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If you are looking for inspiration for clothing and the like my wife recommends you give the Viking Sagas, the original ones she says, before sensationalist nonsense took over. In particular she says The Orkney Book by Donald Omand (the Viking Chapter in particular). It describes the sort of pelts that they would wear (which tended to be very muted with only basic geometric patterns).

You have opened a subject close to her heart with these guys as she absolutely loves the Orkney Islands and they have a lot of Viking history up there. She has studied up there in the past (and excavated several sites). "So put all Hollywood nonsense aside and ask yourself what textiles they would have had at hand and the natural colours and dyes they would have had available. All about functional clothing."

Sorry just our two cents.....

Nice finish for the year on that last page. Good on you for sticking to your goal. I didn't have one, and didn't make it either

Thanks for the feedback, everyone!

@Slinky - I've added some small Ravens to his shield - I haven't had a chance to photograph it yet, but it'll be coming in about 2 or 3 updates' time. It has helped it out a lot.

@Archer - thanks. I did a fair bit of reading before starting on them, and eventually found a few pages with example dye colours. Of course, I don't remember where I saved them, but simply googling "viking dyes" turned up a bunch of the same images. So while keeping those in mind, I'm still happy to give some richer-coloured outfits to those who might have served as Varangian Guard and also allowing for items that may have been picked up in trade/pillage up and down the rivers and coasts of Europe. These aren't the village-bound Vikings that we're dealing with! Obviously, - my style of painting for the shields can be a bit bright and clean, and they'd look more realistic if I dirtied and damaged them, but I like the "clean" painted look, and we know that Vikings were clean and cared about their personal hygiene. Rest assured, I won't be doing any tiger skins, though!

@Grimdork - I didn't get my December task done in the end. I tried to paint up 40 models, but then as we got right up tot he line I still had their overly-detailed, embossed shields to go, and my wife bought me Watch Dogs 2 last Monday. Which I spent 17 hours playing in my first session last Wednesday or Thursday...


Anyway, on the topic of Vikings, I have a couple of their inspired-cousins - Dwarves to share today. These, like much of what I’m showing at the moment were painted during the latter months of 2016 when I was too busy to post. Basically, my free time was right down, so I spent a few months where my “hobby time” was spent painting instead of writing posts and following blogs and my “gaming time” watching YouTube videos before falling asleep for the night. Reaper Miniatures really has some lovely models for wargamers. We all know that their bread and butter is the D&D/RPG crowd, but the effect that this has for the wargamers is that their models tend to have a lot of character to them, and so make great low-level heroes, individuals and unit leaders (as long as you don’t mind some uniform variation amongst your usually-quite-uniform plastics. Since I’m an old grognard and love my old metal models this isn’t a big issue for me. On the other hand, they’re not especially cheap. They’re not expensive, or anywhere near the prices of GW’s hero models mind, but if you were looking to make a unit of Reaper metals, well, they’re not so cheap as to make that an easy option.



Anyway, I saw this guy somewhere online at some stage, and knew I had to have him, so I picked him up. He’s sculpted by Tom Mason and alternately known as Dwarven Pathfinder Grunt with a slotta or in “broccoli base” form, as Bregol Jagstone, Dwarf Ranger. Oddly, despite the “Pathfinder grunt” moniker, I can only find a single other dwarf pathfinder by Reaper, so…

When it came to the figure, I of course got the slotta version, so he fit in immediately. Anyway, with his wrench shaped axe and hooded cloak, he could easily go in any of several directions as far as paint goes. I chose for reasons unknown to me to go with the “ranger” look and painted him with a series of naturalistic colours – a series of greens to give him some variation and red-browns to give the model a nice rich tone. I have a box or two of AoW’s dwarf rangers somewhere, so one day he’ll no doubt lead some of them. He did get a great ginger beard, since I felt that fit the sculpt and palette nicely.



