Hammer Time: Thoughts on assembling and painting Dwarf Hammerers

Over the weekend I finally managed to complete my Dwarf Hammerers unit after roughly two weeks of sporadic painting. Seeing as my personal hobby articles on this blog have been a bit thin on the ground recently I thought I would briefly share my experiences.

The Kit
First of all, I have to mention how good the Hammerers/Longbeards kit was. The parts were well detailed and really looked the part for elite warriors, you can see the sprue up close in my un-boxing video. After removing the Hammerer parts from the sprue I was left over with a nice amount of spare parts, namely the longbeard command parts, weapons and heads. As I'm not a Dwarf player these leftovers will probably find there way on to eBay, which helps to reduce the cost of the kit in the first place.

Assembly
Assembling the kit was pretty quick, mainly because I decided to paint the arms, heads and shoulder-pads
separately from the body. Overall there were no really fiddly sections and all of the parts fitted well together. I was quite impressed by how well the beards had been sculpted to ensure that they fit snug against the Dwarfs body.

Priming
I decided to a cheat a little when it came to priming the dwarfs. As I had not fully assembled the parts I was able to use the Army Painters silver spray primers to base coat the body, arms and shoulder pads as these parts were predominately metallic. The heads and the banner on the other hand were primed black as the beards and the banner fabric contributed to majority of these parts.

Painting
Now at the time of painting I didn't bother to take pictures as I worked (selfish I know) so this will be no detailed tutorial, just a quick review of what I did.
Metal & Armor - The majority of the models were metal so the silver primer saved a lot of time here as they only need a wash with nuln oil. The gold sections were painted with , washed with agrax earthshade and dry-brushed with runefang steel along with the silver parts.
Beards - For the beards I followed the paint splatter article in White Dwarf Weekly Issue 1.
Fabric - The fabric handles and ropes were painted with screamer pink, washed with carroburg crimson and highlighted again with screamer pink.
Standard - The standard was deathworld forest, washed with athonian camoshade and highlight with deathworld forest and straken green. The free hand symbol was baneblade brown followed by a ushabti bone highlight.
Skin - The skin was based with bugmans glow, highlighted with cadian fleshtone, washed with reikland fleshshade and highlighted with kislev flesh.
Gems - The gems were based with caledor sky, washed with drakenhof nightshade, highlighted with hoeth blue before finally adding ceramite white dots.

Conclusion
To some up painting my first ever Dwarf miniatures I would have to say that they were a joy to paint. They were a little time consuming, but that is probably mainly due to my own slow painting speed. I also tried out a few new techniques with these guys and I think these experiments paid off. Priming in silver saved a lot of
time and painting them partly assembled ensured I was able to easily reach every detail. I also attempted to paint eyes for the first time in a long time. This attempt was much more successful however due to the use of the Army Painters super thin psycho brush.

I would most definitely recommend this kit to any Dwarf player or any hobbyist who is looking for something interesting to paint up.

If you are interested in purchasing the finished hammerers they are currently on eBay and can be found here