Owl Woman

 I realised yesterday that I hadn't posted anything for ages. Anyway, here is Owl Woman.

She is a Bad Squiddo figure, part of the Amazons range that I painted last year, but she had been lurking in my To Be Painted box, not exactly forgotten, just slipped down the list a bit. She is a Sorceress or Priestess. On the website, she is called Aurelia the Oracle. Here she is from behind.

Having finished her, I'm not sure that I've really done her justice. I think the colours I've chosen aren't really "right", but maybe she will grow on me. Who cal tell?

Anyway, I am thinking that she ought to hook up with Basil the Bold a.k.a. Angry Cat Guy and head off to sea in a beautiful pea-green boat.

I am sure that she would work in Saga: Age of Magic games, or maybe in Of Gods and Mortals or Dragon Rampant armies too.

Bad Squiddo Athena

I finished off this lovely Bad Squiddo sculpt yesterday and spray-varnished her last night. Luckily, no fogging at all.

I can see here that I didn't manage to straighten her spear out perfectly, although it looks OK on the actual mini. 

                       

 

Here is the obligatory rear view. Nice cloak!

I love her shield with the Medusa's Head on it. This was a common design on hoplite shields, apparently. 

I think that she is a spectacular figures and I hope that I have done her justice. I'm not sure what else I could have done, to be honest.

She will be my Goddess for my Of Gods And Mortals Greek warband, which will be an all-Amazon one.

The Last Amazon .....

... which sounds like it ought to be the title of a novel, but it isn't.

She is the Queen of my Bad Squiddo Amazons, and obviously her name is Hippolyta. In Greek mythology, Hippolyta was the daughter of the god Ares and Otrera. Otrera was the creator and first Queen of the Amazons. 

Below is a side view of her. The name Hippolyta can be translated as something like "She who let loose the horses". Her girdle (actually a kind of belt and not an undergarment) was the subject of the Ninth Labour of Heracles. In that legend, she was slain by Heracles. Miraculously, perhaps, she also pops up in the legends of Theseus of Athens, where she becomes his wife, leading to the Attic War, when her sister and successor as Queen, Penthesilea led the Amazons to attack Athens, and Hippolyta is killed in battle. Other variations of this story also exist. In some of those other versions different daughters of Ares and Otrera are named as the Amazon who ran off with Theseus.

Mary Renault tells her own version of Theseus and Hippolyta in her novel "The Bull From The Sea". It is a book I fell in love with as a teenager.

Here she is again from the other side. I really like her bronze arm armour and armoured glove. She clearly couldn't use a two-handed axe with a shield, but she would still need protection in battle, so this armour seems appropriate.

I have used the same violet/lavender colour for her cloak, which you can see below. This view shows the one thing that I think I've done wrong with this figure, and that is miss the unsightly blob of ink on the lower part of her cloak. I only noticed it after the varnish had dried, which is a pain. I may have to go back and do some remedial work to minimise it.

Four more Bad Squiddo Amazons

This is my penultimate Amazon post. Scroll down to see all four.

Above are an archer and a warrior. Below are two more warriors.

I have tried to stick to a relatively limited colour palette throughout, but a few splashes of red and pale blue seem to lift the appearance of the group as a whole. They have been a fun project, but it isn't quite finished, though. I still have to finish painting the Goddess Athena and I have a few minis left that I want to turn into a vignette, but that will have to wait. Hopefully, I'll  get Athena done this weekend, bar varnishing, because of the humidity.

So, this is the complete Band of Sisters. The final post will be their Queen, who obviously has to be called Hippolyta. I'll probably include a group shot in that post, too.

A couple more Bad Squiddo Amazons

I finished off all the rest of my Bad Squiddo Amazons yesterday, but I've decided to make separate posts for them. To be honest, there wasn't a great deal left to do, just the tufts and then varnishing, but I don't want to just bung them all into one single post, because they all deserve their own moment of glory.

Here we have a musician and a warrior at rest. You'll note that for these two, I have stuck closely to the colour palette I used a month or so ago for the standard bearer. I think that the violet works well for their tunics and the turquoise tail on the musician's helmet is a definite Baggy colour.

Once again, these are lovely clean casts and they painted up really easily. The bases are adorned with more excellent Gamer's Grass tufts, available on the Bad Squiddo website.

More Amazons join the Sisterhood

Thanks to the continued dry weather, the Curse of the Fogged Varnish has receded. Therefore, I have finished off five more Bad Squiddo Amazons. 

These two look quite different to one another. I think that the one on the left, drawing her sword is more of a fantasy figure, reminding me very much of an old Warhammer fantasy High Elf but I don't think that really matters. She could equally be a dismounted cavalry figure and, when all's said and done, the Amazons themselves are a people from legend.

Here are three heavily-armoured warriors, the kind of women you would definitely want in the front rank in your shieldwall.

I absolutely love these three. They came out exactly as I had visualised them in my head, which made me very happy. It is always a good thing when what I plan comes together so well. Shame I didn't spot the small piece of dog hair on the shoulder of the left hand figure before I photographed her. Still, it is gone now.

Amazons ............... or maybe something else?

