Up until now I’ve exclusively been painting a bunch of Blindwater stuff here on Handcannon. My primary reason for being here though is to provide you with some tournament coverage from some european events. I like to travel around with my metal men and intend to go to both german and austrian events later in the summer and autumn. I like to take a lot of pictures and write a battlereport, but I tend to keep it rather humorous so don’t expect any deep analysis of the games I play.

Anyway, after two months of almost constant painting the day had finally come to bring a backpack full of hungry gatormen over the North Sea for a weekend of gaming in the European Team Championships. The event was being held at Maelstrom Games’ own venue the Eye of the Storm located in scenic Mansfield, England. Not too far from Sherwood Forest.

I was fortunate enough to have a designated left-handed driver on my team so the trip north from Gatwick airport went without a hitch. Formerly-briton-now-swede John handled the driving like a champ while I had a silent freakout every time we went into a roundabout.

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Tags: Army building, Battle, Blind Water Congregation, Convention, ETC, European Team challenge, Events, Farrow Briggands, Gators, Hordes, Privateer Press, Tournaments, Warbeast, Warjack, Warmachine

Yeah, I went ahead and skipped the 35pt milestone. I didn’t have a tutorial or battle report or anything to flesh it out with, and two pictures of my second Wrastler and Swamp Gobbers seemed kind of meager so I went straight to 50pts instead. I still don’t have any nuggets of wisdom but I do have plenty of pictures with some notes that I hope will appease you. Starting off with the family shot:

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Tags: Blind Water Congregation, Bog Trogs, Brine, ETC, Farrow Briggands, Gobbers, Gun boar, Lord Carver, Rorsh, Thrullg, Tier 4, Totem Hunter, War Hog, Wrastler

May is almost up and I’m way behind schedule with only 25pts completely done. Things have popped up here and there that I’ve not been able to foresee but that’s life as usual, eh? Not about to panic just yet since it looks like I’ll have much more time in June to get up to speed again.

Here come the new challengers!

Wrong Eye and his best buddy Snapjaw:

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Tags: Barnabus, Blind Water Congregation, ETC, Feralgeist, Gators, Painting, Painting Scales, Snapjaw, Wrong eye

I have good news and bad news. Good news is that I’ve reached the 15pts milestone! Barnabas and his buddies are merrily traversing my Zuzzy mat in search of fun and adventure.

Some close ups of the individual models:

Barney and his bestest buddy:

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Tags: Barnabus, Basing, Blind Water Congregation, European Team challenge, Gators, Minions, Painting, Privateer Press, Swamps

Crocs are cool. They and the boars seem to be the current vogue in Hordes. Unfortunately, I was never really happy with how the gators got painted in the studio. The colors are drab and swampy ( which is reasonable given that they are gators), but this just doesn’t fly with me. Monsters like the gators should be fantastic and should pop off the table – with awesomeness. Recently a rouge band of gators found their way onto my painting table, so I thought I would demonstrate how to put some razzle-dazzle in your croclgators.

Strangely enough there are only two really big gators found in the Minions book; Snapjaw and the Backhide Wrastler. In this article I will take you through the steps I took to paint the Blackhide. In this article I will primarily be talking about how to utilize non-white colors as highlights.

First a note about this model: This guy has a LOT of relief in it. There are many pointy spiky bits. It is a good idea to give his back an extra coat of primer ( preferably applied by hand). This way touching and rubbing of the back during general play is less likely to take paint off the model. The other thing to mention due to the relief is strain on your paintbrush. This guy doesn’t need a whole lot of precision since there are not a lot wide flat spaces. Use a brush you do care about that much for most of the painting. I used a synthetic size 1 I got for 3 dollars at the art store.

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Tags: Blind Water Congregation, Gators, Hordes, Miniature Painting, Minions, Painting, Painting Scales, Privateer Press

Those of you on the other side of the ocean opposite Euroland might not have heard about the European Team Championships. It’s (not surprisingly) a team event held by Maelstrom Games at their own venue The Eye of the Storm in the beginning of July where people from various European countries come to settle their cultural differences on arenas of pink stuff. Right now it’s looking to be a massive event with 42 teams registered, each consisting of four players.

Last year 104 participants ran the gauntlet with a Belgian team representing Cygnar, Circle, Khador and Cryx taking first place. This is the second time the event is being held and although I didn’t attend last year I’ll be the captain for a motley crew of swedes this time around. We’ll be bringing the northern fury for sure!

The format seems pretty fun. Each player has a single 50pt list and you’re not allowed to have any duplicate characters in the team. I won’t go into the details of the format but in short each team member scores battle points during their games that will contribute to the team tournament pool. In the end the team with the most points will win the tournament. Sportsmanship and painting also factor into this but not to the same extent as winning the actual matches. Teams also have some control over the pairings in each game.

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Tags: Barnabus, Blind Water Congregation, European Team challenge, Gators, Minions, Privateer Press