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.

A couple of figures from Bad Squiddo

Well, I've been working on a larger project, of which more in a later post, when I have some results to show people, but while I was prepping that stuff, I also took the time to complete these two.

They are from Bad Squiddo and are on the website, here. They are nice figures, clean and flash-free, as is generally the case with all things Squiddo, but are definitely on the small side compared with the Land Girls, although they are nicely proportioned and are of a similar size to some of my Crooked Dice minis.

They painted up really well and I am pretty pleased with them. I especially like the pilot on the left. The details on her flight jacket really pop out.

Bad Squiddo Land Girls

I bought these five Bad Squiddo Land Girl figures ages ago, but, as is the way of things, they slipped down the list of Things To Paint. Now, with the completion of Annie's Women of WW2 Home Front Kickstarter, I felt that I really needed to get them painted.

Officially the Women's Land Army, the Land Girls freed up men to serve in the Armed Forces and the total number of women who either volunteered or were conscripted into the WLA was around 80,000.

These are really lovely Alan Marsh sculpts, quite chunky but very much in keeping with the majority of the Bad Squiddo range. Sizewise they are similar to the glorious Shieldmaidens, also sculpted by Alan Marsh. As usual with Bad Squiddo figures they are an absolute joy to paint.

I am now one small step nearer to my ambition of mounting a multiplayer "Went The Day Well?" game. Of course, they will also be perfect for Operation Sealion games and probably for VBCW games too.

Not played Saga in a while, until Sunday ...............

................ so here is what happened.

I got totally annihilated.

So, I'll show you the pictures of my Bad Squiddo Shieldmaidens, acting as generic Vikings and then just chat about the game a bit.

OK, so what actually happened? Well, the simple answer is that I rolled rubbish dice over and over again. My Saga dice rolls only gave me the rare S-shaped Sol (Sun) rune once in the entire game and when I really needed to roll high in combat I invariably failed to do so, thus losing my Hearthguard and Warriors to little effect. I also failed to realise until it was too late that the brown felt square in the final photo represented an area of Hard Cover, which meant that my bow Thralls had difficulty in killing off any of their opponents, but the Anglo-Danish archers killed off my Shieldmaiden Legendary unit without any difficulties at all. Perhaps charging across the table with gay abandon wasn't a good idea in the first place. They disappeared almost as quickly as my Berserkers usually do.

It didn't help that my opponents were Anglo-Danes, who seem to always defeat my Vikings, even when I use the board to boost my attacks. It seems to be one of those cases where the two boards tend to cancel one another out, leaving the dice pixies to decide who wins.

Still, it was nice to see my Shieldmaidens on the table again, I really love these figures. I think I'll love them even more when I start using them in Saga: AoM, but I need to get my mounted Shieldmaidens painted first.

More Sci Fi figures! Ghosts of Gaia

My science fiction project is moving on at Warp Factor 3 (at least!). The latest figures I've finished are from the terrific Ghosts of Gaia range by Bad Squiddo.

These are gorgeous sculpts (as are all Bad Squiddo figures) and lovely clean casts too. As they are so nice, I have chosen to photograph them front and back.

The figure on the right of this group is "Raging Annie", a miniature depiction of the Mother of Peegs herself - for those who don't know, Annie Norman just loves her Guinea Pigs a.k.a Peegs - and in the second picture, you can see her Baggy The Dice Bag backpack. I particularly like the armoured figure on the left with two chain blades. I love the dynamic pose.

After the exuberant colour schemes I chose for the first group, the second group are a bit more stealthy-looking and are clearly the kind of women who will pop up and take a few potshots from heavy cover. I really like the stealth cloak on the right-hand figure. I chose a few misty colours, inspired by the odd camouflage patterns on World War One German fighter aircraft.

It is back to colour for the remaining four figures. These figures have a fantastic comic book quality about them, and that made me paint them so that they will stand out on the table. I thought that red would be a good choice for these two. 

and purple/violet shades for these two.

So, there we have it. Some more figures ready for play-testing my Sci Fi skirmish rules.

