Agreed, came here to comment on the great beards!
Started work on my general. I’ve been putting off doing it because I want to get it right. It’s been an intimidating project haha. Anyway here is your introduction to my warlord: Oxymandias The Mad
His name and character is inspired by Ozymandias by Percy Shelley:
“I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Early on I had this model planned. I love the poem and it’s themes of hubris and utter belief in the immortality of ones achievements - it fits the greedy, self assured and cruel industrialists we all know and love. They believe themselves superior to all and what they build, they build to last.
The idea was of the chaos dwarf lord standing upon an edifice of himself as it slowly sinks into the lava and melts away similiar to the half buried statue in the poem. Whilst he stands defiantly upon it he’s ignoring the inevitable and daring anyone to tell him his works won’t last forever! I want it to look like a kind of furious last stand against time and nature itself. In my head - time wise - it’s probably a chaos dwarf in the final days of the end times surrounded by orcs on the steps of Zharr Naggrund as his city burns.
Anyway enough geeking out about my inspiration and head canon. Here’s the first WIP of Oxymandias the mad…
Hoping to get some more work done on him over the weekend!
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Very cool base but the favourite piece is the cloak, looks like a perfect fit for the pose
Great colours as always, I really like the Taurus topped hat 
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Have to agree. Lovely base on him. Like the embellished axe as well. It’s too bad he’s not going to finish sinking into the lava shortly… Kidding… Well done!
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Very cool, he looks like standing on a rock of the coast of the sea of fire!
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Iron Golem completed!
Made using a converted scotia grendel golem. I aimed for chaos dwarf but think I landed on doctor robotnik? either way I think it works haha.
Anyone who’s been following my first forays into sculpting In a separate blog may recognise that statue melting into the lava. The model wasn’t of a high enough quality to join the army and was wrongly scaled to be a dwarf but dirtied up and drybrushed i think it makes a pretty convincing statue!
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Great work, and good use of the statue as well! 
Seeing this reminds me of my version of a Scotia Grendel Golem which I think never got painted.
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I think the golem landed on Chaos Dwarf spot-on! It looks really cool. The statue is also a great idea, it works perfectly with your mini. And cool base as always. 
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Awesome! Didn’t notice your used one before @tjub!
The drawing pin hats - I stole that idea
I think this one is more a case of “great minds think alike” 
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Looks like today’s lockdown won’t be so dull! Looking forward to working on and posting this guy!!!
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Oooooooooooh!! I can’t wait to see this 
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I’ve been having a hobgoblins issue. My army has been severely lacking any of the sneaky little sods. So this weekend I put a fix to that!
I started off with some em4 miniatures orcs. They are very basic but also very very cheap. 20p each I believe.
They are more 25mm than 28 so they scale well as hobgobbos being taller than goblins and smaller than orcs. They come with integral bases like old heroquest minis so i removed these and used the offcuts to make the rocks on their new circle bases.
(As you can tell from the picture i did this in the garden as it was a gorgeous day!)
Then I had to de-orc them. I attacked the faces with greenstuff to give them a rudimentary rhinoplasty and pointed chins. I also had a play around at adding points to their hoods.
Then they were ready to paint. I stuck with grey skin tones like I did for my orcs. I don’t know why but green just didn’t fit the colours I’m going with in this army and would make em stick out too much.
These were seriously fun to paint. And made a nice change from beards and scale mail! Haha.
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My Hashut, these are pretty freaking awesome!
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Grandiose conversion of the models! Kudos!
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Hello fellow Hashut heads - latest model is my banner bearer all finished. Really happy with how he came out. @Fuggit_Khan ‘s sculpt was an absolute joy to paint and was also really informative as I’ve been fiddling about with learning a bit of sculpting myself lately. Lots of good ideas to steal.
Hope you don’t mind @Admiral but when he arrived with that little card I was inspired for the banner. So he’s kind of a banner bearer/advertising guy for your etsy store!
Here he is:
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Haha, wonderful… Love both the model and banner! Your style with bold highlights almost make me want to repaint my stuff, and that face is just so good. Are there any basic tips/techniques you use?
All my main techniques are below.
A poorly explained run through of how I painted this dude.
