Lighning Strikes! A Night Lords painting tutorial

I recently offered to share how I paint the lightning effects on my Night Lord models.  It's always best to start something like this by saying there are many ways to accomplish this out there, this isn't necessarily the best, but it's what I like and it works for me so if you like you can give it a go and add it to your bag of hobby tricks.  Best practices usually end up in my possession by way of learning how someone else did something I like or doing something wrong enough times.  This freehand method owes to more than a few helpful teachers and all sorts of trial and error on my part.

In Midnight Clad Again

Over the years I have dabbled in a lot of 40k forces.  On the blog I have posted on the Imperial Guard and the Dark Eldar.  The Dark Eldar are a rather young project as far as my hobbying go and while the Guard are probably my longest running on again, off again running back into the mid 90s it's debatable if I ever had a cohesive, themed force mustered for a single game in all of those years.  The VIII Legion are the only army that have ever had that distinction for me and in the course of a decade and a half there have been six distinct incarnations of my Night Lord armies.  What follows is a retrospective and yet another resurrection of the army I never truly leave behind this time as a skirmish level "art scale" project for Shadow War: Armageddon or some form of Inq28 in the future.

Tutorial: The Lights Went Out in Georgia

I was pleasantly surprised by the number of people who stopped by and checked out the rust tutorial I posted last week.  I like to share my completed projects but people also appreciate learning something and taking something away to use in their own hobby.  I enjoy sharing completed projects but there is an old adage goes about teaching men to fish.  If I can make the additional time to document the, "what I did" or, "how to" components in projects I will try to include some more of that in the future.  This time around I made some utility poles to dress up my boards.  These are fairly simple to make, reasonably economical, and most importantly I think they look the part.  These poles should look right at home along a lonely road in the Wastelands or in the rotton core of a walker infested town.

Tutorial: Simple Rust Effects

Sometimes half measures work out.  Over the years I've read about, tried and seen all sorts of methods for simulating rust on miniatures and terrain pieces.  Some work. some not so much.  From finding the brightest orange paint on hand and smearing it to, "real live" iron oxide particles captured for your modelling pleasure there are all sorts of methods to suit most hobbyists budgets and need for veracity.  This is one of mine I've used that tries to walk a line between simplicity and a fair visual representation.

TWD: Things

Since I ran out of miniatures to paint for my Walking Dead project I have been focusing on making terrain pieces to use on the board.  Initially my plan was to work at replacing the card counters included in my core set but I have also made some other pieces as well.

TWD Board: The Lay of the Land

Somewhere between painting up the miniatures included in the core set and getting the scenery counters started I had a look at the printed game mat.  It is a 20"x20" folded paper mat depicting an intersection somewhere within the zombie apocalypse.  "Fixed" terrain representations don't normally interest me but in the big picture it's intended to be modular with other map releases that can be butted together to make varied game areas.

TWD Survivors: No More Kid's Stuff

The 6 survivors are done and with them the contents of the Walking Dead core set are now complete.  At just 18 models this is probably a negligible achievement to most but I am a slow painter and easily distracted by other projects so I will take my victories where I can get them.