I'M BACK FROM THE DEAD!!

Save your prayers, 

Don't bless my bones, 

Erase my name from my headstone...

It is fair to say that my 2023 did not have a very good start. 

There was a lot that went wrong over the new year, but one of the worst parts - and the part that's most relevant here - concerns a lady who was friends with my parents. We'll call her Sarah. Growing up, Sarah was pretty much the closest thing I had to an aunt. My biological aunt lived a long way away and did not really have that much presence in my life except for the occasional visit and a couple of trips to Christchurch. But I spent a lot of time with Sarah as a kid, not only from the frequent visits my parents made to her house but also day outings where she looked after me when my parents couldn't by taking me to the zoo. Most notably, she also gave me one of my deepest, closest and longest friends, Katy The Kakapo, who kept vigil over my bed for about a decade or so. 

Anyway, at the end of last year I found out that Sarah now has something the doctors called Cerebral Decay. My understanding is that it is similar to if not synonymous with Alzheimer's. 

Visiting Sarah to check up on her was... quite an experience. Sarah was even in her later years sharp as a razor. She had multiple academic credits, read a massive range of literature, and was until very recently learning both French and Arabic. To go from talking with someone like that to talking with someone who was... not... is a feeling that there is no word in Orcish, Elvish or the language of The Ents for. 

Then I also learnt that my Grandparent-in-all-but-name had also had a heart attack while I was occupied elsewhere (fortunately they survived, but still). This left me spending most of the new year staring down the barrel of mortality and a world that was vanishing even more rapidly than I thought. 

When Forest Gump found himself facing the concept of mortality, he responded by running a marathon across the United States. It turns out when I find myself grappling with mortality I respond by burying myself in model painting. 

The first project of this year was the biggest model I've ever painted thus far. A few years ago I purchased a Castle with the aim to painting it and using it for Warhammer games in the future. Last year I resolved to paint it in the coming new year as a Summer Project. 

It took me over two months, six times longer than I had originally anticipated. But by god, I did it. 

This had been sometime coming. Ever since I first got into Warhammer I knew I wanted to have a fully painted Warhammer Fortress set for use in games. You see, I have this sick perverted disgusting fantasy of one day playing map campaigns of Warhammer using the Mighty Empires tiles, with rules for constructing castles (again using the Mighty Empires castle markers) in territories you control, and a rule where if an army attacks a tile with a Castle on it then they play out a Siege game with the Warhammer Fortress castle on the table. 

But it was a revelation last year that expedited the castle's painting and assembly. See, there are a few people in the local area who are Warhammer 6th edition curious. Some even have armies built with an eye towards using them in 6th edition. This is of course excellent news, except that due to various factors most of these other armies are tiny - only around 1500 points in size, as they're still under construction. This leaves a lot of my regular 4000-5000 point Wood Elf force unable to be brought to bear in its full glory (ironically, this is the opposite situation to Warhammer 40,000, where I am the one desperately struggling to cobble together enough models to reach small scale skirmish size against much larger and more established model collections). 

However, towards the end of last year I had a realisation. You see, in 6th edition Siege games are asymmetric - the attacking army has twice as many models as the besiged army. That means that if I can get these other people playing Sieges as the defenders, I can match their 1500 point armies with 3000 points of my own and get a much larger portion of models on the table! The first step towards this is of course a Castle to besiege, so here we are. 

There was a cost to this though, as several planned features of the castle were sacrificed and never made it to the finished model. In particular the towers were originally going to be pinned on the upper story, allowing for metal arrow slits to be attached and interchanged with plastic door pieces to provide options for expanding the castle with extra walls and towers. As it was I was unable to source a set of GW Arrow Slit pieces, so that feature ended up being discarded to simplify the construction process and speed up actually getting the thing painted and on the table. 

The painting itself was a mixed experience. The actual painting work was simple enough, as the entire model is almost completely drybrushed, but the sheer scale of the model and volume of surface area to paint in very monotonous greys ended up dragging the process out much longer than it needed to take. The towers were particularly bad, given that they had almost twice as many faces to paint as the walls. I am very tickled by the result though, a lovely white stone effect directly based off the GW Studio castle model featured in the army book for this castle's future masters that will be moving in soon... 

In the mean-time it will be under the protection of whatever armies my Wood Elves will be opposing. Eventually. I'm still not quite fully ready to play Siege games yet, as I still lack siege equipment for my own army. 

What my own army does have though, is its first two fully painted Rare choices, a pair of Great Eagles. 

 

The Great Eagles have always been one of my favourite Warhammer units. I have always been very fond of birds of all kinds, and Raptors have held a particular place in my heart since I was a kid (not the same central place as parrots of course, but close nonetheless). So when one day I happened to be browsing the wall of blister packs at the local GW store and happened upon the Warhammer section with its distinctive red blister packs, and my eye fell upon a blister pack for a High Elf Great Eagle I was immediately intrigued, because the idea of a fantasy army with giant eagles in it did seem a lot cooler than the fantasy offerings I normally found. And the more I thought about it the more right it felt to have giant eagles as a monster for the Good Guys to have on their side against the Trolls and Giants and assorted Big Scaly Things that the Bad Guys always seemed to have. 

Of course, as history shows, it still wasn't enough to get me actually invested in fantasy stuff, but it was another little signpost along the way. And when I started up with Wood Elves, I was only too delighted to learn that they too could take Great Eagles as a support unit. 

These guys are of course the classic 6th edition Warhammer eagle, released in 2005-2006 in glorious solid metal for the 6th edition Wood Elf release. If you were to purchase one, this is what you would have got: 

They were a dream to paint. The hardest part was getting the undercoat on, which took several days to get all the nooks and crannies on the sculpts covered. After that and a basecoat of Dryad Bark, it was just a series of dry brushes. The body and forewings were drybrushed with... well basically every brown in the Citadel Paint range from darkest to lightest, starting with Rhinox Hide Scorched Brown over the basecoat, followed by Doombull Brown Dark Flesh, then Mournfang Brown Bestial Brown, then Skrag Brown Vermin Brown, followed by a final dusting of Steel Legion Drab Graveyard Earth to mellow out some of the more vividly bright hues. The inner wings were done with Dawnstone Codex Grey over the basecoat followed by Administratum Grey Fortress Grey, and the wingtip feathers were painted with Ungor Flesh Bronzed Flesh and Ushabti Bone Bleached Bone over the base colour. 

These are also notworthy for being the first Warhammer models where I've really bothered to paint the eyes. Normally for the other Warhammer models I'm content to just leave the eyes shaded in the base colour, or an occasional dot for monsters and creatures, but that just felt like a disservice for animals that are legendary for their fantastic eyesight, so after studying some reference pictures of real life Raptor eyes, I picked them out in yellow and then put a small circular dot of black at the centre of each eye for a pupil - it helps that Raptor pupils are completely perfectly circular, which is an easy shape to paint at small scales. 

Finally, I decided to give their bases a little something extra and populated them with some spare doodads from the Glade Guard sprue, most notably some skulls and a Spite each (Haast's is from the Glade Rider sprue). I had wanted to use the larger Gor skulls that come with the Dryad sprue, but I appear to have used up my entire supply of them elsewhere, so I had to resort to multiple Ungor Skulls from the Glade Guard kit to showcase the healthy appetites and superb hunting skills of these majestic predators. I then tried to place the Spites foward to suggest them becoming startled and scattering before the diving and swooping eagles as they make their attack. 

And so here they are, ready to rescue any of my Wizards that end up captured and imprisoned at the top of a very tall tower.