The Sorcerer and the Shaman

Here are a couple more pieces for the Heroquest collection. Pending one of the extremely elusive 'regular' HQ monster prototypes becoming obtainable that's probably it for the set.

The village people reunion wasn't going well... I do want to do a full YMCA lineup of sorcerers sometime.  The new chap here is the guy on the right hand side who joins my 'metal proxies from commercially available lines'. He's Arkon Stormrider from the Champions of Chaos speciality set but without his head. I had a head from the fan sculpt female Chaos Sorcerer model that came out a few years ago intending to use it for him, but didn't realise how tiny it was! Not wanting to make him look like Thrud I carved the top section of the helmet off and used a handy Ral Partha Europe skull and some green stuff to make a better sized head for him. He got the Skeletor colour scheme rather than the flaming one. 

Added to the plastic and my tribute sculpt Grawshaks is the metal prototype (far right). He's certainly a big chappie! Fun to paint though, that really is the most grinning orc face of the lot.

The Gargoyle, more ferocious than ever!

So it is said in the 'Paint your wagon, er, orc!' article in the Heroquest Marvel Winter special below a picture of Mike McVey's stunning metal prototype gargoyle miniature. Here is the very thing itself in the Foundry cabinets.

This weekend I got a nice lot of painting done, including a new crown jewel for my collection, my very own metal prototype gargoyle.

For some reason he was extremely hard to photograph and it really doesn't do him justice. Happily he was a joy to paint, sometimes when you have these holy grails they can be quite disappointing to put colour on but this chap really painted himself.

Here he is with some mates, a genuine Bloodthirster and my (somewhat oversized it turns out!) attempt at sculpting one in the middle. All good practice for the eventual original miniature.

And here he is with his plastic counterparts.

A ratty rarity

You may remember a while ago I was painting up Advanced Heroquest Prototypes. Thanks to some generous folk they were mostly acquired as gifts, swaps and at generously low prices. The only one I didn't have was the Skaven, along with the elf the rarest of the set. Thus when I was able to buy said model for a large but not ridiculous amount I decided it was worth it to complete the lineup and balanced out amongst the others still meant a bargain for the entire prototypes collection. Here is my first ratman acquisition painted up. He's a bit shiny, hasn't had his matt varnish yet. I also haven't done the sand fill-in between his paws on the base.

He is bolder than the rats in my Skaven army. My goal was to go some way towards imitating the image below which I first saw in the Marvel Heroquest Special, I don't know if it was published anywhere else. The printing is grainy even by the standards of the photography of the era. I guess Marvel's coarse comic paper isn't ideally suited to printing of little photos, a little like newsprint. You can just make out from the photo that this is a mix of the plastic and metal Skaven and henchmen, though as far as I can tell the only plastic Skaven is the one front and centre. There are several plastic henchmen in the other side, I guess to vary the weapons a bit.
 

The same models (plus as far as I can make out some extras) appear in the full page advert for AHQ as featured in White Dwarf. I have been using this to try and pair up the figures and see what the paintjobs actually look like.

Then there are the actual models from these images in the cabinets at Foundry. I looked through my own photos and whilst I had taken many of the Heroquest and AHQ Heroes I didn't have any good ones of the Skaven or Henchmen. Idiot. Thankfully Ian Stuart did take some good photos of them and sent me the image below. As you can see they're a lot less yellow than the Marvel publication makes them look and more vibrant than the WD advert. I went for the guy on the right in the fetching red attire for my first Skaven. This is pretty simple block colours, no particular patterning except for the marks on the face. The hoods on these guys are definitely good territory for chequerboarding, diamonds and stripes. I can see a few of these in the various photos. Also that shield is harder than it looks, getting the three-pronged-swastika central and evenly spaced is tricky!

My first Skaven? Well, yes. Since I mentioned that I was looking I had contact with a nice gentleman who might be able to help me get a bit closer to recreating that childhood image... There might be a few more painted Skaven coming up along with some henchmen counterparts. 

I might stop short of doing the Warlock of Firetop Mountain heroes that can be seen on the shelf below the Skaven in Ian's photo. Much as I love that game (my copy got lost in a move, boo) the figures are not a wonderful example of GW from that era!

Fantasy Miniatures diorama part 3

It's been a while since the last post and I was hoping to have a somewhat finished base board to show you... but I don't. However I do have pictures of the miniatures I will be mounting on it mostly painted.