Stonehaven’s sculpting is a little uneven, but many of the figures have a definite old-school charm to them. I’ve shared a few of them a little while ago, and will have more soon as well. They’re clearly also going for the D&D/RPG market that Reaper aims at, but that’s ok by me, and I’m sure it’s fine with roleplayers, who obviously have an absolutely huge range in what their characters look like. This model is their Anti-Paladin (Death Knight, Shadow Knight, etc). As such, I painted her armour with metallic blues with a sea-green/black tabard and gloves, and bright red hair as a nod to my old (non-dwarf) EQ character. Her sword doesn’t quite reach down to the ground (at least on my casting) so I hid it with a little skull at the front and a tuft of grass at the rear.

In game terms, they’ll both work well in RPGs and various board games. Bregol will have a place leading some Dwarven rangers, or as an Artillery guy in the interim (because wrench-axe) and the Shadow Knight can no doubt have some sort of spot in the Undead or Chaos armies. Until I get the Chaos Dwarves properly out and about, anyway…

The armor on that dwarf lady is sublime! Is it NMM?

Great work! The Ranger in particular is really well done colour-wise.

Thanks guys - Nope, the armour isn't NMM. It's just me playing around with different shades of metallic paints and washes. I bought a bunch of large Vallejo metallic bottles a couple of months ago, so it was a chance to play with them.

I'm really happy with the colours on the ranger as well.

Yeah, the ranger really "pops", he's lovely

You've been very prolific since I last swung by! Love the zombies on the last page!

EDC

Thanks guys. And after a bit of work today, I'm up to 86 completed models for the year. Of course, that includes 40 tank traps that weren't too gruelling to paint, and 40 dwarves that I started in November and might have finished at the very end of December if Watch Dogs 2 didn't happen... causing both my failure to produce anything in December for the paint challenge and to beat 2015's number with 2016. I guess on the other hand, it gives me a good leg up in 2017 to beat my total in 2016 (and maybe, 2015?).

86? Ye gods

The two new additions are excellent, keep it up!

Part Two then, of my Vikings. These figures were mostly completed in 2016. On the 14th of November if my record-keeping is accurate. Of course, I then realised that the horn-blower who wasn’t yet finished should really have a shield as well, and so completing the sextet went into painting limbo, since the horn-blower isn’t exactly my favourite model from the bunch. Since I had to paint a Viking shield for another model a few days ago, I did this one as well.



His mate in the picture above is one of the smaller figures amongst my metal Vikings, but he’s got a bearing to him, both in the pose and especially in the facial sculpt. Like he’s the sort of bloke you wouldn’t want to mess with. The horn-blower on the other hand looks like he has a big plum for a head, but the ruddy cheeks work for his pose.



Of course, now that I’ve finished it, I’m happy enough with the horn-blower’s shield. Simple, but neat and effective. I went with more muted yellows than I usually do, from almost white into an ochre, rather than orange.



I believe that the larger of these two is a Viking Hearthguard model, and he’s a big chunk of metal. Since he’s chunky and quite well-geared, I gave him a deep red cloak to suggest wealth, and grey hair and a marked face to suggest that he’s both a veteran of many battles as well as (probably) some lucrative international bodyguarding duties. His friend here is painted in simpler, more muted and earthy tones. I tried to “streak” the paint in his shield to suggest a less wealthy origin. Damn, at this scale, the blown-up photographs really emphasise every flaw in the freehand shield painting. They look much neater and straighter at their actual size of 10mm or so.



The final pair are amongst my very favourites of all my Viking models. I think these two are both by Foundry again, but it’s the dynamic posing that really works on these for me. Not a lot more to say about these two. I like the models and I like the way they turned out with paint and their shields added.



These models, like the first half-dozen will be used for SAGA amongst other things. I’ve got a nice selection for my Hearthguard, and the others will make up a unit of Viking Warriors for the time being. I’m still short a model for a final warrior or my Warlord, so I’ll have to get some more done soon. I’ve just finished a few more Vikings, so once they’re dry and flocked I’ll have them up here as well. I can see a lot of the metals here being spread out amongst the plastics eventually to use as unit leaders.



