Three More Yokels

 A quick post as - very gradually - I chip into the mountain of unpainted stuff (probably just prior to buying some more). Here are a few more citizens of Blognia.

The man on the left is an old man with a dog. He's from Black Scorpion's Wild West line, although I think he could be a farmer from pretty much any time at all. I really like the model, especially the dog (even if it does look a bit worried). He was very difficult to photograph, and looks much better in the flesh.

The lady in the middle is a hedge wizard, wearing traditional Blognian dress. Actually, she's an apprentice from Frostgrave. She is reading out a spell from her book - I managed to paint a small star in the book, but it's probably impossible to see.

The taller woman on the right is... well, she's a pirate, from Black Scorpion. I think she's meant not to be wearing any trousers, but that looked utterly ridiculous, so now she's got some britches. While I really like the sculpting of Black Scorpion models, they often seem to have a very slightly rough texture, that might be to do with the way that they're cast (this is pure speculation). 

That's it for this week. I'm very slowly chipping away at some cars for Dark Future/Gaslands, but more of that later. I'll save those up for one big post.

Ruins, Stairs, Peasants and Peasants Standing On Ruins and Stairs

 This week, I headed to the UK Games Expo in Birmingham. Here is a picture of me, soaking up the ambiance and laughing madly at... something. I'm not usually this gormless.

It wasn't the sort of event where you'd go to buy an Ultramarines army (not that I want one), but it did have a lot of small stalls where you could find interesting things. I picked up some bits of terrain.

At one stand, I bought a cheap 3D printed ruined arch from a chap who seemed to be making them in his garage. It's layer-printed, so a little bit crude, but the design is decent. I added a platform to the top, where a model could stand, and stabilised it with one of the many, many barrels that I was bought a while ago (thanks Ruth). 

I also bought some stone and wooden steps made by Dungeons and Lasers. They came on a sprue in a boxed set: Dungeons and Lasers' stuff seems pretty good quality and quite cheap. They're not terribly exciting, but here they are:

Perfectly reasonable stuff, I think, although I slightly prefer the stone ones to the wooden ones. All in all, a pretty good haul. Nothing exceptional, but they're all nice bits of terrain.

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I've also been painting some more of the wretched citizens of Borovia (at least, this is what I imagine them to be). They're West Wind models and are quite simple and cartoony, and they have a vaguely Napoleonic, Eastern European feel. I painted them all fairly quickly, and while they're not my best work, they aren't really the sort of models that I can do anything fancy with (at least, not at my level of skill).

This bloke likes his pies. He has a small musket strapped to his back.

This guy is some kind of half-feral peasant trapper, who probably eats squirrels.

And this bloke is a slightly Cossack-looking swordsman. He's quite small, and I originally intended for him to be a young man. I now think that he's a seasoned duellist. I couldn't tell if that thing on his head was a hat or some kind of beehive hairdo, but I painted it as a hat.

And now, here's the terrain in action! 

A pirate captain and a lowly Skaven

Once again, I've been digging in the box of random stuff that I never got around to painting. This time, I found a Black Scorpion model called Esmerelda. She's a pirate captain, as her attire suggests. 

I enjoyed painting this model, although it was very detailed and some of the stuff around her waist - a pistol, as it happens - was actually quite hard to make out. I tried to paint the coat in a mock-leather technique, to make it look old and battered. She seems to be wearing a tabard of some kind, maybe made out of a slit dress, which I painted red. That tended to draw the eye away from her face, so I painted her hat and feather in suitably ostentatious colours.

This being a Black Scorpion model, the sculpting is excellent. However, I had trouble getting the colours to look really bright, which has happened to me with their stuff before. Still, I'm happy with the results.

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Time for another skaven. This chap was in with a group of models I bought a while back. I think he's an old metal Blood Bowl model, but someone had drilled out his right hand, presumably to put a weapon in it. In the process, they'd taken some of the detail off his hand and arm, so I added some green stuff and tried to resculpt it.

The knife came from the excellent Frostgrave Female Wizards set: it was one of the few small enough to fit this guy. He looks suitably nasty and underhanded. I painted him to fit the other members of the warband: I reckon he's pretty junior and disposable, even by skaven standards.

