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! 

The Enduring Legacy of the Realms of Chaos

Remember those amazing illustrations from the original Realms of Chaos books, by artists such as Adrian Smith, Paul Campbell etal, the ones that provoked so many ideas and fleshed out some of the possibilities and potential within 3rd Edition Realms of Chaos? I still love looking at them today and often feel inspired to try and convert my own miniatures based on the characters depicted within them. But I don't have to so much anymore because the Games Workshop of today (which has more recently seemed like quite a different beast as to what I grew up with) has released some models that are so obviously steeped in and inspired by some of those very illustrations I alluded to earlier.

I rarely venture onto the GW website, so I am somewhat behind the times, but I saw someone else had painted this model (Sloppity Bilepiper) and assumed it was a conversion, but no, this is a bonefide GW release that is clearly based upon some illustrations from GW of the 80's, specifically the Realms of Chaos. I just had to buy it (and make a bit of an adjustment to make it fit a bit better with those illustrations and lose the, quite frankly, ridiculous staff);

The musical element, the dynamic, dancing poses (especially the Nurgling) are just so evocative of those early illustrations, especially the Dance of Death. The older Nurgling I added to Sloppity's hand is a reference to that era.

I had forgotten about my scenic photography backdrop, so I dusted it off (I actually had to and was surprised by the versatility of static grass) and used it again here:

 Before converting and painting this modern model, I just had to reach for my Lost and Damned book and look for the specific illustrations that I saw the link to in these sculpts. The two images were by Adrian Smith and Paul Campbell from the Nurgle pages in the Lost and Damned Realm of Chaos Tome, specifically the Dance of Death and Nurgle Calvalcade pages. Have a look:

So, as I was researching some of this post, I discovered that GW is releasing a game called the Realm of Chaos. It's not aimed for me, but it is nicely reassuring that my favourite era and output of model miniatures is seeing something of a revival for a new generation of gamers/painters. I'm looking forward to some new plastic models to paint and then sit alongside my original lead ones and hope they all are happy lined up alongside each other.

A small restoration project - St. George and the Dragon

I originally painted these two when the Green Knight was first released by GW back in the early 90's (I believe). It was a diorama that I had intended to enter for Golden Demon (I never did) which used to have a plinth with a matching base (now lost), to show the story of George and the Dragon. It was largely inspired by Paolo Uccello's and Raphael's "St. George and the Dragon" the former of which resides at the National Gallery, London. I thought the Green Knight was a great Citadel miniature with a dynamic pose, crisp, detailed sculpting and characterful for a human model, I still think this today. 

So I recently found these in a box back at my parents house and they were a bit battered to be honest. Chipped paint everywhere, flaking paint on the dragon's wings (where they had been bent), dust, broken sword and a missing shield to name the worst of the problems.

So I set about restoring them. Now I was so keen to get involved in this process that I forgot to take any pictures of their condition, which I'm very annoyed at myself for, however if you look closely enough at the wings on the dragon you can see the texture of the cracks/flakes still. Obviously I could have stripped the paint and started the process from scratch, but I was keen to keep my original paint job (20-something years old and two of the few models that I still own from my original teenage hobby time), consolidate the issues and make some minor improvements to the original paint work.

After the models had been carefully dusted with a soft make-up brush (the wifes!) the Knight had his sword pinned back into position and then re-painted, originally I had painted it green, I think to keep a link to the Green Knight, but it looked terrible and so instead I plumped for a kind of purple nmm style. A new (Elven?) shield was attached and painted - this is the same shield design that I originally used as I liked the dragon emblem. I have updated the painting of the armour, the original painting was quite poor (I hadn't mastered metals at this time in my development) and very dull black, so I went for a layered gold effect, starting with dark bronze and working through copper and eventually gold highlights. A bit of touching up on the horse flesh and barding was also needed.

The dragon required a bit more work. I had to initially carefully reshape the wings which had been bent, this did result in some more paint flaking away. I stabilised this by using some dilute pva which ran underneath the flakes and when dried consolidated beneath the cracks. A really thin fill of putty was added to the missing areas of paint so that there was not such a large "step" in thickness between paint/primer and bare metal. 

The lance was intentionally broken (the missing section was a part of the base) and the dragon itself needed a lot of touching up. Trying to match the colours was quite simple - I could pretty much identify the colours I'd previously used (for example it was clear that Bestial Brown was the base coat for the fleshy stomach and it had been highlighted/layered with increasing amounts of elf flesh). I still have both these paints and would probably paint it in exactly the same way if I would be starting from scratch! The blood looked quite poor, so I reworked this using some Tamiya Clear red for the glossy areas and some purple/brown/black washes for the more dried looking areas.

And here are the images that I used for my inspiration all those years ago:

Paolo Uccello's St. George and the Dragon. I'd love to add the maiden and a cave to complete the diorama.

Raphael's version. Here you can see why I originally painted the armour black and how I got the idea for the broken lance embedded in the dragon's torso.