Hobby WIP: Free Dwarfs

After several false starts over the years, I am finally making some real progress this year on my long-awaited Free Dwarf army! The Dwarfs are apparently in a bit of a narrative flux, and the Free Dwarves may not be the best idea to pursue for the longevity of my new army, fluff-wise, but hey, I am not a clever man, and so here we are.

MOST of the bases and unit tubs... it's a big project and I've even scaled it back a LOT.

I wanted to have the army be majority Mantic, though I did not want to deal with the stands the majority of their older models have. Oddly, most of the army legs are just a few sculpts, so snipping stands off has come to be the easy part, and the biggest hurdle to all this has actually been the basing...

With the adventurous Free Dwarfs largely living in isolated Holds or even above ground, I was set on a very lush basing scheme, in contrast with all my other armies, of all gaming systems to-date... but I am not great with static grass, and didn't want to have my entire army shedding grass everywhere. Good grass technique has been the hurdle. Fortunately, I have a two local players that do some great basing with grass, and I was able to pick their brains over the last year, and am making good progress recently on my own skills.

Grasses are looking good! About 90% done with the first batch of bases.

Being a brand new army, it would have made a lot of sense to slow grow this. Maybe do up a few test heroes for exploring the basing and painting ideas... and then expand to a demo or ambush list, and then add units bit by bit... but that is not really how we've been doing this. 

Gaming details be damned, the new edition kickstarted my motivation, and best guesses coupled with the rule of cool for decisions has been guiding me for many months now. The painting has actually been making steady progress ever since 4E was announced, and a lot of units are ready, or very nearly so. The results have been ok overall, though I am definitely lopsided with some slots. 

Basing is the bottleneck, and while I was trying to approach this a sensible manner, as suggested above, I spilled a ton of glue as I was prepping my test bases in March and April, and jumped right in on about 1/3 of the units. This was right at the start, right when I needed to figure out a good and repeatable process, which led to several weeks of spinning my wheels due to dry times. With both numerous mistakes and sensible adjustments made over the last month to my new basing process for grasses, we should have a workable army soon!