Not sure really - very much self taught with painting so don’t always know the names of techniques etc just experiment and do what I do haha. I’ll try to describe some of the effects i try and get.
Lava axe and banner
The lava, axe, and banner all just play with gradients of light to dark or one colour to the next. On the lava and axe I start with the darkest red I can - which is contrast flesh tearers but over a black undercoat. Makes them i move onto dark red. Next I move into blood red, orange, yellow, then off white. After each stage i water down a 50/50 mix of the two colours I’ve just put next to each other and I wash over them to try and tie them together. This might be called glazing? I don’t actually lie haha.
Axe was identical except afterwards I did the lighting effects. However it looked a tiny bit flat and I wasn’t sure to sort out the edge highlighting on it. Texted a mate of mine (who was also up painting at 1am on a Monday…because lockdown haha) and he suggested I edge highlight but change the colour of the highlight as I move up the axe. The bit that’s dark red gets a red highlight. The bit that’s red gets an orange highlight. The bit that’s orange gets a yellow highlight didn’t get any because the off white lightning was there already and I didn’t want to draw the eye away from it.
Before and after edge highlighting on the axe:
It’s a subtle difference but I think without the highlight it does look a little flat.
The banner is a much simpler version of this moving from grey to white or black to dark grey depending on the bit. I did all the freehand first then did the highlighting.
The Eye
The eye is one in a similiar way to lava and axe but I do the whole thing while it’s all still wet. Instead of doing the glazing bit i drag bits of colour away the centre outwards to create a sort of iris looking effect. Also the blend is much more extreme going from yellow to red to black in a short space of time. After this I added washes of yellow in the centre, red in the middle and black on the edge and while all three were wet I blended then roughly again - this time dragging towards the centre. then to make it pop I painted the outermost bit purée black and freehanded black veins going in. Then I painted the very centre a bright yellow and dragged bits outwards while still wet. I then paint the pupil black.
Next is a weird trick I’ve picked up. I bought army painter dark tone a little while ago when I couldn’t get nuln oil. The main criticism of the paint is it leaves a very glossy finish. The army painter method seems to expect the user to matt varnish at the end so I guess if I varnished it wouldn’t matter but I’m terrified of spraying anything on a finished model haha!
So using this dark wash, I mix it 50% with water maybe even more and slap it all over the eye (this works well with gems too). It’s watered down enough that the pigment has basically no effect but the medium retains its glossy finish making the eye shine. Some kind of gloss varnish or medium I’m sure would do the same job. It’s just what I have to hand and it works for me :).
The white dots were last. I did them last as I was scared that the last wash would discolour pure white.
The face
The face was painted big man’s glow. When dry I did a layer of elf flesh by army painter (I think that’s what it’s called - maybe it was barbarian flesh?) then I mixed 50/50 water with guliman flesh contrast and washed it all down. The eye sockets are made a little more sinister by then dropping magos purple contrast into them giving them a kind of sickly look. I then highlight with the original flesh colour which now appears much lighter because of the GUliman wash. The nose tip and lips are pinked up by first of all using contrast volpus pink on the nose tip. Then I mix volpus pink with off white and paint the nose tip. To blend them I then get that mix I just made and dry brush it up then finally get volpus pink mixed with water and wash it down. (A lot of work for a pink nose tip I know haha)
Eyes are very basic - lights grey and a black dot for the pupil! (Had to redo the left eye as I messed this up at first and had both eyes looking in very different directions!)
Hope that answers some questions mate? Sorry it’s a bit of an essay haha - again I don’t always know how to explain what I do haha.
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Wow, excellent Hobgoblin conversions and standard bearer! The painting is top notch as ever, and the freehand banner is stunning together with the character’s colours.
May we by any chance use some of your photos for the standard bearer’s Etsy page and Facebook? Due credit given, of course (if yes, please tell if we should refer to you as Oxymandias or by other name).
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Of course mate!!!
I go by far too many names on the interweb 
- should probably start streamlining them into one handle to be honest haha. Oxymandias is my chaos dwarf lord’s name and my screen name here seeing as it’s all dawi-Zharr focussed but my most active/easy to access hobby blog is probably my twitter handle “@cimmeriangamer”
So maybe credit as “Jac Bottjer (@cimmeriangamer)” ?
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