Well, I decided that I would risk a spot of varnishing this morning, seeing as it hasn't been raining here for a while. I have a few more Amazons finished, ready for the ordeal by spray but I thought that I'd stick to just two first.

They are a nice pair; an experienced fighter and a younger warrior in training, equipped with a quarterstaff. I think these are pretty good proxies for Xena and Gabrielle of Xena: Warrior Princess fame.

I rather like the way the bases have come out here, once again using Gamer's Grass tufts, but also bits of cork debris as rocks, plus a gravel and ballast mix. I think that the "rock" on Gabby's base looks quite like a piece of broken column with those vertical dark lines.

The Xena figure is one of the nicest ones in the whole Bad Squiddo Amazon range, to my eye. The sculpt is really nice, but the thing that makes it stand out is the ornate hoplon shield with the lion pelt attached to it.

So, I am happy, as well as relieved that there was no fogging this time. I shall now varnish a couple more figures.

What do people think? Xena and Gabby? Yes or No?

Two more Amazons

I completed two more Bad Squiddo Amazons yesterday and varnished them, with a degree of trepidation after what happened to the previous two.

The figure on the right with the owl is an older Bad Squiddo figure, but she fits quite nicely into the Amazon theme, seeing as the owl was a common symbol of the goddess Athena. She makes quite a nice Shaman, I think, or maybe a rustic priestess of the Goddess. The origin of the association of the owl with Athena is unclear and a number of ideas co-exist. The anthropologist and archeologist Marijas Gimbutas, considered a controversial figure (mainly for her feminist interpretations of the past) suggests an origin going back to the Neolithic Period in Europe before the arrival of Indo-European-speaking peoples. 

The figure on the left looks quite like she could serve as a Roman female gladiator, which were a real thing, although the evidence for them is not large. They were sometimes described as "Amazons", which is perfect in this context. The Emperor Domitian is said to have put on Games features battles with Amazons.

There was a class of gladiator (or gladiatrix here) known as dimachaeri, meaning "carrying two knives or blades" in Greek, and these could easily have been siccae, a curve-bladed sword associated with Illyrians, Dacians and Thracians. I think that is appropriate for an Amazon.

The next Isolation project - Bad Squiddo Amazons.

Well I actually started this project about a month ago, here with a Standard Bearer, but I am now working on all the rest of my Bad Squiddo Amazons. Here are the first two I have completed;

On the website, Annie describes the figure on the left as an Assassin and the other as an Amazon Captain. I think of her as my Strategissa (the female counterpart of a Strategos, meaning "army leader").

I am really very pleased with these two figures. They are lovely clean casts of excellent sculpts and the folds and drapes of the cloaks and robes gave me lots of nice detail to work with. The tufts on the bases are also from Annie. They are Gamer's Grass ones.

Originally released as a Kickstarter, these are currently available on the Bad Squiddo website, along with many of their sisters.

I thought that I had had a disaster when I varnished these. I usually use Humbrol spray varnish, which I always give a good shake to ensure the contents of the can are properly mixed. I was horrified after spraying to see that all the metallic paints had fogged. I can only assume that there was residual humidity in the air. However, I was able to salvage matters by a judicial application of additional paint over the affected areas, which solved the problem. Strangely, the parts of the figures with no metallic paint weren't in the slightest bit fogged, otherwise I would have had a real problem, requiring the olive oil treatment.

Bad Squiddo Amazon standard bearer

I've had the Bad Squiddo Amazons since last September when the Kickstarter shipped, but until now I hadn't got round to painting any of them. This standard bearer is the first one;

I think she is a lovely figure and her Squid standard is great. I decided that it needed to be painted with a bronze body, turquoise eyes and purple or turquoise tentacles, because they are very Bad Squiddo colours. I decided to carry those colours over onto the standard bearer herself, with her purple belt and turquoise helmet plume and tunic edging. Her armour is a mixture of bronze plate and brassier scales. I couldn't decide whether her blade should be iron or bronze, but I decided on the former for colour variation.

Here she is from the rear, the view her troops would see advancing into battle;

Here from the front, the view her enemies would see coming towards them.

The tufts are Gamer's Grass, also available from Bad Squiddo.

Bad Squiddo Dwarves and Amazons

Annie Norman at Bad Squiddo has a new Kickstarter running at the moment. There are two separate sets of figures, Dwarves and Amazons.

People who follow this blog will probably remember that sample Dwarf figure that I painted up recently, and the rest of the Dwarves are similarly excellent figures. There are a number of really useful models available; A Captain, a Thief, two Champions, two Berserkers, a Wizard, a Bard, a Rogue, a Monk and a Ranger, which pretty much covers all the bases for a band of Dwarvish adventurers for a wide variety of fantasy rule sets.

The Amazons set is similarly varied, featuring a Captain with two Bodyguards, two Elite Guards, an Assassin, a Musician, an Archer, a Spearguard, a Champion (accompanied by a guinea pig sprite) and two "little wolves", who are two Amazon girls.

As with all Kickstarters, there is a range of pledges, up to a huge one which gives you two sets of both ranges, plus all the stretch goals.

You can also buy into bundles of existing figures from the Bad Squiddo collection, including some excellent resin scenic items, many of which were formerly part of the Ristul range.