this posting and suggest why they're well suited to the mission.
(5) On Oct 14th 2009, I'll start a voting poll that will be open for 1 week to vote for what Warpstone Flux readers consider to be the "most effective army list that also best articulates the theme" (whatever readers interpret that to mean) out of all entrants.
(6) Winner will be tallied and announced on October 21st.

Remember, the real aim of these challenges is to help others design effective army lists that are both themed and effective. There are no prizes beyond honour and kudos!