Some orcs and their spiritual leader

I finished basing these orcs some days ago. Somehow I always end up postponing the basing of the minis; starting new projects or fiddling around with other thing instead of completing what is right in front of me. I’m sure this may sound familiar to quite a lot of you. However, usually when I start working on the bases I find it quite fun. Thus I’m not sure why I try to avoid doing the bases in the first place.

This band of merry orcs were all produced by (of course) Citadel, in ’87 I believe, and they are absolutely classic minis. At least the two guys on the left as well as their shaman are perfectly loveable orcs. The last one with the bow is less eye-catching but he was fun to paint. The shaman on the other hand was a pain in the ass. He’s covered with small, fiddly details and while they may look great, they certainly took forever to paint. By the way, the white face on one of the shields looks surprisingly smudged on the photo. In real life it looks very different and much better. I guess the minis were over-lighted when I took the photo.

 

As a little twist I gave the shaman a familiar. A giant ladybug! I’m quite fond of this little detail.  What do you think?

WIP: A chaos champion with a huge head

Howdy. Here’s a little something I want to share with you. It’s a WIP I’m currently working on. A chaos champion randomly created through Orlygg’s “chaos bands made easy” post on his blog. Actually this chap was created very late in Stansted Airport while Claus and I were waiting for our plane, going back to Copenhagen from this year’s BOYL. I rolled the following attributes for this guy: 1: a “crown of toes” (!),2:  a “huge head” and 3: “very fast”. I tried to make the crown of toes work but it didn’t look right and “very fast” is hard to show. I thus ended up with this bobblehead of a champion. The conversion was wickedly fun to do and I’m really eager to get a go at the painting now. Actually he’s already undercoated white and drying while I write this.

He still lacks a name – more on this to come. In fact quite a lot more I think. He’s the first of four champions we created for a little Oldhammer scenario entitled “Vale of the Small Jealous Gods” which we will be running at the Horizon Convention in Silkeborg this November.

We’ll post more about the scenario soon and hopefully we’ll be able to get some of the other “oldhammerer” from Denmark or even the nearby countries to join us.

 

Back from the pilgrimage – A few photos from BOYL ’14

Hey folks. Claus and I went to this year’s BOYL in Stoke on Trent and what a trip! It was absolutely great to see all the oldhammerers again and be a witness to all the creativity unleashed during the weekend. I managed to get a few games played, had time to follow even more games, buy some old Citadel lead and loads of Foundry minis, drink a lot of pints and get a tour by the man himself in the Ansell mansion of Stoke Hall and see Bryan’s enormous cabinets of vintage gold. Wow.

A hilarious moment was when a small group of us found ourselves kneeling in almost religious reverence, studying Ivan Bartlett’s classic ‘chalice diorama’ in first person. The very idea of actually seeing this stuff in real life is mind boggling and my 15-year old self would probably laugh in disbelief if told that this would one day happen.

The photos you see here are more or less random shots I took when I remembered that I had a camera with me. So much was going on and I only captured a small part of it. Would I come back next year? If possible without a doubt.

Cheers to all the participants!

 

 

 

 

 

A bunch of slave creatures

This is one of my recently finished projects. As some of you perhaps will remember I bought a large, mixed lot of minis fairly cheap this spring. In the lot this little group of figures immediately caught my eye. Honestly I really don’t know why – they are smallish, badly cast and rather messy. Nevertheless I like them and painted them up to be used as weird, kobold-like slave creatures in the scenario we played last week. Armed with slings they served the archmage Altarus nicely in the defense of his tower and were the cause for some good laughs – especially after Claus declared that they were firing their own dried feces as ammunition!

The paintjob was fast, if not rushed, and frankly the minis don’t invite to more thorough work. They are severely flawed in the casting and the details are in many cases almost blurred beyond recognition. In fact I still don’t know what these ratty little fellas are or who produced them. My guess would be that they are some sort of oriental goblins by Grenadier during the mid-80’s but that’s only guesswork. Can you identify them?

Here’s a photo of the fellas in the state I bought them in.