Unreleased Empire Landsknecht

At the time of writing it is a beautiful, summer's day in England. The sky is a cloudless blue and my family duties consist of cooking the Sunday Roast. With the meat, potatoes and vegetables well at hand, I found myself with a morning to work on this unusual figure. Ever eager to move fast, this figure took me less than three hours to complete and was a joy to work on. Like many miniatures of its ilk, this Landsknecht feels a little unfinished and rather Maraudery, judging by the size of the chap's hands. His weapon is not gigantically proportioned though, and it is hard to place. A halberd? Short pike? 

I am guessing here that this model was sculpted by Aly Morrison and seems to fit the style of the Marauder Fighters range more closely than true Citadel. Why is never saw release is anyone's guess and I am thankful to Steve Casey for this model, as he generously bequeathed it to me at the Oldhammer Weekend last month. 

Thanks a lot old chum! 

Not being the type to horde these rarer models, nor sell them on for gratuitous profit, I much prefer to get them painted and on the table as soon as I can. Somewhere in my lead pile is a bulging bag of other unreleased gems that I really must crack on and complete, perhaps for October's 'Night of the Living Lead' game?

The casting is of good quality and needed little cleaning up before painting. As is now usual, I undercoated the model in white and then blocked in the colours. A sepia wash was then run over the model, head to foot, to help generate a little depth. Landskneckts can be intimidating for any painter and one of the key elements to success is getting the colour scheme just right. 

As I do when inspiration is needed, I searched through the work of the late Angus McBride, probably the finest military painter who ever lived. If you haven't heard of him, you will no doubt recognise his work, especially if you grew up with any Osprey titles cluttering up your bedroom. 

It didn't take long to find a similar character among McBride's copious body of work. 

Obviously, there are some design differences between the two but I took the pink, red, white with blue ribbons colour scheme and transferred it to the figure. It was a fairly strightforward paint job with each colour being blocked out and highlighted until I was satisfied with the tone. It practically painted itself. 

A lovely, relaxed painting session is what Sunday is all about, isn't it?

I experimented with orangey brown and a buff colour on the reverse of the model and I am very pleased with the results here, as in the past I felt that the leather trappings on my figures were a little lack-lustre and washed out. I found that using the lightest shade in Foundry's Boneyard triad helped give the leather a more worn out look. Definitely something I will try again. 

Right, the Yorkshires and crackling awaits.

Orlygg

The City of Lead: A Tale of Four Oldhammer Gamers

Hello all! I have managed to paint up a figure, despite my looming return to work. Sometimes I think the long, sprawling days of summer don't help the painting mojo and work can slow to a painful crawl - but this figure seemed to just paint itself over the last few days.

He is the first model in Steve, Paul, Chico and my new ongoing project - The City of Lead: A year long mission to create a warband for Mordheim. Now, I am a complete stranger to the game and have yet to explore the published materials but I have picked a side.

Kislev.

And this Russian looking chap from the recent Foundry 'Time Warp Wizards' will do nicely for my warband.

There are a couple of other possible models in my collection already, but beyond buying up the original Kislev Warhammer models I am stumped as to where to find medieval looking Russian miniatures.

Can any of you readers suggest any ranges?

Oldhammer Weekend 2016: Who are the Time Warp Wizards? and other miniatures

Last post I mentioned the Time Warped Wizards that Foundry cast up especially for BOYL4 and I promised that we would look at them in greater detail, so here we are. I had seen most of the figures in this collection before, as I had had the near impossible choice of choosing but one in previous years, so it was wonderful to finally have them all.

Now, these figures have lurked out there in the murky world of obsessional Citadel collecting and most are often included as part of the unreleased Empire range. Check out the Collecting Citadel Miniatures wiki here for further details. I couldn't care less whether my models are slotta based or solid, but I know that there are some out there who highly value the original style castings.

As you would expect from Wargames Foundry, the models are exceptionally cast. Witnessing Marcus Ansell's skill and speed producing the miniatures in the photograph above is testimony for that. In fact, comparing these newer versions with some of my more ancient unreleased models the Foundry castings are enormously superior and feel wonderfully weighty in the hand.

Now this first model is clearly not a traditional wizard and bears a striking resemblance to a certain Heroquest character model. He is in fact an unreleased Wood Elf can a reference to him can be found here at the CCM wiki.

If you have been aware of this model for a while, I can give you a sneaky rear shot (steady, Chico) to reveal further detail.

These two chaps have long been considered to be Empire models, though the Russian influence is extremely strong. Though it is fairly easy to suggest that these figures were originally produced as part of a possible Kislev range, they may simply just be late- medieval (note the pistol in the first model's belt) sculpts who have been caught up with Warhammer.

Again, like the Wood Elf, these two models don't strike me as the traditional magic users, though battlemages are always possible if you don't care for strict rules and background. I will most likely use these for warriors in my own games.

