A few, old gobbos

Here’s three old, early 80’s pre-slotta gobbos finished a while ago. They look rather different from each other, however, the Ral Partha one on the right is really the odd one out. This one is, of course, sculpted by Tom Meier; an old favorite of mine. While painting the Meier goblin it suddenly dawned on me that the little chap is going commando, so to speak. You can almost see it in the photo. Tom Meier sculpted a number of trolls with a bare bottom, but I didn´t know that he did the same with at least this goblin. Perhaps he did more; semi nude orcs? Elves?

I really love these old goblins and the sense of wicked menace they convey. Particularly the Meier goblin is really oozing grim evil, but the other two have something of the same. Most will probably prefer the humor Kev Adams brought to the greenskins, but I really dig this early stuff.

 

  

Yep, still more greenskins

So here I am again with another mix of greenskins and this time the mix is particularly eclectic. First up is one of Kev Adams’ early 90’s night goblins. I was never really taken with the night goblins from this era, but they are certainly nice and smooth to paint and still way better than the later, plastic incarnations of the gobbos – at least to my mind.

Speaking of smooth painting the next one is an early 80’s pre-slotta so-called Red Orc from the Fiend Factory line. This is a very crude sculpt indeed and somewhat of a challenge to paint, but I must admit that I rather like the odd moon face and the strange body proportions of the red orcs.

Then we have another familiar face from the Fiend Factory line – a pre-slotta goblin archer. The outlandish fishlike face (and feet with only three toes!) of the goblin made me paint his skin tone blueish or turquoise. I don’t know if this was I wise decision but sometimes you just have to go with the flow and see where things end up. This sculpt is in many ways much better than the red orc, but I would still choose the red orc over this fella.

Finally, we return to Kev Adams with a goblin he sculpted for Crooked Claw Miniatures. Like most of his Crooked Claw gobbos this is a fun and wicked looking chap with lots a character. Good stuff.

Luckily I have now finished painting the last greenskins I was planning to do and I am thus now stated painting other stuff. Hurra. However, on the blog the next post will still be showing greenskins as I will post the remainder of my work as well. Nevertheless, bear with me, other stuff is coming down the pipeline.

Look out! Raiding goblins approaching

Wow, it has been awhile. My mojo for blogging about minis more or less completely disappeared as I was preoccupied with other projects. I guess everyone blogging at times loses the perspective and starts questioning the whole purpose and the time spent on this. However, I have been painting and gaming regularly and things have thus not been quite on the hobby front as such. Yay to that. Now I think the time has come to try and do some writing again, not least because we are starting a new fantasy campaign, which I am psyched about and very eager to present to all those who might still be interested in this blog. But more about this in another post.

Here I just want to show you a nice little band of very old gobbos I finished painting a few days ago. It is, of course, the splendid Goblin Raiding Party, released as a so-called “speciality set” (no. 4) back in the early 80’s – in ’82 Stuff of Legends informs me.

They are pre-slotta and very different from the cartoony goblins to come. Some of them look more or less like little humans with pointy ears while others carry characteristics closer to future green skins. I must admit that I really love these minis and their somber vibe of quiet menace and restrained approach to weapon sizes etc. They are definitely among my favorites from the old Citadel box sets and I have been looking forward to painting them for quite some time now. The box had been resting deep within my lead mountain for some time and it was a sort of spur of the moment thing which made me dig them out. Something I definitely do not regret. They were a blast to paint and my love for these minis only grew during the process.

A look at the shields

Well, that’s all for now. More soon about out upcoming campaign.

I hope someone is still out there to reads this!

– Martin

     

Street wise eggheads out exploring

These three professors left my desk recently and I really had fun working on them. The minis are very different and doesn’t exactly hold the same scale, but I think the colours tie them together nicely – anyway, that’s at least what I tell myself.

The little fella with the enormous head is one of the pre-slotta supervillains from Citadel, produced along with a set of superheroes, in 1984 together with a few blisters. Both sets are great with some very striking and useful models among them. It does not show too well on the images, but I painted veins on the little doctor’s head, which turned out rather good, if I should say so…

The hooded scientist is recent and comes from the absolutely splendid little line of Colony 87 miniatures. I know you know them – if not – go Google them, go buy them. They are worth it.

The last of the lot is the mini known as the ‘Talisman scientist’. The model is slightly crude and somewhat both awkwardly posed and sculpted, but I like his face with the eyes peering over his glasses. I got the idea of painting his receding hairline from the always excellent Oldenhammer in Toronto blog.

 
That’s all for now. I hope you like them. Any thoughts?

 

Cheers
Martin
 

Bow-wow Bow-wow

Ok, so here we continue with models relevant for the Orc’s Drift campaign. What you see here is the orc champion Grashak Kra, who was already presented last week, and his pack of wild hobhounds rushing towards Ashak Rise and the dwarf miners working there. Something which takes place during the second scenario of the campaign.

I don’t think there is a colour-canon for painting hobhounds but some Google searches confirmed my general impression that people mostly have approached them very traditionally. I wanted to add something to the miniatures, making them slightly weirder and perhaps even a bit wilder. The minis themselves have a certain monkey-like look and this I took as a que for the baboon-like heads and combined it with fur inspired by hyenas. The result is pretty strange but also very dramatic and drama is, I think, what these minis need in order to work well. Because, honestly, the hobhound minis have a certain goofiness to them, which counters the very idea of them as being the fiercest, meanest sort of warhounds around.

