For my Tzeentchian cult I want a proper mix of Chaos monstrosities and other dubious characters. Those that have been following me for a while will know that alongside humans and daemons a few beastmen are an absolute must in my book. Plus I’ve been wanting to paint some of the new Tzaangors since they were first released back in November of 2016 (which I guess means they’re not exactly new are they? Time I got on with it then eh!). I really like these models but they are hellishly fiddly to paint, you’ve got to be in the mood for all the little details if you’re going to do them justice. The other thing which delayed me has been trying to choose a suitable colour scheme, I’m not overly enamoured of the blue skin used by the Games Workshop studio team, despite weird colours being very much part of Tzeentch’s repertoire I want something a little more natural for mine. Of course when it comes to Tzeentch natural is a relative term…
However that doesn’t mean I’ve packed the blue paints away – in fact they’ve been hard at work as I powered through a few more Blue Horrors.
Some readers may recall this partly-pink Blue Horror which I showed recently.
He got quite a good response from everyone who saw him and I enjoyed painting him so much that I took the idea even further with this one. Don’t worry though, it’s not a trick I’m planning to overuse until it descends into cliché, I’ll keep the others relatively normal looking and blue from now on.
Lastly I painted up a few more Brimstone Horrors, so that should those Blue Horrors meet their unnatural end they too can divide into malevolent magical sprites. I painted the first one as living flame in the same style as the studio models but with these I decided to go for a range of different colours. That way in the middle of a game it’s easier to point out exactly which one you’re talking about “I’ll attack the green one” rather than “No the one on the left, no my left, no not that one… etc”. Who could have guessed that someday I’d use gaming rather than purely aesthetic reasons for choosing a paint scheme – it seems we live in strange and interesting times indeed! That said I reckon the range of bright colours look great, they were fun to do and they add to the Tzeentchian aesthetic so it’s all to the good.
Anyway, that’s it for the moment, I’ve still got various other Tzeentchian oddballs sitting around on the desk and at the moment I’m not sure which I’ll tackle next, but I’ll aim to have something else finished for the Changer of Ways by the end of the week.
Convert or Die 
January 11th, 2021 at 7:37 am
Great painting once again, I especially like the tentacles on the Tzaangor and the blue Brimstone Horror
January 11th, 2021 at 9:46 pm
Thank you! I really struggled to come up with an idea I liked for the Tzaangor’s tentacles but I’m pleased with what I ended up going for, and it ties in nicely with the Blue Horror who has the same ‘do. 🙂
January 11th, 2021 at 10:10 am
Superb mate, especially the different colours on the wee Brimstone scamps!! Genius!
January 12th, 2021 at 3:33 pm
Cheers man 🙂 The little Brimstones were a hoot actually, they’re so small it’s really quick and easy to paint them up and I never let myself play with bright colours often enough. Kind of want to do some more actually but I’m going to need to a)find or buy more of them and b)invent more colours which might slow me down a bit. Could maybe do three more, red, yellow and pink, then I’ll have to get inventive.
January 11th, 2021 at 12:53 pm
Coming on nicely, good choice for the skin tine on the beastman works really well. I love the little horrors as well all the different colours work well.
January 12th, 2021 at 3:33 pm
Thank you – they’re like an evil rainbow aren’t they! 🙂
January 11th, 2021 at 4:19 pm
Stunning work.
I’ve got a friend who is just starting out collecting a Tzeentch army- I’ve been showing him the pink horror you did as inspiration for him.
Cheers,
Pete.
January 12th, 2021 at 3:35 pm
Thank you! Good to hear that another foolish mortal has fallen under the sway of the Architect of Fate, hope he finds these helpful. 🙂
January 11th, 2021 at 6:15 pm
As always all the figures are excellent and the Tzeentchian is superb but I do like those little blue horrors. 🙂
January 14th, 2021 at 10:05 pm
Thank you! The blue horrors were a lot more fun to paint than I expected, I don’t really know why I like them so much when I dislike the pink ones, after all the blues are basically just smaller versions of the pinks. I’ve got a couple more blue horrors on the desk that I’ll paint up soon but I could be tempted to get some more…
January 11th, 2021 at 6:22 pm
I bet those Brimstone ones were pretty fun to paint. The half-and/half Horror is pretty cool. I wonder if he could count for either side? 😉
I also like the green flame used on the blue horror, adds some very nice contrast.
