North Star Frostgrave Necromancer and Apprentice

Back in February, Nick Eyre at North Star announced a painting competition. The objective was to paint the new Frostgrave Necromancer figure. Of course, I had to give it a go. I bought the figure, who comes with a nice (well, nice if you exclude all the necromancy stuff) apprentice. They arrived, I prepped and undercoated them and then I caught Covid and didn't feel much like painting for a few weeks. Finally, I got back to painting and today I finally finished them and even got them varnished, because it stopped raining and the sun came out. Here are my finished efforts; Necromancer front and back, ditto for the apprentice and then both of them together.

He is a pretty dynamic figure and, being a resin cast is beautifully crisp. I decided to do a fairly simple base to portray a blasted heath with clumps of dead grass. The tufts are by Gamer's Grass. Overall, I think he looks OK.

Here is his evil sidekick. He clearly graduated from pulling the wings off of flies a few years ago.

Annoyingly, I noticed a stray piece of ballast on the strap of his bag after uploading the photo. It is gone now, but doesn't really matter because it is the main man who matters for the competition, which I am not expecting to win anyway. It is the taking part that matters.

I think they have come out reasonably well. Certainly good enough for gaming purposes, which is the reason I paint things in the first place.

Here they are together;

Undead army for Warband Fantasy

OMG! The figures are getting smaller!

My latest completed project is something I started planning last year, but it got sidelined by other things, mainly my Saga 2 Late Romans. Still, I managed to get the delayed project completed in a couple of days recently while waiting for a parcel delivery that eventually turned up a day late.

Last year, some of us at the club got talking about Warband, the fantasy ruleset published by Pendraken, which uses 10mm figures, also produced by Pendraken. I thought that I'd get a project going to produce a single army that I could play a few games with. It seemed to me that the quickest one to paint would be the Undead, and this turned out to be the case. I bought the basic army deal, plus some extra packs of figures to allow me some variations in my army, and also to add extra figures to the various stands of units.

In Warband, units are mounted on 10 cm x 5 cm bases, and damage is recorded on a D6, which should ideally be included on the base, so I bought some suitable dice and little dice holder squares at the same time as the minis. You can see these in the pictures. First, a command stand (with the banners), plus three stands of Skeleton Warriors;

Next two stands of Skeleton Riders;

Here are the ranged units, Skeleton Archers and stone-throwing catapults, plus a unit of Zombies with a purple-robed necromancer using dark powers to send them shambling into battle;

And finally, the magical attack force, comprising a stand of Wraiths and Spirits, being conjured from the Beyond by another Necromancer, plus a stand of Necromatic Wizards with their defensive entourage of Warriors and a couple of magical altars;

These were all remarkably easy to paint and, for their size, rather nicely detailed figures. Everything was glued to the MDF bases (dice holders having already been glued on) and then sprayed with Army Painter Skeleton Bone primer. Then, the parts that needed to be coloured, weapons, shields, robes etc were painted, everything was dry-brushed and then inked using W&N ink. I used green and yellow inks on the Wraiths to give them a ghostly tinge (influenced by Ghostbusters, obviously) and a brown ink to bring out the details on everything else.

I'm not sure that I would want to paint up figures as small as this with a colour scheme that required a lot of detail, hums for example, but I suppose that it is a challenge I might rise to at some point in the future.