Ogryn Bodyguard for Necromunda (or Stargrave)

A tedious bit of real-world stuff: this hasn't been the easiest year, in terms of my job and my writing "career", and while nothing terrible has happened, I've found that I'm getting more entertainment out of painting models than usual. When it's difficult to get much satisfaction from my work or the world of publishing, it's good to be able to look at a finished model and think "I did a decent job of that".

I've also realised that, while repainting the Bretonnians is fun, a lot of what I enjoy in this hobby is altering and converting models, which I'm not going to do with my knights (although some repairs might be required). So, this week I've done a conversion that I've been thinking about for ages.

Years ago I bought the ogre Blood Bowl team. It's not bad, as you get four ogres (much better miniatures than the usual fantasy ones) and a lot of gnoblars in funny poses (again, much better models than the fantasy versions). I thought it would be cool to turn one of the ogres into a Necromunda hired gun. 

This was one of those conversions that got bigger and bigger as it went on. I decided to replace the belly-plate on the ogre with sculpted trousers and a belt (the buckle comes from the side of the plate). Then I decided to give him a vest, and then a sleeveless jacket, and before long I was rebuilding a lot of his upper body. Well, it's all good practice in sculpting.

What else is there to say? Hmm, well, his shoulder pads are plasticard, and he's got a lot of bits and bobs that looked suitably technical and futuristic. The odd bobbles on top of his left (our right) shoulderpad were inspired by the jackets in the Cyberpunk 2077 computer game. His pistol is an Imperial Guard grenade launcher and his cigar is a bit of wire. The box on the ground by his feet was from a plastic Van Saar ganger. I have no idea what the objects in it are supposed to be. Ammo? Cans of baked beans?

Anyhow, here's the finished version. I think he's come out quite well - the sculpted bits don't look too blobby, which is always the risk when I attempt anything with green stuff. 

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I've also been painting a few more minions for the Bretonnian army. At present, the Peasant Progress looks like this:

Archers: 10

Foot knights: 6

Men at arms: 10

That's about a third of the way through the foot troops. I'll post more pictures once I've got a few more done. I'd forgotten just how many guys you need for a Warhammer army.

Horsies!

 It's time to go back to the Bretonnian project for a bit. If reading about knights isn't your thing, skip the next chunk of text (or possibly this whole post).

There have been three Bretonnian army books, if you count the recent one for The Old World (and why wouldn't you, really?). The first was released in 1996, and was written by Nigel Stillman. Stillman doesn't get much mention these days, but he was a fairly big figure in the old days of White Dwarf. The second, by Anthony Reynolds, came out in 2003. I've got both, and I think the Stillman Codex (which sounds like the title of a Dan Brown novel) is the better of the two.

The Stillman book actually makes Bretonnia look like fun. In fact, it seems to be a cartoon medieval kingdom, where jolly peasants quaff wine and brightly-coloured knights fall off their horses a lot. There are references to stuffing cheese in your ears to avoid annoying minstrels, and to something called "the Great Flapping Monster of Chateau Mal" (as slain by Bertrand le Brigand, who in no way resembles Errol Flynn's Robin Hood). It actually sounds like a place you might want to visit. It also gave the Bretonnians an Arthurian feel, introducing the Lady of the Lake and the Green Knight, and provided rules for special formations and divine protection. These did a lot to move Bretonnia away from the "Empire without the fun stuff" feel that had dogged it in the past.

And that's the time that I'm looking to recreate with my army.

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After all that, I've painted my first unit of knights for about 30 years. These guys aren't even Bretonnians, technically: they're from a game called Battlemasters, which Games Workshop released with MB Games back in 1992. I remember looking at the pictures of the knights in White Dwarf with my friend Jim when we were at school.

Obviously, they're all the same sculpt, which isn't brilliant but isn't bad either, especially for a board game about 30 years old. I've used these as a bit of a test unit, trying out a variety of colours and block patterns for later units. The early Bretonnian knights had a wider range of colours and less ornate detail than the current miniatures, and I don't think they suffered for it.

After painting harlequins and Escher gangers, I was expecting these to be very fiddly. In fact, the main challenge is keeping the different sections looking cleanly defined and shading the big sheets of cloth without having an airbrush. It wasn't easy. The overall effect reminds me of those 1950s films about Camelot (it is a silly place) shot in Glorious Technicolor: very bright and slightly hallucinatory. I like them. I might even paint some official Bretonnians soon.

Tank Girl and Friends

Here's one of those slightly irritating "How it started/how it's going" posts you see on social media. This week, I have been repainting one of my last Escher gangers. This model is a juve with a stub gun and a pick. I've mentioned before that the Eschers seem to have been influenced by Tank Girl, and this one really looks as much like her as GW could manage. She's even got the slightly pigeon-toed stance that Jamie Hewlett often used to depict her.

