The Metal Quest continues...

Some more special Heroquest minis for you today. An orc for orctober, necromancer for halloween and an 'orrible troll. One of the upsides about being vocal on platforms about your collecting of Heroquest prototypes is that occasionally people contact you saying they have things... Both the necromancer and orc came to me this way whilst the troll was a gift from Mike @ Broadswords and Beasts. I had to modify him slightly to fit on a 25mm base! 

The necromancer makes 3 out of 5 of the wizards miniatures, still the high mage and man at arms to find. I first came across this miniature in the undead armies book where he (a metal one I asusme) lurks in the background of an army image:

Since he was clearly in the studio army at this time I went through all my White Dwarfs to see if I could find a better picture of him, but no success (only the same photo duplicated). The previous two necromancers I have painted I used the cover of Wizards of Morcar as a reference but for this guy I decided to go as close to the WD image as I could, giving him a more corpse-like complexion and orangey robes. This was helped by my recent acquisition of 'British Redcoat Red C' from the Foundry paint range after about a year searching for a yellow-shade red rather than the somewhat pinkish 'Bright Red'. As you can see from the comparison picture he's somewhat larger than the eventual plastic piece (as are the orc shaman and storm mage), as opposed to the prototypes of the base set minis which are smaller than the plastics and which were my guide for sculpting my own homages.

The orc is an extra-special find as I only know of one other person who has one (though likely there are more out there). There isn't even the Mike McVey one in the foundry cabinet. The rarity can be understood since the minis from the base set never had a general release and with all the great orcs in the Citadel ranges he was never going to be especially eye-catching to the extent that a casting room worker would spin themselves one up. Unlike the gargoyle, chaos sorcerer and chaos warrior which would be understandably more popular. I still hope to lay my hands on a chaos warrior one day, having been used as a young bloods trophy at one point there must be a few around. Anyhow, the orc was a lot of fun (and quite quick) to paint. As with the gargoyle I tried to get as close as possible to the box photos but without laying eyes on the actual mini I had to do a bit of guessing as to what the colours were like in reality.

The troll, of course, is not a Heroquest mini. Shakined Bonebender is, however, one of my favourite troll models. Ultimately I'd like to add the Marauder troll that appears in the Marvel special to my collection, but that for another day. I need a HQ troll for an adventure in December and Shakined doesn't really fit with my river, stone or regular trolls so this is the best use for him I can think of. I know he was based on a John Blanche image, I have in mind that he is actually a John Blanche sculpt? But I could be mis-remembering that.