Those look excellent too, Moriarty! I am very interested to see that this battlefield looks like when it is all assembled.
Anyway, here is my VBCW Challenge Lady:
Gertrude Tunns (the Weobley Valkyrie)
A powerfully-voiced soprano noted across the County for her dominating presence (on and off stage) she was progressing steadily up the rankings of Herefordshire opera singers when war rudley interrupted her rise to international fame and fortune.
Deeming her art above the grubby business of politics, she initially avoided taking a side in what would become the VBCW as constitutional crisis led seemingly inexorably to armed conflict. She was, however, unable to avoid getting entangled in the growing conflagration when her much anticipated performance of Wagner's Götterdämmerung at Weobley Village Hall was threatened by the approach of a marauding mechanised column. According to her agent, while at first her singing was able to drown out the desperate shouts and crackle of gunfire outside, mid way through Act II a tank shell passed through the wall and shattered the ceiling-mounted spotlight that was illuminating her. Incensed at the interruption, but without once stopping singing and in full costume, she strode off stage, out the side door reserved for members of the cast and straight to the barricades, pausing only to relieve a gaping militiaman of his anti-tank rifle. There, firing the weapon from her shoulder, she emptied its magazine into the impertinent tank while her voice soared to a shattering crescendo. Her intervention turned the tide of the action and the remaining attackers retreated, dazed and deafened, back down Gadbridge Road.
My entry is an attempt to portray her as she appeared on that fateful day. I used as the starting point a Reaper Bones henchwoman figure that I had acquired some years ago in a Kickstarter but had not yet found a specific use for. I always liked the figure while finding her "armour" rather ridiculous. Closer, you might say, to that of a pre-war Opera singer than a medieval warrior:
I replaced the mace that the figure was originally armed with with a Boys anti-tank rifle taken from a sprue of Warlord Commonwealth WW2 Infantry I got free with an issue of Wargames Illustrated.
Removing the arm that was gripping the rifle on the sprue meant that there was a degree of reconstruction required using milliput (so don't look too closely!) and (after these photos were taken) I used a plastic sword hilt to create the handle behind the pistol grip.
Gertrude v SHODDY Tank: No contest
09 March 2010, 05:38:55 PM