This model is particularly interesting to me, as I first painted it about 15 years ago, and thought at the time that I had done a really good job. It was always one of my best-painted models and I was somewhat reluctant to strip it and start again. So, here is the old paint job:

And here is the new one:

I definitely think I've improved, and I'm surprised at how much better the second one looks to me. Sometimes it's quite hard to tell that your painting - or maybe any artistic work? - has got better until you stop to actually make the comparison.

Here are a couple of other Eschers, both of whom use the same not-Tank-Girl colour scheme (and unusual boob armour). There's less room to personalise these models than there is on the Eldar harlequins, as a lot of the Eschers is either leggings or bare skin. I've tried to vary skin colours to provide some extra variety, which I think has worked quite well. We've got a heavy with a massive heavy stubber that looks as if it was first used at the Siege of Stalingrad, and a ganger with a shotgun and pistol who is definitely showing off. As ever, the sculpting and details are superb.

Also, I made a few more horrid little lowlifes for the Scavvy horde. The advantage with making inbred, filthy lunatics who live in a rubbish tip is that you can mix and match pretty much anything to construct them. The guy with the musket has a zombie body, and medieval arms. His friend has a WW2 body, and arms and an axe from the Frostgrave cultist sprue. Both have cultist heads. Weirdly, the musketeer's shirt ends just above nipple-height. Perhaps he ate the rest of it.

Back in the day, scavvy gangs could take mutants, who had pretty daft, cartoony miniatures. One of the options was to have a big claw. I found an old Mantic zombie body and added a claw from a plastic daemonette and a Stargrave head. The whole thing was a good opportunity to try some shading with glazes, which I enjoyed. I like the results and might use this technique more often. Here is the nasty little creature:

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I've also decided to keep a tally of how my efforts to paint the Bretonnian footsoldiers is going. I'm not going to post my progress until I've finished a load, but I'll provide a weekly update (hopefully). The plan is to do three guys every week. So far, I'm ahead of the curve!

Peasant Progress:

Archers: 10

Foot knights: 6

Men at arms: 6

Bretonnia Redux: The Army Starts Here

 I mentioned a while ago that I wanted to repaint my very old Bretonnian army. These date back to 1991, and were some of the first miniatures that I ever saw. I was somewhat intimidated by the prospect of redoing these models, but I stripped them and started to give them a new lease of life this week.

We've got three main units of infantry, painted in colours roughly following the original army featured in White Dwarf 137: knights, men at arms and archers. I've done five models for each unit - not exactly a mighty army, but probably a legal one under the rules of 5th Edition Warhammer Fantasy Battle. 

Here are the men at arms, painted in the colours of Les Hommes de Renault.

Here are some knights, in slightly simplified colours of the Baron D'Angon:

And here are five bowmen in the livery of the Archers du Brest:

I've done with a slightly grimy but still quite bright look for all of them. The knights have cleaner weapons and armour (I left off the brown undercoat), since their gear is newer and better. 

I also tidied up an old model from a game called Dungeonquest, about which I know nothing. She's an elf wizard called Serelia of Zimmendell, but I think she'd work well as a Bretonnian wizard. I painted her scrying orb to look a bit like the palantir from the Lord of the Rings films.

And that's where we are for the moment. I'll slow down a little on the painting, but I'll keep chipping away at these guys. And then we can do the knights on horseback!

Even More Orks

 More orks! I find that projects blur into each other these days, which probably means that I get distracted too easily. (There are still a few Eschers to go...) Still, orks are fun to paint, and I will put the remaining ones to the side for a little while now. Maybe.

First up, we've got another mek from the 2nd Edition, as seen in the blue Citadel catalogue. This guy has a kustom weapon in his right hand, which is superbly sculpted and has loads of cool details. I wanted to give him another big gun - he's the unit's inevitable crazed shooter - held up in a fairly similar manner but in a slightly less "flat" posture. I cut and repositioned an old plastic arm, which was much harder than I'd expected it to be. I ended up adding a damaged marine shoulderpad to hold the whole thing together.

His new gun was made from a damaged old ork bolta, with a new bigger magazine and a barrel built from - of all things - an ork axe. It has big bolts and a spiky bit. 

Painting him was easy and enjoyable. There were loads of interesting bits and bobs on the model, but it wasn't excessive and there was enough space to add stripes and other marks, including some bluing on the kustom gun's barrel. His eyes are a bit crazy, but then he's probably seen some things. I'm really pleased with this guy.

Then we've got two models that almost nobody seems to have any nostalgia for. They're plastic boys (or perhaps "yoofs") from the old game Gorkamorka, which was a sort of Necromunda with orks in a Mad Max-type setting. It was very short-lived and marks the point where the ork models moved from the goofiness of 2nd Edition 40k and Paul Bonner's pictures to the over-muscled, mantrap-faced creatures we have today. 