These four figures are simply beautiful pieces of single cast design. Each is unique and lovingly detailed and will not doubt prove to be a thorough challenge to paint. The second figure from the left you may well have seen here before as I selected that example as a prize a couple of years back. The first three figures are clearly all traditional magic users and have been attributed to Aly Morrison. The fourth figure is a bit of a mystery, and could possibly just be a standard villager type as he wears pretty standard clothing and carries a goblet.

These figures feel much later in the Citadel chronology and may well have been produced just as Bryan Ansell was preparing to leave GW.

These next three figures feel earlier to me, and match in style with the wizards and clerics that were released in 1987 as part of the C series. A glance at the CCM page will show you that there are an awful lot of unreleased miniatures that share similar characteristics with these, with a large number being conversions of other models. My unreleased druid I wrote about last November is part of this collection.

Many figures in this particular group of unreleased models look unfinished or are rather crudely converted (perhaps giving a clue to why they never saw the light of day) as anyone who has seen this Nurgle sorcerer will attest. Though Bryan has said to us that many of these models never made it to market purely because there was just so much to release back then, that many fine models just slipped through the net. It is fantastic that some of these excellent models are at last seeing the light of day.

I am sure that many readers will be keen to get there hands on these models. Marcus told me that the mould he made for the Oldhammer Weekend is only a temporary one and won't last forever. If you are after some of these models (and they were selling individually and as a whole set) my advice is to contact the Wargames Foundry directly via telephone and speak to them.

I also spotted this chap (image from CCM) being handed out as a prize (along with the unreleased Advanced Heroquest Dwarf and the hideously brilliant female space marine my friend Steve Casey discovered last October) to one of the lucky painting competition winners. Bryan went on to say that only the Perry's would have gone to the trouble of sculpting such an accurate hatchet style weapon, complete with nasty curving hook!! 

But it wasn't just Foundry producing exciting models, Geoff from Oakbound Studios, designed the event miniature based on an image of Morcar he found in an old Heroquest comic. There was a very weighty box of castings being lugged around by even organiser, Garth, during most of the Saturday session.

By the time I took this picture a large number of them had been handed out. As I said previous, Garth ensured me he wants to get these sent out to other Oldhammer communities across the oceans so if you are after one, get hold of him via the Oldhammer forum. He uses the moniker Weasil there.

And here Morcar lies in glorious close-up. I love the horned beast sign he is making with his free hand.

Villains the world over really lost out when the hooded cloak dropped out of fashion, don't you think?

Kev Adams worked flat out to produce a large number of converted models, including a tiny bottle swaggering model with my rough features adorned upon. This model really is tiny. In a couple of days, I will get collect up as many pictures of his work and share them here as I did last year, as well as sort out the three chaps whose models Kev took home as he ran out of time.

Orlygg

A Tale of Four Oldhammerers: March's Magician of Nurgle

Oh, what a month it has been. It all started out with this great plan for getting my bigger units finished for this project. After limping along in the race during the Tale of Four Oldhammer Gamers, I wanted to make more of a mad dash to the finish (this year's Oldhammer Weekend in August) and get so BIG units completed. Sadly, life as always intervened. So, a few days ago I finally admitted to myself that I was not going to get the two units of Nurgle I had wanted finished by the end of the month. 

But this left me a problem!

What could I submit if I only had a few days? 

Thankfully chaos is very forgiving in a project like this and the necessary 100 points can easily be found by painting up a single champion model. But what model should I pick? I have a stack of the classic champions that Jes Goodwin designed in the late '80s and I even went as far as fishing their bag out of the Welsh Dresser. In the end though, I decided to paint something really, really special and I chose the model you can see here. 

Being close to the beating heart of Oldhammer, I have been lucky enough to meet a few collectors with some really nice pieces, and I have even managed to pick up a few of them too! Miniatures that were produced, but for many different reasons were never actually released. And this model is one of them. Perhaps you have seen it before on one of the CCM pages?

It has been referenced under 'Empire' and someone has suggested it represents a magician or druid. After painting it, I think that this assessment is not quite right. Judging by it's cadaverous visage (the face resembles a fleshy skull) I suspect that this model was once destined for a 'baddie' range. Having worked on it for a few hours, I feel that the model was never actually completed before casting. Parts of the figure seem unfinished and strangely empty. The 'robe' seems very, very smooth when compared to similar models from the 'era', almost as if additional detail were to be added later, but weren't. 

One thing that did strike me when I was preparing the model for painting were the three 'ball' shape pieces on the back. You can see them here in the image above. I have painted them a rusty silver. They don't appear to be grenades or pouches (you can see a pouch painted red below them) and are really rather inexplicable unless you look at the model from a chaos perspective. 

