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G'day all,

I'm looking for some realistic opinions on these models, don't sugar coat it! I've long wanted to do Bretonnian style skeletons but I've never been able to get something I'm happy with. Back in the day I tried mixing men at arms with skeletons, but the scales were mismatched on those older models and I never got something I was satisfied with, it always looked like I just glued together 2 different kits rather than them being something that looked like it was designed to be that way. I've tried taking skeletons and greenstuffing men at arms style armour on them but it's hugely time consuming and I'm not a professional sculptor so they always looked mediocre.

I noticed the current batch of VC skeletons have similar proportions to Bret MAA, so I decided this time to go simple and just do a head swap. As if a skeleton has been raised from the dead and been equipped with Bret armour or maybe a living Bret army was turned to skeletons through some terrible magic (vs the alternative of dead Brets lying in the ground in their armour for long enough to turn in to skeletons).

So what do you think, do they look like junk an amateur would through together, or do you think they look decent enough?

I'm thinking the hands might be a let down, I just used a knife to cut grooves in to the hands to make them look like bones and I'm not sure it's sufficient (one dude is wearing gloves so I just left his glove on).





EDIT:First one painted


If you click on the images it will take you to my gallery where you can zoom in on them more to get a better idea of what's going on.


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This is the colour scheme I'm planning (assuming I can paint them well enough, I'll be airbrushing the shields and so the design might be a bit too optimistic, we'll see, lol).

Look great! The only thing I might add would be a foot swap or two, have a skeleton foot showing under the armor. Depending on how old you want them to be, you might want to tatter up the cloth a bit as well. If you feel up to it, cut bits away and replace with skeleton parts. If they died from mundane means, showing some cause of death could be nice. Dented helmets, cleaved armor, etc.

But what you have is a sold base for conveying what you want, but one you can grow from.

So what do you think, do they look like junk an amateur would through together, or do you think they look decent enough?

I think they look bleedin' brilliant. One of those simple-but-very-effective conversions, and as part of that I don't see anything wrong with the hands.
I might be biased 'cos it kind of annoyed me that VC apparently found a lot of corpses lying around in goofy bat-wing armour for some reason, or consciously decided to outfit them with goofy bat-wing armour. Much prefer the idea of skellies raised from one of the other existing factions, with remains of the clothes and paraphernalia they wore in life. Like Richter Kruegar's Cursed Company, or Mantic's basilean-armour skellies. Anyways.

I also think a little battle-damage might finish off the effect, but speaking just for myself I don't know if it's entirely necessary. Maybe a suitably grunging of the colour scheme too, or instead?

Making the cloth tatty is actually surprisingly time consuming and would be impractical for a whole regiment, which is why I didn't end up doing it. You have to carve out holes with a knife but then it won't look right so you have to greenstuff the surrounding area to get more realistic looking tears and floppy tatty bits otherwise it looks weird. Battle damage on metal things is significantly easier than on softer material, lol.

Though I could do a bit of battle damage on the shields I guess, that wouldn't be too hard.

I was just planning on using some weathering powders to make them look dirty.

For skeletons there is no right and wrong for how hard to weather them. Were they brutally killed centuries ago and left to rot and rust? Or did a necromancer just wipe out a parade ground unit with the curse of years, skeletonizing the troops, but leaving the gear intact, then raising them to serve. Fresh blood, dried blood, or dust?

As rank and file troops, there is a limit for how much time most people would spend per model. I think some hack marks on the shields and weathering powders would be enough to make a very nice looking block of troops. Post pics when you are done!

FInished airbrushing the shields. They still need to have the rims painted Leadbelcher and need to be weathered. The masking didn't work out quite as well as I'd hoped, most of them are fine but a couple of them had a bit of seepage under the tape.

I look forward to seeing them painted!

Those shields look good from here. Don’t be too hard on yourself.

They look ace!

Nice netrotics ya got there.

inspiring.
I've been wanting to try to convert some WGF ashigaru into skeletons and this may have just pushed me over the edge.
how are you sourcing your skulls? I cant imagine buying a skeleton kit for just the skulls is very frugal...

I would suggest tracking down some Parafilm "M", as it can be quite interesting.

Here's the first one. I need to come up with a more efficient way of painting it, this one took far longer than the mediocre paint job might suggest



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usernamesareannoying wrote:how are you sourcing your skulls? I cant imagine buying a skeleton kit for just the skulls is very frugal...

