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Yeah I agree with the others, the skeletons work really well, the shields divert the eye and "concealing" the mono-pose models in the back makes them hard to notice. But being animated undead as carlos13th has said they are simply standing vigil until they are called to action....

Thanks guys, I'm pretty happy with how they came out - and more importantly, so is my wife!

Another model in my "Clean up this bloody messy desk and shelf by finishing stuff" series - This Bob Olley-sculpted Iron Claw Stone thrower was first painted by myself way back in the dark ages of the late 1980's, not too long after its release in 1988. The goblin crew have been lost to the ages due to my general dislike of Bob's sculpting style (aside from Ogres and Ogryns), but the war machine remained, albeit somewhat grudgingly.



Now it's time for the resurrection. I'll be adding this to my Kings of War Orc and/or Goblin force (they're separate armies in KoW, and only Goblins have much in the way of war machines) when I get around to painting more of my old-school models. In the meantime it can fit in with whoever else is on the table with appropriate crew, perhaps as war booty.

As (most of) you guys know, I've been rebasing my old WHFB models to have 25mm round bases for KoW and other games, and because I generally prefer them. The exceptions being larger monsters like Ogres - though I've continued to give War Machines round bases. After some looking around at options, I'm still not sure what to do with this one. While it fits on a 60mm round, it's clearly much too small. My next options are the 80mm round, and the 50x75mm square (rectangle) - and I'm really not sure which to go for.

With that in mind, here are a couple of pictures. Please vote or comment to help me decide. The rectangular base makes it more of a discrete piece, while the round base would allow some crew to be placed on the edges of the base (on their own bases).



Option A - 50mmx75mm Rectangle



Option B - 80mm Round

I'll leave this up for a few days (I'm going away for work for a few days with intermittent-at-best internet) and I'll make a decision when I get back later in the week. Just a note, even if 100% of the vote is one way, I absolutely can be swayed by a well-argued point the other way. Compatibility with WHFB is something I don't give two hoots about, though! Once I decide, I'll do any touch ups/cover ups or repaints I think the model needs, base it, and then post again with the completed renovation! The good news is that it shouldn't take long to finish either way.

I'd go for Option B - the 80mm round base.

I think having the crew on the round base could open up some nice options for cool diorama/scenic basing, you could even make some dented green-stuff balls for ammo,
or use spare undead and dwarf heads if you have any lying around. Besides its not like these things need to rank up or anything, and the facing shouldn't cause any
issues, the catapult itself is a rectangle after all.

Also round bases for individual models just look "neater" for some reason, especially for bigger units like war-machines.


BTW Aza you still working on your KoW Ogre army, or is it classed as finished, theres gonna be a whole bunch of new unit options (including giants) available when KoW V.2
lands later this year, just curious if your planning on expanding your army. I'm gonna start work on my own KoW Ogre army soon (first one), already got a mock-up or two
ready for some conversions, definitely gonna be adding a giant myself, should be fun.

I vote round base, especially as it gives greater scope for a mini diorama with the crew and spare ammunition.

As the others have said, especially if you're wanting to leave space for variable crews, go with the round one (if cost isn't prohibitive).

Yep, good ratonale on all parts - I'm going round.

 Rolt wrote:

I think having the crew on the round base could open up some nice options for cool diorama/scenic basing, you could even make some dented green-stuff balls for ammo,
or use spare undead and dwarf heads if you have any lying around. Besides its not like these things need to rank up or anything, and the facing shouldn't cause any
issues, the catapult itself is a rectangle after all.

The Mierce base I'm using has some little nubs on it - three of them for some reason. I guess it's 2x 90 degree arcs or something? Anyway, I carved one of them off and will just use the other two as 90% front fire arc markers - not that it matters in KoW since they just swivel at will. After reading your post I remembered that I've got some volcanic beads that I bought off eBay years ago that are perfect for an ammo pile, so I'm using some of those. I spot-glued them together last night and will add some more glue shortly.

BTW Aza you still working on your KoW Ogre army, or is it classed as finished, theres gonna be a whole bunch of new unit options (including giants) available when KoW V.2
lands later this year, just curious if your planning on expanding your army. I'm gonna start work on my own KoW Ogre army soon (first one), already got a mock-up or two
ready for some conversions, definitely gonna be adding a giant myself, should be fun.