The Tzaangor weapons look great. I didn’t realize that’s a Beastman. There have been rumors that there might someday be a Tzeentch Blood Bowl team, which has my curiosity piqued now. So Tzeentch have Beastmen, some sort of Human/Mutated Humans, and Horrors? Do they have a Chaos Warrior equivalent? Just trying to picture what their team might look like.
January 16th, 2021 at 12:01 pm
The Brimstones were great fun to paint. I’ve run out of them for now but if I get my hands on some more I’ll paint them like a shot.
Funnily enough I did consider, as an alternative way of making pink horrors, putting two blue horrors on one base and painting them pink (especially when I realised how much I like painting the blue horrors in comparison to the pink ones).
So (he says, putting on his nerd hat, pipe and slippers) the thing to keep in mind is that these models are taken from Age of Sigmar whereas Blood Bowl has its roots in AoS’s predecessor WHFB (Warhammer – the game of Fantasy Battles! Or just “Warhammer” as we used to call it). Sorry if I’m stating the obvious here by the way but it’s all context innit? 😉 WHFB was much more traditional fantasy than AoS. In AoS we’ve seen each Chaos god given their own faction so that the big differences in character and aesthetic between each one can really be explored. Back in WHFB all of Chaos was covered by three army books (Warriors of Chaos, Daemons of Chaos and Beasts of Chaos).
Now then, in general it’s been the ordinary troops from WHFB who have equivalents as Blood Bowl players, the heroes, elite troops, big monsters, warmachines etc have either been left off the pitch or only appear as star players, secret weapons, special rules etc. For Chaos your four troops choices fitted to the following archetypes (and to a greater or lesser extent this has been carried over to AoS too); Warriors, Marauders, lesser daemons and beastmen. Warriors are the more elite, heavily armed and armoured troops, Marauders are weaker and more lightly armoured (think professional soldiers vs peasant levies, or in the context of a Blood Bowl team like Nurgle’s Rotters Bloaters would be Warriors and Rotters would be Marauders. (As an aside, in AoS we have Nurgle Warriors in the form of the Putrid Blightkings but no Marauders or beastmen, which is something people would like to see – or at least I would!).
I’ve never seen daemons in Blood Bowl (unless there’s something I’m forgetting?) so the three troops we’re left with are Warriors, Marauders and Beastmen – and in fact that’s exactly what we see with the Nurgle team. I would suggest that the Nurgle team actually provides quite a good template for what other future Chaos teams might look like.
Tzeentch is more inclined towards mutating his followers even than the other gods so I’d imagine some kind of Chaos Spawn as a big guy (probably something new and unique to Tzeentch much like the concepts of the Beast of Nurgle and Chaos Spawn were merged together to make the Rotspawn for Nurgle).
Tzeentch also loves cunning schemes, the more complicated and hard to pull off the better, so I think the team would be hard to master, with lots of tricks up its sleeve which may not be easy to pull off but which give great results if you get them just right. Probably the kind of team where planning a few turns ahead is absolutely vital.
His followers tend to be wizard’s who’re not a class of people who tend to go the gym very often (not when there’s some dusty book of lore they can be pouring over!) so I think the players would be physically weaker and more agile than other Chaos teams (maybe not to the extent of elves but something in that direction). I also wondered about a team with a few very elite sorcerers and the rest of the team made up of enthralled slaves a bit like the Vampire team.
Tzeentchian sorcerers often fly through the air on magical disks so maybe something like that as a secret weapon or star player? Imagine them unable to be knocked down and sailing right over the heads of opposition players – but of course the ref will send it off as soon as he sees it!
Anyway, I seem to have ended up writing an essay – and of course this is just speculation based on what I know of Tzeentch and how it could be applied to Blood Bowl – it’ll be fun to see how close I am if they ever make a Tzeentch team!
January 18th, 2021 at 8:40 pm
Very interesting and thanks for the background! In Mantic’s Dreadball, they had a race of Wizards, who I think had the ability to teleport.
That could be a crazy power to give a Sorceror, though it would need some sort of counter.
If GW keeps to current rules, they would probably just give the Wizards Leap to simulate them flying over people. Which would be pretty meh.
Still I’m curious what they come up with, and hopefully it’s something new that plays very differently.
I prefer that over just a re-themed team to fit their universe.