Here's the trio of foolish knights fresh from their foray through the dungeon and looking to climax by slaying a dragon... a little one. The arrogant fop on the left is their leader, Sir Nilles Guel Fromage. A Bretonnian noble cast out from his country for being a prat and now associating with commoners from the Empire. His followers are suitably sunburnt Gammoners of the George Cross.

The two young dragons, a male with wings and a girl without. Between them the object of the hunting party, a waterleaper the juvenile male is learning to force from its lair by boiling the water around it. The female dragon is a rescue piece I was sent many years ago when the Oldhammer Forum was doing a round-robin "send a broken miniature to someone, they have to fix it and paint it" challenge. I finally fixed it and painted it in 2020 and now it needs a home. The male will have his nostrils drilled for flame once I start assembly.

Here's the bad boy himself, ol' spiny. I've tried to preserve the colour scheme he was painted in when I received him (he did get stripped and rebuilt from scratch) but to mute them a little. The joy of the sculpt is how natural it looks and I wanted to complement this with an earthy feel. His head has been repositioned a little so he is looking down at his offspring and the wings have been angled as to keep his balance on top of the skull. The weight of the bottom wing caused it to snap at the elbow joint so I drilled and inserted a long steel pin to fix it securely. The join was then masked with some putty and hopefully doesn't show too badly.  It has held a month so far, fingers crossed it continues to!

The wings themselves are fine muslin scrim with layers of PVA glue applied, thinly at first until the wings could be dampened and shaped, then with much thicker layers to give a leathery texture. I mixed some paint into the glue layers and have painted further washes with inks over the top trying to preserve a translucency that looks like membrane. 

The Aedwyrm has been painted for the longest amount of time so the plan was to try and match the colouring in with the others but to give each a different kind of accent colour. This was originally determined by the four elements, so the Aedwyrm is earthy hues, the Spined Dragon has an airy blue and the young winged dragon has a fiery red as he spouts flame at his prey. When I decided to add the fourth dragon I wanted it to be closer to the Aedwyrm in colouration as in form so I gave her an orange accent rather than going along with the theme and doing something watery.

The 333 3rd Ed Challenge- Beasts

It's the penultimate month for the 333 3rd ed challenge... well kinda. Technically I think there's June and July to go but since the last two months' chaos warrior units have munched through so many points I only really have a months' worth of figures left to do. July is going to be a month of finishing the basing and doing banners I think.

Anyhow, here's May's submission thanks to the early May bank holiday. As far as the challenge goes this is a unit of twelve beastmen with hand weapons and shields, plus two armoured beastmen with hand weapons and shields to join Luxetia's non-goat beastmen and another (don't have a) cow-man to join the Countess. No room in the remaining points for a shaman but I had the model so it made sense to paint him up at the same time.

Continuing the colour scheme from the rest of the army (black and white with pink accents)I adopted the same black for the skin/fur as with the first unit of beastmen but decided to differentiate the leader and shaman by giving them white fur. I'd actually already painted these beastmen for a Path to Glory campaign a few years ago but stripped them as I wasn't happy with the quick paint job I had done to get them ready for the table between weekly games. That warband had been "The Black Goats of the Woods" and their tribal paint had been based on KISS makeup so I wanted to continue to nod to this past in their new role.

There's not a lot of clothing on these models, but where there is some I have tried to suggest the remnants of clerical garb, using the same colours as the robes of the acolytes and the sorcerers but with a bit more distressing. Possibly these are devolved and mutated clerics fallen from (or perhaps exalted to) grace through their worship of dark powers. They now march with Chezatro in his regional campaigning.

The standard pole is topped with the head of a Troll Soup Miniatures Bog Troll. You get so many spare heads for these guys! It will also have a flag if I find time in July.

Three misfists even within the ranks of the beasts. Bob Olley beastmen and a Blood Bowl player come to join the fight.

I think the right two here are chariot crew originally? The whip-goat's right arm was missing so needed a bit of rebuilding.

Here are the three joining other bands already painted. I didn't realise until painting him that the minotaur guy has the same head as the bull-headed chaos champion already in the Countess' retinue. It's fun finding bits of miniatures that were re-used to make up others, would be an interesting project to develop a chronology based on where body parts reappear!