… and his name was Guthrum Mane

As you perhaps may have seen, I have been very slowly painting the miniatures belonging to the Orc’s Drift campaign and in fact, I was really considering this project finished as I have finally given up on finding the Hagar Sheol miniature. While painting the minis for the campaign my little gaming group has played all scenarios except the last one. The first scenario I think we even have played three times and I have been using a very nice old, giant for this, serving as the drunken Guthrum Mane.

There is little chance for me playing the scenario again anytime soon, but some time ago I got hold of the mini suggested for the campaign as Guthrum Mane and he has now been staring at me from his cave in the lead mountain for a while. Finally I succumbed to temptation and painted my Guthrum in order for him to join his fellow minis from Orc’s Drift.

The mini, as you probably all know, was one of the first, if not the very first miniature sculpted by Kev Adams to be put in production by Citadel back in 1985. It is listed as a ‘giant hill troll’ and despite the rather crudely sculpted face I really love this mini. It has so much cool old school oddness to it. I love the lumbering pose and general dismal look, topped by the mask-shaped knee protector all kept in a not too cartoony style.

Guthrum has been painted by many and you will find a lot of great Guthrums on the web. I followed the idea of others and put him on rocky ground. It suits the model nicely. all in all i am very pleased with how he turned out. Now he can return to his cave and wait for some action to come his way.   

I hope you like him.

 

Two bluesy orc brothers

I found time to finish these two early slotta orcs by the Perry twins. To my mind this early generation of orcs are some of the best from Citadel. I really like their smallish stature and melancholy faces devoid of the later goofiness which Kev Adams later developed into the signature look of the Citadel greenskins.

The one with the shield came from the Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Monster Set from 1985 and I could not help myself, I had to try to emulate John Blanche’s take on the orc from the box cover down to the eye of Sauron on the shield. The other orc is roughly contemporary and a great little fella. I really enjoyed painting both them and hopefully they will soon be able to fight for King F’yar.

Cheers

Martin

The Dolgans soon to raid again

In two weeks the annual Horisont convention is held in Odense, which undoubtedly is the best and most interesting Danish war games convention. Like the two previous years I will be hosting a game of Oldhammer with my ol’ buddy Claus and this year we decided to run the famous “Dolgan Raiders” scenario from the Second Citadel Journal published in 1985. We will be using the 2ed WFB rules and more or less stick to the scenario as presented with a few small tweaks. More about both the miniatures and the scenario later when I’m done basing the minis we will be using.

The Second Citadel Journal published in 1985

In this post you can see the table on which we will be playing the scenario. We just finished the whole thing this weekend. Basically the action of the scenario takes place on flat grasslands which of course makes the terrain fairly simple if not even boring, so we decided to spice things up a bit by letting the confrontation take place on a slightly slopping hill and included some small features which breaks the monotony – a burial mound, an ancient stature and the remains of some gigantic thing which once wandered these plains. For those of you who know the scenario, which undoubtedly is most, you will remember the three wagons pulled by lobotomized ogres (sic!) which of course also are going to be a very dominant feature on the battlefield.

 

The styrofoam boards put in place and ready to be attacked

Cutting the slopping hillside

First stage done. A lone dark elf mini is used to test if the slope is not too steep

Statue and burial mound added

We initially were toying with the idea of having a road crossing the battlefield but this idea we soon discarded

Them the whole thing was covered with white glue mixed with brown paint and sand

And a giant skeleton as well as some smaller bones was put into the wet sand and glue mix

The statue is a some cheap religious kitsch with just the right flavour

The giant skeleton is the last remains of a rabbit a found a while ago which I had soaking in bleach for a while

More rabbit bones strewn across the battlefield

Once dry we gave the whole thing a new layer of dark brown

Once the brown layer was dry we took the whole thing outside and highlighted the boards with brownish yellow and khaki spray paints

Back inside the last details – such as the statue was painted and patches of reeds and large bushes was added.

And done. Ready for the Dolgans and their hated Hobgoblin enemies

 

 

Severed Hand Personalities

https://wordpress.com/It’s been a while since I posted anything on the blog. It’s not that I haven’t been painting rather the opportunities for taking pictures (I haven’t advanced beyond using natural lighting yet) and finding time to actually write the posts have been limited lately. Life you know… Well, what I have been doing is painting stuff for and from the legendary Orc’s Drift campaign from 1985 for Warhammer Fantasy Battle 2ed – the first large campaign-box Games workshop produced – which you of course all know.

