Chaos Warriors

I had this fancy to do some Mordheim warbands using only Grenadier Fantasy Warriors humans.
So I was sifting through a load of old mediaeval and fantasy miniatures and I stumbled on this Blood Bowl starplayer. Continuing my rusty grimdark experiments I made it into some sort of an iron golem (not to be confused with those new GW Warcry plastics, I mean an actual golem or automaton).

 I'm quite happy with the results, but something went completely wrong: I became obsessed with Mark Copplestone's early Chaos Warriors. Back in 1989/1990 I thought these were crude compared to Jes Goodwin's but now I actually prefer them.
Someone on the FB oldhammer trading company offered some of them which I couldn't refuse. Then I started asking and searching ebay and now I'm expecting a bunch of overpriced metals to join these guys.

For as far as I can tell the folowing warriors and champions were done by Copplestone. Warrior with massive mace is uncatalogued.
Warrior ten actually has a hound/wolf shaped helmet. Something I never would've guessed from these pictures. 
Note that these have all similar codes in the Blue catalogue, while Goodwin and earlier warriors have different initial numbers.

Green Men from the Woods

Twenty years ago, October 1999, Mordheim was released. Apart from the beautiful presentation and scenery featured in the rulebook and White Dwarf, I think it was especially the incredible suggestive artwork that recalled original Realm of Chaos illustrations, that totally turned me on.
At the time Mailorder bits service was still active and in Amsterdam were I lived at time a GW store had recently opened so I could buy anything through the store. 
I started designing warbands cherry-picking miniatures and components of old Realm of Chaos miniatures from the catalogues. 
One of the best attempts and one that I actually completed and painted are the Martikor's Green Men of the Woods.
I immagine this Possessed warband to be creatures tainted by warpstone in the woods around Mordheim, mutated all in green, furry monstrosities. 

Magister Martikor with familiar.

Two Darksouls. Shields from Bretonnian Green Knight.

Elfbane, brethren with bow with his wild boar

Brethren, or Beastmen.

Two Possessed. One based on a rat-ogre and the other a converted Manticore.

The whole warband.

Colin Dixon's original illustration.

Ian Miller's masterpiece.

Little Prick the wizard

The other day I stumbled on these two wizards I painted several years ago when Frostgrave was released. Somehow I never showed them here.
Little Prick the wizard and his apprentice, Warwick W. Widget.

Any similarity of the halfling with Willow, George Lucas' 80's fantasy movie lead character, is purely coincedental. 

Willow was played by Warwick Davis of course, who also played Wicket the Ewok in Return of the Jedi.  My first Starwars action figure, incidentally. For mysterious reasons he was called Wicket W. Warrick on the Kenner Toys blister pack.

Don't know about you guys, but I thought it was so funny to call the halfling like this, it had me giggle for days.

I'll be rationing my blog posts the coming months because this year's edition of the Lead Painters League is coming up. This means I will be painting teams that will not be shown before published on the Lead Adventure Forum for the contest.  

EDIT: I dug up my old Mordheim buildings and scenery from 1999. Touched them up a bit with spraycans and contrast paint. 

Dark Fantasy Warriors

If you've read my other posts on this blog you may have noticed I've been a big Copplestone fan for many years. I loved his 40K and Bloodbowl miniatures at the time but when his Future Warriors were released I was just blown away.

When Mark Copplestone left Citadel around 1990, he joined Grenadier and sculpted many of the hot new Fantasy Warriors line. Interestingly his style became much more realistic compared to say, his earlier Bloodbowl players and Chaos Warriors, while Citadel entered the crude and chunky Red Period.

Recent chats and various blogs about Blanchitsu, grimdark Mordheim and AoS28, reminded me I still had some unpainted Fighting Men that could be darkened up.
These were the Grenadier equivalent of Warhammer Empire or Bretonnia. In reality they are historical Wars of the Roses miniatures.
Funny thing is there were no lush magazine pictures of painted examples around at the time.These Fighting Men were nice but boring I always thought.

Retrofitting grimdark Blanche-esque neogothic techniques kind of changes everything.

