From PhilH: Going Small at Swords & Sandals (56 Points)

 And now for something completely different...

Intrigued by the works of Mark Backhouse, Sidney Roundwood and our very own Snowlord in having a go at a teeny tiny scale project. So, with a copy of Too Fat Lardies/Reisswitz Press rules Strength and Honour in hand, I'm thought I'd use the Challenge and the Swords & Sandals room as a reason to have a dabble.

I've a few ideas, but am more at the stage of figuring out how I want to approach the project, what minis to use, and what scope I'm aiming for. Not helped that I'm juggling a whole bunch of projects this winter. But I am settled on it being a 3D printed project. 

So, rather than succumbing to my innate ability to procrastinate and I applied some JFDI - 'Just Flipping Do It'.

These are are hairy barbarian warbands, using files from Thingiverse designed by user T1ickL35 and kindly printed for me by fellow Lard America luminary and Challenger JohnE (thanks John!). The files are a bit rudimentary compared to the files with a price tag attached, but its good to handle and paint them before going to deep down the rabbit hole. 

The bases are 120mm x 60mm x 2.4mm thick to aid being picked up, designed by me in Tinkercad and printed on my FDM printer.

Trying to get into the 3mm style, I primed them black, then laid down some dark brown tones through the airbrush. These are vaguely meant to be Germanic warbands, so I was after brown and flesh tones and no colours.  For these formed units, a lot of people seem to use acrylic paint pens (what a thing!), but I don't have those to hand, so went with a toothbrush-flicking frenzy with various brown, beige and tan tones, trying achieve splodges of colour. My base was a bit dark for this, so it doesn't come out well: I should have taken the brown lighter. Lesson learned. Then I picked out the shields sculpted on the front in similar tones, and each of the 'heads' with flesh tone, aiming for a 'sea of faces'. 

I did the basing afterwards, because of the paint flicking. This was an error, I couldn't apply the paste anywhere near as neatly as I thought. I'm fairly content with how the basing came out. 

So my approach didn't really work as I'd hoped: I need to be bolder with colours, and I think the paint pens might be the way to go to achieve that. But some valuable lessons were learned along the way, I can always rework them as I get into the 3mm vibe. I'll pick this project up again when I complete my planned investment in a resin printer this summer.

I think 3mm large bases have been scored at 12 points each previously. If my esteemed minion agreed, that would be 36 plus 20 for the location bonus for 56, which should nudge me over my 500 point target with a week to spare, and 4 or 5 posts still to come 🙂

Excellent work, they look like a frenzied mass of hairy armpits, I assume that was the plan