Immigrant Herd, picture-heavy

We come from the land of the ice and snow,
With the midnight sun, where the hot springs flow
-- Led Zeppelin, Immigrant Song

The song is about vikings, heading off in their ships to conquer new lands. I loved the imagery of cold, hard warriors from the frozen North descending on their unsuspecting victims, so I decided to attempt a wintery themed beastmen army with snowy bases and cold colors. I'm no great painter or modeller, I just love playing the game and want to have a nice looking army to SMASH my foes with. I'm starting up this painting diary to document my progress, encourage me to paint more, and just to share my army with you guys.

In my gaming group we play at three main points levels: 1500, 2000, 2500 (check out my army lists). As for painting, I figure the best strategy is to start by trying to complete all the models that make up the 1500pt list, and then the additional points for 2000 etc... until eventually I hope to have a 3k army painted.

For the 1500pt list I will need:
1 great bray shaman (general and all-round bad-ass)
1 wargor BSB (beast banner of course)
39 gor
29 bestigor
2x5 ungor raiders
2 razorgors
6 harpies

I started with gors as they are most numerous, and have now painted about 30, but only gotten round to basing 12 of them. With no further ado... the photos!

1. My 12 completed gors! I use quite a pale skin color (tallarn flesh) because they are from the sunless North, and purple as a spot color to complete the chilly look. I am not invoking any ties with Slaanesh, they just like purple



2. Close up of the command group. The banner is stencil, not freehand. I attempted freehand but turns out I'm pretty rubbish



3. A close up of some of my favorites - I love the unruly barbarian look of the gor models. Note the poor gluing and mold-line removal - this is something I'm working on improving!



4. I also finished a shaman! Not a huge fan of the model but it will do for the time-being. I will be grabbing the beautiful banelegions one as soon as its available to be my great bray, and this guy will be demoted to herdstone shaman.



Well thats pretty much all for today folks. More photos of the gors when all 30 are based. I have also painted a couple of bestigors, my BSB and some harpies - might post some pics of these before I base them, as I'm still perfecting my basing technique and its pretty slow at the moment.

I'm gonna try to post quite regularly, so please stop by to check on my progress!
cheers,
Billy.

This post has been edited by Billy Ocean on Aug 1 2012, 07:44 PM

Great start to your army!

Nice color theme, and good, clean painting. Some tips you might find usefull:

1. Try some mithrill silver highlight on the weapons, it is simple and adds nice effect.

2. I can see you are highlighting your main colour - violet, try going even further into violet/skull white mix. I don't have much experience with this colour but I believe it will fit your frozen north style and bring the colour out nicely

Good luck and have fun painting!

Looks great, keep it up

Nice start! I like the purple.

I just read the line "the banner is stencil" and then took myself outside and gave myself a good kicking. Why oh why have I never tried that??? What do you use for the stencil? Just paper or something adhesive?

Wow, thanks for all the support guys.

@ Logres: Great advice. Currently my purple is just hormagaunt purple base (or whatever they call it now), then mixed with some warlock purple for highlights. But yeh, adding some white could give some cleaner, more natural looking highlights. Will experiment.

@ Shadespyre: Stencil is just drawn on paper, adhered to banner with a little water, left to dry, and then washed over with some watered-down paint. Once paint is dry, stencil can be pulled off easily, leaving beautiful outline of your design. I do white base for banner, then wash over with purple. I have another done this way, on my bestigors, which I think turned out even better. Pics soon.


This post has been edited by Billy Ocean on Apr 30 2012, 10:54 PM

Thanks, I'll try that.

For the highlights, try using Bleached Bone or Deneb Stone (or whatever it is now) instead of white.

Nice start to your army! How about making some eyes on the skull on the banner?

I agree with mrtn, great stuff, I will start a diary when I get a digital camera. I always shun my own painting but its time i started to share with the world.

@mrtn: I have been meaning to do some eyes, but first I will practice my freehand skills elsewhere.
@charioteer: Thanks! I encourage you to start up a diary, I think its going to make the whole army painting process a lot more fun.

Okay, time for something new. All the nice comments from you guys spurred me on to do a little more basing tonight. I decided to finish my harpies as I use them in every single game. As I have said before, I prefer to think of my beastmen as a wild barbarian tribe than a fully-fledged force of chaos, so for my auxiliary units (harpies, razorgors etc) I want to use models that look like wild animals rather than mutated monstrosities of chaos. I was delighted when the Dark Eldar razorwings were released as they had just the kind of look I was after for harpies - a flock of big nasty ravens. So here they are...

1. I usually run a flock of 6. That way I can get 9 attacks on an enemy character I want to snipe. I was worried the razorwings would look too small mounted individually, but I think they came out ok.


2. The paint scheme is a simple, shameless copy of the GW one - I thought the red stripes looked nice so just went with it


I also have a plan for my razorgors to continue the wild animal theme. More on that later. Thanks for stopping by!

This post has been edited by Billy Ocean on Apr 27 2012, 06:46 AM

OH will they be... giant kangaroos?

Very nice work! Love the colour scheme. Great idea for the harpies too! Look forward to seeing more of your work!

Nice birdies.

Hello friends!
Time to show you the bestigors I've been working on - the fighting elite of the Immigrant Herd. I apologize for posting these guys before getting the bases done, but I've been painting them slowly with lots of love and care and now that I have enough for a nice group shot I didn't wanna wait any longer to post them. Imagine them tramping through snow like the gors above . Ok, here we go...

1. Group shots. Choppy choppy!



2. Close up. The armor is tin bitz highlighted with chainmail. The purple robes and bindings use the same recipe I mentioned above and are highlighted, although that doesn't show up too well in the photos. Nevertheless, when I have time I will probably touch up the highlights using the method suggested by Logres and Shadespyre above.


3. Another banner done with my stencil method - pretty pleased how this one turned out.


4. The big boy. I love this model but I don't use a beastlord in my 2k army (my most played-at level), so have demoted him to bestigor champion.



More photos once they're based. I'm currently working on some quick'n'easy unit fillers for gors and bestigors to save my slow ass some painting time . Pics of them soon too.
Thanks for stopping by!
Billy

This post has been edited by Billy Ocean on May 4 2012, 02:04 AM

I'd like to see some glowing runes on those axes, but apart from that I really like em. The wargor is cool and the stenciled banners are working out really well.