Nevertheless I’m rather pleased with them and it certainly took some time to gather ten of these pre-slotta beasties (from 1984 I believe). Luckily Mr. Phreed kindly provided me with the last three I was missing. There was, I think, only produced three different hobhounds and as you can see I ended up with six of the same dogs. I could not bring myself to do any conversions on them. Although I considered adding some armour here and there.

Next up is the dwarfs from Ashak Rise.

 

 

Tom Meier’s Troglodytes

Back in April  I bought Tom Meier’s box of Troglodyte goodness. Sadly the miniatures were in a dire condition and needed some love before they were in a state to be painted. Luckily the good advice of Mr Phreedh worked nicely, although several things snapped off while in the acetone bath. I thus had to do some heavy restoring on the models –pinning and filling gaps with green stuff that is. The keen eye will thus undoubtedly spot some small adjustments on the miniatures making them slightly different from the originals. In order to make the restorations hold I had to change a few things, such as for instance the pole-arm blade on one. Nothing big, just small stuff. I guess that’s the price you pay when getting minis cheaply as a joblot on Ebay.

Disregarding the prep work I must say that I really enjoy these miniatures. They ooze cold, reptilian deviousness and pulp fantasy. What surprised me was how long it took to paint them. Having just painted Meier’s lizardmen I expected the Trogs to be as fast a paint –not so. Very likely because of their massive bulk; the scales took me forever to paint. But it was fun work and I’m pleased with the result. I’m quite infatuated with the impossible weapons, the runes odd shape of their gear.

Any thoughts?

 

Next up I’ll show you some pygmies I finished.

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.

Tom Meier’s Spectacular Lizard Warriors

I have been working on some very old stuff lately and the first batch is now to be considered done. It’s the magnificent box of Tom Meier’s Lizard Warriors released simultaneously, I believe, in 1984 by Citadel and Ral Partha. To my mind Tom Meier’s lizardmen are some of the best reptilians out there. The lizard warriors are petite, slender creatures covered in exotic armour and wielding equally exotic weapons. Strange runes are shown on their shields and some of the minute belt buckles are shaped like snake heads.

 

This is great fantasy stuff. You really get the feeling that these lizard warriors are part of a particular, alien culture. To emphasize the idea that the nine of them belong to the same tribe I painted them in the same colours and I’m quite happy with the result.

The keen eye will undoubtedly spot some small conversions on a few of the models. I bought the set rather cheaply on Ebay as a so-called job lot. This meant the some of the quite thin arms and weapons were broken off. Most of the loose bits were still in the box but some I had to replace. Thus the conversions were an act of restauration not a creative urge to tinker with the originals.

 

 

These cloaks are a rather intriguing. I find it at the same time odd and rather fascinating that the lizardmen should wear such large cloaks – I’m not sure why.

I’m so happy to finally have this set painted. Next time I’ll be back with a band of coke-crazed Amazons also straight out of the magical year of ’84.

See you around

Cheers

Martin

 

Troglodytes unpacked… Yay and oh no!

Celebrating a job well done I recently decided to bid on a set of Tom Meier’s troglodytes produced by Citadel back in the glory days around 1985. I’ve had my eye on Meir’s lizardmen and troglodytes for quite a while now. Their snake-like, curling bodies, strange poses and oddly shaped weapons decorated with arcane symbols give them a very distinct look. A look, I must admit, I’m quite fond of.

Especially the troglodytes have a certain weird vibe – perhaps because the minis are huge. I mean huge compared to pre-slotta Citadel minis, but even next to the minis you see now a day they look big.

It was thus with great satisfaction that I succeeded in securing the seven troglodytes including the original box and actually doing so without having to pay some absurd sum.

Sadly when I unpacked my precious troglodytes I discovered that all of them are starting to show signs of the dreaded lead rot and some are even beginning to crack. The seller had not mentioned this in his auction and perhaps I should have returned them but I’m so glad that I finally have a set of these minis, and managed to purchase them for a decent price, that I’m willing to spend the required time restoring them.

But clearly I now need to get cracking at the lizards, since they are on their fast way towards disintegration. It thus looks as if my next painting project will be this set.

Do you have any experience handling lead rot you want to share? I’ll probably need all the advice I can get soon!

Mixed gobbos for your pleasure

It’s been a while. I’ve been swamped with work and only found time to do some short paint sessions since the beginning of the month. Sadly this appears to continue at least for another few weeks, but I’ll probably be able to fit in some occasional painting. At least that’s what I hope. I have 18 eager snotlings awaiting my brush on the workbench, but more about them in a later post.

Here you see what I have almost finished. Five gobbos – the oldest is the little fella in the middle. A so-called Lesser Night Goblin sculpted by the Perry twins around 1983. I have quite a few of those in the leadpile and I for some reason really like these gnomish goblins. They are quite different from the Citadel goblins we came to know from the mid-80’s but their minute appearance certainly is charming and I would really like to do something more with these lesser goblins.

Then you see three goblins from around 1987. The one with the shield and the chap holding a spear are excellent sculpts while the one with the bow is suffering from some awkward details and a slightly, unintentionally deformed face. He looks good from a distance but the sculpting doesn’t really hold up to closer inspection.

Finally the one on the far right is a Crooked Claw Goblin. A decent mini, although the body perhaps is a bit too rotund or trunk-like, but nothing which should keep you from getting one yourself.

There is not much to say about the paintwork. The skin turned out slightly lighter than intended but that’s how it goes with my greenskins. They seem to end up a bit different each time, which is probably because I don’t really have a preferred method to do the green skin. I added some poppie-like flowers to two of the bases.

As you can see I still need to finish the bases but that’s the easy part and something which I even might do tonight.

Cheers