These definitely aren't the best ork models in either variety (in fact, they seem to sit uncomfortably between the two styles). They've got very small heads and, despite their high shoulders, fairly human proportions. You could mistake them for Goliath gangers. Anyhow, they're not the greatest miniatures, but they'd do as a couple of minor hangers-on for a warband. I don't really enjoy painting fur very much, but otherwise they were alright to paint.

Out of interest, I've painted ork skin in two different ways. One is to work from a fairly bright mid-tone green, washing it with dark green and (very thin) purple, and then highlighting with yellow (and pink for lips). The other is to start with a drab military green, and then proceed as before. I suppose that the lighter orks might be younger, but I don't mind having a variety of different skin tones in the ork horde: for one thing, you get a variety of tones in human skin, and for another, the repeated colours and styles in the clothing ties them all together. I doubt the orks care very much, so I won't.

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And now for something completely different. I have a Bretonnian army to paint! I have stripped all of my old metal and plastic foot-soldiers, which comes to about 40 models. I plan to paint three main units, in roughly the same colours as the GW studio army featured in White Dwarfs 136 and 137. 

There will be three main units: foor knights (yellow tunics), archers (blue and white) and men at arms (green and white). I don't want this to end up as a chore, and I'd prefer to avoid painting in bulk. So, I thought I'd try painting one of each type, then a different model, and then more Bretonnians. I don't know if this will work, but I think it could make it a more entertaining process.

The Obligatory Orktober Post

 October is a funny month. Here in the UK, it's when the clocks go back (or forward? I can't remember) and it marks the start of five or six months of cold, snowless slush. It's also Orange Plastic Tat Month, or Halloween as it is also known, and model-makers everywhere are plundering the shops for useful terrain. And it contains several Oldhammer events, the greatest of which is surely Orktober, where everyone paints some kind of orc. There's also the less-snappily-named Zomtober, when people paint zombies, but I did that a couple of posts ago. And apparently there's Dreadtober, where you paint a dreadnought, although I think that would sound better as Dreadcember.

Anyhow, not wishing to miss out, I painted two orks.

 The guy on the left is a medic that I've had lying around for a while. He's very obviously an alternative sculpt on another body (basically, an alternative head) and while he's not a terribly exciting model, he was quite pleasant to paint. I reckon these metal ork specialists must have been quite popular models, as there always seem to be a lot of them knocking around on ebay.

The model on the right is slightly odder. He's actually a looter from the Deathskull clan, and was released after Rogue Trader and the blue Citadel Catalogue, but before the major change in style in the orks that happened around 1998 or so. Nonetheless, he's slightly different: his face is longer and slightly less cartoony, and his proportions are more humanoid (I actually wondered if he was a converted Delaque ganger from Necromunda). He originally came with a massive heavy weapon, but I got him without arms and so added some classic ork ones.

He was actually quite a pain to paint. Sometimes a model just won't look right, no matter what you do. Eventually, I got him to look fairly piratical. I'm starting to wonder if I'm collecting an Oldhammer ork army. After all, I've got about 20 men, a dreadnought and a vehicle, which is about enough for 2nd edition!

Even more Scavvies, and an alligator with a blunderbuss

 When I was younger, I used to hate preparing miniatures - which is why a lot of my earlier models have huge mold lines, odd little spikes where I snipped them off the frame and very dodgy basing. These days, I'm the opposite. I find something quite satisfying in doing the boring preparatory work, making the models look ready and smoothing the bases down with clay so that you can't see the slots.

Anyhow, this week I've been doing some more on the Eschers - they are turning into a horde, rather than a gang - but that's for later. I also did some more filthy maniacs for the scavvies.

The guy on the far left is an old official scavvy leader. Like the beastmaster on the far right, his left arm feels a bit wrong and overlong, although in fairness it's easy for arms to look too short or too long when they're clothed and flailing about. I wasn't sure that I liked the model until I got going on it, and now it's come out alright. There's lots of interesting detail, but it's not too excessive.

The two in the middle are based on Civil War models. The standing guy is an English Civil War soldier, with a medieval musket and Frost/Stargrave bits and bobs. The kneeling guy is an American Civil War model with a Frostgrave head and arms. Really, the historical bodies are just there to provide a basis on which to hang the crazy scavvy stuff. 

The next chap is an old Necromunda wyrd beastmaster, a psychic dude who can control the various horrible animals that dwell in the city. He's technically a hireling rather than a gang member, but he looks like the sort of villainous nutjob who would at home in the scavvy ranks. I didn't actually like this model all this much, but once I got going it worked out okay.

And I also made another Scaly. This one has the much-feared scatter cannon, a sort of huge blunderbuss that functioned much like a grenade launcher.

This model was made from the body of a Privateer Press trollblood soldier (the head went missing many years ago) with the head of a GW lizardman. I rather like him.

To an extent, the scaly is a bit of a test model. I've got a few really old trollblood models, and it occurs to me that they might make a nice unit. I think they could be quite good. But that's for another time...