The Glass Cabinet

For my birthday a few months ago, I was kindly given a glass cabinet by my wife, in another new display of her accepting my hobby and giving it some space to be shown in the house. This is quite a momentous occasion for me too, having not really publicly shown my hobby off before. It is in the downstairs bathroom though..

So here it is now mounted on the wall and starting to be filled with some of my smaller projects:

Blood bowl Orcs and a couple of Fighting Fantasy tributes:

Gaslands at the top, Buried Giant tribute and a human warband

More Fighting Fantasy tributes along the top (characters from the novels and choose your own adventure series) and of course the Freeway Fighter. Wood Elf blood bowl team beneath:

A barbarian warband based on Frank Frazetta's art and some (unfinished) Star Wars miniatures. 

Some 40k Rogue Trader along the top:

Orctober 2020

 This month I've been busy painting a selection of Greenskins from my collection of Orcs and Goblins. I've chosen to work on the models that relate to the Citadel Combat Card system to try and work towards completing one of my many ongoing projects! So here they are together as a group, my Orctober offering:

I've stuck with my normal greenskin recipe, a brown wash over white primer and then a build up of layers from baneblade brown highlighted up with increasing amounts of pallid Wych flesh to the brown. A final glaze of dilute waywatcher green and then the facial extremities and knuckles have a glaze of Kislev flesh to add some warmth.

This one had a few arrows added, simply paperclips through a hole in the shield and then some plastic arrow feathers on the back end. 

You can see here that my versions are just a pastiche of the originals. I wanted to add some checkers to his hood, but not the entire hood! Also I've generally gone for more drab colours than the quite gaudy originals.  

Here you can see that I've made my own shields, sculpted with greenstuff and again loosely based on the original designs.

Never quite work out why they flipped this image! 

This one was a conversion, I didn't have the right head but found a close approximation. I don't quite have the right body or sword either!

And the boss of the warband to finish with. Hopefully next year's Orctober will see me complete the set..

Mighty Chaos Warband of Nurgle (400pts)

Perhaps the greatest attraction of the Lost and the Damned is the opportunity provided within to roll for and create your own Nurgle warrior and his accompanying, wandering warband. Now you may or may not recall that I had a self-set project to create a model for each of the possibilities on the Warband Retinue table. The majority of these 19 options have been absorbed into my Chaos Allies project or my Orc Allies project, but the remaining models (and a few other Nurgle side-projects) can now be absorbed into my main Lost and the Damned army by way of a cool mechanism in said book which allows for new and/or existing warbands to be part of the larger army.

So here is my warband as a unit in the army, led by a Mighty Champion (further on the path to Chaos then an Aspiring champion and less so than an Exalted champion - 200 and 600 points respectively), my Mighty Warband is worth 400pts and the equivalent of D4+4 rewards, so about right in terms of followers from the Retinue table. 

So amongst this chaotic rabble (just how it should be), you may be able to make out a Troll, a maggotty spawn, 6 Dark Elves, 4 Cultists and a Chaos Magus and Warior, an Undead Chaos champion and the mounted Mighty Champion himself. I really like the eclectic mix of models, races and characters in the same unit and one day I'll write up a backstory for this lot, how they came together and how they have fought their way along the path to damnation. The idea behind an undead chaos champion and a spawn and the path they took to get there are just too tantalising... 

So there we go, a 400 point unit taking the tally so far up to 2455pts of rank and file... A hefty character will be next...

 

The Buried Giant - Kazuo Ishiguro

I recently finished reading a wonderful fantasy/historical novel named The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro. It's a story of an old couple's journey in Saxon England and the characters they meet along the way and my it is so beautifully told by the author. I can't recommend it enough, so read it if you haven't already and I won't go into the plot here. But if course it so inspired the model making part of me and with the characters so fresh in my minds eye, I made a few purchases and found a few old models to represent the characters of Axl and Beatrice (the two elderly main characters), Edwin the boy and Wistan the warrior and Sir Gawain and his steed:

The first two models I bought were for Axl and Beatrice, they are Reaper models (part of a villagers set) and when they arrived they were quite a bit bigger than I expected. I removed the broom from her and sculpted a hood and scarf over her head:

Then for Wistan I used an old Citadel warrior, however he looked tiny next to the Reaper models, so I cut his legs and extended them to give him a more heroic size. The boy Edwin is a resin model that I bought direct from ebay:

Finally, the ageing Sir Gawain is a Citadel paladin I got from an eBay auction, again having to cut his legs and elongate them to give him greater height and his steed is an old, brown plastic steed that I sculpted some extra details on, including a new right, front leg which had snapped off at some point in its long past on my bitz box, as well as some reigns and saddle equipment to show that they have been on a long mission:

Here's the sculpting in progress:

And a few glamour shots on my modular tiles:

Now I'm tempted to tell the story with my models (I have some painted ogres) and some unpainted monks somewhere, as well as some female plastic ghosts, but it would involve me building and painting my Great Spined Dragon and I'm not sure I'm ready for that just yet... We'll see, but in the meantime, read the book! 

My Barbarian Warband

Here's my warband, completed. In the studio:

Roaming around a town:

Fighting renowned adversaries:

And discussing the necessity of indiscriminate killing:

The End.

The start of a Barbarian Warband

This is all going to be about musculature and flesh-tones. To help me with this project I have gone full method acting; last night I re-watched Schwarzenegger's "Conan the Barbarian", I've started reading Robert E. Howard's titular book (not enjoying it so far), I had a protein shake this morning for breakfast and I'll be hitting the gym tonight (maybe). Oh and I've [carefully] looked for different skin tone painting techniques that I can try out on so many scantily clad Barbarian models.

You saw my Bob Naismith Thrud and friend and here I've gathered a couple of his friends that I have previously from Hasslefree Miniatures as well as a Citadel "fan" and a Reaper Bones leopard:

To add to these, I've captured a couple of very cheap old Citadel lead Tribesman from ebay (£1 per model!), Big Momma and a Dwarf beserker, also from Citadel, another Hasslefree model with a nice dynamic pose and a Red Box games (which I've head-swapped) model too. Additionally a plastic kitbashed model to create a Shaman and another Reaper Bones wolf. I'll share these next time if I can find time between my gym and protein shake routine.

Roi's Dwarf Warband

Apologies for my poor, convoluted and self-absorbed story-telling skills in the build up to this, but I quite enjoyed fleshing out my characters as I painted them, and it gave me a bit of much needed motivation to not be distracted by other new and shiny ideas/models. When I physically had the model in my hand, the paintbrush in the other, I started to think about who this lump of lead could become, both in terms of colour choices and character. The decision to paint a beard blonde or ginger was as important as to whether he may be ragged or in uniform. Of course the decisions to paint them in any particular way was reflected in their backstory, or at least I hope that was articulated to a degree.

Well here is the warband off to fight in Mordheim or Frostgrave. A load of painted Citadel lead, with a movement tray (just in case this ever makes that leap from a single unit/warband, to an entire army. I dare say it's happened before...