God's Fire, England's Fury and West's Zombies

A bad week of parents' evenings and marking has severely cut into my plans for the week. As it happens, I only managed to get the base cut from some offcut MDF at work:

before this evening sitting down to some cutting and sticking. Once I'd got the base in front of me, it rapidly became apparent that my original sketch included too many of the vitally challenged.

A quick rethink led me to these fine chaps. They are constructed from the old faithful Games Workshop Zombie sprue from the turn of the century. Lacking the more outre design elements which came to plague later GW sculpts, these are incredible fodder for conversions, offering arms, heads, bodies and legs which can be mixed and matched to your heart's content.

In order to help anchor the period I carved up a couple of the Warlord Parliamentarians so that some of the foul undead horde would be dressed in a slightly more formal fashion than the run of the mill peasants that the rest of them represented. The Warlord sprues also furnished some headgear which helps give the shamblers some character.







Why is this chap crawling?


It might be something to do with this chap's choice of blunt instrument...


So tomorrow will probably be terrain building and greenstuffing on the brain hungry mass with painting on the schedule for weeknights next week.

A milestone

Crikey, chaps. 500 page views in a little over a week.

Thanks for all your support; it's very reassuring to know I have people to help chivvy me on.

Thou Shalt Not Suffer...

And so we begin with the second one.

As any general will tell you, detailed planning is the key to a successful operation.
So here we have my detailed plan.



Stunning, I'm sure you'll agree.

Our stars for this project are the Warlord Games Parliamentary Infantry; phenomenal value as this box cost me only £12 at a show. That's £12 for 40 miniatures. I'm just going to say that again - £12 for 40 figures. Now I know the usual RRP is £22 - but that's still around 50p per chap. As I say - incredible value. Three of them will be forming the main body of our gallant heroes whilst the rest of them... ah, well, that would be telling.



The sculpts on these seem to be better than the British Line Infantry used in the last project; there are fewer soft areas and the details are generally crisper. The faces, as with the other Warlord plastics I used, are a particular strength; full of character and emotion. I just hope the painting does them justice.

Poses are a little limited as the bandoliers and apostles limit which arms and muskets and can arranged on which bodies. This could well lead to a lot of repetition if you were building a proper wargaming force; for limited use in a vignette, there's no concerns really.

The only lead addition to this is the Rabble Rouser I bought the pack for; indeed, the whole concept of the piece hung on finding the right figure in the right pose, so I was happy to find this chap. Here he is with his comrades.



So tomorrow will be the construction of the Opposition; this will require a trip into the depths of the garage as I pretend to be Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Lead Pile. After that will be the start of construction on the scenic elements. This all works out quite nicely as I'm teaching the Wars of the Three Kingdoms at the moment and so can pass this all off as research if I talk fast enough.

In other news, Lion Rampant has caught my eye with the thought of cobbling together some Low Fantasy, semi-historical stuff but that's on the back-burner.

I must resist the Siren call of Shinybloodyitis.

Shield Question

Just looking at the Romans taking shape over at Legatus' blog and his musing about shield transfers. Back in my days of scale modelling quite a few people had some success printing their own decals. Has anyone tried that for shields?

One of the projects coming up will require the painting of a large number of shields and given what happened to the White Hands on my Uruk Hai last time, any shortcuts are probably to be seized with both hands.

If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and-- WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?

It was in the long hot summer of 1898 that caravans started going missing to the south of Wadi Phukwa'zaht. Harassed by the Colonial Office and - perhaps more importantly - seeing the gifts and gratuities he had become accustomed to receiving from various businesses vanish like a mirage, the Governor General suggested an investigation was in order.

Thus it was that a small section under the command of one Lt. Keene was dispatched to find out who or what was responsible for the disappearances. He and his faithful Sergeant Cordwangle were quite unprepared for what they found...









Well, here it is. I'm eternally grateful to everyone who's supported me in my efforts to get back in to the hobby. Your compliments and cheerleading have been vital to the success of this little project.



I am quite happy with how it's turned out; perhaps more importantly, aside from the few places where the brushwork isn't up to much, I'm glad that I have started to built up my confidence and remember some techniques after the long gap.



Perhaps more importantly, it looks pretty much like what I had in my head when I had the idea for it in the summer looking at Mr Awdry's wonderful Whitechapel CD-based vignette at 28mm Victorian Warfare. 

The last few in progress shots are:

The bases were blended in with some simple basing sand which then had a wash applied:





And the last details were added to Barney




And then finally some static grass was added to give some variation to the ground cover. I would have liked to add some moss to the rocks but I can't find my flock anywhere.




The total cost for the project was a quarter of a box of British Line Infantry, so call that a fiver; an old PS2 game, 50p for Barney and £2 for the aquarium plants. Everything else was offcuts and leftovers.

 See you all next week for the next project which is a little bit Hammer and a little bit folk horror...

Shinybloodyitis 1 - Me 0

I am very impressed with Warlord Games' service. The single miniature I needed to complete the complement for the next project arrived almost the day after I ordered it.

Errrr... along with some more miniatures.



Now, to be fair, I didn't spend much. But the entire point of this was that I wasn't going to spend anything more than the bare minimum to avoid the wrath of She Who Must Be Obeyed. So I guess I have to find a use for the leftovers.

For the tally, then, I have two seventeenth century Rabble Rousers to use up and a suspiciously familiar roman general...

I have an idea for the General but I'm damned if I can think of a use for the two spare seventeenth century chaps. I'll stick up a picture of them when I've got them unpacked so anyone who's got any bright ideas can chip in.

An Intermission

Progress is ongoing. I'm on track to finish tomorrow night or possibly Saturday at the outside. The brave chaps of the Prince of Wales' Own Volunteers have been stuck on and modelled in. Just waiting for the glue to dry for final weathering and blended and then we pop Barney on.

I didn't want to post any pictures tonight as I'm almost ready for the grand unveiling but I likewise didn't want to leave the blog entry un-illustrated. I've therefore put my other skills as a photographer to use to produce this so you'd all have something to look at:



Thinking ahead to the project after next, you see.

If anyone of you are pulpy Lovecraft lovers, incidentally, you might find some of the photographs I've taken interesting. You can see them here or more general photography can be found here or even here if you're not allergic to Tumblr and want to see my more peculiar creations. I will, needless to say, be doing some decent photographs of the model when it's done.

Close to the finish line!