… And out come the wolves

I finished basing these two wolfies last week. It’s the “vicious giant wolf” from Citadel’s classic Monster Set from 1985. The mini is very basic and kind of static, nevertheless I really, really like it. It has a certain shaggy nastiness to it. It bit like an old scabrous dog or something like that. You get the impression that the wolf is approaching its target carefully, shown just a moment before it explodes into some sort of frenzied attack.

Crossbows or JoJo the Dog-Faced Boy and friends

I have been able to get a lot of painting done these past two weeks. I’ll post some pictures of the finished minis shortly. However, today I want to share this WIP with y’all: five men-at-arms with crossbows from Foundry. The minis look great from a distance but frankly, on closer inspection, some of them don’t really hold up.

One of them is missing a hand, the are bowstrings chunky and broken and they all had a tremendous amount of flash as well as very pronounced mold lines. Even the face on one of them was completely destroyed by a mold line. I could of course have done some reconstruction with green stuff, but I didn’t really find it worth the effort.

Again, from a distance they look fine, and while generally being a big fan of Foundry’s stuff, I was sadly very disappointed by the quality of these minis. A shame.

I’ll return soon in the company of wolves and goblins.

Decrepit shack 1

Here’s a little WIP; a rundown, dilapidated shack or hut. I find it striking that we put so much effort into giving our old school Oldhammer minis a wild, unruly vibe and then make the houses and buildings we field on the tabletop alongside these minis neat and very ‘proper’. You know, nice timber-framed houses and fortifications of even ashlars. It looks good, but at times I wonder what the rundown buildings on the outskirts of Old World civilization look like. Or how the houses in the war-torn lands of the Empire look in the poor villages struggling to survive.
Well, all of this has let me to start producing some houses in bad shape. One is already finished and two more are now on their way. I’ll post some images here on the blog as the work on these last two proceeds.

The house or hut you see looks pretty bad at the moment but it will come around. Basically I cut a piece of Styrofoam into a rough house shape onto which I have glued ashlars – also of cut from Styrofoam. To this I glued some wooden details (a door etc) made from balsa wood. More about these details at a later stage.
The thatched roof, which is yet to be trimmed a bit, is made from a piece of fake fur bought at the Danish equivalent of a pound store. It’s a cat toy actually. I cut the fur to fit on the roof of the house and then glued it on. After the glue dried I soaked the fur in watered down white glue to make it stiff and straw-like.
Once dried the entire thing was spray-painted black and is now waiting for the next stage. Exciting, right! … or perhaps not so much.

One wet and grumpy troll

I finished working on my Citadel Marsh Troll this week. An absolutely splendid miniature. It was such a pleasure to paint. Obviously the base still needs to be done. I love the idea about a marsh troll and I’m inclined to get Bob Olleys giant marsh troll as well. They would male a fine team.

While choosing the colours I was of course thinking along the lines of earthy, swampy hues. However, I also kept returning to Puddleglum from C. S. Lewis’ The Silver Chair and the way he is portrayed in most illustrated editions of the book.  Here you have one particularly shifty looking version of Puddleglum painted by Rodney Mtthews. Great, right?! It almost has hints of Ian Miller and Tony Hough.

How very 90’s

One of the things I bought in Hamburg two weeks ago was this unopened blister. A “Dark Goblin Leader” sculpted by Kev Adams for his fantasy–line produced by Heartbreaker in 1994. Check out the presentation on the back of the pack. Here we find an introduction to the master himself, his likes and inspirations. We are even given a photo of the man himself with nose ring and all. Yeah, those were the grungy days. It certainly brings back memories.

Oh ya, by the way, the goblin inside the blister is very nice indeed. A perfect champion of some sort.  I wonder how much the other minis from this line cost on Ebay. This one I got dirt cheap; 1 euro. Certainly a fair price!

And if you wonder what his taste in music sounds like, you can sample what I believe are the mentioned Spacemen here: