Brettonia Redux: My First Painted Models Ever

The first models I ever bought and painted were a bunch of ancient Eldar (now sadly gone) and a load of metal Brettonians. I got the Brettonians from a kid called Alan for very little money, mainly because I wanted to play Fantasy Battle and they looked like King Arthur guys, which I recognised. I painted the Brettonians over a week and proudly fielded them in their first battle. They were the only painted miniatures in the game and I was so keen that I gave every one of my knights his own name.

They were garbage. My opponent exterminated them, and so I failed to take the hint and bought some more. What I didn't know then was that, at the time that I was starting to play Warhammer, the only armies that GW cared about were High Elves, Empire, Orcs, High Elves, a bit of Chaos and High Elves. My main opponent had High Elves.

For a long time, Brettonia was literally the Empire without any of the good units. Fighting High Elves was like a medieval army fighting the Battle of the Somme: they just got mowed down by bolt throwers. The only way to win was to buy the minimum number of actual Brettonians and to pack out the army with manticores (I do miss those general lists of monsters available to all armies, which gave them a lot more options).

But now, Brettonia has two army books and even a new list in the Old World. Hmm...

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Repainting the Alice in Warhammerland models got me thinking about my old Brettonians, and Lasgunpacker's comment on my last post pushed me over the edge. I've considered repainting my Warhammer Frenchmen before, but have been deterred by the complexity of the heraldry involved. However, painting old harlequin models has given me a bit more confidence - at least, in painting checks. 

Here are some of my old models. I'm putting these pictures up as a bit of a record, as I'm going to strip and repaint them. They've got no real shading and are extremely basic, but they're not bad for my first efforts.

(Incidentally, the first GW Brettonian army was painted in flat block colours, without shading. It looked very basic.)

So there they are. I also found a few blister packs in a box at my parents', stashed away for many years and testament to a time when even GW were desperate to get rid of the Brettonians. Back then, as my friend with the High Elves pointed out, £1 was not a bargain.

So there we are. I am going to paint a load of Brettonians in the near future. Not a very big load, certainly not a proper army, and I will paint them pretty slowly. But I reckon they might look nice, and it'll be an interesting project.

Now I'm going to paint some space orks.

Queen of Hearts, Caterpillar and Dormouse

 The Wonderland books don't really have heroes or villains, especially. Most of the time, Alice wanders into a new place, meets some weirdos and tries to talk sense to them, usually with bizarre and comical results. There isn't enough plot or time to develop many characters in depth.

On the other hand, the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland does seem keen on cutting everyone's head off. That's not normal. And (amazing segue alert) nor are inquisitorial minions in Warhammer 40,000.

My own version of her - slightly more glamourous than the John Tenniel pictures - was based off an old metal dark elf sorceress, who I'd chopped up in the past. This version got a new hand and an axe from the Frostgrave demon set, and to my surprise a left hand from a Mantic ork. I sculpted a heart on her crown with green stuff.

I painted her red and cream/white, as suits the look of the warband and her background as a playing card. Her face is slightly greyer than normal, for a bit of contrast.

I expect that she is just about to deliver her catchphrase - "Off with his head!" - while doing the decapitating herself. Times are hard and you just can't get the staff.

I also had a go at tidying up a couple of my old conversions for this warband: the Caterpillar and the Dormouse.

The Caterpillar is based on an ancient metal Necromunda milliasaur model, with a kroot body and arms, and a chaos warrior's head. He's sitting on a "toadstool" made from a Tau drone. The hookah he smokes was made from pieces of kroot rifle and some kind of dwarf contraption.

Finally, the Dormouse himself was a tiny detail from a skaven kit. In the original Alice In Wonderland, he ends up in the teapot, so I gave him a massive mechanical teapot in which he rides. I expect that the spout functions quite like a flamer.

The legs and ball of the teapot were left over from a big robot kit from a steampunk game called Wolsung. It looked really cool, but I don't think it still exists. The spout, handle and other bits came from Necron and Dark Eldar leftovers. I suppose there's a bit of a nod to The War of the Worlds in the tripod structure, as well. I think he'd function as heavy support!

So then, here is the whole warband so far. I'd quite like to do a white knight (presumably a friendly space marine), and maybe some other character to get it to ten. 

Curiouser and Curiouser

 Time for more weirdos for the retinue of Inquisitor Alice.