I did  a deep red armour with contrast paint to approach old school chaos warriors or a vampire lord.

 Evil Jeanne Le Noir is a Bob Naismith sculpt.

For the rusty armour I've been trying out GW contrast medium mixed with pigment rich Vallejo military paints. a drybush with gun metal  and a second layer of medium with black paint. A final  higlight of silver and a bit of rust paint on the swords.

The Western Lands

It must be the heat, but I'm totally into Dracula's America western stuff. Not just dusty Sergio Leone imagery but also Acid Westerns like Jodorowsky's El Topo and Dead Man by Jim Jarmush. I should watch Blueberry too again, actually. I vaguely remember it was pretty good.
I settled for "the Western Lands" as a working title for this project, after the W.S. Burroughs novel.

In any case I've been painting more miniatures the last few days. 

This is King Rat. Sculpted by Mark Copplestone in the early 2000's I think. Based on the title character of China Mieville's book but in victorian dress. I imagine King Rat has crossed the Atlantic from England to America to track down Count Dracula for revenge or to settle an old debt. Taking out any vampire, necromancer or harbringer on his path.

I absolutely love this sculpt. It's a bit bigger than the usual 28mm miniature but just look at his face:

Following are these two zombies. On the left 'Dead' Iggy Jenko. On the right an old Grenadier 'Fantasy Classics' zombie Copplestone sculpt.

Iggy is done with a black undercoat, highlighted with GW Wraitbone and painted with Contrast paint.
The coat became a bit grimdark Blanchitsu in the process.

 
 

Swamp creatures

Yay! it's been two years since I painted Dracula's America toys!
The other day I've been experimenting some more with GW's Contrast paints and I still like it. Some things would work better with traditional paints though. Contrast isn't going to save us all, it's not the utopian solution to our problems, it isn't communism as my mate put it. Paint to the People! None of that.
But some colours are pretty swell. Applied well that is. 

Anyway here are some of North Star's DA miniatures.
I've got some more Foundry old west guys coming in to complete my vampire and voodoo congregation gangs. Can't beat those old Copplestone faces.

A Temple Snake, a giant serpent with a slightly human head summoned by the voodoo rites.

A Ghost Witch

A Manitou by Mike Owen

A minor servitor of Dagon. I believe this is an old Harlequin Miniatures swamp-troll. Probably sculpted by Mark Simms of Crusader Miniatures.

A deep one. This is a conversion of a Reaper caveman with a deep sea fish as a head.

Grendizers

After keeping them in a box for 26 years (I think that's how long ago 40k 2nd ed. was released) I managed to paint these monopose space marines. 

These were painted with the new GW contrast paints. It's the first time in many years I bought more than the occassional paint pot from GW. I really recommend them. They give an immediate acceptable effect. Certainly not the same as the usual painting but it's so easy and fast to work with it creates a great opportunity to paint tons of unpainted lead I've hoarded over the years.
I designed this chapter over a decade ago. Some of you for sure will recognise the colors of Goldrake/Mazinger/Grendizer, a Japanese animated series extremely popular in late seventies Italy.
The great iron giants from the Dark Age of Technology.

I only discovered Goldrake when I first came to Italy, as Dutch television I grew up with was extremely child friendly. For us no Galaxy Express, Dem or Goldrake with their violence, creepy villains and dystopic backgrounds. Sometimes even nudity! 
Heidi, Remì and the Robinson family we had. Not even Kenshiro, the Fist of the Northstar, introduced to us only in the early 90s through expensive Japanese VHS imports.

Black Flag

The preparations for my Ucranian Black Army goes very well. I ordered many toys and they're being delivered as we speak and I have started to do some research on Makhnovist flags. 
I remember that 10 or 15 years ago, before facebook anyway, information on the Maknovist movement was really scarse. There was an Anarchist History yahoo-group and some sites, all with the same three or four photographs. Most of the information was confirmed on the Back of Beyond yahoo-group, the Miniatures Page and Lead Adventure. The  "Death to all those who stand in the way of the working people" banner is world famous by now and over the last ten years I've noticed a boom of t-shirts and other merchandise with various renditions of that banner.

