The Warthogs Complete

Well, Sunday night again and therefore time to water my paints. No further conversion of paint to dust to deal with, and my painting hand was a little more in shape compared to the last outing. So I cracked on from where I left off. 

Don't look at us! We're not ready!

I began by going over my work from last week, tidying any real abberations of paint. Then I realised that would mean starting again, so I just went over the bigger slip-ups. 

If you're going to talk about us like that, we're leaving.

I was using my only decent brush for this, a standard one that still had the plastic tube over the top and therefore all the bristles pointing the same way. It didn't take long to cover up the bits where I'd gone over the lines. I also decided to put some early camo stripes at this stage, only the darker tones so they'd benefit from drybrushing. 

They’re guns, they’re in hands, so that makes them…

… certainly not Dogs of War pistol-wielding Duellists that have been press-ganged into service as Empire Handgunners.

This unit narrowly misses out on the Most Tenuous Conversion award, thanks to the bow-armed Pistoliers (mind you, you haven’t seen who’ll be proxying for my Knights or Warrior Priest yet). Still, those Mordheim pistols are pretty long in the barrel…

Ten shooters and only one of them is aiming forward.
That grassy knoll has nothing to worry about.

This unit is the last use of my Empire Militia plastics (the remaining ones got painted up as an actual Mordheim gang) and I think I was getting carried away with their potential for conversions. Previously, I’d managed to add some personal touches to the Free Company and Crossbows with a snip here and there and dash of Green Stuff. This time, I went a bridge too far.

Taking the Pistoliers

And now we come to the most tenuous part of my metamorphosis from Dogs of War to Empire army: the light missile cavalry.

Back in the old days, you didn’t have to be a Volga Bulgar (say that five times quickly) to carry a bow on horseback. So for my horse archers, I chose to utilise some Riders of Rohan from the Lord of the Rings range.

Enemies from the left, we got it covered.
Enemies from the right, we got a problem.

And there were some good reasons: they were relatively inexpensive plastics; the bows and shields matched up to the then-equipment requirements; most importantly, they were sculpted by the Perry Brothers, so the realistic proportions of men, weapons and horses meant they were a better fit for my existing Dogs of War that any other range.

You’ll just have to imagine them carrying pistols…

Could happen. Those are some spacious cloaks they're wearing.

Warthogs

I got jealous, looking at all the shiny models appearing over the last few weeks. Time to crack out the paints and get back in the game. I knew it had been a while since I last did that, because the first thing I had to do was a spot of weeding.

It doesn't how matter much water I mix in with a stick, I'm not getting anything from this one.

Nothing like opening the old bottles to see what you can't use any more. Skull White and Chaos black are always the worst culprits, I find. It's probably because they're the two paints I find most useful. I mix my own shades a lot, so they often stand open longer than they should as I blend.

Or GW knows they're invaluable basics, so they add chemicals to make them dry out faster. That way they know I'll be back soon for another couple of pots. And a 50% chance of a £50 Land Raider, depending on my WP test result.

Some works in progress

Now I have a [machine] gun, ho-ho-ho

Hit em up, move em out, roll em out... RAWHIDE

Scared yet? you should be... you should be

Pikes – they're like a spear, man

“SPARTANS! TONIGHT WE DINE IN … where have we got vouchers for? Pizza Express?
TONIGHT WE DINE IN PIZZA EXPRESS!”

The Alcatani Fellowship, the poor man’s pikemen of Tilea. A natty combination of classic Greek helmets, late-medieval body armour and rather skinny jeans.

"What are we - the anti-aircraft part of the regiment?"

Despite their status as cannon-fodder (their stats were comparable to Goblins) – or perhaps because of it – there is a really impressive variety of models. Including command models, I counted 20 different versions.

Congreave’s Patent #37 Automated Spitfyre

“An harquebus that shall contain balls or pellets of lead, all of which shall go off one after another, having once given fire, so that with one harquebus one may kill ten thieves or other enemies without recharging it.”

Sir Francis Walsingham
(who knew a thing or two about killing large numbers of people)

“Forsooth brother, I wouldst put a cap in thine ass.”

The Greenjackets

This is the smaller of my two crossbow units (the 20-strong, full-command, Marksmen of Miragliano are to follow). The motivation behind creating them was simple: when looking at all the excess weapons from my Empire Militia box, it occurred to me, ‘there’s enough crossbows there to make a whole regiment’.

How easily you boys could have been halberds.

To get some uniformity, I gave them all Dark Angels green jackets (the sharpshooters of Sharpe must have been in my mind), with the usual Shadow Grey trousers and Desert Yellow hats. Unlike the larger rank-and-file unit of crossbows, I saw this one as more a ‘light company’ of woodland patrollers (and I realise that giving them bows would have been more sensible in that case).