Nope, Ogres are still very much a WIP. I was painting a second unit each of shooters, and since I dislike painting the models so very much they stalled me out. I've been going with "finish these before starting any new ones." so they took me about a year? I finished the crossbowmen about a month ago now, and literally just finished the blunderbusses this past weekend before my work trip. I'm hoping to photograph them this weekend as well as some full army-in-progress shots as I get back on the Ogre train properly. Though I still want to make myself finish some more stuff that's clogging up the paint desk before starting tons of new units.

I also have some more photos - Just a bit of a mini-update today. A small unit of mummies. These were painted some unknown number of years ago on square green-flocked based, and rebased to my current style last year. I'm not even sure if they got touched up in terms of paint. Later last year they were drafted into my wife's KoW Undead army, when I had to create an undead army out of existing painted figures in a day. Of course, KoW "officially" uses 20mm bases on mummies, so a Troop of five is on a 100mm frontage x 20mm depth stand. Four mummies based on 25mm round bases gives me the same frontage and +5mm depth - which is well within reasonable for a movement tray, so good enough for our games.



The "hands down" mummies are from my original copy of HeroQuest, cut off their original square bases and stuck onto citadel-style ones. The "reach out and touch someone" mummies are from a boardgame whose name I cannot remember, but it was from the same era, had a bunch of miniatures, and some temple scenery that I keep recognising in people's collections and batreps from time to time. Dark-something? I'm sure someone will remember. Anyway, quite decent mummies. I have a few of the official Kings of War mummies from the Kickstarter, but they don't really appeal to me. I'll probably look at them sometime this year and see if I can convert them more to my liking.



While these are nothing special in terms of wonderfully painted figures, they're effective enough for what they are and do, and along with photographing everything I finish this year, I'm also planning to show off the armies as they get built up. Mostly, though - this post was inspired by seeing Tarmor and Subedai's mummy-blog-posts in the last few weeks with the same HeroQuest figures. So it's also a "me too" post.

Well they look nice so good work

Who would have guessed heroquest miniatures could turn out so nicely? I remember that board game must have been the first attempt I ever made at painting models. Oh the terrible memories.......yours look great.

I like those mummies. I have a few of those HQ mummies in a box somewhere. I never bothered to paint them because they looked to boring, but your results may have changed my mind. I'll have to dig them out sometime.

Love the old stone thrower. I used to have the old goblin "skull crusher" and "lead belcher" from the Machineries of Destruction range, but they got lost in the original grand sell-off...

Nice! I never had either of those. I had (still have? somewhere?) the Man Mangler and the Gobbo Chariots - and painted a few Gob Lobbers for various people back in the day. It'll be good once I've gotten as far as resurrecting my Orc and Goblin armies for KoW.

While I continue to work on the Stone Thrower's base, here's some more stuff I finished recently and just photographed today.

Despite the difference in dates, it's "only" 14 months since I last updated on these figures. As I've noted before, while Mantic's Ogre models do turn out night enough, I do not enjoy painting them. My cunning plan was to cockblock myself and not allow myself to paint the "fun" Ogre models until after I finished the second batch of shooters. Since I hadn't worked on them in 13 months, I think we can safely state that particular plan wasn't the best. It was one of those 3am epiphany-type things that actually got me to finish these. Getting back into painting again after almost 3 months, wanting to paint Greeks and Romans, and thinking about the mess on the desk resulted in the thought of "just finish the fricking things - they'll probably only take a couple of hours to finish" replacing the usual "shove them out of the way". It's the same thought process that helped get those Skeletons out of the way as well as a several of the other odd figures that I've recently shown and will continue to show shortly, and will also have some Elites for my Gondor army finished and off my desk in a couple of days. Or within a week. Or two. Hopefully.



I went with red tabards for these guys, so they're distinct from the blue of the original two units, though sometimes they'll potentially be combined into regiments of 6 rather than troops of 3. I've kept the tabards a dull red. I feel there's no need for them to be overly highlighted. I'd been looking at the shields for months thinking about adding some red to them, and I think it's worked well to add a little more colour and interest to them. As I mentioned a long time ago, I used Citadel Ogre Kingdom heads on the leaders of both units since Mantic has an incredibly limiting six total heads for their ogres - most of which are average or below quality. (Along with only three body types!) The Crossbows are equipped with the "Jar of the Four Winds", which I've represented by cracked amphorae filled with lemon-lime soft drink-coloured ...liquid.