Two days ago I googled 'Makhno Flag' for the umpteenth time, I guess because there is something about the skull & bones flag that doesn't convince me. Mostly because the skull and bones image was usually used by Whites, as it was used by the freikorps in Germany and Latvia around the same time.
So I stumbled on this Reddit post and I read a reply stating that the famous banner isn't Makhnovist at all!
Here is the famous parade banner:

And here is a picture of the backside of the banner. I've never seen this photo before. The same two soldiers apparently aren't Black Guard at all but Red Army soldiers with a banner captured from Ucrainian Free Cossacks, another faction in the Kiev area.

Supposedly it says: "Kish [battalion] of Upper Dnipro", a (socialist leaning?) volunteer Cossack unit of the Ukrainian People's Republic.

There you go, 15+ years of discussion on wargames forums destroyed. Just like that.

[Edit:]Here another picture of the same soldiers with another captured UPR flag:

To compensate here are some confirmed, authentic flags from the Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine:

 2nd regiment

 3rd regiment

The Makhnovshchina

As if I didn't have enough projects going on, I decided I should paint my old Back of Beyond/Makhnovist project from a bunch of Russian Civil War figs I have.
The central figure here is Ukrainian Anarchist Black Guard commander Nestor Makhno with on his left the notoriously extravagant Fjodor Schuss. On his right may be Maria 'Marusya' Nikiforova, a fellow independent Black Guard commander.

I bought these Brigade Games figs already some years ago. At the time the Dollar was low and postage relatively cheap compared to today. I should've bought more as there's some really nice stuff in the Great War and the 'Storm in the East' ranges. Here's a resin Whippet tank. I painted no markings so it can be used by anybody.

This Lancia armoured car was made by Force of Arms' Spanish Civil War range. I believe it's now sold by Warlord Games for Bolt Action.

Coming next should be the anarchist cavalry. I ordered russian cossacks from Copplestone but also seven year war cossacks and some other useful miniatures from Foundry.

Demogorgon!

A year and a half ago I got Netflix only because I had heard good things about Stranger Things. As probably many of us I was baffled and amazed by the appearance of an original Grenadier monster used by the kids playing D&D.
The miniature was sculpted in the 1980's by John Dennett for Grenadier Models Inc. It's called a demon for the Fantasy Lords series but it clearly is a two headed, tentacled Demogorgon.
The whole appearance of this miniature in the TV show is actually an anachronism: the first episode of the series is set in November 1983, while the miniature has the year 1984 inscribed on it's base.
Mirliton in Italy has all the old Grenadier figs so I ordered three of them immediately. Two got seized by my daughters though.

Of course this is a vintage Gary Gygax D&D monstrousity, but if Rick Priestly can retrofit an Umberhulk in Rogue Trader and call it an Ambull, I can upside-down a Demogorgon and call it a Warp entity.

Hard SF Tau Auxiliaries

I got a box of plastic Tau the other day, as some the the designs have been really growing on me. While some it is a bit too much of a mish mash of manga styles, some other things have a great hard, military SF look. As a result I've been quite obsessed with the genre: anti-grav tanks, powered armour, but with a gritty realism. The box included some Stealth suits that remind a bit of Maschinen Krieger and Stargrunt II. 

I decided to get some of the new Albedo cat heads from Sally4th to make alternative Tau. I ordered bare heads and helmets. The helmet pack also includes heads with baret. Unfortunately I got more barets than the helmets I wanted, but still enough to make a good kill team.

In action with grav tank.

 

I remembered my old Grenadier Future Warriors that could work perfect as high tech humans allied to the alien Tau. I painted most of these Copplestone sculpts ages ago, around the turn of the century.

Standard troopers.

 Urban Camo 

Colonial Marines

Powered Armour, these are almost the same size as the Tau Stealth suits.

But also these Vor powered armour (or Power Armor in the USA) by Kevin Adams.

Powered armour troopers advancing Stargrunt style. It is said Stargrunt is a terrific game system and very realistic acording to veterans.