A Big Dragon

 This is from Dungeons and Lasers. I bought the kit ages ago from Annie at Bad Squiddo.

It's taken me a long time to paint this because I didn't want to mess it up. The kit is called Durkar the Sovereign Serpent. It isn't a difficult kit to assemble but you do have to take care that all the parts fit together. I ended up using some liquid Green Stuff to cover a couple of the joints. It's wingspan is 23cm and it stands 12cm tall.

I undercoated it initially in Army Painter Brainmatter Beige and then did another spray from behind/above in AP Greenskin. After that, it was all about softening the rather raw green primer with Army Painter Warpaints Army Green and then washes of Citadel Mortarion Grime and Agrax Earthshade, followed by a lot of drybrushing with progressively lighter shades of green and a couple of stone and bone shades on the underside of the wings and body. The mouth was done with Army Painter Barbarian Flesh and a wash of diluted red paint.

The base has a moulded dungeon floor with piles of coins and treasure. I glued it onto a larger MDF base for added stability and built up the edge with aquarium crushed shell ballast and lots of PVA glue. Then I painted it to bring out the treasure etc, washed it in Peat Brown drawing ink and added flock and Gamer's Grass tufts.

I'm pretty happy with the way the dragon has turned out. A bit of a scary project at first, but after a lot of thinking and planning, it has become a pretty good piece. The backdrop is from one of the excellent Jon Hodgson Handiwork Games books.

Not sure what I'll use it for, though.

Carts!

I have had these two carts for ages. I bought them from Warbases at Colours back in 2019. I thought it was time to finish them off.

 

As you can see, one is a water cart and the other is for ammunition. As I said, I bought them from Warbases, who also provided the horses, but you need to buy them separately, they don't come as a kit. I've got another cart from Warbases somewhere, which I'll make sometime but I don't currently have any draft animals for it. The tufts are from Gamer's Grass and the base texturing is AK Terrains Dark Earth gunk.

I decided to make the bases look like a spot of rough going, because it adds interest, hence the luxuriant grass and foliage.

I've posed them with Austrian pioneers here, but they will be useful for lots of different 28mm armies. Ammunition and water carts are useful support options in Sharp Practice.

The rest of my Austrian Fusiliers

Here are the last three groups of my Austrian Napoleonic Fusiliers;

So, I now have six groups of eight figures, which is a pretty large force in Sharp Practice terms once you have added in Leaders, skirmishers and possible support options.

Obviously I don't have to use them all in a game, but it does give me various options. For example, I could field two equal commands of three groups with a couple of leaders each and bulk things out up to around 85 points with different additions, perhaps some Grenzer skirmisher groups of six, or maybe Landwehr militia groups of ten. Cavalry would also be an option. It all depends on the scenario.

I am pretty pleased with how they look and that is it as far as like troops goes, but I've just started work on three groups of Grenzer.

 

More Austrians

Here are some more Austrians for my Sharp Practice project;

 

These are three NCOs, who will be Status I leaders in Sharp Practice and below are the three Pioneer figures I mentioned previously.

As I said before I'll have to find a use for these. I suppose I could use them as part of a work party for specific tasks, maybe just escorting wagons or as characters in a scenario. 

Finally, below is a third group of eight Fusiliers;

A note here about how I painted the white uniforms. The figures were all undercoated with Tamiya pale grey spray. The uniforms were painted in with slightly-diluted Vellejo ivory and once the figures were painted given a wash with Army Painter Quickshade acrylic Soft Tone, the stuff in the dropper bottles not the tinned one. This took the bright edge off of the ivory white and added depth around the belts and straps on the figures. I think it worked out pretty well.

African huts and cooking pots for Congo

While some of us from the club were at the IPMS show up at Thornbury last Sunday, we bought some resin models from Wargames Terrain Workshop's stand. I'd already bought some graveyard items from them but these were a club purchase to be used in African-themed games, Studio Tomahawk's Congo in particular. There is a growing amount of interest in this game at the club, I've even bought the rules and some minis myself. They aren't painted at the moment, just undercoated, so they aren't going to feature here for a while yet.

Anyway, I volunteered to paint the stuff we bought for Congo and here they are;

There is one large hut (described as a Chieftain's hut) and two smaller ones (presumably for hoi polloi) and five scenic items for scattering around the village. There is a nice cooking fire and four other sets of pots of varying sizes. I've included a 28mm figure in the photo so you can see the size of the models.

I can report that these are excellent models, no bits of flash or bubbly or pitted surfaces and they paint up really easily. The huts are hollow, to reduce weight, which is nice. These models took me around four hours to paint, in total. They were undercoated in Army Painter Desert Yellow and the colours were built up on the straw parts of the huts with progressive drybrushing in suitably bleached-looking dried straw-like shades, given a wash with Windsor and Newton nut brown ink and then given a final drybrushing with Vallejo Beige paint. I used a similar palette of colours for the scenic bits and bobs, with the addition of Vallejo Red Leather on the pots (I also used this for the mud walls of the chieftain's hut). The mud walls were inked with W&N Deep Red ink and the pots had a wash of W&N Sunshine Yellow ink. Finally, they were varnished with Army Painter matt spray varnish.

I have to say that I am pretty pleased with the way that they have turned out. It'll be good to see them on the table in the not too distant future.