My October hobbying goal was to finish up the ~400 points of Halflings I had in process, and get that army up to 2000 points. Like most of my hobbying goals, it was almost immediately ignored. Instead, I worked on some Vampires, and then added a number of other things to the table. Oops. The good news is that every army of mine has some new things coming soon! The bad news is that the Halflings still aren't up to 2k yet. They are one step closer with this though, their Battle Shrine!
As my Halfling collection broke 1000 points, I decided that I really liked the idea of the halflings dragging around some kind of Ark of the Covenant or Mikoshi-style shrine that they could rally around while it would liberally dispense lightning to their enemies. I decided I had neither the ability nor the patience to modify any of the remaining soft plastic figures, so having halflings drag the shrine around themselves was out of the question.
Fortunately, I had a spare dino toy sitting around, and was able to build a platform relatively quickly, though as an Eagle Scout I'm aware and ashamed of the "lashings" I did here. I mean, flat rope? No frappings? C'mon... Also, yeah, the statue would probably slip off in real life. okay, engineering-wise, this model is clearly lacking. But it is painted, so that counts for something.
With the platform done, I needed something to worship, and decided on a statue. My girlfriend has me hooked on From Software games right now (Bloodborne and Dark Souls 1 down so far; Dark Souls 2 in process...) I was finishing up DS1 while working on the Shrine, so I decided to take a little inspiration from the game for the statue. (For those familiar and/or curious, I ended up Praising the Sun with a very, very janky dex/faith guy wielding Quelaag's Furysword or Iaito.)
I used a spare Warlord Roman body for the statue, and then glued shredded bits of a green scrubby to a pila-throwing arm to try and emulate the iconic Lightning Spear line of spells. I considered trying to green stuff or paint something to serve as the ubiquitous Grass Crest Shield, but decided against it. I didn't think I could easily do something interesting with a flat, blank shield, so grabbed a spare Fireforge Mongol Cavalry shield, because I figured it would look cool with some shading effects.
It turned out ok! But the halflings still have a long way to go. An second Archer regiment and a horde of Spearlings are still in process, which is 50+ figures. Every model there has some paint on it right now, but yeesh.... I still have a long ways to the table for those units.
Closer to completion are some infantry for Kingdoms of Men, Direfangs for the Varangur, some Wraiths for the Undead and a few odds and ends for the Herd. Most of these are nearly finished, so I'll have some more updates soon!