The blunderbuss unit had a bit more reposing, in an attempt to make them a little more interesting (or less uninteresting?) I also gave them bucklers and a shield on the boss to aid in this. It wasn't until the end of painting them that I finally decided on painting the shields red.

I'd hoped to finish all six of these in a week from getting "motivated", but in the end it took closer to two weeks to finish the Crossbows and a further month to finish the Blunderbusses, but that's largely due to the fact that I still found it quite hard to make myself sit down and finish them. I found breaking them up into their sub-units just made it easier again. The trouble being, obviously, that I didn't really enjoy working on them. Now they're done, I'm happy enough with them to use them or look at them, but I'm in no rush to work on more of them. I'm planning on getting back into painting more interesting and fun Ogres - not Mantic ones for awhile! I've actually got two more units almost done - each both lacking a single Ogre to finish them.

Here's a shot of the Ogre Army in progress:

The ogres turned out well. Is the wood grain sculpted into the blunderbusses or did you paint it on?

Nice paint work!

 JoshInJapan wrote:
The ogres turned out well. Is the wood grain sculpted into the blunderbusses or did you paint it on?

Sculpted on. I've just painted it and given it a wash to bring it out.

Buncha ogres, nice work!

If I may ask, what is it that you don't like about the Mantic ogres. I've got half a dozen of them that I may work on sometime, and it would be nice to avoid any pitfalls.

They're nice enough models in many ways, and if you needed just a couple, they'd be fine. For units (or worse, an army) they're just way, WAY over-detailed. So, so many straps and belts and tiny tiny buckles and rivets and stitches and so on (and on). Only three torsos and six heads, so repetition is the name of the game - Especially since most of the heads are bleh. Not so bad if you only have 6 in total, but imagine painting an army.

All that is aside from the broader design choices such as the Mantic Johnny Bravo Huge Torso and Tiny Legs Proportions that they have, or the Remy is French So They're All Knock-Kneed thing that they also have going.

With the shooters (I've now painted 12 of them) they all have their arms across their bodies so it's a nightmare to get to the underlying tiny, tiny details with a brush - and you still have to because you can still see it. The one that isn't in my pics has had his blunderbuss arm converted and rebuilt, and given a "warrior" shield arm. I imagine armed with sword & board (or WHFB Orc arms) would be less painful, but that armed with 2-handers would be just as painful.

Now that they're done, I'm happy with how they look. But I've got no enthusiasm for starting on some more any time soon.

Ahhh. That's kind of why I can only paint so many Infinity models at a time, and why typically prefer painting Martians to mars attacks human soldiers. Straps and buckles can be an absolute bear, especially when there are a lot of them.

Cool thanks, I'll probably aim to do one ogre at a time then, to help prevent burnout. It's kind of funny, usually Mantic sculpts are a bit lighter on the detail (one reason I like painting them, especially the mars attacks stuff) without being overly plain. I guess they figured they had a bigger canvas with the ogres.

Interesting about the ogre sculpts. The GW ones I have been doing I feel have the right amount of detail with the possibility of gluing on seperate pouches and bags and such if you so choose. I have to admit I prefer the stockier GW sculpts to the leaner mantic ones.

You have done an excellent job of painting them though. They really have come alive.

Once I've finished up with some of the older classic metal Ogres in my half-painted queue, I'll be doing some of the current GW Ogres. I like the GW ones since they have enough "blank space" to use as an interesting canvas for tattoos or decorative pants, etc - as you well know. Though some furry/hie pants to mix things up would be welcome as well.

And with the 6 Gondor Spearmen I've just finished I have just hit parity on 2015's personal 365 painting challenge!

I'll keep staggering the photos of the stuff I've not yet shown, but things like these Gondor figures will be shown once I complete their units, and I'll fill out the quiet times with pics of last year's that I didn't show and other models I've worked on.