 Incidentally, this week I loaded up the old computer game Mordheim: City of the Damned on my PC. I really wanted to like it (I've greatly enjoyed bashing skaven in Vermintide in the past). Unfortunately, it was unintuitive and extremely difficult. After the computer arbitrarily wiped out half my squad in one turn, I deleted it. Life's too short for that. There's a moral here: you're better off with miniatures!

Goblin Sky-Ship 3

 Just a quick update on the goblin flying machine. The more I do on this, the more there seems to be more to do. Oh well - at least I'm enjoying it!

I added a railing to the upper deck on the bows, by cutting two ladders from Mantic terraincrate sets and rearranging the pieces around the front of the ship. I also made a pair of runners to go on the bottom of the ship. These were made from some thin pieces of wood that I had lying around, with metal parts from blister pack plastic.

(I also moved one of the crew from a rather precarious perch on the stern to sitting on the stairs in the middle, which made more sense.)

At the weekend, I visited Warfare, a miniatures fair held at Ascot racecourse. I stopped by the Black Scorpion stall and got myself a model goblin captain for their pirate game, Cutlass. The only conversion I made to him was to trim down his bare feet and give him some hefty shoes. I always think that you can tell the seniority of a pirate by the largeness of his footwear: the most senior ones have the biggest boots. Anyhow, this chap got Georgian-type shoes and I painted his legs as if he was wearing big socks.

 Yo ho ho!

Goblin Sky-Ship 2

 I've been chipping away at the big goblin flying machine. I wanted to build up the front of the skaven screaming bell frame, to look like the forecastle of a pirate ship. I made a box from coffee stirrers, and added a little staircase made from plasticard. It was fiddly, but I think it looks right.

Here's the raised deck when assembled.

I also painted the engine block that will be at the rear of the machine.

It's a bit rough and ready, but it'll do.

Then it was a matter of adding some crew. The gnoblars on the scraplauncher kit look quite piratical as it is, and one of them happened to be winding a wheel. He'd look perfect for the guy steering the ship. Another was pointing and holding a telescope. He could be providing "helpful" advice.

The third gnoblar came from the ogre Blood Bowl team. These guys are quite a bit smaller than the regular Warhammer gnoblars, but they're much crisper sculpts. This little chap looks as if he's been surprised by a change of direction and is about to fall out.

It's getting there - slowly. Oh, and here's a mast. It's just a bit of dowel at the moment, but hopefully you can see how this is going to develop.

Goblin Sky-Ship 1

I took a break from the marines (I've got at least 10 more to do), and took out a project that I've had lying about for ages but never really started.

A long time ago I got a broken Skaven Screaming Bell off ebay. I cut the actual bell and its arch off the model, leaving me with the wooden framework that the bell sits on. It looks very primitive and slightly like the shape of an old sailing ship:

I thought it could be the basis for a flying-machine, crewed by goblins. I had an image of this thing being rickety and jury-rigged, with goblins swarming over the exterior, constantly making alterations and repairs, shouting orders, falling overboard and generally creating chaos. That sort of model would require at least half a dozen crewmen, probably plastic gnoblars.

I had a resin steam engine that I bought several years ago at a show. It was the right size and would make a good power source for the machine. I then built up a rear deck where the ship's wheel would be. It was almost entirely made from coffee stirrers, with a ladder turned on its side for a rear railing and a barrel from the excellent Ogre Kingdoms scraplauncher to give the various spindly bits something to stick to. It looked like this:

The next bit I made was a cannon to go at the front. This was made from a metal Mantic model that I got in a sale. It's called a "Goblin war trombone", and is an oversized blunderbuss. I chopped off the wheel and monopod on which the gun rested, and made it a very small gun carriage instead, out of a little block of wood. That was given four tiny wheels, which were cut from plastic rod.

I then made a little section of decking for it to sit on, along with two plasticard runners to soak up the recoil. This will be going at the front of the ship, under the big flat deck.

The metal wheel/monopod from the war trombone will be some kind of gear underneath the engine deck, which will be powering the rotors (somehow):

Not a bad start, but there's a lot of work to go. Here's a very rough idea of the general shape:

This might take a while...