When I got to the second half-dozen of my Vikings, I’d decided much more consciously to paint the shields with a palette that complimented their bearers’ clothing and overall colour scheme. I’d been doing this to an extent with the first set, but I’ve been much more aware of it since then. A flaw in the way I used to paint years ago was trying to get too many colours onto my models, when a smaller palette with more variation of those colours works better for the models far more often.

Damn. No love at all for the second batch of Vikings? Ouch..

Today’s figure is another that was finished back in 2016, that I’m only just getting around to sharing. Like it says in the title of the post, this guy is one of Marauder Miniatures’ MM27 line of Giant Black Orcs.





One of the many ranges released by Trish* and Aly Morrison’s Citadel offshoot Marauder Miniatures were Orcs and Goblins. The Orcs, with their scale mail and Mongol-style helmets were a real highlight of all of their ranges, with a style that remains distinctive even today. Subedai has recently showcased some fantastic looking converted boar boys using these same models.



Part of the Orc range that was a little more limited were the Giant Black Orcs, released around about White Dwarf 128 (August 1990). There were apparently only four sculpts, and so they seem to be designed more as an appendix or supplement to Citadel’s existing line – though back then Black Orcs were an ill-defined thing as far as actual models go. Just pick out your bigger orc models and divide them between “Big’Uns” and “Black Orcs”. I’ve got to say that these Black Orcs were not Marauder’s finest work by a long shot.



Black Orcs of course derive from Tolkien’s Uruk Hai, which GW had a range of, though those seemed a bit “normal sized” even back then. The only distinct Black Orcs to that point were Nick Lund’s Giant Black Orcs from 1985 – also a pretty indistinct set, and Lund’s Regiment of Renown: RR18 – Eeza Ugezod’s Mother Crushers. Citadel’s Black Orcs wouldn’t get their own distinct style again until the mid-1990’s, when they launched that terrible range with the huge horns and ridiculous looking axes. It wasn’t until the early 2000’s when the current, heavily armoured design debuted with the metal range, to be updated a few years later with the current range of plastics – now called “Ironjawz ‘Ardboyz”. The current/2004ish design is easily the best iteration of Warhammer Black Orcs in my opinion, being both distinctive and badass looking.

What does this mean for the Marauder model above? Well, he’ll eventually be rolled into whatever Mantic call Big’Uns in Kings of War (hm… Ax, Greatax, Morax… nothing there that really works for Big’Uns or Black Orcs… I might have to fudge something for our friendly games.) He may occasionally be used in RPGs, skirmish gaming or maybe even Silver Tower. Do they have an Orc character for that yet? I’ll figure it out later…

*Now Trish Carden

Sorry was out of contact with work and have only just started to get back into the hobby swing so missed the second round of Vikings. I think they look excellent. The sculpts look really nice not out of scale or sort of shrunken like a lot of smaller miniature companies seem to get.

The orc looks suitable Ye olde. Reminds me of some of the models that got me into my addiction. I still remember the first model I ever painted was an orc and it ended up with bronze skin. Didn't undercoat it and the paint started wearing off very quickly.

There really is an ogre feel to the heads of some of those old orks isn't there.

I really like all the vikings you have shared. In fact, they inspired my work on the shieldmaidens in my own blog. I'm still amazed at your freehand skills.

Thanks guys. I'm still working on a few more Orcs and Vikings. Hope to have some more up soon. Today though - more dwarves.

In November last year, for some reason I got it into my head to delve into one of my figure boxes and paint up a bunch of Dwarves. Specifically, to go through and paint a bunch of the Battle for Skull pass plastics that I’d picked up from eBay, WargamerAU and my mate, Damo. I think the idea popped into my brain since I’d been painting and finishing a few Slayers around the time and getting stuck into other random dwarves (which I’ve been sharing recently).



By mid-November, I’d actually gathered them up, and selected the figures I was going to paint, and then got into them properly over December. Batch painted, they’re no works of art, but since there were 40 of them and work cranks itself up around November into December, I didn’t get them finished before work broke up for Christmas, as was the plan. All because of their overly-complex sculpted shields. After a few days of rest, I got stuck back into them again, but Marouda bought me Watch Dogs 2 which then proceeded to eat all of my time after I installed it and started playing it. I seriously played for near-17 hours the day I properly started it. From 8am until 1am. Sure, that’s with breaks, but still… I’m finally done with the game now, by the time I got about 2/3 through the story it had started to drag a little, and the result was that after an incredibly strong start I didn't even play it every day to get it done.



