Wednesday, September 2, 2009

PAINTING: Mighty Empires...eventually

While I'm in the midst of my eBay selling extravaganza, and between long-term projects, I thought I'd spend a few hours painting my Mighty Empires tiles. I've had them since July 2007 but never got around to doing anything with them. The release of Planetary Empires gave me the push I needed to pull them out and paint them.

I've decided to paint both sets in the same colours so I can combine them freely. This has given me a few headaches in trying to tie the 40k and Fantasy gameworlds together.

The obvious choice, and one I immediately discarded, was to paint the tiles green and call the 40k tiles an agri-world. Boring!

My WFB army is Warriors of Chaos and my main opponent plays Dark ELves so I thought a rocky, snowy tile would represent rugged Norsca and the blasted terrain of Naggaroth and would translate well into 40k where it could stand in for an irradiated, nuclear winter type Hive world, an isolated death/feral world or even just a temperate world in winter. I wanted a few patches of colour on there to break things up with some greens and browns. Over the top I wanted a dusting of snow to tie everything together.


So far I have drybrushed the the tiles with Charadon Granite followed by Astronomican Grey, then picked out the edges of the rivers and the roads with Scorched Brown followed by Bestial Brown. I also painted the woodland Catachan Green then added some Astronomican Grey and some Desert Yellow for a further drybrush. This is too light I think, so I'll wash all the woodland with Thraka Green to reintroduce a deeper green.

I plan to wash the whole board with Devlan Mud (what else?) and Badab Black to tie it all in together. Of course I also need to paint the details like the rivers and cultivated fields.

The whole project should take no longer than a fortnight, fingers crossed.

5 comments:

  1. Looking good so far mate.
    I'd wanted to get some too as I think they look awesome for map based campaigns like. I just don't have the money.

    Mind you, its something I might buy at the end of the year when I come to spend my New Model Fund. They do look pretty snazzy, and I've got two spare tiles from when they came with WD when the fantasy one was released, so, should be a good buy.

    ReplyDelete
  2. So this begs the question... are you going to append your painting points to include terrain and/or campaign items?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Yeah, my WD tiles are mixed in there somewhere. I've also ordered four Hive city tiles from GW so when I combine the two Empires boxes together I could make a massive 102 tile map!

    ReplyDelete
  4. @FoxPhoenix135 - Excellent question, and one I've been mulling over for a while.

    On the one hand they aren't actually models but on the other they are still painting which takes time away from painting models.

    I'm acutely aware that I'm currently stuck on 61 painting points for the year with my target being 100 points. Will I reach that target, especially if I go on to paint my Planetary Empires tiles and then my Planetstrike terrain? Possibly not.

    At the moment I'm leaning towards NOT counting them as models which will force me to make a start on my AI models and my 40k Orks.

    ReplyDelete
  5. That is quite a cool site and idea. I am glad GW made them compatible and you scheme leaves it to be a nice generic feel.

    I suppose if you really wanted, you could flip them and paint them another colour - but I like your scheme.

    ReplyDelete