I feel that they are a Nurgle symbol, such as you see on many shields and models across the Citadel Range. Have a look here to see what I mean in more detail. The red shield clearly displays the classic symbol for the Plague God, doesn't it?

So this begs the question - could this be an unreleased Nurgle Magician instead? I believe so and it is for this reason I chose to paint him up for my (very slowly) growing old school Nurgle army. 

He was great fun to paint. The unfinished areas were suitably challenging and resulted in me having to be more creative with my painting. I had a little serendipity along the way too. As I was sticking the model to it's base, I managed to drip some superglue onto the figure's robe. In attempting to wipe it away I ended up sticking my fingers together and making a right old mess. However, the dried glue gave the robe a little irregular detail and instead of stripping it in the Nitro-Mors overnight (remember, I was on a time limit) I decided to just paint on over the dried glue. 

Can you notice? 

Recently, I unearthed a pot of Bilious Green in my storage area and decided to put the paint to one side to do something with. I haven't actually painted a model with the stuff for over twenty years and the challenge of doing so was a welcome one. You will have seen that I used this green to build up the skin tones with the final highlight being pure Bilious Green - a classic '80s clolour you just don't see any more. Bright red made up the eyes, a purple tongue and brown rotting teeth. The hair was also straightforwards - just grey, light grey and white painted in streaks. 

The robe was harder (not just because it had a crusty layer of superglue on it, either) as it was just so bland. It looked too smooth to be the fetid rags of a Nurgle follower. To solve this, I used a stippling effect with the paint while highlighting and created a rather wormy, irregular finish. A good glaze with a chestnut ink made the material look oily and damp. Nice and offensive like all good Nurgle follower's like to look! 

The staff was a throwback to an old undead army I painted in 2010. I used gold as a basecoat. Then washed over in a dark black ink. Once this was dry, I made a verdigris green wash out of blue and green and seeped this over the staff. Once this dried, the gold looked filthy and aged. I used the original base colour once again to highlight the edges of the metal. 

Bags, feathers and belts were painted quite simply with browns and blacks, as were the shoes. I used my prized Foundry Boneyard triad for the animal skull on the end of the staff. This really is a set of paints you NEED to own as they are absolutely excellent for painting bone. Finally, I used red and blue as spot colours for the pouch and dangling hair tuft below the animal skull - what are these called? 

All in all, I just scraped in with the time limit. Phew! I have been so busy I haven't even had a look at what the other boys in my Oldhammer gang have been up to this month, so I better go remedy that immediately! 

Orlygg

Unreleased Citadel C series Cleric 1

I blogged about this model a few days ago but could only share a rather poor photograph. I managed to capture a couple of snaps today in the back garden using my preferred illumination, natural light, and post them up in my usual style. 

This is an extremely rare model. It is part of a wider range of wizards and clerics that never saw the inside of a blister way back in 1987. The CCM website can provide you with comprehensive details of this range of models and it can be found here. As you will have seen, the range has a real mixture of models comprising it. Some are quite obviously unfinished, or were in fact test or training pieces, and it is clear why they never saw release. Others, like the example I have painted above, are wonderful models and you are left wondering why they never made the cut. Talking to a fair few of the personalities involved in the early days of Citadel over the years it is fair to say that things were sometimes a little, and I am quoting Bryan Ansell here, 'disorganised' in the 1980s, so perhaps that explains why little gems like this never made the grade. 

He was a wonderful model to paint but I must admit he has sat on my painting table since August along with the other unreleased wizard I have won in Foundry Painting Competitions. But the need for a small group of miniatures for yesterday's game galvanised me into action. 

The face and hands were fairly straight forwards to paint and I used my usual 'flesh' method. I use a suitable skin tone and a base (in this case it was the new GW Kislev one) and add a spot of dark red and a little brown. Mixing this up gives you a nice dark shade that is perfect for basecoating. I cover every part of the face and hands, leaving no areas of darkness (I used a brown undercoat for the figure) and once dry, wash over with a watery chestnuty ink. Once the ink was is dry, I paint back over with my original base colour and tidy things up. Then adding increasing amounts of the starting colour (the new GW Kislev one) I slowly work up highlights until the face 'pops' as some painters say. 

It is pretty much the same method for everything else you can see here, bar the toad, the laurel and the staff. 

I knew I was going to be using a great deal of white on this figure, so I chose a grey to darken the beard and a blue to deepen the white cloak. I kept the pale tone style for the staff also.  

In case you were wondering, he is holding a small frog or toad on the palm of his hand. It is a wonderful character trait that amused me the moment I saw it and was the reason I chose the model from the selection offered. The amphibian was painted in exactly the same green as the laurel and the bunch of herbs at the wizard's belt, only I used a great deal of sunburst yellow to build up the highlights. I feel that the resulting colour compliments to other green on the fugure very well indeed. 

Overall, he was a real pleasure to work on.