What you see here is the orc characters for the second scenario “Ashak Rise”. First we have my take on Hagar Sheol – the leader of The Severed Hand Tribe. I was debating myself for some time what to do with this character as it gradually dawned on me that I probably would not be able to lay my hands on the original scenario model anytime soon.

The Hagar Sheol scenario model. A rare and expensive Little chap

Thus I started looking for a replacement. However, once I accepted that I would not be able to use the original I thought why not try to make my own Hagar. So that’s what I did. I rummaged through my pile of unpainted orcs and found a suitable model to convert and set out to make the model resemble Gary Chalk’s fine, fine portrait of Hagar on the cover of the Orc’s Drift scenario booklet. I must say that it was an extremely fun project, but the collector-part of my brain is still nagging me and I’ll probably never be complete at ease before I tracked the original Hagar down. Nevertheless I must admit that I’m very fond of my version.

Frontcover of the Orc’s Drift booklet with a drawing by Gary Chalk

The other orc is a ‘scenario model’ who goes under the name of Grashak Kra. A fierce, cool orc champion of the sort I love; punky, wild and wicked. He also appears outside the Orc’s Drift universe as an ordinary orc champion and is very easy to find and thus not expensive in any way.

That’s it for now. Stay tuned for more Orc’s Drift stuff coming up soon.

 

Cheers

Martin

D&D miniature poster

Recently people wrote some blogposts about their old Citadel and Warhammer posters. Great stuff. By chance I came across this promotion poster for Citadel’s Dungeons & Dragons line of miniatures in my copy of White Dwarf no. 68 from 1985. Just take a look at it in all its John Blancheian goodness. It’s soaked in all that makes mining this Oldhammer stuff worthwhile.

I love details like the classic Blanche-flame tongues on the sleeves of the adventurers, the weird runes reminiscent of Tom Meier’s lizard men, on the armour of the monsters, the red eye of Sauron on the Orc/Goblin’s shield and the inscription “TSR” above the dungeon passage, as if saying – “if you want to go further, TSR is the gateway”. Brilliant!

If I had a geek room all of my own this poster would certainly find a place on the wall. I don’t though, so this glorious piece of 80’s fantasy artwork will have to remain snugly in the magazine.

Cheers

Martin

Crazed amazons straight out of Lustria’s steamy jungles

Things have been rather slow when it comes to blog posts these lasts weeks. A nasty combination of much work and quite a lot of preparations for this year’s Horisont Con in Odense more or less stole away any chance to write about what I was doing. However, things have settled down now and over the next days I’ll show you what I and my sometime co-blogger Claus Kliplev have been up to.

However before we go into the Oldhammer scenario we presented, I here show you the amazons I mentioned in the last post. A selection of the great, great models released sometime around ’85. Is a fair selections of models from the range and I finished two models more for the scenario. Those you’ll get to see at a later stage. The remainder of the group will have to rest peacefully in my lead mountain until something inspires me to finish the lot.

The Second Citadel Compendium, 1985

The amazon range

These amazons are a wonderful bunch with a ton of wild character. The colour scheme I partially nicked from the cover of the Second Citadel Journal, where the amazons appeared inside for the first time, and the absolutely splendid paintjob done by Thantsants. All in all I’m rather pleased with the result. They weren’t easy to paint though. They are marred by quite a lot of flash, very thick mold lines running through faces and other important places on the minis as wells as some crude sculpting here and there. All of this is what you have to accept when dealing with pre-slotta stuff like this and when it comes down to it I in fact enjoy these small flaws as part of the character of the miniatures. There is a certain beauty in these imperfections which really appeals to me and I find myself drawn more and more towards this early stuff, where creativity seems to have reigned somewhat more freely than later in the 80’s where the conception of the Warhammer world began to find its form.

Well, that’s it for now. Be prepared for more posts soon. Up next is Tom Meier’s fantastic Troglodytes.

The Boyz Are Back in Town

Here you see my latest output – five more greenskins. Technically they’re all orcs as the little fellow you see among the classic Citadel orcs is an orc from Metal Magic. However in my collection he’ll be serving as some sort of elite goblin. Elite because he looks way more well-equipped and fierce than most 80’s-era Citadel goblins.

I’m no huge Metal Magic fan but they did a lot of fine models, but I’m not sure their orcs are to be counted among them. Somehow their orcs lack personality or that certain quality which makes the miniature vibrant. At least that’s how I fell about their orcs. Nevertheless I have quite a few of these Metal Magic orcs and eventually, once painted, they’ll constitute a nice alternative to my Citadel greenskins.

