Thanks a lot Blue (in VT)...

I have known Blue in VT for a long time as he is a fellow Evil Stunty fan and we are both quite active on the CDO forum: http://www.chaos-dwarfs.com/forum/

Blue has been following my sculpting and painting escapades recently, and I found out he has a great and huge blog himself. I'm a digital idiot (I'm still trying to figure this blog thing out, how the hell do I move the menu to the left side of the page @#6^*$#@), but Blue has been keeping track of his Oldhammer and Marauder madness for quite a while already: http://bluesmarauders.blogspot.com/

So while browsing his blog I read his BOYL 2019 report and subsequent visit to Foundry (http://bluesmarauders.blogspot.com/2019/08/boyl-2019i-finally-made-it-pic-heavy.html), and there I found this picture:

A very clear picture of the original painted MM90 Chaos Dwarfs (by Aly Morisson) of the left side of Bryan Ansells cabinet that I hadn't seen before.

Now why is this a problem, you aks, be glad you say, enjoy you preach!? Well since Clam (https://clamshellsandseadogs.blogspot.com/) and myself have been doing a MM90 paintoff for the past two and a half year (yes,  I know, we are old and slow), where I am painting my miniatures in the original colour scheme. I just found out (thanks to that picture) that I have to paint a face on Hammer Slambo (inside the fricking helmet!), I have to completely redo the mace and hands on Red Big Ear guy and I have the complete wrong colour blue for Hand on Hammer dude...

So Blue (in VT), thanks a lot mate...

MM 90 painting countdown 13

So here we have number 13 and 14 actually...

I painted the one with his hand resting on his axe and I finished the crossbow dwarf.

Clam beat me to the punch by a mere few hours unfortunately...

Bottom left and bottom right are the new additions, both in blue.

StormCast interview with Aly Morrison

Great interview with info on Marauder and specifically Chaos Dwarfs. I learned for instance that there is only one Chaos Dwarf that is not based on an existing Chaos Warrior: Cousin It!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ivybQCK-9I

Skip to 20.40 minutesfor Marauder
Skip to 23.19 for Chaos Dwarfs

Filling Aly's gaps, part 2

So a while back I started sculpting the missing chaos dwarfs from a cut and paste sheet from Aly’s scetsch book. See this link:

https://evillittlebuggers.blogspot.com/2018/04/filling-alys-gaps-hmmm-that-came-out.html

Now i have finsished numbers two, three and four.

Number two is based on the crouching axe wielding warrior. And i get why Aly never sculpted this guy. Trying to pose a fully armoured human sized warrior is a challenge, let alone trying to do this with a dwarf, lacking knees and almost no arms to speak off. Anyways I managed to crank something out:

And then off to number three, a mini version of Slambo. Although officially this one was not on Aly's sheet of warriors, see my previous link and this blog:

http://eldritchepistles.blogspot.ae/2016/01/aly-morrisons-marauder-miniatures.html

I just felt that Slambo deserved his own mini-me. We have a double hammer wielding Marauder Chaos Dwarf, but we needed a proper one with axes and nobody wants to cut up original Marauder Chaos Dwarfs, now do we!? This mini almost sculpted itself it went without thought, as if Hashut himself guided my sculpting tool in order to get this tribute to one of the most iconic chaos miniatures done.

Number four is the scythe wielding warrior. Again due to lack of reach of those tiny dwarf arms combined with their fat bellies, I had to improvise on the pose a bit. I went for a horizontal scythe hold instead of a diagonal hold (yes Clam, it's going to suck to line them up). Lovely minature to sculpt, I added the croissant horn later, just to pay more tribute to the original minature. This was my first time sculpting chain mail gloves and my last, and i hate them, wouldn't be practical in combat and they look stupid...

Group shot and a shot where they are amongst the original Marauder CD's to show off size and style compatibility.

And the size comparison shot:

Two more are in the making, update to follow soon!

MM 90 painting countdown 15

So after Clam beating me to the punch in finishing his work the last two rounds, this time I took home the prize and finished first. It was Clams turn to choose the subject for this round and he chose MM90/2A:



Clam already dubbed him Hunchback, Quasimodo, so ill just call him Modo for short.


Straight forward green, blended highlight, ginger beard nothing fancy, few simple freehands on there.


Anyways, pictures;

The comparison:

MM90 painting countdown 16

So here is our next subject: Dauger. After the alleged man in the Iron Mask WIKI.

I have two samples of this miniature but both are very soft on detail, so I had to do some repairs.


So here you have it Clam, lets get it on!


Small update, not there yet, but getting there for sure!

And Clam beat me to punch again, basterd...

https://clamshellsandseadogs.blogspot.ae/2018/05/mm90-painting-countdown-17.html

He did a great purple version, but same like me this mini is terrible. Probably the worst in the range, details are soft, nothing on the mini of any interest, bland and boring... anyways the final product:

And a group shot, I've put him at the back, so we don't have to look at him too much, damn ugly Dauger...

MM90 painting countdown 17

So, Clam chose to go with mr. Big Ears (whom I dubbed Smith, after Will Smith because of the ea... ah well you got the idea) for the next challenge, and boy was it a close call. He managed to post his completed picture just minutes before me. I actually already finished Thursday evening, and was just checking out the CDO forum, and BAM, this Mr. Lamebeard had his completed work up already, even though he assured me that he would be busy and wouldn't have time to paint until Friday, basterd, can't trust a chaos dwarf now can you  >:-)

Anyways here is Clams attempt:

And here is my finished puppy.

