From MattW: Caesarian Roman and Medievals (80 points)

Caesarian Roman and Medievals

I have been working away a few different pieces this week as a change, still a lot that did not make it for this week. Starting my next big project next week ancient Germans.....

Medieval 

 First up a medieval siege engine and some medieval casualty markers. figs are all foundry

medieval casualties

4 x medieval 28mm miniatures and siege engine (vehicle) points 40 points

Roman Markers

A beginning to my Caesarians, miniatures are all Warlord games.

28mm roman casualties laying down x 6 (1/2 points) 15 points

28mm roman casualties laying down x 4 kneeling 20 points

Roman side duel

35 points

that is me for this week

cheers

Matt

  

Great casualties, Matt, but it's the siege engine that's the showpiece of this post! As per last week, I'm awarding some bonus points for the extra basing work on the casualty markers.

Tamsin

From MattW: Prussian Jagers and Schutzen (60 points)

Prussian Schutzen and Jägers

lacking in my Napoleonic Prussian army are my schutzen companies and Jagers, rectified this week with the addition of 24 figures. We have been playing Napoleonics at the club playtesting the new Perry Rules, the Prussian Napoleonic Jagers and schutzen will help combat the French hordes…. The miniatures are 28mm Elite Miniatures which gave a certain character and make up the majority of my Prussian 1813 army. More to come over the next five weeks 

Prussian Schutzen 

Prussian Freiwilliger Jäger from the 1st Silesian Regiment.

Points 28mm x 12 @ 5 points 

cheers

MattW

Brief, but beautiful! Nice work, Matt!

Tamsin

From KerryT: Dwarves and Oliphaunts (132 points)

 Morning, afternoon and Evening all from a stormy NZ

If your reading this on Tuesday February 14th then we still have power at home and my post will have been completed. As I've started writing this on Monday evening, cyclone Gabrielle is just about to reach its peak in the East Coast of NZ and many parts of the country have been hard hit again by unseasonable weather.

Thankfully my wife and I feel safe and comfortable in our home at the moment and are prepared for a probable power outage and as I write we have a few flickering lights and the worst thing that's happened to us is that a small tree has come down in the garden. Many people have not been so fortunate particularly those whose homes border the sea where tidal surges are causing problems and expected to peak at 2am.

Under the circumstances being concerned as to whether a post with pictures about toy soldiers  will make a deadline seems trivial.

I thought I might do things backwards this time and track my progress to date on that all important studio map that I failed to show last week. This time as its so far from The Book studio to the Fantasy studio I've kindly asked Lady Sarah to send around her Limousine. The Fantasy studio will be my second blue studio and my ticket this time is the lady below

Hopefully this will help Tamsin

I think she needs a little more make up to cover what looks like a scar!

I found this miniature in my odds and ends box and have no idea who produced it. I suspect I picked it up on a visit to an UK show possibly Salute or Partizan or maybe even Vapnatak as a door entry give away figure. Its got to be a good few years old as I haven't been to the UK since before the Covid outbreak. When I found it I thought it was apt as its a lady with dragons but I doubt Daenerys Targaryen was the inspiration behind it. 

Next up are three Oliphaunts that I must have picked up more than 10 years ago from Old Glory 15s- at the time my intention was to produce mass fantasy armies in 15mm as I felt the GW stuff was too costly. The inspiration for these came from the Mumakil in the army of Harad. Like many other projects lots of figures have been painted up including adventurers, dwarves, orcs, goblins and even a unit of Hobbits but the project has stalled. In addition the plan of converting these to look more like their GW counterparts never got off the ground and I'm also unlikely to purchase 15mm Arab figures and pass them off as Haradrim warriors. Given that these are the last of the 15mm fantasy figures I have unpainted I thought I'd just paint them up.

The camera never lies, I filled those bloody mold lines but I can see them

Charge

My last entry are more dwarves, my first round entry were from Westwind but these are from the Oathmark range sold by Northstar. 

These are the metal rather than plastic figures

Why do all my figures run away?

I had planned to add another 20 odd of the plastic Dwarf Infantry but at the moment they're still on bottle tops and the Light and Heavy infantry are undercoated and still in a box somewhere. I felt I had no chance of getting them done as well this week so they'll have to wait. Some closer ups of the metal packs

OAK 101 Dwarf King & Musician

OAK 102 Dwarf Champions

OAK103 Dwarf Heroes

In summary then

Modern mother with dragons @ 5 points & Lady Sarah's Limousine 20 points = 25

9 Oathmark metal dwarves @ 5 points = 45

3 15mm Oliphaunts @ 4 points (gulp) =12 points

9 15mm crew @ 2 points = 18 points

Fantasy Studio Bonus @ 20 points

Total = 120 points

1 Squirrel (Oliphaunts and crew)

Hmm, I have been planning to produce a unit of 15mm Napoleonic Young Guard at some stage but at only 2 points per figure and all the effort that will be needed I won't contribute enough of my share to that 91,000 points target that's been set.

I'm pleased this entry made the deadline particularly as I doubt I'll get one ready for next week as I'm away on holiday provided the weather settles and the beach house we're renting has not been washed away!

That's a lot of different, but very nice stuff Kerry! Having consulted the arcane tome of lore, The Minions' Guide to Scoring Precedents, it appears that elephants (aka nellies, oliphaunts, heffalumps, mammoths, Mumakils) are scored as vehicles so these 15mm ones are 8 points each rather than 4.