Most of the Citadel orcs were produced in that golden year of 1987. The only exception is the one in a brownish red/yellow tunic holding a bow and grabbing for his scimitar. He is one of the Orcs of the Red Eye-range released in ’85 (I think) for the Middle-Earth universe. Not that this makes him different from the other orcs in any way!

The shield you see in the middle, on the slightly blurry picture, was inspired by Eddie on the cover of the first Iron Maiden record. The guy on the shield ended up looking somewhat more like an undead Ziggy Stardust but being a major Bowie-fan this hardly matters.

Iron Maiden 1980

Ziggy Stardust

Ah, what geeky fun we have with our miniatures.

Cheers

Martin

A bunch of fantasy characters

I finished a batch of vintage goodness this week. Two wizards, a gypsy and a halfling all produced by Citadel and furthermore a Marauder elf.

I really like both wizards, especially the one in green. I have painted this mini three or four times over the years and this time I went back and used my first colour scheme from way back. The other wizard, the one holding a bird, is also very nice, although I must confess to having no idea what bird he’s holding. He has a glove on his hand, indicating some sort of bird of prey, but the bird’s beak looks like something on a water fowl – a duck perhaps! It’s very likely a joke that went over my head. Anyway, I ended up painting it in crow colours.

Then we have the very politically incorrect gypsy with the shifty look and a short sword hidden on his back. I love it! His face is slightly distorted but it still has a lot of character. The mini is perhaps not a masterpiece but still incredibly cool.

Then we have the Halfling – or should I say Hobbit. It’s Merry from the Fellowship of the Ring set released in 1985. A nice little fellow and great fun to paint.

The last mini is the Marauder elf. A slightly boring sculpt which I choose because I need an elf and he was at the top of my pile of unpainted elves. The face of the mini is also skewed or contorted, which adds to me slight irritation with the mini.

Absalom Herlich – wizard and sage

Bela Ustapur – thief and adventurer

Luthviel – outcast and loner

The halfling Jeremias Halla

Gabor von Stefansberg – diplomat, spy and libertine

More monks – now with donkey

Yep, I finished more monks. After having painted chaos for a while it’s rather soothing to work with a limited range of muted colours, and I thus found the monks a great fun to paint. The fat monk on the donkey is from Conquest Games, while the young, goofy chap with the axe is from Gripping Beast. The monk with the hands on his back is one of Foundry’s ‘Jolly Monks’, while the anxiously praying one is by Black Tree. All very fine models I think.

Finally we have a dear old friend of mine – the cleric from Citadel’s Adventurer Starter Set launched in 1985 to the joy of countless young collectors. This mini was very likely the first one I ever painted, which perhaps was during the Christmas of ’89. My memory fails me on the exact year, but I still remember how I painted the cleric bright green. Ahh, those were the days of Humbrol enamel and turpentine!  The cleric is not the same model but one I have purchased at a later stage. Sadly I parted with the original one at the stage of early adolescence where minis became slightly embarrassing and uncool among ‘serious’ role-players.

Sorry for my blurry image of the minis by the way. I’m still having some trouble with the lighting at the moment.

Well, no more monks for now. Up next is a slime monster and then a party of adventurers. Stay tuned!

Cheers

Old Firm Ogre Casuals

Last week I finished these five chaps for a small scenario we played Sunday. And let me tell you this – these models have been some of the most fun to paint in a long while. The largest of the models is a late-80’s ogre captain by Bob Olley. The mini is absolutely splendid and although all Olley’s ogres more or less look alike they are among my favorites. They remind me of Enki Bilal’s grim-faced sportsmen. And boy are they different from the current, boring Ogre Kingdoms-stuff GW is sporting. Sadly the mini had lost its hammer when I got it and I therefore gave him a big chaos warrior axe with skulls.

The four smaller ogres all come from the second incarnation of Golgfag’s mercenary ogres, produced around 1985; a classic Regiment of Renown. They are lovely figures but slightly crude compared to the stuff Citadel produced only a few years later. Nevertheless they were an absolute joy to paint. Also here one of the ogres had lost his weapon (the one on the far left), and I thus gave him the slender mace-head. I forgot from which line it originates.

In our scenario the Olley Ogre was named Groar and he arrived into the battle with his four brothers to combat the nefarious vampire Walther von Löwe. To underscore the fact the ogres are brothers I gave them the same orange-blond hair. Sadly Groar and his brothers fled the table much too soon. oh well…