Good question... I don't know yet These ones are just done using a few spare skulls I had from a VC skellies box I hadn't put together... but as you say that's a painfully expensive way to get skulls. They also seem to be hard to find on ebay. Soooo, I might swap to WGF skeletons as they're a lot cheaper, but still not a great option.

If anyone has a pile of skulls they want to get rid of, let me know I never thought I'd have a problem with insufficient skulls in a GW game!

Kanluwen wrote:I would suggest tracking down some Parafilm "M", as it can be quite interesting.

I'll have a look in to it, does it make a good masking material? I just used a painters tape, stuck it down to some cardboard and cut it in to the shapes I wanted then applied it to the model. It didn't damage the underlying paint which was good, but the seepage was a bit annoying.

I have those kind of shields

Parafilm is a pretty good masking material--especially if you keep a hair dryer nearby as you can heat the material slightly to get it to cling better.

It's also really good for irregular patterns on larger items.

Parafilm looks cool, though I'm not sure it'd help me much on these models. I do the yellow first and then mask the thin line or a cross using strips of tape, I think that would be harder to get right with parafilm.

I should probably look in to some better masking tape. Not saying I couldn't do it with parafilm, just looking at the tutorials I've seen it's probably easier to do with a good tape in this case.

Part of the problem might simply have been that I left the tape sitting in front of the window for a couple of weeks by accident and it's summer over here so it's been sitting in the hot sun most of the days. It's also just a cheapo masking tape from a hardware store.


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AllSeeingSkink wrote:

usernamesareannoying wrote:how are you sourcing your skulls? I cant imagine buying a skeleton kit for just the skulls is very frugal...

Good question... I don't know yet These ones are just done using a few spare skulls I had from a VC skellies box I hadn't put together... but as you say that's a painfully expensive way to get skulls. They also seem to be hard to find on ebay. Soooo, I might swap to WGF skeletons as they're a lot cheaper, but still not a great option.

If anyone has a pile of skulls they want to get rid of, let me know I never thought I'd have a problem with insufficient skulls in a GW game!

I took inventory of the number of heads you get in a VC box. Some of the helmeted heads I think are close enough that with a bit of modification they work for Bretonnians. So... you can make 21 Bretonnian heads and 10 regular VC style helmeted heads from 1 box, OR, you can make 23 Bretonnian heads and 8 VC style heads.

So if you either have a friend who collects VC and is happy to hand over some of their spare skulls or you just buy a box of VC and ebay the extra skeletons with the helmeted heads (or just build them and use them for freshly raised skeletons?) then it's not tooo bad.

The WGF ones are still better value for money... but since I'll probably only make about 20 of these guys I might just stick with the VC ones.

They look realy cool, and don't kid yourself on the painting they look ace.
White Dwarf (The one with space hulk I think?) had a load of great tips on converting empire and bretonians to skeletons and zombies. Including how to make them look more shuffling by cutting the feet off and turning them inwards. Planning with the angle of the feet can really make a difference.

 Firefash wrote:
They look realy cool, and don't kid yourself on the painting they look ace.
White Dwarf (The one with space hulk I think?) had a load of great tips on converting empire and bretonians to skeletons and zombies. Including how to make them look more shuffling by cutting the feet off and turning them inwards. Planning with the angle of the feet can really make a difference.

That's a good idea, though probably more appropriate for zombies than skeletons.

I will admit I was somewhat inspired by the wraith forces in The Witcher 2 which I've been playing recently I had the idea of bretonnian skeletons years ago, but playing TW2 reminded me of them and inspired me to give it another crack.

They had other examples as well. if you don't have the WD it might be worth a look at the digital copy they have 4 people playing with skellington and zombie conversions in the sprues and glue.

Yeah I haven't bought a White Dwarf in about 15 years Do you remember which issue # it was? I'll check it out.


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Found it, it was issue 33. I have actually seen those models somewhere else before (maybe an old white dwarf daily before the site was updated). They kind of did the opposite of what I did.

I took a Bretonnian and gave it a skull head and modified the hands to look skeletal... what they did was to take a skeleton and give it a bretonnian shield, bretonnian helmet and bretonnian pole-arm.

I don't see me turning this in to an army simply because I'd need too many and it takes too long, but if I ever do turn it in to an army, what I might do is take 20 like the ones above, 20 done like in the white dwarf (so more skeletal looking) and 20 regular bretonnians just painted with more pale flesh. But I don't see myself getting that far... I don't have the motivation to do another WHFB army, especially with the changes rumoured for 9th.

I'm more just doing 1 regiment because it's something I've always wanted to do and I already have enough random bits lying around to do 1 regiment without having to buy anything else, lol.