Salamanders and Stuff

... the kind that spit fire, for Lizardmen, not the green-armored space-dudes.  I had to explain this to several GW staffers when I was trying to find these models.  No, I'm not looking for Forge World Rhino doors, dammit.  Anyways...

These were a fairly straightforward paint job.  The tough part was that there is not much space between the Salamanders' underside and the base, making it difficult to get a brush in there to paint the undercarriage.  I'll base them up later when I paint the Skink handlers.

Painting Plastic Palm Trees

Long time no post, but sometimes life gives you lemons and you waste a bunch time jerking around trying to make lemonade instead of painting silly plastic men and blogging about it.  Anyways, a few weeks back I painted up one of those nifty plastic palm trees I found at a craft store, but I just got around to snapping some pictures.  The whole process was rather simple, since the palm fronds don't come glued to the tree trunk, making the tree easy to disassemble for painting.  So, I took one of the trees apart, primed it black and then dry brushed with the appropriate colors.  The fronds have these little coconuts, which I was thinking about removing, but they look decent when they're giving some color to make them stand out.

Before & After

Great Find at the Local Craft Store - Palm Trees

I was out running errands with the misses this weekend and she needed to stop by the local craft store.  While wandering around I found the display for the California Missions model kits.  When I was growing up, if you went to a public school in California you spent a good chunk of the 4th grade learning about the Spanish missions.  At the end of the year you had to make a model of one of the missions (mine was La Purisima Concepción).  Nowadays, most schools don't make kids build a model as most of the work was, rather obviously, done by parents.  However, a few companies got smart and started making styrofoam model kits of the missions and selling little plastic accessories like farm animals and plants.  One of the things they make are these palm trees:

Tomb Kings Leaked & Gazing into the Future

Pictures of the upcoming Tomb Kings releases have leaked out over the internet like radioactive water from a broken down Japanese nuclear plant (too soon?).  For the best collection of pictures, try this link, which I found through Drinkin' and Modelin'.

Predictably, there’s new Tomb Guard (but no new skeletons).  However, the big news is the new big kits.  I’m seriously impressed with the sphinx kits - although the concept is not too much of a surprise since they were included in Warmaster many years ago. The giant serpent rider kit is, well, it’s interesting, I’ll give it that.  I wonder if the unridden version replaces the Tomb Scorpion.

After seeing the obscenely large Arachnarok Spider and the stomach churning Hell Pit Abomination, I’d been waiting for news of what the Tomb Kings would have in store in terms of big plastic kits.  I think these guys are sign of things to come.  GW has been getting very good at making larger plastic kits and I have the hunch that we’ll be seeing more of them with each new army book.

The fun part about all this is speculating what else may be coming down the pipe.  There are units out there that could easily be retooled into a bigger plastic kit: war hydras, ogres mounted on rhinox, treemen, dragon ogres, hell cannons.  Who knows what else GW might pull from the fluff and surprise us with.  I have my fingers crossed for a Coatl for my Lizardmen - check the background section of the army book, there's a picture of one!

Stegadon Finished