From StuartL - Crusaders and... (234 points)

Following on from last week's theme of crusaders, I present... some crusaders. Over the past few weeks I have been slowly grinding through this pile of 40 miniatures in the hope of getting them done by the end of the month. When I started the challenge, this was my second big group of figures that I wanted to get done, so I am feeling pretty pleased with myself.

First of all, a group of 8 archers. All of the figures are from Fireforge games and come from their archer set, which uses exactly the same bodies as their foot sergeants set. Some of the poses are a little odd, but overall, I think they're OK.

Providing some more ranged support we have 8 crossbowmen. The bodies come in three types, quilted leather, scale mail or a tabard. To keep things simple, I painted up all of each body type the same way. After that, I varied the colours on their tunics, leggings and any other visible bits of clothing. As with my Bretons that I painted up earlier in the challenge, I stuck to three colours on my palette to give some variety without breaking up the uniformity of the models. 

To lead the way in any assault, I painted up 8 guys with a variety of mean looking hand weapons. All of the shields are hand painted, with a fair bit of variation between them. I am not sure what the shields of holy order footmen should look like, so I went with plain black and a red cross for the majority. Some of them got some extra embellishment, but they all look like they are from the same group.

And finally, for the main body of the force, 16 spearmen. One of the models carries a horn borrowed from the Gripping Beast Dark Age Warrior boxed set. Again, all of the models have hand painted shields following the red cross motif.

And to finish, a group shot of all 40 guys. Fireforge's minis offer a fair level of detail and aren't bad for their price. They also work nicely with Gripping Beast and some of Warlord's figures, so I plan on kit bashing some figures from the three makers at some stage in the future. 

And, quite for gno reason, here are some Gnolls.

These figures are both from the Reaper Bones range. I have a bunch of figures having backed all of the Bones Kickstarters so far. I have had these kicking around my painting area for ages, but have never been able to figure out what to do with them until now. My painting style isn't great, but it is pretty involved. Everything gets painted in distinct colours, washed, key points get highlighted etc. With these figures I decided to try something new. The models were painted from top to bottom in Vallejo Chocolate Brown. Once that was dry, I drybrushed on a lighter shade for the fur, a deep red for the cloth, a few other colours for the assorted gear and grey for the weapons and armour. I didn't pay too much attention to detail and just let the drybrush hit everything fairly roughly. Once it was done, I gave it all a full wash of brown and left it.

The end result isn't bad, given that I spent about 30 minutes total on both figures. I wouldn't use it for historical figures, but for dirty looking monstrous barbarian types it will do the job. Given that my RPG group isn't picky about the models they use, I think this may speed up my work on prepping more minis for those games.

Anyway, that's it for this entry.

So, 42x 28mm figures should net me a nice little 210 points I believe. No squirrels were harmed in the making of this post. (I claimed my RPG mini point in my first post and my crusader point last week). 

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Gnu Gnolls! Oh Gno! And more Crusaders! 

Lovely work, Stuart! I'll give you 210 points as a start, but you also get an extra 24 points for those hand-painted shields. You're a machine this week! Now let's find out what lurks at the end of that ellipsis...

Ev