El Cid diversion

I have been contemplating my next project, torn between doing hoplites and Persians or the Reconquista. So I scored a few boxes of the Hat 28mm El Cid range plastics from Wall-e to try out. I am particularly keen to build an Almoravid army, with ferocious North African Berbers.

I assembed one sprue of these guys:



Which I have to confess did not impress me that much in bare plastic form. The details are not as crisp as other hard plastic ranges, and the plastic spears are quite fragile. But when I painted them up, I was pleasantly surprised (as is often the case with Hat products):




The problem with them is that they are proportioned like 1/72, with realistic head and hand sizes, so they will not mix well with metals, shown below here beside an Old Glory 28 despite having the correct height:


I would be happy to use just Hat figs, but the ranges are incomplete. So this leaves a bit of a dilemma.

Mantic Revenant Cavalry

This week I finished a unit of Mantic's Revenant Cavalry that I will run in my Vampire Counts army as Black Knights. They are quite good, unlike the other stuff I have done these are resin models. Nice details, bit of a pain to assemble though, superglue prefers human flesh to resin.

At the van is an old GW Wight Champion who I will run as a Wight King to lead the blood knights. He's a very good melee character in a VC army with high Ld.


Here are the leader, standard and musician:




In these photos I also tried to be a less-crapful photographer, so I fiddled with the light settings to try to get more depth and less blurriness in the pics. Let me know what you think.

I have remaining a vampire lord, some fell bats and spirit hosts to fill out that army, then it is done.

May 2-4 weekend updates

It's been a busy couple of weeks, conference travel, kids birthday parties, etc... but I have completed some characters for my Vampire Counts army. These are all GW. First we have the Wight battle standard bearer (love this model), a necromancer, and two Lahmian vampires (love these models too!)


I painted one of the girls to look like daughter number 2 (blond hair, fond of snakes):


And the other to look like daughter number 1 (brown hair, loves kitties):


There is also a unit of cairn wraiths with banshee (looks a bit like the missus on an angry day..)



And finally, picked up a bunch of goodies at a local swap meet on the weekend, these are some chaos war hounds that were in rough shape when I bought them, but I spruced up their paint jobs and based them to use as dire wolves:


In other news, daughter number 2 turned 6 and we had a birthday party at Edmonton's historical Rutherford house:


And very sadly, we had to say goodbye to our lovely cat Sophie at 11 years of age. She has been slowly going downhill for the last few months and I had to have her put down right after the birthday party on Saturday. She likely had cancer. It broke my heart, she was a lovely little girl, always spunky and good natured. I don't think Sophie ever caused any trouble (e.g. messes, furniture destruction, etc...) although she was very fond of begonias and spider plants for snacks. Funny little kitty. I've been crying all weekend.

Sophie, rest in peace, we will miss you dearly. I'm so sorry.

Sophie (2000 - 2011)
Place of birth: Sheffield, England

The Undead keep on coming!

Yesterday I ran my Vimeiro game at MayDay, unfortunately I forgot my camera. Dang!

My highlights at MayDay- first game of HOTT playing Bob's undead version of Teutoburger Wald went well for my team, no complaints here. My CC:N Vimeiro played well, although the more experienced team of participants won with both the British and French (12-6 on aggregate). My last session was DBA, where Seljuks played well enough to win 3 methinks but the cursed dice left us with a mid-table 1-1-1 record (yes a draw at 3G-3G with time elapsed) mostly due to poor pips. Unforgiving with a LH army.

But today I did finish a unit of Mantic Revenants, these were quite a bit more stylish and heavily armoured than the regular skellies, you can see the inlaid armour quite well. I will use these as Grave Guard in my Vampire Counts army:








I might get some characters done this week, but it will be short since I have a confererence on the weekend. Tuesday night is also the second night of our DBA Crusades campaign.

Zombese!

I finished these 30 conservative party members last week (or are they liberals? Nope, they are just dead!) for my Vampire Counts army. I enjoyed doing them, even though there are only a limited number of body parts and attachements, there are countless ways to combine them.




SSSteevenn...where is my polling station....

The guy on the right here must be Ignatieff, he has clearly lost his head and cannot reattach it!


I plan to use these as reinforcements to be summoned by vampires and necromancers, ideally somewhere really inconvenient for my opponent. Like an urban riding where there is an even split between the NDP (Not Dead Party) and Liberals (freshly dead party).

Next up: Revenants and characters