What a surprise - a sneak preview of the next Bad Squiddo Kickstarter

Well, actually I am sure that people who follow Annie on Facebook and elsewhere know that there is a new Bad Squiddo Kickstarter in the offing, and that it will feature Dwarves (a.k.a "Dorfs" in Annie-speak), so saying that it is going to happen isn't really a huge surprise.

However, I did get a proper surprise when a small parcel from Bad Squiddo arrived at my house on Friday, mainly because I wasn't expecting anything. Mystified, I opened the box and found the usual fruit teabag, a small figure in a ziplock baggie and a note.

To be honest, I felt honoured. I don't think I am a bad painter, but I am certainly not a Matt Slade, Kevin Dallimore, Paul Sanderson or John Morris in the paintbrush stakes, so being given the chance to paint up an advance figure from the Kickstarter made me really happy.

Anyway, I soon found out that I had a small grumpy woman with a big axe to paint. I got to work as soon as I could and finished her this morning.

There was something about her that spoke to me, saying "I am a grizzled veteran of many fights in the deep places of the world", so I wanted to give her grey hair, and well-worn clothes, but also the richly-embellished accoutrements of a fighter of great repute, hence the jewels set in her belt.

I didn't think she would be wearing bright colours, so I settled on a muted colour palette.

I must say that she was an incredibly crisp and clean casting, with absolutely no flash or moulding lines and she painted up a treat. 

Once again, Annie has really hit the bull'e eye with this figure, and also with a very timely female Dwarves Kickstarter, which will surely be featuring in more than a few Masters (Mistresses?) of the Underearth warbands for Saga Age Of Magic in due course. Equally, there are possibilities with other rulesets. Me? Well I am going to be revamping my Frostgrave band in the near future and I am sure I can find a place for a grudge-bearing Dwarf with a huge axe.

So, an absolutely terrific figure. Just don't mention the Hi-Ho song.

Bad Squiddo specials - Lucrezia Borgia and Caterina Sforza

I bought two blister packs from Annie when I visited the Bad Squiddo stand at Warfare at the end of last year.

One represented Caterina Sforza in two separate poses, one in armour and one without. The other featured two different poses for Lucrezia Borgia.

They have been sitting waiting for me to paint them which I have now done.

First, here is Lucrezia dressed as an assassin with two blades. I think she will work well in all kinds of games.

I think that of the four figures, she is my favourite, but they are all nice miniatures.

Now, here is Lucrezia in more conventional dress, in green, together with both versions of Caterina.

I wanted to stick to a simple colour palette and I liked the idea of Caterina in blue. When I painted her armour, I used silver with some blue gunmetal mixed in, because I wanted her armour to look like an expensive custom-made suit. You occasionally see blue tinged armour, so it seemed like a good idea to keep the blue theme consistent.

These were fun to paint, lovely clean castings with no flash. I think that they have a future in fantasy games, as well as in a more historical setting.

I don't think that these are available from the Bad Squiddo website, so I am glad that I got them when I could.

Freyja's Wrath painting update - Freyja is finished

Well, there is always an upside to bad weather, and here is the proof.

Freyja will, naturally be the Warlord of my Saga Viking warband, so she has to be on a larger base, but because she is such a fantastic model, I wanted to make the base a bit special, so I added on two of her special cats. The name Freyja is Old Norse for "The Lady". She is associated with love, sex, beauty, fertility, gold, seiðr (a kind of Norse sorcery that Freyja, a member of the Vanir, taught to the Æsir), war, and death.

Freyja is the owner of the necklace Brísingamen, rides a chariot pulled by two cats, is accompanied by the boar Hildisvíni, and possesses a cloak of falcon feathers. I did a bit of googling and discovered that a colour often associated with Freyja is russet, so I clearly had to paint her robe in that colour.

Anyway, this model is really lovely, I think that her cloak, with its feathers, is pretty amazing and I love the way her hair has been modelled. I really didn't want to overwork her, so I kept the range of colours to a minimum, but I wanted to link her cats into the overall colour scheme, so one is a similar russet to her robe and the other matches the grey of her cloak.

