On the Painting Table: Spider Catapult and Yet More Spiders!

So I was building my Arachnarok Spider (haven’t quite finished painting it yet) and I went through a bit of a soul search about which build to use. None of the upgrades struck me as being that brilliant but I decided to definitely not use the catapult.

At least on the spider itself…

But who would want to waste a perfectly good catapult! And I didn’t already have a Rock Lobba in my army, so…

I am a huge fan of setting war machines on these dreadnought bases. It always makes them look like a mini-diorama and because you have to cram the miniatures on a little it always looks like a really bustly scene.

Using tooth picks as spikes and to support the catapult (the spider has a very similar structure really), I added the stand with the little forest goblin loader on. Then I stuck on a spare Night Goblin and two very old miniatures I had kicking around, courtesy of my friend Neil.

One of them is an Orc and the other, I guess, an old Night Goblin. I’m really like the way I positioned the goblins so they’re looking up at the loader – though it’s tricky to see on these pictures.

And now my spider army is all but complete. I’m a day or two away from completing my Arachnarok and here below are pictures of my last two mini spider units.

I went for a different angle here (filling out the units by the way with spare spiders from the Arachnarok kit).

I could have gone for another horde of forty but I decided to experiment with more manoeuvrable smaller units. Two units of ten will be able to distract my opponent hopefully and while they waste time killing them, my larger units can be doing what they do best!

I used the large spider from the Arachnarok kit here as a unit champion. Those are bits of shale he’s standing on.

Spotlight On... The Ogre Yhetees

Taking a trip to my local model shop in Christchurch, I spotted a pack of War God Wendigos.

Now these are beautiful miniatures that my good friend Joao had already purchased a couple of. Apparently they were no longer available so to find a little stash was great news! I gave him a call and asked him if he wanted me to buy them for him and before I knew it I'd bought some for myself! Which left me with the predicament of working out what to do with them.

And then I realised! Ogre Yhetees!

These really are nice models and so I wanted to do something really special but my other challenge was there were a little small compared to my Ogres. Since there were supposed to be stronger, how could I make this make sense?

I decided to make a sort of movement tray diorama to give the models some height, make them look cool and draw the eye away from their stature.

Building a cliff did the job but I needed each model to be individually removable without destroying the look.

I used balsa wood covered in all-purpose filler to make the cliff, painting it a variety of greys and adding a bit of foliage from a railway model shop to cover some of the gaps. That tree is a railway tree. The Yhetees themselves were painted dark grey, inked black then highlighted back through all the available shades of grey to white.

They're lovely to play with but a bit annoying. The Yhetee rules don't seem to be that competative and this unit costs 540 points - over wuarter of a 2,000 point army. With the new cover rules, their previously amazing move through cover rule is a bit useless and without armour or impact hits they aren't as good as they might be after a new army book is released.

On the other hand, they do look cool. And that's the most important thing.

Right?