It was a great mini to paint, I really focused on the big ears, because they draw all the attention.

And a group shot just for fun:

MM90 painting countdown 18

So this was a rather quick one, just plain full body armour bronze. I put a lot of highlights in there but it doesn't really show on the picture. Since I didn't have bronze I went with a mix of gold, brown and touch of black, highlighted by adding silver.


My good friend Clam dubbed him Miley Cyrus, because, obviously, the wrecking ball. I liked that reference but will keep it simple and just name him Cyrus, sounds a bit more manly also, and I don't want to hurt his feelings...


By the way this is my favourite of the MM90's so a bit sad that I had to paint it in such dull colours...

 

And a group shot of the work so far:



And the results of the battle so far, mine on the left Clam's on the right:

MM90 painting countdown: 19

So my dear friend Clam has called the next challenge after he finished his Spikem which can be seen here:


http://clamshellsandseadogs.blogspot.ae/2018/04/mm90-painting-countdown-24.html


He has chosen to paint MM90/6B

I must admit, that I hate painting yellow. so this one is going to be a challenge for me. Since Clam has accused me of cheating here is an unpainted picture:

And here is the work I've done yesterday, just base colours so far.

And finished, darn I have at least seven highlights on that yellow, but it still looks bland as heck, anyways, pics:

MM90 painting countdown 21 and 20

Over the weekend I had time to do some painting and added two to ranks of painted MM90's in the same colors as the originals: the sorcerer and the Assyrian looking bloke (or as I call them Garga and Pilsner, after my favorite bad guy sorcerer from the Smurfs; Gargamel, and after Tiglath Pileser III, founder of the first real Assyrian Empire).


For Garga is wanted to go full NMM, but I decided to do a mix so while incorporating many of the NMM techniques I still used the traditional gold glitter paint, but mixed in with normal paints.


For Pilsner I went with same approach to the gold parts and the greens are normal blended highlight, nothing fancy. Without further adoody, pics:

Group shot!

Filling Aly's gaps (hmmm, that came out wrong...)

Alright, this is about something completely different than the title suggests. A few months ago I wrote a post on my love for the MM90 Marauder Chaos Dwarfs.


http://evillittlebuggers.blogspot.ae/2018/02/the-marauder-mm90-chaos-dwarfs.html


Shortly after publishing this post I received a private message on the CDO forum from fellow member Threadbare, pointing out a post in Steve Casey's blog. This post contained pictures from Aly Morrisons personal sketchbook from his Marauder days.


http://eldritchepistles.blogspot.ae/2016/01/aly-morrisons-marauder-miniatures.html


Apparently Aly did a lot of sketches of miniatures he was planning to sculpt, so the post is full of lovely pictures of sketches that became actual Marauder miniatures. And of course my attention was drawn by the sketches of the Chaos Dwarfs!
A total of 17 of the ultimate 24 MM90 Chaos Dwarfs are sketched very recognizable in the book. It's impressive to see how close the actual sculpts turned out compared to the sketches, really shows that Aly knew what he was doing.


In the book there are not only sketches, Aly also used to paste some pictures in there for reference and inspiration I assume. And one specific page drew my attention; a page with 27 cut and pasted pictures of Citadel Chaos Warriors. Some of these pictures were crossed out while others were still blank. We all know that many of the MM90 Chaos Dwarfs are Mini-Me version of Citadel Chaos Warriors, and here we see the actual selection process went into that project.


But there are still gaps in the picture, and those gaps sparked my interest! Have a look at this picture:

In the picture I have crossed out all the Citadel Chaos Warriors that have a MM90 counterpart and I have circled the ones that were selected by Aly but never received their Mini-Me in the Marauder range.

Now I’m by no stretch a sculptor of the caliber of Aly Morrison but do manage to crank out a decent Chaos Dwarf on occasion. So that’s why I decided to start filling the gaps (finally, there is your topic title).

As my friend Clam has pointed out many many times I am not a fast sculptor. Besides work that requires me to travel a lot and my feeble attempts of building some sort of social life, sculpting isn’t a number one priority. But!!! I managed to make a start:

 

MM90 painting countdown: 22

And number three is done! This is the repaired 'Spike' (you see 'Spike' because on his helmet he has a... nah you get the idea). Also known as MM90 5D.
When I got this miniature it was properly mangled and some work went into fixing him up, see this post:


http://evillittlebuggers.blogspot.ae/2018/03/repairing-two-mm90-chaos-dwarfs.html


Now to add to the excitement (woopidoo!!), my fellow CD collector, Clam, proposed to turn it into a Paint of, see this post:


http://evillittlebuggers.blogspot.ae/2018/04/weve-got-challenge-on-our-hands-mm90.html


Well Clam, sorry to say, you are one behind (that's what you get for calling me slow back in 2012).


Without further ado, pictures:






Again, damn difficult to match the exact same colour blue, so not 100 percent happy but it will do for now!









Now it's up to Clam to choose the next one to paint, gives me some time to focus on sculpting, more on that later on!