Miniature painting: The Baron's Men

This is the Baron.

Not the best of my miniatures, either in terms of painting or sculpting, but easily one of my favourites.

 

The Baron serves as the default leader of my collection of miscellaneous 'medieval soldier' miniatures, who, like the Greenwood Gang, are united by theme and colour scheme and very little else. I collected and painted them over the course of the last two and a bit years: they include fantasy miniatures and historicals, old metal figures and modern plastics, figures from different cultures, figures from different centuries, and figures sculpted in very different styles. Some are figures I'm quite proud of, while others are far from my best work. If I ever fielded them together then my excuse would be that the Baron had been made so desperate by the antics of the Greenwood Gang that he'd started hiring anyone who turned up, from foreign mercenaries to dungeon-crawling desperadoes. I imagine they could be used as opponents to the Greenwood Gang in a skirmish game, or combined with them into a single force for a larger wargame.

Here are the ones I've painted up so far.

Axemen and swordswomen.

Miscellaneous soldiers.

Spearmen (and one spearwoman).

Soldiers with polearms.

The Baron and his knights.

More miscellaneous soldiers.

Dungeon-crawling adventurers on the Baron's payroll.

The whole force gathered around a village smithy, ready for a showdown with the Greenwood Gang!

Miniature Painting: The Greenwood Gang

Two years ago, in September 2018, I took up miniature painting. You can see my first fumbling efforts here, and my very-slightly-less-fumbling second efforts here.

Since then I have continued, in an extremely unsystematic way, to collect and paint miniatures. The pandemic has meant that I haven't actually done any miniature-based gaming, but painting tiny plastic goblins has proven to be a very calming activity in these uncertain times. One of my students recently confessed that she spent her spare time assembling Gundams because it was 'meditative'. I knew exactly what she meant. 

The Greenwood Gang are a good example of my haphazard approach to the hobby. A couple of years ago I bought a sprue of Dark Ages archers and painted them in green and brown, with the idea that maybe they were hunters or foresters and would thus be wearing clothes to camouflage with the woods in which they moved. From then on, every time I got a figure or two with a vaguely 'medieval outlaw' air to them, I painted them in the same colours. And so, gradually, the Greenwood Gang grew from a band of four archers to a force of thirty-nine, including everything from board game figures, to old-fashioned metal models, to modern plastics. They were painted at intervals over the last two years: some of them were painted when I was still learning and had almost nothing in the way of paints and basing materials, while others were completed much more recently. I rather like the motley appearance this gives them, even if the historian in me can't help noticing that some of them really don't belong within about five hundred years of each other. 

Anyway. Here they are. There's got to be some wargame out there in which they'd count as a rules-legal force...

Outlaws with swords.

Outlaws with staves.

Outlaws with mixed weapons.

Outlaws with bows 1.

Outlaws with bows 2.

Outlaws with bows 3.

Outlaws with bows 4.

The whole damn gang, swarming from their hovels to defend the forests from the Baron's men!

Miniature painting: the adventure continues

Last September, after incautiously writing too many blog posts about Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, I took up miniature painting. I posted about it in December, providing images of all the crudely painted figures that I'd completed to date. Five months on, I'm still at it, although my pace has slowed somewhat. This post is an update on what I've been painting since.

I'm still very much a beginner, as will be obvious from the images below. I'm only just starting to experiment with things like basing figures or painting human eyes. I'm painting figures pretty much at random, just in order to experiment with different things - big models, small models, cloth, skin, armour, hair, scales - and my focus is still on quantity rather than quality. But I'm improving. Slowly. I think.

Here are the models I've done so far this year. Click the pictures for bigger images.

More miniatures from Castle Ravenloft and The Legend of Drizzt:

THE CHORUS LINE OF THE DAMNED.

Some chunky old elves from Chronopia: 

Some Arab warriors from somewhere or other:

An angel.

A sprue of female paladins from Shieldwolf miniatures:

Some 1:72 (20mm) elves, as an experiment in working on a smaller scale:

Some GW skinks and Frostgrave snakemen:

A bunch of fantasy henchmen and irregulars:

Some random historical figures:

Painting these guys was an oddly intimate experience. As my brush tenderly caressed their athletic buttocks, I suddenly realised why there was such a big market for cheesecake female miniatures.

Some dark elf spearmen:

Some old Warzone miniatures:

I FINALLY WORKED OUT HOW TO DO EYES!

And a dwarf.

So that's where I've got to. Current projects include finally finishing the board game miniatures, painting up a bunch of other Warzone figures (Brotherhood, Bauhaus, and Lutherans), doing some more Celts (some of whom will be wearing trousers this time), and completing a squad of Mantic orcs who have been sitting on my shelf, half-finished, for about six months. So expect another update in, like, November or thereabouts...

Adventures in miniature painting

It's time I came clean about something. All the Warhammer stuff I've been reading over the last few months has obviously affected me on a much deeper level than I wanted to admit. It's made me do something I thought I'd never do again.

For the first time in twenty years, I've started painting miniatures.

Initially, I felt as though I barely remembered which end of the brush to hold. I bought a sprue of Moria goblins off ebay, for no reason except that they were cheap, and used them for painting practise. The results, unsurprisingly, were pretty rough.

Still, I'd found painting them to be extremely relaxing, and it had given me a taste for painting goblins. So I pulled all the teeny-tiny goblin figures from my 1st edition Battlelore box and painted them, as well.

And then the goblin models from Arena of the Planeswalkers, for good measure.

By this point, my confidence, if not my skill, was increasing. So I decided to take on a bigger project: painting all the miniatures from the old D&D boardgame I bought earlier this year.

The next step, obviously, was to move onto the other board game I acquired at the same time, Legend of Drizzt, and its sister game, Castle Ravenloft. These came with a lot of miniatures, so getting them all painted up is clearly going to be a long-term project.

  

In between board game miniatures, I also painted a few other orcs and goblins from here and there.

And some cultists and adventurers from Frostgrave:

So, four months in, here's what I have painted up so far.

The humanoid horde:

The lich and his minions:

Dungeon dwellers:

The Company of the Foaming Tankard:

WILL FIGHT FOR BEER.

I'm still not very good, and I'm focusing on speed and efficiency rather than fine detail, but I think I'm getting better. I've recently picked up some new paints and brushes, so I'm looking forward to seeing what I can do with them in the new year!