After many many years out of WFB (I think the last time I actually played was 5th edition!) and a bout of playing lots of Total War Warhammer 3, I decided now was a reasonable time to slowly start painting up an army in preparation for TOW... or to try and find some local players next year to try the Warhammer Armies Project rules. I always wanted an Empire army, but for some reason I has Dwarves back in the day. Slayers were obviously cooler to 14 year old me than ranks of floofy sleeved infantry, but the empire infantry being released by Highlands Miniatures at the moment have been inspiring. Given that TOW is hopefully introducing Kislev, I decided to go for Ostermark as the two regions tend to work closely together which gives plenty of scope for allies or counts-as going forward. They are also bordered by the Vampire Counts; which I've also been painting over the summer... so that's the main army colour scheme selected, which is nice as it's a good counter to the dark colours of the undead and I need something to alternate between.
I've started with a small unit of handgunners and an engineer to try out the colours. I've been using an old flagellant as a scale, and ended up printing these at 90% so they don't tower over any old models that I find or buy to bulk out the options. The photos aren't great as we're in the process of moving the house around... so fingers crossed the new lightbox will be better!
Colour wise, these are an experiment to see how much I can get done with contrast paints, with metals being the only non-contrast paint. So far, looking pretty good! Still need to go back and touch up the engineer's rifle as I missed the metal slippage before taking the photo.
The bases and magnets for the army arrived this morning, so part of the Christmas challenge is to create a pile of decorative bases for them all to go on so they rank up nicely. I've still not decided if they should have cobbled streets to go with my vampires, or woodland as a nice counterpoint to the yellow and purple colour scheme. Either way, I need to have a play with properly basing them.
To go with this there's the start of a spreadsheet of doom that lists everything assembled so far, and the planned acquisitions. While we've been moving rooms around I did manage to uncover some bits that I clearly acquired at some point in the past... including 6 empire knights, the Manaan's Blades command, some ooooold wizards, 10 plastic handgunners and a general!
There's also a nice selection of troops from the printer as well. 10 swordsmen, 10 archers and (so far) 16 halberds, including command, a BSB and a mounted Captain. All of these are bulk standard Highlands Miniatures prints. So far the halberds are probably the weakest as they are one of the earlier sets from them, so the posing has improved a lot since then. Still really nice though!
