Hobby Update: Bob Ridolfi's Undead Adventuring Warband

I've been a fan of Reaper Miniatures for a long long time. Their offerings are amazing and sprawling and usually very easy on the wallet. Back when I regularly visited my FLGS for Warhammer Fantasy, I'd often pick up a half dozen minis or more at a time on a whim, as these were perfect for my D&D campaigns.

Such is the case with these. Sometime in the past, I picked up these undead adventurers, and finally got around to painting them up over the summer. Originally there were to be used for D&D, as I thought an opposing undead party would be a neat thing to overcome. That didn't come to pass. Last year I set them aside to eventually hobby up while I was exploring Fistful of Lead by Wiley Games. Their varied look, gear.. well, their varied everything would make them ideal for that kind of game where you are pushing around a select few, very individualistic models. But that also didn't happen. So these were hobbied up this year, mostly just for fun.

Undead are always fun to hobby on.

The central fighter-guy is multi-piece metal, the halfling is one-piece of metal and the rest are the bendy, softer Reaper mono-pose plastic, so no conversion work was done at all for this warband. I am quite cool with that. These had a nice variety of flesh, bones and scraps of armor and cloth and were fun to do. The dwarf having beard remnants and the elf having hair remnants were both nice touches on their respective miniatures. Kudos to the sculptor, Bob Ridolfi, who, as I went back to cite... turns out he sculpted all of these. Very cool.

These were done for fun; no real adventurous hobby testing performed. I am, however, getting away from my old more orangey wood (Deathclaw Brown), and into more natural-looking browns and tans. You can see some of that here with the axe handles and bow. These tones look much nicer, and I'll likely make them the standard going forward.

Hobby Update: Beastmen Warband

My second fantasy warband was hobbied up late June and early July, and saw me dipping into some Beastmen. I still had 30ish Beastmen minis sitting around, and I wanted to play around with some more pale skin tones. I picked up some un-Gor and a Shaman from ebay to round things out, and dipped into my pile of shame to get the rest, opting to hobby up all my remaining Bestigor. I chipped away a bit at my pile of remaining beastmen, but not nearly enough. I've still got around two dozen minis left.

The gang.

I was going for a bit on an apocalypse feel for these, like this warband were marauders and just scouring the wastes. I copied the boring base from the Apocolypse Orks for the Grimdark Future game, just browns and some gray dry brushed rocks. The bases look a little too sparse here though; I'll likely add some grass or tufts in the future if I can find a suitably subdued color. 

I primed in black, which was probably a mistake. I was going for pale skin, so black was not doing myself any favors. The "Pallid Wych Flesh" took about a half dozen layers before it looked good on anything, so I wasted a fair bit of time stemming from the wrong primer color. Priming in a gray or white or even zenithal scheme would have been much smarter. Even doing a gray base coat to kick off the painting part would have been smarter too. 

The hounds turned out pretty darn nice!

The pale skin was basically off-white. I needed a wash, but wasn't sure what. I had a half-spoiled pot of Death World Forest, to which I added some water to get a bit of a sickly green wash. After a test model, I ended up applying this to all the models in the warband, though this turned out best on the hounds I think. I don't know why. Exposed skin was an issue on the other minis, but it just worked on the hounds and the scorpion tails look poisonous in person.

Next best were the Bestigor.

The Bestigor had limited exposed skin, so things turned out pretty nicely with them; just a nice, slightly greenish tint. I think I could have done more, maybe with a rust effect or something though. Grass and rust... ok, two things I can fix down the road.

The shaman was a great model, though I could not get the skin tone to play nice with him. Even in person that left leg looks gnarly, and not in a good apocalypse way. The ungor were similarly bad. Watery flesh layers just didn't seem to work out and the wash turned out a bit yucky. The normal gor seemed to turn out ok though, so I just don't know what the deal is.

The ungor look a little too inky. It works, and I am likely not going to repaint anytime soon, but I am a little disappointed. Not sure what the issue was.

The warband is mostly all "out of the box." The only conversion work in the warband was on the "boss," a bestigor body and head with axes from the champions of both a gor and bestigor. He's got two large axes, so he's gotta be in charge, right? I certainly thought so, but it didn't quite differentiate him enough, so I gave him a cape, I think from the GW Chaos Marauder kit.

Yeah, the cape sells it a bit more. Nice, simple solution.

The leader also got a piece of bark for his base, making him a little higher and hopefully having him stand out just a little more on the table. I have heard that bark > cork board for more natural rocks so I wanted to give it a try. During the pandemic, I went on a lot of walks. There was a fair amount of bark around, so I grabbed some, took it home and baked it (to kill bacteria and dry it out), and then threw it in an old takeout container to store it. 

This was the first attempt at using it. I sanded down part of it so there would be a pretty flat join to the base. I then covered it with a layer of Elmers glue (as its known here, also known as PVA glue, or white glue, or school glue I am told). I figured this would "seal" in the bark a bit, and protect it from moisture, etc. I let that sit for a day because what do I know about drying times, then spray painted it black and then painted it.

Sanding the bark down is a pain. If you have a legit sanding power tool... maybe that's better, but I'd worry about fingers getting sanded. Sawing to get the flat join is also possible, but it depends on the piece - you could be trying to saw through an inch or more of bark, which might be frustrating with just a hobby saw. 

Posing a mini on the bark can also be difficult. The wide stance of the leader worked well for me, but could easily have backfired. The barked looks good and worked well and I'll be trying it more, but the more rugged basing requires a little more planning (or more sanding to get footholds where you want to place the model).

Overall, this ended up being a nice warband. Despite some hurdles, the pale skin worked well enough more often than not, and overall the warband looks nice and unified colors-wise. It was a fine hobbying diversion!

Hobby Update: Lizardfolk Warband

Still catching up on some non-Kings of War hobbying posts. This summer I got into some semi-random hobbying on a variety of warbands, instead of Kings of War things. It was nice to paint up a few minis each week and just explore a few ideas in very limited ways rather than batch paint a unit, or worry about a full army scheme.

A lot of these summer warbands coincided with my rediscovery of ebay, and the ability to buy sprues instead of full, new boxes. This is great for this kind of circumscribed hobbying, though price-wise, you are almost always better to buy the full box. New-on-Sprue tends to come with a bit of a premium.

The first individual sprue I snagged this summer was in June, from an old Lizardmen kit. I think just an iteration of the old, basic Saurus Warriors. I expanded the little warband I had done up the previous year in the Wiley Games post, and with some reinforcements, they look a little more menacing now! 

The static grass continue to shed... you can see a few fuzzies in the box. 

The sprue had four lizards, which I modeled up into two spears, and then did some very light conversion work swapping in hand weapon heads instead of spear-tips to make two polearm-wielding lizardfolk. This seems like a nice little warband now. 

There is a fantasy-themed game from One Page Rules. I think these port reasonable well into that, but honestly, just did these up for fun; all the fantasy warbands to come were pretty lackadaisical. I don't know what they will be used for... honestly these will probably just be lizardfolk and kobolds in D&D.

Orange was the big hobby experiment here, which worked out a little better this time. It was Army Painter paint, and still took a few coats, but it seemed to go better than last time. It could just be I understood I needed a few coats to get the coverage I wanted. 

The second hobby experiment was pressing on with basing and grass. I added a lot of static grass and tufts here, trying to get a more overgrown jungle look to these. Without huge bushes or trees, the overgrown effect falls a bit short, but I was happy with my groundcover effect overall, though the grass continues to shed a bit. I'm experimenting with some solutions for that, and should have a Hobby Basics post covering my experience with grass soon.

Yeah, not much more to say on these. They were a fun little experiment.