The unit is made-up entirely of classic early 90s Citadel forest goblins, sculpted by gobbo master Kev Adams. The unit, equipped with two handed weapons, is worth a whopping 141.5 points (and that's including the Big Boss)! 

The depth picture, to prove all the little bastards have been properly painted!

So, the points :

30 Forest Goblins w 2 handed weapons, including standard & musician & Big Boss : 141.5 pts
3 Fanatics : 90pts

Total : 231.5pts

And we finish the new year celebrations with another classic, a sorcerer of Tzeentch from the Lost and the Damned days. I've had this figure for 25 years but never painted it. It used to come with a Disk and a flying stem but those were lost a long time ago. Fortunately he doesn't look out of place on his two feet.


The figure was also a test for future colour schemes for my Tzeentch forces; I find my orange recipe will need a bit more work but I'm quite happy with the turquoise and the yellow. He's another figure I intend to use in my second chaos army but who I can use in RoC warbands. I now have at least a champion for each of the chaos gods.


And here is a family portrait of the three classic Champions I recently painted. They were submitted in the Analogue Hobby Painting Challenge "Nostalgia" bonus round.

Another classic today! Crazy, I know. And this one might just be the most iconic of all Chaos Champions, he's like the poster child for fantastic imaginative sculpting of the 80s.

"Farewell, my friend. I was a thousand times more evil than thou!".

A triple row of teeth meeting like the teeth of a comb, the face and ears of a human being, blood-red color eyes, a lion's body, inflicting stings with its tail like a scorpion...with a special appetite for human flesh!

One of the things I love about the old Warhammer editions is the numerous monsters available. It is perfectly acceptable to have in your army a few of them, from good Elementals to various Chaos creatures. As it should be, really, I mean we are talking about a fantasy world goddammit!

Citadel produced a number of monsters in the 80s, and of course Chaos being the favourite child (lets not kid ourselves here) a wide selection of Chaos critters were sculpted. Many of these were stand alone beasts, and not the mandatory heroe's mounts like we see today. They were also often of "normal", as in "human" size. The following Manticore is such a sculpt. It was designed by the master Jes Goodwin in the mid-80s and is probably my favourite Manticore sculpt to this day. A good Manticore should always look like its in a very bad mood and this one fits the bill!

It is smaller than the recent offering by GW, but to me the Manticore was never meant to be a gigantic beast. I was surely influenced in this view in part by the well known cover of "The Shamutanti Hills", from the Sorcery! series of Fighting Fantasy books. A creature doesn't have to be the size of a Dragon to be terrifying!


The Manticore has the body of a lion, a human head with three rows of sharp teeth (like a shark), bat-like wings, and a trumpet-like voice.


I went pretty conventional on the painting, with a classic beige for the lion body and some dark purple for the wings and scorpion tail. I did modify slightly the position of the wings, I just prefer the look. I love the animation of this model, I find Jes Goodwin has really nailed the feline slow and predatory walking stance.


The base was made with cork, accompanied by the remnants of a skeleton to add a little atmosphere to the piece (he is a man eater after all).


Another nice addition to my Chaos bestiary. In my young days, I used to be afraid of painting these creatures, but they are a lot of fun and a great change of pace between unit painting. After painting a Griffon and now a Manticore, I'll probably need to paint a Chimera soon, I figure!

The Champion of Khorne finally broke through the hordes of enemies. Now no-one stood behind him and the Wizard. He started up the rise and was suddenly crippled by the heat of a debilitating fever. He staggered to a halt and fell to his knees, axe dropping from sweaty hands. Too weak to resist, he watched in helpless horror as the Wizard closed to deliver the death blow.

Chaos sorcerers hold a special place in my hearth, as I would always pick one when playing RoC Warbands in my young days. For you see, I was that guy who always played the wizard in all RPGs. I think it all started because of the Sorcery! "Fighting Fantasy" series and from that point most of my characters were practionners of magic.

 Citadel produced a number of fantastic looking sorcerers in the 80s, and I happen to have a few in my collection.

That Nurgle sorcerer with the staff (top right corner) has been eluding me for years, if anyone has a spare they'd be willing to part with...

The first two sorcerers I decided to paint are true classics, and have fought many a battle for me in the early 90s! So I rewarded them both with a new paint job. Now of course with accompanying familiars (I was always too lazy to paint those as a kid!)

I shall call him "Mini-Me"

The sorcerer above has a very different colour scheme from the rest of the army, just because I felt like doing something different (I will also admit being a fan of the colour pink), so I went with the green flame to tie him with the rest of my force. I also think it looks more chaotic than the classic red flame. I just used reverse colours for the familiar, something I picked up from Napoleonics!


I just love this figure by Jes Goodwin. You can see the inspiration behind the later Chaos Lord figure
I went with my main colour scheme on this figure but with a deeper green i've recently been experimenting with, using the Andrea green paint set.

I will probably use these two as undivided chaos sorcerers (although they could be used respectively as Slaanesh and Nurgle sorcerers in a pinch). We do not use a lot of magic in our games anymore, at least not when playing Warhammer, so I really do not need more than two wizards...but I'll probably end up painting a few more, just because I like the models so much. They can always be used as Chaos Champions.

Guttering flames from the spilt oil illuminated a nightmare scene of flashing swords and spouting blood as the Beastmen literally hacked their enemies apart in an orgy of unallayed savagery. In less than a minute the human were all dead - a pile of broken bodies and limbs. A slow stream of human blood trickled over the stone and extinguished the flames of the broken lanterns. All was dark and quiet in the forest once more.

