Miner Adjustments

My ordered scheme of tackling armies one at a time has clearly gone for a Burton ... this week, I'm repainting Dwarves!

It's off to work we go.

At least half of this army is fully painted, although I'm not happy with the bases. They're currently on brown bases (which I'm already using for Empire, with other shades of brown for Wood Elves and Orcs & Goblins). I've also glued tiny pebbles on each base, as a kind of scree.

It sort-of works, but not enough, so I'm doing away with it all! Mechanicus Standard Grey for the edges, with Astrogranite on the surface, with a White Scar drybrush, to make it look sufficiently rocky.

Rock on.

This resolution did leave me facing over a hundred dwarves with pebbles glued to their bases (and some idiot added a layer of wood varnish, so they weren't coming off easy). Even a conservative estimate would have me labour away at the bases for hours, trying to snp them off with liberal amounts of elbow grease.

Luckily, a general election was coming up, which left me with hours to waste in front of the telly.

My own personal swingometer.

I started off with the Miners, and by the time Nuneaton was called, they were scraped clean. I soldiered away through the night, and with only a few instances of stabbing myself in the finger as caffeine and sleep-deprivation took their toll, the whole army was done.

The next morning, I was sleepy, dopey and grumpy.
(which is a lot of dwarves in one go)

The next stage was to add the new basing, and touch-up the paint job on the boots (most of which came off with the pebbles).

I've no idea how I did the beards - I think I used a different approach for all of them.

To consider the models themselves: a straightforward metal drybrush over the mail coats, with leather accessories and Ultramarine Blue gloves (which follows the blue theme of the rest of the army - a bit bright for my current style, but repainting only goes so far).

I love how dwarf models are 30% face.

And they're pretty nice models, now I get to examine them once again. At first glance, the 'double-handed pick' stance makes them look the same, but they're quite characterful.

Extra pouches, a little miner's lamp, and a rock hammer for fans of The Shawshank Redemption.

I started with a unit of 15, then added a few more to bring them up to 20. A couple of these came from the 'Grudge of Drong' expansion, which included a scenario of drunken dwarves and some models to fit them.

There should also be a model eating a Ginsters.

The command group musician could also be viewed as using a drinking horn (maybe I should have sculpted some froth coming out of the top),

It's Stein Time!

The standard bearer only had a simple boss on top of a pole. I've since acquired some plastic banner tops, so I'll be adding them to all my bannerless units.

Lighting the way... apparently.

Thinking about it, I didn't reckon an underground unit would get much use from a cloth banner, since visibility wouldn't be much of an asset. I decided to paint the banner top as if it was glowing (call it the Rune of Duracel), to cast some light for the unit.

The method I used continued my experimentation in Object Source Lighting - not quite as good as glowing eyes, but I'll persevere.

And to lead them, another model from the Grudge of Drong: Krudd ’Mad’ Mattock. A shame he doesn't have a steam drill modelled (the Gamezone alternative is a cracker), but I'll get by.

As an incentive for rebasing the army, I treated myself to some classy movement trays for all of them (courtesy of Base-X-of-War). Most of these will be the 'Celtic' range, but I had an extra 'Thunder Mountain' movement tray, and the heaps of rock would be perfectly suited for the International Brotherhood of Excavators.

"Everyone out, brothers!"

So that's one unit of Dwarves down, but don't expect the next update to include the stunted ones - I've no idea where I'm going next.