Warmaster: Complete Wood Elf Army

This is what I've been working on the past few months. A 2,500 pt Warmaster Wood Elf Army (or thereabouts). It can be divided into two 1,250 pt armies (one forest spirit/Sylvaneth and one elf/Asrai) fairly easily, so I can use it for games with my kids, where I need to supply both sides. It includes a small Wood Elf village.

I don't really want to go into how most of this was painted here ... a lot of different things were tried and there are better guides out there. Most of the heavy lifting on this project was done with Contrast paints. Aggros Dunes followed by spots of Aggrax Earthshade works surprisingly well.

I tried something a bit different, by adding some scenery, with the pictures. Now onto the pictures:

 

Warmaster: Waywatcher Rangers

The sneaky guerrilla fighters of the Wood Elfs. The Waywatchers come in smaller units (2 stands instead of three) and have special deployment rules that let them ambush other units. Technically I had 2 units worth, but I split them amongst three. I only realized after the fact that you can only have 2 units in a standard 2000 pt sized army. So I have enough for 3000 pts. Oh well.

 

Warmaster: Wood Elf Eternal Guard

More warmaster units. These are the Eternal Guards. Painted with either blue cloaks or white cloaks so it's easy to tell the two units apart. Mostly these were painted with contrast, which works pretty well at this scale. The key to getting the light blue on the cloaks was too thin the Contrast paints down. These were fun to paint. In game, they aren't necessarily the best choice.

 

Warmaster: Wood Elf Dragon

 I need some Warmaster miniatures to go with all of this Warmaster terrain I've been making/painting. So I bought a Wood Elf army for my birthday a few months ago. I got these from Warprunner Games in San Diego. Looking at pictures online, I think Excellent Miniatures are a bit more crisper, but given my painting skills at this scale ... I don't think it matters much.

The first piece I finished is the centerpiece of the army. The "general" on dragon.

I had a lot of fun painting this guy. I tried for an autumnal leaf look for the wings (it was either that or make them look like monarch butterfly wings).

My eyesight isn't as good as it used to be, so 10mm is proving to be a challenge. It doesn't help that my brushes are bit worn and due to Covid I haven't been able to get new ones. Overall I like him though, he looks suitably woodsy!

Warmaster: City and Graveyard

I'm calling this project complete. I think my family thought I'd gone a little mad with this one (well ... more so than usual).

It's a modular 3d printed Warmaster city (i.e. 10mm scale), complete with graveyard and city walls. I don't even own an army yet that would call this thing home ... although the Skaven would probably like invading it. So at some point I should probably get a Empire or Bretonnian army (or Vampire Counts).

The pictures show one possible layout. There's not enough walkways for all of the walls, but there are enough for 6+ Warmaster infantry units worth, which seemed like plenty for a reasonable army. Not everything is pictured here (there were a number of bits I didn't setup in this photoshoot ... mostly extra ruins, barrels, and fieldstone walls). I could also set this up on one side of a table to imply a much larger city off screen.

Only the graveyard pieces were painted this month.

• 17 Gravestone Bases
• 3 Small Mausoleums
• 2 Large Mausoleums

I ran my 3d printer until it finally broke down. So that makes me sad. I was trying to print rivers and bridges to add to the city. I'm still trying to troubleshoot it, but this seems like a bad break. It's not heating either the print bed or the filament and the reason isn't obvious, the fact that 2 parts seem to have broken at the same time suggest to me it might be software related (although it happened when I was trying to print a river piece that had a particularly bad scaling down attempt).

Now onto the pictures:

 

Warmaster: City & Ruins Work in Progress

This is primarily what my 3d printer has been doing for the last few months. Printing a small walled city for Warmaster.

This entire project came about when I was looking at some 25mm field walls I'd bought a couple decades ago. Some were resin from a company call Armorcraft (iirc) and some were from Pegasus (I think you can still purchase these). The Pegasus ones were pre-painted. I use these mostly for skirmish games, but also as a quick way to setup dungeon rooms when playing D&D. At the time, I was thinking they might work as an old city wall for Epic games since there wasn't anything about them that defined their scale.

Fast forward to a few months ago. I was looking for themed terrain for my Warmaster Skaven army and found some ruins I could 3d print. Along with those, the modeller had made some non-ruined houses. I started printing, found more stl files that would work, printed more. Then I remembered my 25mm field walls and the idea that they'd work well as city walls. The scope kept increasing, I kept printing. Printed and assembled guard towers for the wall, and walk-ways for the walls (not pictured since they aren't painted yet). I'm about 1/2 way done with painting and about 90% done with printing. At some point I need to call it and move on to other things.

 

Warmaster: Skaven Wizards and General

The last of the Skaven (for now!). The general and 5 Wizard stands. The General is a Grey Seer with 2 undead rat ogre bodyguards (it's obviously supposed to be Thanquol). The wizards are 1 Grey Seer (Masterclan), 2 Clan Pestilens, 2 Clan Skyre.

 

Warmaster: Skaven Heroes

Heroes?!?! More like villains. These are the real leaders of the Skaven army. With the Screaming Bell nearby, their command is equal to the Generals.

The 2 in front are from Clan Verminous, the middle 2 are Clan Moulder, and the last 2 are Clan Eshin. If you look closely you can spot old Warhammer named characters. I'm fairly certain I bought 2 command packs long ago, so I have enough heroes for 3,000 points worth of Skaven.

I also played with my camera settings a bit and got a less dark picture (although it constantly wants to switch back to the default which is pretty dark).

 

Warmaster: Skaven Warp Lightning Cannons

A unit of warmaster skaven warp lightning cannons. Same basic paint scheme as all of the other skaven warmster stuff I've painted recently.

 

Warmaster: Skaven Screaming Bell

The centerpiece of the army. It's the Skaven Screaming Bell. It's usually surrounded by hordes of ratmen.

I got a new phone, and the pictures seem to be a bit darker.

 

Warmaster: Skaven Army

Now for something a bit different. This is all the Skaven Infantry I have for Warmaster. It's the bulk of the Warmaster miniatures I own, which comes to about a 1200 pt army. I still need to paint heroes, the screaming bell, and 2 warp lightning cannons. At some point, I plan on picking another 1200 pts, which should make for a truly epic army.

Warmaster miniatures are fairly easy to paint. Contrast makes them even easier. 12 of the stands I painted 15+ years ago, and just touched them up (did another layer of highlights, redid the bases with a darker edge color). Another 15 stands I had undercoated dark brown and followed my previous plan to just do drybrushes and highlights to finish them off. The last 9 (the Rats & Rat Ogres), I started with Wraithbone primer and used contrasts (and Agrax) to darken them, followed by highlights to bring them back up. The contrast does a great job of capturing the miniatures details. You can see the fur on the Rats and Rat Ogres. The last 9 came out significantly better IMO. Stylistically you can somewhat see the difference. Moving forward, I'll use the contrast method.

There's a ruin I also printed on the 3d printer and test printed. I've since printed a few more. The rats need to live somewhere.

From front to back: Giant Rat Swarms, Jezzails, Rat Ogres (left), Clanrats (right), More Jezzails (left), More Clanrats (right), Plague Monks, Gutter Runners, and the lone ruin.