In the old days of lore (the 80s!), the Beastmen were an integral part of any Chaos army, providing the Chaos Lord with a (relatively) cheap and plentiful option to help offset the crazy expensive elite units of Chaos Warriors and Knights. Their high toughness and wound scores also made them annoyingly difficult to deal with for any opposing general.

They fitted perfectly well in a Chaos army, twisted and bloodthirsty abominations of the Chaos Gods, always willing to take arms and ravage the lands of men or just fight each other! Eventually, Games Workshop, in their infinite wisdom decided to split them from their Chaos Warriors brothers (the horror). The foolishness of it all...anyways.

The older Beastmen were really cool models, especially because they were really beastmen, and not only goatmen. You had dogs, goats, bulls, wolves and all manner of beasts models available. And, of course. so. much. variety. As it is written in The Lost and the Damned "However Beastmen are Children of Chaos itself, and their mutated bodies can be twisted into all kinds of bestial shape". Damn straight!


My unit of Beastmen is the biggest of my army to date at 20 models, and although I have a few duplicates its almost all different models. 


The Beastman champion and the musician are newer models of the 90s, but they fit really well and the Champion's scale creep quite works well here, giving him an imposing stature compared to his brethren. As usual, I used shades of green to tie the unit with the rest of my army. I think it works surprisingly well with the Champion. The halves and quarters of the shields are, I must admit, a rarely seen pattern for Beastmen, but just green shields did not work well with these guys and, well, I'm just really, really bad at freehands! Still, I'm happy with the results.

When I showed them to Laurie my girlfriend, she said "I really like them, but its just sad that we can't really see them well all tight in their unit." She's right, of course, so here are the close-ups.



The Oldhammerers will notice I happily mix Khorne and Slaanesh Beastmen models in the same unit. I just really like the models, and I don't see myself painting 4 Beastmen unit, one for each God.This part of my army is undivided after all, so they are all a big happy family ;-)

The "Minotaur" Beastmen (second from the right) is probably my favourite Beastmen model, ever. It took some efforts on Ebay to find him!

A close-up of my Champion. I really enjoyed painting him. For all the shit I give them, one must admit GW has produced some really good stuff after the 80s and this model is certainly one of them. 
Its not really visible on the pictures because of the shadows, but for a very, very rare time I painted blood (on his axe). It just seemed to fit the model. 


Next on my painting table, some Chaos sorcerers. Although I've been recently challenged in an Old School painting competition over on the Facebook Old School miniature group. Which I might join. I cannot use the sorcerers for the challenge since some paint has already been applied. Not sure yet what model I will use. A few models are currently looking at me on the painting table "pick me, oh pick me"

The most feared of all Chaotic humans are those who openly devote their lives to its worship. Amongst them are Warrior of Chaos, human warriors who have sold their souls in return for strength and power. Those who make such a bargain are tragic figures for they know that they will gain immense powers, but only a fool could hope to survive unscathed. The Warrior of Chaos enjoys a meteoric rise to glory, followed, more often than not, by a swift collapse into bestiality and madness.

Can't really do a proper Chaos army without Chaos Warriors, now can we? 

The Chaos Warriors of the 3rd edition really represented what Chaos Warriors are supposed to be; diverse, mutated and wearing twisted full plate armour. Key word here being diverse. I can't help but laugh at the new all-identical Chaos Warriors of GW. Hmm...Anyways I digress...I see these guys as the undisputed kings of the battlefield. Sure, the knights are more glamorous, but real warriors fight on foot!
I have no idea how many individual Chaos Warriors were produced from the mid 80s to the early 90s, but there is a lot (and I mean a lot) of choice available!

One of many pages of Chaos Warriors made in the 80s

I'm not into collecting them all or anything like that. I like most of them, so really I just try to get my hands on as many as I can! I'd like one day to have at least a small unit of Warriors from each Chaos god, plus one unit of undivided warriors. To do this I like to mix warriors and champions in the same units, to create varied units with no duplicates.

The grinning warrior is one of my all-time favourite

Not surprisingly for those following my progress, I painted my first unit as Undivided Chaos Warriors. Most of the models are warriors or champions from the Citadel Realm of Chaos ranges, although one is a Marauder models. It's a shame really Marauder only ever produced three chaos warriors (see left picture).

 Most of the figures below were from my old collection, and most were horribly painted and needed a good Simple Green bath before I could start working on them. Makes me proud to see them finally having a proper paint job after all those years wasting away in a box. 


I kept to the green and black colour scheme of my Chaos army, although going for a slightly less vivid green than the Chaos Dwarfs. At 15 Warriors, its definitely a very big (and expensive!) unit for Warhammer 3rd edition, but the bigger size will work well if I want to play other recent editions or other fantasy rule sets. I might also use them as Marauder instead of Warriors when playing the 3rd edition. And, well, big units do look pretty good!


The blackened armour was created using chainmail drybrush on black, followed by a wash of badab black. The brass parts on the armour were done by successive sepia and black washes over a chainmail base. Most details were picked up using my standard 3 layer technique, often followed by a glaze or wash to bring out the details.


As for the rest of my army, I will add a banner later after making some tests.





Up until now everything I have shown in this blog was painted in the last 9 months. It was originally posted on my historical blog but I thought it was logical to post them here for all my new readers to see. From this point forward, we will move on to newly painted stuff. My Beastmen should be first on that list. I varnished them yesterday and I expect to take some pics in the coming days. 

Also expect in the coming weeks some posts on army building, my want list and collecting efforts, and a current inventory of my Chaos collection.