Monthly(ish) hobby update – Empire/Brets & Lizards

Another month has shot by without a post. This is starting to be a habit!

As ever, although my blogging activity has dipped, I’ve been steadily painting, interspersed with a game here and there.

Empire

The first thing crossed off were the first 20 Halberdiers in my fledgling Empire army. I don’t mind saying that these were absolutely horrible to paint and so the effort put in to clear them from the board was minimal. Even then I struggled to finish them. I’m not sure what the issue was. I know that I was disappointed by how dark the Shyish purple contrast was (Magos was too translucent and so I went with Shyish). It may have been as simple as that as I don’t mind mass batch painting units. I’ve since ordered two different purples from the new range to test out. It does mean that the remaining 20 are going to remain in their box for a while longer

Bretonnians

It comes to something when after painting basic infantry that you instead turn to painting the one army that probably gave half the warhammer gamers palpitations just thinking about tackling them…

However, I had some thoughts about the upcoming club show in October and top of those thoughts were the Brets and if that was to become a reality I needed to get over any reticence and get a mosey on!

So with that said, I went for the easier option and cracked open the Fireforge Sergeants at arms box i’d had lying around for a good few years. These would be used as Mounted Yeomen in the Bret list and as with all the peasants, they would take the overarching yellow and black colours of the Baronetcy.

Initially I painted 5 in just a couple of nights ready for a game at the club. I was so enamoured of them, that I ended up finishing off the remainder of the box the following week. As with much of my recent painting, I used contrast paints as much as possible and detail is fairly light as I’m going for volume at present.

I feel I should talk about the models, as it’s my first experience with Fireforge. What can I say, I think they are really top notch. They had plenty of weapon/head options and other details on the sprues. The horses have a good dynamic movement to them and to top it off, they are a good price for plastics. 28 euros direct from the fireforge. They also sell an equivalent box of foot sergeants that makes either 48 foot sergeants or 24 crossbow and 24 foot troops. These are 44 euros. I will be picking up a box of these as I’ve been impressed with the company and models.

The only slight thing to note is the models are smaller in scale than the 6th Ed knights, but then they are only dirty malnourished peasants, so no issue there! They are also not that different in scale from the 5th edition Bret knights.

The next model looked at was the part painted BSB that I picked up off eBay, also a number of years back. Although the horse was finished, the knight and banner needed additional work (though after photographing it, I realised I’d missed two ‘ribbons’ on it – which have now been done). The banner had also snapped so I drilled out the hand and it now slots in nicely and can be detached for storage.

The last of the Brets were done in two batches. 5 * 5th edition Grail Knights and 6 * 6th edition Grail Knights.

I again followed the general theme of the army, by which I mean having the same colour scheme for each unit, just with different heraldry. Unlike the other Bret units I also primed these models in black. This was done purely as a time saving device as the scheme I went for was black, red and silver and priming black allowed me to skip an entire painting stage. Pure laziness I know!

I did though try a few new things to offset the sheer cheating in the main scheme, some cross hatching, some cheques etc.

The whole gang!

Lizards

The final entry for this post is some reinforcements for my Lizardmen, in the form of 8 spear wielding Saurus warriors. I went with spears as this will allow me to field the unit with either spears or sword and board. This should have taken the unit up to 40 but when I set them out for the compulsory group shot, I realised that I was missing two. Shortly after I found them in the unpainted skink pile so they have now been painted too.