The Sea Dragon

Here's another thing that I've had lying on my desk for a very long time.

Ages ago, I bought a skaven abomination. With the help of a lot of DAS clay and a Tyranid head, I made the lower half into a dragon. I was never totally happy with it, and I decided to give it a sprucing-up and repaint to match my pirate ogres. It would make a good sea monster, that they had induced to help them.

I added fins to its body, neck and tail. The body fin came from a high elf dragon, and the other two were left over from some river trolls (which also joined the ogre army). The head received some "ears" from (I think) an ancient plastic dragon kit, and the crest was elongated with plasticard and green stuff. The barnacles on its back were just blobs of sculpted green stuff.

I made the base out of coffee stirrers and a small stick of dowell. There's something weird about painting wood to look like wood, but it works far better that way. I don't have a work in progress picture, but for comparison, here's the GW skaven abomination:

And here's another picture of the sea monster. I gave it quite a dark paint scheme, to suggest something that lives deep underwater. I'm not sure why it's got all those stitches all over it (perhaps a helpful ogre repaired it after a big battle) but it looks mean enough to join the ranks of the pirates. Arrrgh!

Captain Morkgan the Orc Pirate

Things are hard for everybody at the moment and, like a lot of people, I'm basically in hiding now. I've spent the last week writing like crazy, and doing a bit of painting. As it's no longer feasible to go out to get new models, I've turned to the huge heap of unpainted miniatures that I've built up over the years: largely things that I got at conventions because they looked cool.

One of these is an orc sea-captain from Black Scorpion, designed for their skirmish game Cutlass. He was resin and, like almost everything they do, a really nice sculpt. I made him a base out of coffee stirrers and painted him as he came out of the box.

Captain Morkgan is a coarse, violent, foul-smelling kleptomaniac with a broad Sumorkset accent who long ago pickled whatever small brain he had with a combination of seawater and naval rum. Consequently, he is greatly respected by other pirates, who secretly think that being an orc would be rather good fun.

More next time: stay safe everyone, stay inside, and paint your old miniatures. Best wishes to everyone!

Avast Behind, it's the Ogre Pirates!

Everyone likes pirates. Pirates are great - unless they're Johnny Depp, in which case they're just irritating. Ogres are good too, even when they're spelled Ogors, because each one is basically a character and you only need a dozen or so for a Warhammer army.

About a year before I started this blog, I made an ogre army. They were themed as pirates, which enabled me to cut off a lot of legs and make a lot of hook hands, and included a force of aquatic trolls and a blue giant who looked like Neptune. Recently, I saw the back part of an ogre mercenary going for a few quid on ebay. I bought it, added some bits I had left over, and came up with this:

Here's the finished version, with paint.

Captain Bloodbeard was one a slave in the Dark Elf city of Port Misery. He sank the ship on which he laboured by jumping up and down a lot, and then, returning to the port, proceeded to kill and eat the entire garrison. This won him an entirely undeserved reputation as a freedom fighter, and since then, he has acquired a fierce following of rogues, sea-dogs and scurvy lubbers, most of whom he hasn't tried to devour. His name is a byword for mayhem and robbery, and he is often to be seen standing at the bows of his ship - largely because he is too big to fit inside.


I also had an old metal Privateer Press model that I'd picked up cheap ages ago. It's a Mercenary Mariner warjack, and has a nice nautical look reminiscent of the Big Daddy from the computer game Bioshock. The one I had was missing a funnel, and seemed to have been slightly miscast on the side of the head. I painted it up in what I hoped were seafaring colours. It will serve with the ogre pirates, perhaps as a champion. Yo ho ho!

Old Barnacle is a pirate golem that fights alongside Captain Bloodbeard and his salty crew. Fashioned from old diving suits and the terrible magic of the Great Whirlpool, it frequently leads boarding actions, where its sheer weight can threaten to capsize enemy vessels. Old Barnacle carries an ancient cannon and an anchor, with which to send scurvy dogs down to sleep in Davy Jones' locker. And also to kill them.