January Restart (not taking note of the dates):

Zombicide Sean Connery John Mason "The Rock"
Zombicide Sean Connery John Mason "The Rock" Zombvivor
Zombicide John Cleese Fawlty
Zombicide John Cleese Fawlty Zombvivor
Zombicide Simon Pegg Shaun
Zombicide Simon Pegg Shaun Zombvivor
Hasslefree Simon Pegg Shaun A
Hasslefree Simon Pegg Shaun B

Reaper Bones Sandstone Golem
3x Mantic Ogre Crossbow Shooters
Harlequin Zombie Champion
Foundry Brass Bull
6x Bones Skeleton Swordsmen

29th Jan
Day 29
20 figures
----------------

Ghoul (Based, Touched Up)
Reaper Clay Golem (as Carnage Demon)
Rackham Confrontation Ruined Hill

1st Feb
Day 32
23 Figures
----------------

6x Wargames Foundry Skeletons
4x Axemen of Lossarnarch

8th Feb
Day 39
33 Figures
----------------

2x LotR Ruins
2x LotR Statues (1 ruined)
3x Mantic Ogre Blunderbuss Shooters

14th Feb
Day 45
40 Figures

---------------

6x Bones Skeleton Spearmen

20th Feb
Day 51
46 Figures

--------------

6x Gondor Spearmen

21st Feb
Day 52
52 Figures

Sweet, look at you go I've just cleared 70 so we seem to be at a much closer pacing than I was to Paradigm. Though you look to be rapidly picking up steam!

Ha! If I'm extremely lucky, I'll have a few over (like 20-30) at the very end of the year, but I'm more likely to waver over and under, get a slight lead, and then have a few breaks that drop me below again.

I'm trying to stay as far ahead as I can now as I know the summer will kill my progress eventually.

Right now I'm getting a boost from bones 2 as well, but eventually I'll run out of really cool models that I just *have* to paint, and models that make neat sets when combined... and I'll have to start fishing around for more inspiration.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Just glad to have someone to keep up with as opposed to Para who's probably cruising towards 200

My current boost is coming from making myself knuckle down and finish off stuff that's been sitting on my desk and shelf, half-finished for ages. The only figures I've allowed to queue jump in have been the Foundry Skeletons - who have the job of completing the units that the Bones Skellies bulk out. Tempted to start the Foundry Harpies soon, though.

Anyway...

Last year I did one of these Confrontation Hill Ruins in a desert scheme to match my desert mat. Not too much later than that, I started on another of them, going for the "brown dirt and flock" temperate scheme I use on my bases, which will probably see use on my green grass mat. This time I glued sand to the surface of the "dirt" in order to give it the same texture and look as my models. When I took a months-long hiatus from painting last year, it sat unfinished for several months until a few weeks ago. There's really nothing too exciting here, excepting the fact that I finally finished it, and I've decided to show off all of this year's painted/completed items.





I did use weathering powders again here, but much more subtly than on the Desert Hill. Obviously the Desert-painted hill looks far nicer on the Desert mat, but the brown dirt should fit in much more nicely on the Grass mat than the Desert Hill. Why didn't I photograph them on the grass mat? Because I was taking a bunch of other photos at the same time (like last post's Ogres) and it basically didn't occur to me at the time. Still, it will work nicely across a large variety of games, so job's a good'un.

Good job on the scenery there Az, I especially like the picture on your Wordpress blog comparing this and the more desert themed one. It is also a nice looking gaming piece in of itself, I may have to hunt one out but I assume they are now like hen's teeth.

There's still some around, but they can be hard to find. Worth picking up if you can get hold of them, though, as they paint up really nicely.

Quite liking that ruin- for a moment there I thought it had the Mortal Kombat dragon on it lol.

It's a nice little piece. FINISH HIM!

/ahem.
So anyway... remember this from 2003?


LotR RotK SBG Box. FFS!
Well, only 11 and some change years later after buying them, I've finally painted the scenery that came with it. I started one statue and rubble pile last year, then found the second status and rubble pile, sprayed them, then let them all sit in their own (rubble) pile on the painting desk until a couple of weeks ago, when (as you'd be used to by now) I pulled out my finger and finished the former and painted the latter.



Actually, I'm pretty happy with how well they came out in the end. Some static flock, some tufts and a bit of weathering powders have given them a look I'm quite happy with over the bog-standard drybrushing.



For the statues I ended up repainting the first one. I went for an aged, dirty and yellowed "white" stone. Just the kind of thing to make you think of fallen civilisations. I honestly wouldn't mind getting hold of another of these sets at some stage soon. I think another of each of these pieces would go well with the ones I've (finally) finished here. Now I'm tempted to string some Ivy over these.