My first Freyja's Wrath figures are finished

A week or so ago I posted that my Freyja's Wrath Kickstarter had arrived, and therefore I really had to get started on painting a few figures. I knew which one I wanted to do first (My Heroine, a personal favourite), but I wanted to work on a few all at once, because that would give me plenty of other things to paint while I waited for work done on one figure was drying.

The minis I chose were the My Heroine vignette, The Seer, Svala the Standardbearer and Dagmar the Champion. I also undercoated Freyja herself, but she is still a work-in-progress.

Here are the four finished figures together;

And here they are separately. First, My Heroine, a Shieldmaiden home from the wars greeting her girlfriend;

Next, Dagmar, a Swordmaiden champion, with a hand-painted shield design. As she is modelled with two swords, I am thinking that the one in her hand might be a legendary blade she has captured from a recently fallen foe;

Next, the somewhat sinister figure of The Seer, a supernatural creation from the chthonic darkness which is at the heart of much of Norse mythology;

And finally, Svala. Her banner is hand-painted, but taken from an image based on one interpretation of the raven Landeythan (land-waster) banner of Harald Hardrada, downloaded from the internet. I know that many images of this are triangular, but this one fits the model better.

I am really happy with how these have turned out. The castings themselves are incredibly clean and have lovely sharp detail, but are not unrealistically ornate. They are simply what Annie Norman does best, offering us believable and realistically-proportioned female miniatures.

Now, I can't wait to get stuck into the rest of these gorgeous figures.

Woo Hoo! The postman brought me a present

OK, so it wasn't a huge surprise, because I'd already had the email, but the postman delivered my Freyja's Wrath Kickstarter today. Here is the box;

Then the nice friendly extras that makes shopping with Bad Squiddo a fun experience;

And finally, the shiny bits. I have lots of lovely new toys here. Enough for a Saga warband with extra shieldmaidens to give me a nice choice of units, plus a few extra that I bought simply because they are really nice models, but which I am certain will find a purpose, because nice models always deserve to end up on the table. I am not going to stop with Saga. These women are going to crop up a a fair few futures projects, I'm sure. I just need to decide how best to use them.

The minis themselves are lovely crisp castings, with virtually no flash. The poses are terrific and there is plenty of detail to paint, which I reckon is definitely a Good Thing. I know which ones are going to get painted first, so they are heading for the front of the painting queue already.

So, shipping the Kickstarter was delayed a bit, but there are perfectly good reasons why that happened, so I'm not going to complain. Good things are worth waiting for, and these are certainly good things. 

Freyja's Wrath Kickstarter - a short update

 

For people who are interested in this, you can check the actual Kickstarter here. So far, three stretch goals have been unlocked and there are some nice updates on what the actual minis look like once painted. The next stretch goal is going to be "Freyja on Boar and Foot", which sounds pretty good to me!

There are 11 days left to get pledged.

I have to say that I am very excited about this, the minis are terrific and are going to look great on the table.

Freyja's Wrath - my sample figure is painted

I really wanted to paint up the sample Kickstarter Shieldmaiden that Annie sent me on Saturday, so this morning I primed her with Tamiya light grey spray primer and once the primer was dry I set to work.

First, I just blocked out the various areas in base colours, with the chainmail hauberk in black. After sticking the figure on a 2.5cm round base I set to work with the detailed colours, highlights and dry-brushing, before finishing the figure off with a wash of Windsor and Newton Peat Brown drawing ink.

I painted the shield separately and superglued it on before the ink wash stage. Once the ink was dry, I flocked the base and added a couple of small clumps. Finally, I varnished the figure in matte spray varnish and gave the finished article a good spray of Testor's Dullcote. Unhappily, this never seems to completely remove the shine in close-up flash photos, but I can promise you that in the flesh, she has a proper matte finish.

Anyway, here she is;

OK, not as professional a job as Ralph Plowman or Paul Sanderson could achieve, but I am pretty pleased with the results. Now, all I need to do is logon to the Kickstarter once it is open at 18:00 tomorrow (23rd January).