These were a pretty quick and simple job for me, though every element is still highlighted and shaded, I did so with an intent of making a solid tabletop standard, rather than my usual care. At one point, I decided that I wanted them to look more work and war-weary than some of the others. Like they’ve been on campaign rather than having just left the keep in freshly washed uniforms. This was because I’d been looking at my unassembled boxes of Warlord’s Napoleonic French Line Lancers while washing my brushes (which I’d bought to turn into some sort of not-Brettonian army). I got to thinking about how Napoleonic uniforms in miniature form always seem so bright, perfect and pristine when the actuality would have been much more filthy and worn. Like in that Napoleon show with Boromir Stark in it. With that percolating in my mind, I decided to hit them all with a brown wash, but then brighten up their axes, helms and paint the shields last – as I felt that Dwarves would always look after their wargear above all else.



I mentioned the shields earlier. They were a hassle, and basically the reason these figures weren’t finished in December 2016, which would have broken my 2015 record/target and not caused me to fail to submit in the final month of the Tale of Gamers challenge I ran on Dakka. Of course there were other reasons. Watch Dogs 2 and burnout/exhaustion from working every day of the week for a period at the end of the year, but the shields were the final hurdle.

If I were painting these models with no “history”, I’d probably have simply painted the Hammer-and-Anvil motif a nice bronze, much like the Dwarf-Mask bling on the Standard bearers. The thing is, when I started to paint the models, I realised that the same design was much older, and is featured on the (Marauder Miniatures) Dwarf Shields that one of my old, Oldhammer Norse dwarves has (and I have a few of these shields left to break out). Since I wanted the new to fit in with the old, being from the same clan(s), I wanted to make sure that they matched. Which meant going from a simple paint/wash/drybrush scheme to one that needed 10 different colours/applications. While keeping it simple. When doing it to almost 40 models, that takes time. Bleugh.



What’s next for the Dorfs? Well, I appear to (almost) have a complete BFSP set between the various secondhand sets I’ve purchased. I’m just short the Dwarven rifles, so I’m going to see if I can get another unit or two painted before I burn out on Dwarves…

Very nice work, especially considering that those are essentially identical models. How many Dwarfs do you have altogether? It seems to me that you have enough to play Dragon Rampant or something of that size.

Love the BFSP Warriors! I have those gems in my painting pile. If you can get the Thunderers I do recommend them as they are some of the nicer sculpts in the box (although I like the miners the most).

 JoshInJapan wrote:
Very nice work, especially considering that those are essentially identical models. How many Dwarfs do you have altogether? It seems to me that you have enough to play Dragon Rampant or something of that size.

Painted or unpainted? These are most of the painted ones, plus the Slayers and random adventurers I've been showing. Unpainted... maybe 400-500 more if you count the Mantic models. I plan to make two forces from the lot - a "normal" dwarf army and a slayer-based one.

 Bottle wrote:
Love the BFSP Warriors! I have those gems in my painting pile. If you can get the Thunderers I do recommend them as they are some of the nicer sculpts in the box (although I like the miners the most).

Sadly I only have about three of them, which is a shame. I've got a unit of the metal ones, though that I picked up from eBay. I want to paint up my gunpowder dwarves as a sub-clan and call them the "Bullet Club". I'm working on cannon crew right now.

400-500? Dang, that's a whole army's worth. How many armies do you have for KOW/9th Age? I'm glad I'm not the only one with a problem...

That's a mighty throng of dwarf kin there buddy. Been super busy I see!

I didn't fully appreciate just how small those models were til I went to Warhammer World the other day, and looked at the big Dwarf vs Skaven diorama there. Took me ages to find Josef Bugman in that thing.

You could totally pull off an Ironweld Arsenal force for Age of Sigmar with all the artillery pieces you have to hand.

