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I've always been interested in painting, if not playing, warhammer fantasy, but never really got past painting a single model here and there. All that changed when I cashed in some store credit for a battalion box and several regiment boxes worth of chaos. My fascination with knights has always been a driving force in my artwork, and it was natural to go with the newly revamped heavy armor of the game.
I discovered that there had been several mistakes in the packaging of the battalion box, and that I had been shorted on sprues. I called GW for help, and the man I spoke with told me that new sprues were on their way. What he didn't tell me was that those sprues were bringing reinforcements. A week later I was surprised to find two complete regiment boxes on my front doorstep. Now that's service!
So I got down to it, cutting, cleaning, gluing; getting ready to dive back into the process of building an army.
Chaos Warhounds
For what you pay, the Chaos Warhound box is a tidy little package that will give you exactly what you need. Nothing more, nothing less.
The molds are designed with little customization in mind. Each body is two halves, which dictates the pose of the model. The tails and horns are left separate to allow some play, but for the most part you're going to end up with exactly what you started out with. Nice clean molds here, with dynamic poses that rank up easily.
One easy way to extend the shelf life of models in the unit is to vary your color schemes. Here I'm working with what is essentially the same palate mixed up in different combinations to create the illusion of a greater variety. As long as you keep the colors in the same family, you can really add a lot of interest without having to spend a ton of extra time.
One thing that's absolutely a must-do before you prime is to put a thin strip of greenstuff across the back of the hound as well as the bridge of the nose. Even a clean fit between the two halves will leave a line bisecting your Warhound, and the ten minutes it takes to fix is well worth it.
All in all a great little box that can be assembled and painted quickly.
Marauders of Chaos
This box offers a ton of variety and extras to make sure that even when you build a massive number of them, you still can have a unit of 20+ marauders that all look different. The one option that isn't represented in plastic is light armor. As a stand in, I painted over the bare chests and gave them extra armor bits.
One clever thing I noticed the sculptors did to help in the assembly process for flails: the wrist guards for the different arms are made to match. So if you lose your spot and don't know which supporting arm is suppose to be glued to which flail arm, just compare wrist guards. It's not as "bone-head" obvious as the newer plastics where they stamp letters into the contact points, but still a nice touch.
This is an older box that has really stood the test of time. The components are clean, the sculpts look competitive despite the advances in molding technology these past few years, and there's enough bits to ensure you'll always have what you need to finish the job... and several others. If you're looking for a box to kitbash into an existing force to give it a nordic overtone (space wolves, et al.), this is the box for you.
Chaos Champion: Khorne
The one who started it all.
I picked him up to paint "just for fun", or so I told myself at the time. In reality, whether I was willing to admit it or not, I was trying this guy out to see how I felt about painting knights. The answer is self-evident.
And so it was that I was on my way to forming a full Warriors of Chaos army. What lay ahead of my humble beginnings were two of the most difficult units I've ever had to paint, 20 man blocks of chaos warriors!
