Updated Empire whole army shot

It has become my tradition to take a whole army photo of my Empire army every 6 months or so, to see how much progress I've made. The last 6 months have not been my most productive, but I figured I'd still hold to the tradition.

My entire Empire army as it currently stands. 12,000 points huge.

I'm still learning how to use our new camera, and despite taking a lot of shots, I still didn't really manage to get one really in focus. Things like aperture are still only vague concepts to me rather than things I am able to control. I'll keep practicing. I tried a variety of lighting, and this dark one was the clearest. Oh well. You can find the higher definition image on Picasa, here.

In terms of what's been added in the last 6 months, you will notice that I sneaked in a few of my Empire Ogre fillers and units, including the Mournfangs who may or may not ever get used as fillers for my Knight regiments (they're rather enormous and it looks a bit funny). These guys have absorbed a fair bit of my productivity, so I figured I should include them to make it look like I actually achieved something. So in all, I've added:

• 4 special characters (Kurt Helborg, Marius Leitdorf, Ludwig Schwartzhelm and Luthor Huss)
• 8 Reiksguard Knights (yeah I know, I need to get cracking and add to this rather paltry number)
• 3 Ogre Mournfangs
• 6 Ogre Halberdiers including standard
• 32 Flagellants including filler and doom-loving Ogre
• A couple of odds and ends, including a Sabretusk wolf and Samawan, my little wizard/trader model from Araby

The army now weighs in at around 12,000 points. It's possible we won't see another of these shots in 6 months, as I think I'll be shifting my focus for a while to add some toys to my long-neglected Orcs and Goblins. Right now I am assembling Arachnaroks...

The other thing I've achieved recently was the upgrading of some basic boards to something a little fancier, in the interest of helping to produce some nicer-looking battle reports. This really just involved using PVA to stick sand to the boards and then painting them, although I then had to hit them with a black wash to darken them down to more closely match the brown-based club

terrain, which as it turns out was painted with a black undercoat. Ah well, it's close enough now.

The textured boards with a few hills to show the colours.

A closer look at the texture on the boards, with a model for scale.

I put sand on 6 separate boards, so enough for an 8x6 table. Due to time and paint constraints however, I have only finished 4. I was originally going to add patches of static grass, but I am no longer sure about that. We'll see if I'm inspired later.

Alright, enough procrastination. Back to writing my very late Convic report...