Every inquisitor requires some heavies, and even the most subtle operative needs protection. Hence we have Tweedledee and Tweedledum, two hefty lads armed with big pistols and large fists. These models were based on some mangled plastic ork nob models that I've had for years, with heads and an arm from some ogre Blood Bowl players (I really must do something with those guys). They look slightly cartoony, which is appropriate.

Tweedledum is carrying a brand new (power) rattle: in Alice Through the Looking Glass, the Tweedles have a battle over the breaking of the rattle. It started off as an axe: I replaced the blade with a weird bit of machinery I found and made the rattle itself out of plasticard.

I gave them suitably gaudy outfits. As chance had it, Dum's armour resembled squares on a chessboard, and I painted them to resemble that. I painted chequers on Dee's arm and shoulder armour, to reflect the checks in the rest of the unit. They got plasticard squares for their bases.

Painting them wasn't terribly hard, although the faces took a long time. I do quite like ogre and troll-sized models, as you can do some interesting shading, but the faces of these guys took a while. I used grey on their jaws to suggest stubble, red for their noses and cheeks, and purple for their lips. A couple of real bruisers. I'm not sure if they're mutants or small ogryns, but they can take care of dirty work.

Here is picture of them being recruited.

Alice in Warhammerland

 I've always liked the Alice books. They're extremely strange, and have a weird combination of logic and anarchy that's very appealing. Also, they're fantasy stories that aren't derived from Tolkien, which is actually quite rare. They're both sinister and comical at once, which of course makes them ideal for adaptation to Warhammer 40,000.

Well, to be honest, it doesn't. Modern 40k consists largely of identical bald men shouting "Heresy!" at once another, which isn't ideal for a surreal Victorian children's story about a little girl with yellow hair. But what the heck.

I did these conversions a long time ago, but I took the opportunity to repaint them where needed. In the case of Alice, I entirely stripped and dismantled the original model. This involved resculpting quite a lot of green stuff and making her a new base. It was a right pain, to be honest, but the end result is definitely an improvement on the original. How much of an improvement, I'm not totally sure. 

So, Alice is basically the upper body of a sister of battle and the bottom half of an Eldar warlock, with lots of extra bits stuck on. I've no idea where her pointy little feet came from. I think her hammer is from a Mordheim sprue.

The Hatter is based on a Mordheim plastic soldier, with a lot of green stuff. His gun is probably from a plastic terminator. 

The Cheshire Cat is from Neferata, an old vampire model. He's got some sculpting around the mouth, and is standing on a bit of wood elf dryad to make a tree.

Getting a half-decent picture of these models was very difficult, which is really irritating but feels appropriate somehow. Here they are - normal people going about their lives.

The Minions of Mark: Dark Age miniatures

 Over the years I've accumulated a lot of random miniatures. Among these models was a blister pack of strange little guys that my local games shop was selling for £5 in a bargain bin. 

They're actually from a game called Dark Age, which I think is now defunct. It was a skirmish wargame based on the pictures of an artist called Bron, and seemed to be about small warbands abandoned on a desert planet. The guys I bought, if I remember rightly, were the followers of someone called Saint Mark.

What they look like, to me, is a cross between the War Boys from Mad Max and the Cenobites from Hellraiser. I put them in a drawer for a long time, and was rather intimidated by the prospect of painting them, especially because they would need a largely monochrome paint scheme, which made me nervous. I don't really enjoy painting black, because the highlights often come out as chalky or too stark. 

Well, I finally dragged these guys out, painted one as a test, found that it worked, and got going on the other four. They're strange designs but really well sculpted, with loads of detail. They seem to be holding guns that fire circular saw blades, as well as truncheon-type weapons that might be electrified. I doubt that they're the good guys of the setting.

Making the skin different to the clothing was quite hard. The clothing is highlighted from black to light grey, by adding more grey and white. The skin started off as light grey, was given a very thin wash of purple, and was then highlighted by adding first bone and then pink to the mix. The skin was eventually given a thin glaze of pink to suggest that it is alive. I'm not sure how well this comes out in the photos.

Here they are.

Weird, aren't they?

Converting Space Marine Arms and Legs

 Bit of a strange title for this post, but it's accurate...

I got this metal space marine for a few pounds on Ebay. He was once a Dark Angels champion, but was missing a right arm, sword a head. I replaced them all. I really like the draped cloak and all the complex details on the armour.

