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I planned a quiet weekend and have been pleased to have the chance and energy to slap some paint on some miniatures. Last month I painted almost two dozen 1/72 fantasy figures for my portable wargaming set up, and I wanted to do a few more. However, I set the warg riders aside at one point and ended up finishing a couple of large monsters. The cyclops on the far right is from a recent Dark Alliance set. As can be seen by Sir Forescale, he’d be a tolerable ogre even in 28s, but the old Airfix Robin Hood figure gives the scale comparison in 1/72. I’m hoping to get to some sort of Homeric Bronze Age project one of these days, as the Dark Alliance Cyclopes are also accompanied by sets of Egyptian mummies, Anubis warriors, minotaurs, centaurs, and Amazons, so there’s some scope. Caesar Miniatures has produced an extensive Bronze Age selection in 1/72, although much of it is sadly out of production at the moment. The big thing is a …. Something … from the Caesar Miniatures Adventurers set, also sadly out of production at the moment. Most people I’ve seen online or in magazines have styled it a “troll”, but my elder son, drawing on a childhood memory of an Eric Carle-illustrated book of poems about mythical creatures, dubbed it a “bunyip”, so that’s what we usually call it. I believe this is the last one we have to be painted; we’ve got four between us. Like the cyclops, it’s big enough to intimidate Sir Forescale and it truly monstrous compared to the Airfix Merry Man. My younger son is relocating back to this part of the world next weekend, and is currently staying with his brother briefly while he looks at apartments. They have been playing some De Bellis Antiquitatis with the elder’s Bronze Age collection (e.g. this recent game) while visiting, so I decided to see if I could make some progress on adding another DBA army to the Bronze Age pool. (As an aside, DBA and its fantasy counterpart Hordes of the Things have been more-or-less the family default tabletop wargames for a couple of decades, although the current DBA binge only started a few years ago.) I sorted out an army of ancient Nubians some time ago, from my stash of Caesar boxes. It isn’t some of my best work; they have some poorly defined leopard spots on their kilts, and I am not entirely certain what the belt wraps and shoulder throws are supposed to be, which also have some shallow incised detail. I’m thinking that it’s probably intended as embroidered cloth, so I’ll have to see if I can’t do better with the next batch. Here’s an Egyptian painting of Nubians delivering donuts and a sleeping cat in tribute: (Which reminds me that I should vary the skin tones more in the next batch…)

There is a more detailed report on my blog, but I tried some Army Painter Speed Paints yesterday. My test piece was a unit of 12 Caesar 1/72 scale plastic elves. I primed these after work, and then sat down with an oatmeal container lid and a single dubious #2 dollar store brush to see what I could do. Since I didn’t really plan ahead, I had the five colors above to work with. Hardened Leather and Camo Cloak were used for cloaks and tunics; Slaughter Red and Pallid Bone for trousers; Crusader skin was flesh tones; Pallid Bone hair and arrow feather in quivers; Hardened leather for boots and bows; Leather and Red for quivers. I used whatever random brown came to hand for belts, and there are a few metallic bits. I realized after I was partway through that lighter colors cannot cover darker, so the proper sequence of painting is light to dark, regardless of where on the miniature those colors fall. Total time from starting (with figures already primed) to adding grass to bases was about 1.5 hours. I let them dry overnight and varnished them with my usual spray varnish this morning. The above is an idea of how they’d look at the typical table top battle viewing distances, alongside some other archers speed painted using my usual techniques, and an elvish command stand in which each figure was painted as an individual to the maximum level I find amusing. So, honest opinions?

I have been spending Minivember catching up a bit on my Portable Fantasy Campaign project. I’ve been chipping away at it as a campaign for five armies since early 2017, and it builds on a 2014 initiative to put a travel fantasy game in a box that will fit under an airline seat, so that I can take it to a convention regardless of my mode of travel. Anyway, I decided to have a little fun and paint an unplanned stand of figures as a reward for finally getting the first couple of stands of orcs for the orcish army finished. All three figures here are from the Caesar Miniatures Fantasy Adventurers box set, originally issued around 2010. As a result of early imprinting by the Airfix company, I have always had a fondness for the 1/72 plastic figures, and I bought a bunch of the initial release when Caesar started making fantasy figures. Unfortunately, they have been rather intermittantly in production, and don’t seem to be currently available. Even finding a box floating in the Bay of Ease would be a small miracle at the moment. But, I do have a bunch.* As you can see by Sir Forescale shimmed up so that his feet are about level with the feet of the sorceress et al., these women are pretty small by Reaper standards. (This does make finishing 30 in a month a somewhat easier task, counterbalanced a little by the level of brush control needed to work at that level. For whatever reason, Caesar packed a lot more of these sorceresses in their boxes than the second, left-hand-staff, figure. (See PSR article linked above.) We have played around in various ways with the large spheroid on the top of her staff. My sons have painted it into a skull; I sliced one off and added a rustic broom using some two-part epoxy, etc. For this one, I tried going with a plant theme, so I halved the staff head, painted a flower on top, and leaves on the sides. The flower theme is then echoed in her bodice embroidery and the bodyguard’s shield. That all seemed like a good excuse to use a flowering tuft on the base. Back to painting orcs…

A little expedient painting...I am still trying to finish my 12-stand De Bellis Antiquitatis (DBA) army of 13th century BC Libyans, and they get a stand of mercenary Sea Peoples blades. So, here it is. As with the other Libyan stands, the figures are drawn from a Caesar Miniatures box set of ~40 figures in 12 poses, of which we have great store.