How many armies? I'm going to say all of them. And pretty much easily themed multiples of all of them. I honestly have no idea how many. Call it collecting since the late 1980s, not selling anything off since the mid-'90s and a serious buying frenzy over the last year or two.

I've still got some work in cleaning up the War Room, which got turned into a dumping ground over the second half of 2016 due to piles of work and it being a bit cold out there. I'm hoping to get some AoS games up and running as well as so much else, and I've got the General's Handbook to hand as well as several of the digital books.

Oh wow, I LOVE those dwarfs. They are so well painted for being a mass of nearly identical models. Color scheme is ace as well.

Noice Dorfs Az. Musta been a long stretch doing all those shields!

I had that really tall big-un orc with the giant sword. He was always falling over, Top heavy! These days I would fill his base up with scrap lead.

Nice paint job on the dwarfs, especially the shields. I am not really a fan of the Warhammer dwarf aesthetic, but you've made the best of it I am sorely tempted by some of the new FW LOTR dwarfs, however...

The dwarfs have buckets of old-school charm. Lovely work for a whole unit of tabletop standard dudes.

I liked the Vikings a lot too, but haven't had much time to comment lately. Must update my own painting blog here with the stuff I did over Xmas.

Thanks guys. The dwarves don't have anywhere near realistic proportions like the LotR ones do, but I've got enough nostalgia for the style drawn back to the Perry's old work, so I can forgive it. In retrospect, I think the more complex shields came up better than bronze would have, even if they took (a lot) longer to finish.

To use a phrase I seem to use a fair bit - Something completely different today:



I have to admit, I couldn’t remember what these things were called and so it took literally minutes of playing internet detective to figure out what the game these things are from was called (and what they are). Armed only with “(illegible) games, 1992” on the bottom of their integral metal bases, google, wikipedia and BGG, I figured it out. Hooray!



I bought these figures back in the ’90s for a few reasons. None of which had anything to do with Legions of Steel. 1) On sale. 2) Because Terminators. And most importantly, 3) They came in little miniatures carrying cases with foam inside. So naturally, I used the cases for a few years, the figures all got shunted into bits boxes, and that was that. I gave the cases away a year or two ago, (I think?) to Tarmor. At some point I found one of them and quickly painted it up, because let’s face it – how hard could it be? Had no idea where the rest of them were, though.

So sometime last year while cleaning up some bits boxes – around the same time as I found and repainted that Judge Dredd RTB01 Space Marine – I found the “Nightmares”. Since I first found out that they’re called that literally 2 minutes before starting this post, I’m just going to call them Terminators from here on in. Anyway, I found the Terminators, and bundled them into a zip-lock bag alongside the tiny number of (licenced) Aliens miniatures I have from the same era. And then put them away in one of my Unpainted Miniatures Storage Cases. And promptly forgot about them until a few days ago, while attempting to tidy up the room where I keep all that crap, I bumbled onto them, sharing space with a bunch of Mantic models.



This being my Summer break from work, and as I’m now getting in some good paint time, I brought them out, lost them, found them again and then painted them from Spray to Varnish to Flock in less than 3 days – most of which was drying time. So now I have a unit of 12… well. I can use them as Terminators in the Terminator Genisys game I picked up on sale during Black Friday. I understand it’s supposed to be quite a good game, but hampered by being massively overpriced for what you get in the box, and an expensive licence that seriously underperformed in the wider market, with the height of it’s popularity being, you know… 25-odd years ago. Still, when it was on sale for £20 I decided to grab it. Also, free rules if anyone wants to try it out.

Failing that I could use them as Necrons in 40k… I just picked up their Start Collecting set, and will probably grab a second one before too long. Or… as Cultists for my Iron Warriors? Hmm….

They may be simple. But there among the Iron Warriors it looks fantastic.

Oooh, making them cultists is a great idea!

Cultists seem like a good fit. Like maybe the Dark Mechanicum guys have been picking up random folks and turning them into automata and these are the rejects?

Yeah - Nice paintjobs, and using them as cultists seems a perfect fit to get them some table time