Tamsin

From SimonG: The Tale of the Valkyrie and the Twenty Zealots (147 points)

With the Green Zone now finished with I need another lift in Lady Sarah's limousine to take me to my desired destination in the new Red Zone. The chauffeur this time around is a menacing Valkyrie.

This is once again a Descent - Legends of the Dark 40mm plastic miniature, excellently sculpted and well assembled with all of the area accessible for painting (which isn't always the case, I've had to cut plastic figures apart in the past and reassemble them). Strictly this is Brynn, a human hero and player character from the game, but to me -- especially as she has just slaughtered a really cute looking baby dragon -- she seems much more sinister, perhaps more of Muire the deeply conflicted last Valkyrie in Elizabeth Bears "Edda of Burdens" trilogy (highly recommended btw if you like your Norse mythology spun through a wringer).

Highlights for me on this one were working on the hair, I find blonde very tricky. Plus the eyes -- I think the left eye is a real success, the right one less so, for some reason I just couldn't register where the brush was as I painted this one (not surprising given it is a) deeply set and b) partly obscured by hair). Anyway overall a good exercise in metallic tones and I tried to pay some attention to an overhead light source hitting the tops of exposed armour. There's also a very small amount of gore, no disguising she's a menacing figure.

Flowing Locks!

Left Eye Good, Right Eye hmmm

The Bloody Evidence (not sure what a severed Dragon joint looks like!)

Anyway the destination for our trip and our next Studio offering is the continuing "Swords and Sandals" epic retelling the fall of the Second Temple in the Jewish Revolt of CE 66-74.  This time around I'm offering up 20 Jewish warriors with a mixture of locally sourced and other materiel liberated from the Romans.

The figures are based on Victrix 28mm Numidians with some swapped in Roman legionary arms (incidentally the Numidians are much more muscular than the Roman's so the mix can look a little odd if viewed under a microscope). The heads are Anvil Industry "Long Hair" - as these are 28mm heroic scale they do look odd when first assembled but once painted up it works out OK. 

The final touches are cloaks (cut down resin camouflage cloaks from Anvil Industry again, awkward bit is removing, or trying to remove, the hoods) and the tzitzit are added with lengths of button thread.

Once they had hoods!

Next up I learn to knot the tzitzit

And of course I couldn't leave without the obligatory toe shot! 

 

Got to keep a good manicure

There are two pairs of sandals and five swords among the 20 so it should qualify for the "Swords and Sandals" bonus giving me 120 points for the Zealots and 27 for the Valkyrie (20 points for the Limo ride and 7 for a 40mm figure) for an addition towards my target of 147 this time around.

Next stop fantasy with a couple more Descent heroes but as I'm away for my wife's birthday it will be a couple of weeks -- until then keep the brushes busy and the film rolling!

"...to my desired destination in the new Red Zone" - I suspect you meant the Blue Zone, not the Red! Nevertheless, that Valkyrie is most definitely worthy of the Limo ride, and you've done a great job on the ancient Hebrews.

Tamsin

 

 

From SanderS: Visiting the Studios part 2 (139 points)

 Hoi,

Let's continue the journey through the amazing halls of the studio today with two more entries of stuff I really love: GI Joe and Star Wars!

 80's Hall!

As we enter the 80's hall I couldn't choose anything else than  GI Joe figures, they echo the 80's like nothing else to me. When reading this you must realise that back in those days trends took way longer to travel from the US to the Netherlands and thus it is that, even though I was born in 1980,  I consider myself a child of the 80's rather then the 90's.

 

While these figures might not be the most recognisable GI Joe figures they are really cool. The two vehicles and troopers in black are part of Destro's Iron Grenadier mercenary corps, who nominally worked for Cobra, but would (during the Cobra civil war) turn on their erstwhile allies. Now I know a lot of you might have no idea what I am going about so there are links to the relevant information pages at 3Djoes.com in the names of the figures.

The big vehicle below (one of the more weird designs) is called the D.E.M.O.N. and I will be honest the only reason it's here, just like the VTOL below, is because it is 3D printable.

 This VTOL is called the A.G.P. Anti Gravity Pod  

 These troopers are the Iron Grenadiers Destro's elite corps:

The troopers in orange and blue camouflage are Cobra Alley Vipers  the urban warfare specialists. These are produced by Footsore Miniatures USA 

All put together these chaps net me a nice amount of points 9 x 5 pts for the footsoldiers, 2 x 20 for the vehicles and 20 for the bonus location is 105 points

Next stop Casting Couch

For the casting couch, I just had to put in Yoda and Ahsoka from the Star Wars saga, most notably the Clone Wars cartoon series. Now I have long been a critic of everything not Original Trilogy, but the relentless badgering of one of my best friends and co-workers led me to finally get Disney+ and watch some of the series for myself. Needless to say I love Mando and The Book of Boba Fett, but most of the cartoons were surprisingly good too, especially the Clone Wars and the Bad Batch. 

 

 

These Star Wars Legion figures of Yoda and Ahsoka were just too good not to paint and I used them mainly as a way to experiment with all kinds of contrast paints and the like. Now I do think I went wrong with Yoda's skin tone but everything else I am pretty happy with.

SW Legion figures apparently go for 7 points each and together with the bonus that's another 34 points making this a grand total of 139 points for this weeks work. 

I will admit that I know nothing about the GI Joe milieu, apart from it's existence. However, you've done a great job painting up those figures and vehicles. Nice work on Yoda and Ahsoka too!

Tamsin