A New Mounted Wizard Joins the Grande Armee

 Though my painting mojo abandoned me for a couple of months this spring, I'm kickstarting things by tackling a project that has been lingering on my desk for at least a year now...A mounted wizard for my Bretonnian army.  I've been messing around with the odd assortment of bits....a wizard figure from the late 1980's and a much more recent (c1998) Vampire Counts mount.  I've been second guessing myself on how these things would work together...but one evening last week I decided to just take the plunge and dive into it and see how things turned out.

I'm Glad I did! ...and am quite pleased with the results

The wizard figure is from the late 80's Empire Knights release...this image from an 1989 Advert (thanks Stuff of Legends!)

 

The mount for such a dashing figure needed to be equally flashy and also fit in with the other 5th edition Bret mounts that the rest of the Grande Armee are mounted on....so I settled on this interesting sculpt from the late 90's Vampire Counts release...which has a very ornate metal head but uses the same cloth barded warhorse that came with all the 5th edition Knight releases.  this image from the 2000 catalog

 

After watching my wife use a tooth brush to create a paint spatter starfield on one of her water color paintings I decided that it might be a cool technique for creating a suitably mystical cloak for the mage and cloth caparison for his mount.

 Below are some WiP photos of the process.

 

 

I think the star field worked out very well and was, honestly, quite easy and saved me from over thinking how to make the large amounts of cloth on this figure work to my advantage.

Now that I'm back at the painting desk more often I hope to have some of the first foot knights to share with you soon as well.

Cheers!

Blue

My First Frost Grave Warband...Don't worry its still Oldhammer!

So there is some interest in the Frostgrave rules in my area and I have decided to start to pull together a warband that I can use during games in which I lose to my friend Roberto...:).

If you are not familiar with what Frostgrave is....well then you have been living under a (hobby) rock for the last year.  Frostgrave is a new Skirmish game, put out by Osprey, that is focused on small warbands, 10 figures or less, led by a powerful wizard and his apprentice as they scour a long abandoned city for ancient relics of magical power. 

Being the old lead head that I am I thought that this would be a perfect time to employ some of my long neglected figures in a new and interesting way....while keeping them available for potential expansion into a full fledged army for 3rd edition WFB fun....therefore I will be deploying them on square bases.  BTW there is a fantastic range of figures produced by NorthStar that are specifically for Frostgrave...many of them sculpted by Mark Copplestone...but I couldn't possibly justify buying new figures when I have so many unpainted ones to chose from already...

Dwarf Wizard

Here is another quick post to share with you another excellent figure that I have just finished up for a client.  This is a really fantastic Dwarf Wizard figure that I really had fun painting up and had not been aware of before.  

As you can see I went for a fairly straight forward paint job on this guy other than his robe and hat which I attempt to make fade smoothly from dark blue to light blue.  I had originally hopped to paint stars and moons on his hat....but I attempted that and failed miserably so fell back on this as an alternative solution...and in the end I think this probably looks better anyway.

Here he is!

Cheers,

Blue