My hobby interests are mainly non-historical, and include fantasy, science fiction and near future apocalypses of various sorts. There are some historical elements - ancients, pirates and WW2 being the main ones, although I haven't done much with ancients for a long time and I have no aversion to including fantasy and zombie elements in my pirates. The bulk of my figures are Games Workshop, although there are plenty of other manufacturers represented to various degrees.
Anyway, enough waffle. It seems fitting to show some of my earliest dwarves and a few of my more recent figures in this inaugural post. The dwarves date back to the late 80s, early 90s, long before slottabases. I still remove the slottabase tabs from my dwarves and put them on milliput and card bases; Stunties should be short, and I've always felt a slottabase makes them too tall. I'll discuss my dwarf collection/obsession in a separate post(s), as there are several hundred of the little blighters collected and painted over the years.
This was one of my first attempts at black-lining, now a bit chipped after several house moves in the intervening years. Black-lining involved a white undercoat on the figure, then applying black paint where the shadows would be, as well as separating out pouches, weapons etc. It was quite a few years before I thought to just undercoat the figure in black... This was done with highlights only, no shading, then finished with a coat of gloss varnish (covered years later with matt varnish when I decided that the figures were too shiny). If I remember correctly, the figure is an old Citadel dwarf adventurer, from when they did RPG stuff as well.
From the same period, a female dwarf fighter. I seem to remember I swapped out her weapon and made a scabbard for the new one.
A slightly more recent dwarf - the White Dwarf himself
I haven't painted any new dwarves for a few years now, as there hasn't been much inspiring me. GW plastics have come on in leaps and bounds, but all my dwarves are metal, and I haven't the heart to introduce any plastic ones into the army. Nearly every figure in the army is different (apart from the phalanx), so I'm not sure how successful I'd be at making the plastic ones "individuals". I have a few unpainted metal ones lying about, so I'll probably be painting some soonish. Scibor do a very nice looking dwarf king on bear. I have the original Grenadier dwarf bear riders, so it might make for an interesting group to paint. I am somewhat concerned, however, about the size difference, as modern scale creep suggests the Scibor one will tower over the other two.
Finally, for anybody who's made it this far, some modern figures. The first one is a conversion I did for a modern demon hunting setting (think season 5 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer if they hadn't defeated Glory - which would have made for a much more interesting season 6 than the one we got :-)). It's a Foundry Streetfighter figure with skateboard and gun removed and sword and axe substituted. I also chopped the gun out of the holster and added a couple of bits of plastic rod for stakes. I converted a whole bunch of figures to have swords, bows, crossbows etc. There's a sampling below, but I plan to take some more pictures for a future post.
Foundry streetfighter figure
Not sure who made this figure. I seem to remember removing a gun and adding the bow
Might be another Foundry figure. I chopped the end off the rifle and drilled through the barrel to insert some brass rod for the bow arm
Another unknown (Copplestone possibly) conversion
Citadel Cadian with laser rifle modified to be a crossbow. I built the scope from bits of plastic rod. There's a whole unit of these guys that I plan to show more of in a future post.
Added a sword and replaced the pistol with a pistol crossbow. I think this was the first one I did, and it involved me removing and then rebuilding the pistol. Subsequently I modified the pistols by gouging out a line for the bolt and adding a bow arm with brass rod.
For a more traditional zombie future, a Studio Miniatures zombie chicken and a zombie hunter who's manufacturer escapes me
Studio Miniatures zombie chicken
That's more than enough for a first post, so I'll stop there for now. The next post will hopefully be about the Blackbeard figure I painted for my Dad's birthday, but it might change. I hope to post once a week at the moment (seemingly the thing to do with blogs, until you get bored and forget), and there are still lots of figures to cover.
Sadly, the new smell has worn off this blog, and now it's just another bunch of bytes cluttering up cyberspace. Until next time.
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