I also had some battered plastic marines. Inspired by an article about converting marines in White Dwarf 299, I thought I'd have a go at changing their stances. I gave one of them running legs, which wasn't too difficult: it's just a matter of cutting away the piping at the running knee, and pitching the body forward. I also added some purity seals, just for added detail.

The other conversion was subtler and much more difficult. Following the instructions in WD 299, I chopped his legs into seven bits (!) and then pinned and glued them back together. A surprising amount of resculpting with green stuff was required. Aargh.

And then for the painting. It strikes me that very few space marine models are standing up straight, especially without some sort of robes around them. I suspect this is because they look slightly odd and awkward when they're standing still. I gave the standing guy a beardy head from Mordheim. He looks slightly like an aged warrior scanning the horizon, and slightly like an aged hippy disappointed to discover that the Grateful Dead have packed up.

So there we go. A few more marines for the army. These were surprisingly tricky conversions, and I'm not in a hurry to do the standing-marine conversion again. But they look nice and fit in with the rest of the miniatures. I really ought to do something that isn't just rank-and-file blokes sometime. I've got the bits for it... 

Converting Old Mantic Models: little space soldiers, a demon mercenary and The Thing

I had a bit of free time over the weekend. Here in the UK, it was unpleasantly hot, and I spent as much time as possible indoors. I opened the big box of random sprues, and found a bunch of old Mantic miniatures.

Mantic have made some decent stuff - their skeletons are particularly good, and used to be dirt cheap - but they have produced some... less fantastic miniatures. Their plastic goblins are pretty awful: they've got very little detail, they're made from some horrible plastic-resin material, and it's generally quite hard to tell what the heck is going on with them. However...

I've long been of the view that the most important bits of a miniature (unless it's some insanely complex GW sculpt with books, banners and the like) are the head and the weapon (or at least the hands). What this means is that by attaching a good head and arms to a ropey body you can distract from the bad parts enough to end up with something acceptable. In this spirit, I waded into the goblins.

I threw the original heads and arms away. Instead, I used Perry Miniatures Afghan arms, and the WW1 style heads from the Wargames Atlantic "Bulldogs" sprue. A little bit of cutting was required to get the heads to go on properly, but nothing elaborate. The only problem with the guns was that it wouldn't be possible to arrange them so that the models were taking aim. No great issue there, as you get loads of guns on the Afghan sprue.

I really, really like the positions of some of these models. That's largely down to the excellent Afghan arms, which allow for a lot of interesting options.

I painted the bodies brown, and highlighted with successive drybrushes. I didn't bother to pick out any details, as it's not worth the bother. The heads were painted bright green: partly to fit in with another batch of goblin conversions I did a while ago, and partly to get away from the idea that these were short WW1 Tommies. The hands and exposed flesh of these little chaps was painted blue.

The end result is quite decent, I think. The goblin bodies are always going to be a bit rubbish, but the new arms and heads really improve the models.

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The second part of today's post continues the "random Mantic models" theme. Again, I've got no idea how I ended up with these miniatures. 

First up is a plastic orc, who was thankfully made out of a much nicer and more normal material than the goblins. He's a neater, crisper sculpt, but still nothing special. I gave him a horned head from the Frostgrave demons sprue. His arms and gun come from a Mantic "plague" warrior, who has a lot of spikes on his arms and shoulders, which went well with the head. I painted the whole thing red: he reminds me of the trolls from the Shadowrun game. I imagine him as some kind of thuggish mercenary.

The final creature is the most interesting, I think. This was made from the body of the plague soldier who provided the red chap with his arms. The body has a stretched, twisted quality, and looked as if it was about to turn into something else. All of this made me think of The Thing, and so I got some bits together and turned him into a warping, shape-changing monstrosity.

I liked the idea that his head wasn't needed anymore, and would just flop to the side while horns and tentacles burst from his body. Having the big tentacle and the spikes all pointing the same way gives the model a sense of movement. I sculpted an eye to replace his head and act as a focal point.

The model was painted in flesh tones, with a lot of washes to vary the colours. I undercoated in black and then painted a variety of odd colours to sit under the flesh: bright red, camo green and blue. Hopefully this makes the flesh more unwholesome and variable. The head was deliberately left rather lacking in detail: it's no longer important to this creature, after all.

I left the clothes in drab shades and painted the eye with a bright blue pupil, to draw attention. I've got to say, I'm really pleased with how it turned out.

Horrid, really.