Some miniatures for Song of Blades and Heroes (Frostgrave undead and construct)

[Severian]

Excellent stuff - very effective.

[Hobgoblin]

Thanks!

Here's another Essex orc. With the "Azog" type (with the sword and dagger), he'll make up my first Orcish blade element for HOTT.

They're great figures, these Bob Olley orcs, but they're time-consuming to paint!

[Severian]

Ah, now, he's splendidly done - the face & eyes in particular. Great stuff.

Fully agree about the Essex orcs. They're fantastic fun to paint, but a right bother to finish: I have another three of them half- or three-quarters done, but am putting off the final effort because I'm not confident of doing the last bits as well as what I've already done. The ones I recently finished had sat in a similar state on the painting table for a couple of months before I decided to pull myself together and just get them done.

Somehow they have an endless amount of intriguing detail that needs just one more highlight...but eventually you just need to say "stop" and call it finished. Well, that's what I found, anyway. So again, well done!

[Hobgoblin]

Thanks!

That's exactly it - there's so much artifice and ornamentation on them that they don't respond well to a "let the models paint themselves" approach based purely on washes and drybrushing. But they're so fiddly that it's hard to contemplate anything else.

These Iron Claw orcs, on page 5 of this thread, have never been finished, for the same reasons:

[Hobgoblin]

And one more - two elements of blades done, bar the basing.

[Severian]

Yet more great work!

Seeing them all side by side brings out how well your skin tones work - the variety just adds to the effect. Look forward to seeing them based.

And well done with the weird animal (dog? tiger?) head backpack. I rather shied away from making anything of it when I painted this guy; think I shall have to revisit him.

You should definitely go back to the Iron Claw guys - very striking as they stand now.

[Hobgoblin]

Thanks! I'm going to experiment with a few more skin colours over the remaining ten or so that I have.

Yes, what is that animal? A Chinese temple dog or something like that? Tiger skin is pretty much my default for any weird animal (as with the tiger wolves earlier in this thread!).

I'm definitely going to revisit the Iron Claw guys - yellow, pupilled eyes to bring them into line with these ones, and a bit more work generally. I'll leave them on round bases, though - the idea being that they'll work as casualty markers for the multi-based fellows in Dragon Rampant. So, as things stand, I could field all six of them as a unit of Elite Foot in DR, using the two individuals to manage casualties. And I'm unlikely to want to field more than two in a game of SOBH, as they'd be the big nasties to guard a goblin leader or some such. When all the Essex ones are done, I'll have enough for two Elite Foot units (or one Heavy Foot/Bellicose Foot with Shiny Armour), and will still be fine with the two individuals, as I won't need more than one per unit.

The next project, I've decided, is to get all my old Ral Partha giant goblins based up for HOTT. I already have two individually based ones, along with some Wargames Factory types who can sub in, so I'll follow the same process. I did a brief audit and a dip in Biostrip the other night, and I have 30+ of them, plus quite a few of the smaller goblins to go on horde bases. The giant goblins will go three to a base as warband elements; I quite like the idea of an army almost entirely composed of warbands. It might not be much good, but it'd be a lot of fast-moving, terrain-exploiting fun.

A good thing about HOTT is that it supports a "mix n match" approach to armies, as each element represents hundreds or thousands. So there's no problem with having very different-looking units of the same type in one force. I'll initially use the Ral Partha orcs (warbands) alongside the Grenadier war trolls and bugbears (also warbands), the various hordes, and the Essex orcs (blades). Cavalry support will eventually come from Chronicle wolfriders. They'll be tied together with some similar liveries and skin colours, but will otherwise be diverse. And when they're all done, they'll be several complete 24-point forces ...

[beefcake]

I think I've asked this of you before but is that red lizardman type thing a few posts up an asgard/vikingforge miniature? I've been looking at them for a while.

[Hobgoblin]

You did, and it is! Here's another shot. I had to repair the tail, as the club was long gone (this is an early-80s survivor rather than a Viking Forge one):



They're nice old miniatures. There's a really big one that I remember from the Tabletop Heroes column in White Dwarf. 15mm.co.uk sells one of the smaller ones as a "giant lizardman" or some such.

[Hobgoblin]

Here are the based blades elements. They "rank up" in all configurations (side to side and back to back both ways): this was a key consideration for using the Essex orcs.

I'll add some more detail to the bases later, but they're ready for the action they'll see this weekend.

One thing: I know it's deeply unfashionable, and of course it doesn't show up well in photos, but I thought that these Bob Olley sculpts were massively improved by gloss varnish. It seems to have a similar effect on them to a glaze over drybrushing - 'harmonising' the colours and shading somehow.

[Severian]

Nicely done! They look the ticket. And they're not the most straightforward figures to rank up, either.

I hadn't properly noticed the gloss varnish until you pointed it out. I think I can grasp what you mean about it harmonizing the colours: I brush on matt varnish (or satin for metals) and there's a sort of renewed freshness to the painting that comes out whilst it's still wet, particularly over layering.

Not sure I'm quite ready to brave this as a lasting effect, though; but I might try a test figure to see how it looks. I have too many thirty-year-old figures in indestructible jackets of yellowing humbrol gloss, over what might have been fairly good paintjobs (by my standards of the time, that is), to be wholly relaxed about it...

[fred]

Those are some ugly orcs!

Ugly in a good way! Cracking painting on them again. You are really pulling together an impressive force here.

[DeafNala]

Having been absent from your thread for awhile does mean I get to see all your WONDERFUL creations at once. Old & new VERY ELL DONE!

[Katsuhiko JiNNai]

These painted miniatures have a really intriguing old school paint scheme  
and then I'm considering to play with Advanced Song of Blades and Heroes too (just knew about it this morning, and the writer is an italian like me too   ).
I was considering Frostgrave too, the rules seem nice, but I don't like too much the design of the book (too modern for my taste ) and the limit of using only wizards and their apprentices as leaders of the warbands. The design of ASOBH seem with an old school style too. I read that they will include some event cards too. What do you think of this skirmish wargame? Thanks.

[fred]

SOBH is great (I've not tried the advanced version), you can use any figures that you have and build them into a Warband, as long as they are plausible to you, then you are good to go.

The mechanics are straight forward, but there are definitely tactics to be used and worked out.

Avoid too many high powered figures as these tend to be very hard to kill and the game becomes a bit dull.