I still say the Snakemen team really needs to be made. As they are one of the few really good counters I’ve seen to Elves, due to lots of Prehensile Tail and Tentacles,
making them formidable against a dodgy team.
January 12th, 2021 at 7:59 am
I love these bright, popping colours! Everything in this post looks really good and sort of…fun?
January 16th, 2021 at 11:11 am
Fun is exactly the word I would use. I always enjoy painting (or almost always at any rate, there’s always that model that turns into a hassle but thankfully those are rare for me) but with these it almost feels like playing. 🙂
January 12th, 2021 at 1:35 pm
Oh wow those blue horrors are painted beautifully… errr in a horrific kinda way hehe
January 16th, 2021 at 12:02 pm
Thanks man – they were fun to do. I don’t use blue all that often, maybe something I should try more often.
January 12th, 2021 at 2:34 pm
Agree on the blue horrors, but all have great colors and great blending. Really effective use of dry brushing – what’s your secret – it looks so awesome!
January 16th, 2021 at 12:29 pm
Thank you! I didn’t actually use all that much drybrushing on these, I’ve been pushing myself lately to make more use of ordinary highlights. That said I do like a bit of drybrushing as a technique. I’d say the trick is not to rush it, it gives fast results so it can be tempting to hurry or to try to use it to cut corners. I think it has a bit of a reputation for being a lazy technique and so it’s easy to think “well, I can be a bit half-arsed here and get away with it, it’s only drybrushing” but it’s a legitimate tool in a painter’s arsenal and applied properly it gives some very nice results. Because it gives fast results it’s easy for things to go wrong quickly so less is definitely more here, remember the old adage that you can always add more paint but you can’t take it away – for me that’s never more true than with drybrushing.
The more texture on the model the better it works (it’s great for animal fur for example). It also makes for nice dirt, I tend to drybrush a bit of the base colour onto the legs and boots of miniatures to show they’ve been trudging across a battlefield not standing about on the parade ground. Finally I tend to use it to sketch in the peripheral areas, and then use the time it saves me to put more effort into key areas of the model like faces. Hope that helps. 🙂
January 16th, 2021 at 1:22 pm
It does and thanks for the well-composed and thorough response. Your stuff is quite amazingly painted!
January 13th, 2021 at 12:38 am
Wow, you’ve been banging out these minis quickly! I like your idea of more natural (but still chaotic looking) skin on the Tzaangor. Seeing some more blue-turning-pink horrors is awesome as well. That is not only a clever idea but visually striking too. I did see that Tzeench is getting some pretty cool minis in the near future. Might even tempt me to paint one when a certain release comes out 🙂
January 16th, 2021 at 1:45 pm
Oh yeah, there’s some very cool stuff coming! I’m trying to budget a bit more and work through my backlog but some of the upcoming stuff is going to make that really tricky!
January 26th, 2021 at 5:02 pm
Very cool colours. Love the part blue/pink horrors.
January 27th, 2021 at 2:36 pm
Thank you! 🙂
February 17th, 2021 at 6:23 am
I had forgotten how your use of colors that are so vivid blows me away mate!
February 17th, 2021 at 9:59 pm
Thank you! 🙂
March 10th, 2021 at 12:46 pm
Another post filled with really cool stuff (and yes, I feel like I’m going to be posting that a lot as I slowly work through your overly-productive backlog!)
I’m inspired by your skin tones for the Tzaangor – really like that blue-tinged grey and like so many of your other creative ideas, I’m going to have to rip that off …one day.
Loving those Blue Horrors, and the vivid green flame really looks fantastic with them – and a very creative solution to the Brimstone Horrors. They do look a little skittlish like that, but with maybe a few in each tone and some in colour transition I could see doing something like that myself. Like the RGB in a gaming PC… 😀
March 10th, 2021 at 6:16 pm
Haha – I never thought you’d be calling me overly productive! 😀
I must admit I’m very pleased with the skin of the Tzaangor (which is good because I’ve got plenty more to get through!). It’s funny because to me it really demonstrates how context changes the appearance of a colour. Don’t tell anyone but it’s actually the exact same recipe as I use for the trousers of my orks and Goliath gangers!
With the Brimstones I went for extreme ends of the spectrum but I think if I was to do any more (which I’m tempted to because they were a lot of fun to paint) something more like what you’re suggesting would be the best move. In fact the more I think about how good that could look the more tempted I become…