I’m beginning to move on to the more familiar dungeon denizens now for this project, as I get more comfortable with painting these large ( ! ) 15mm figures. It’s been a bit of a steep learning curve, and I’m keeping things deliberately simple for now, with block colours and washes and drybrushing, rather than highlights and other subtleties….. hopefully improving enough so that I can eventually make a decent fist of doing the main characters for an adventure party or two.
So the latest minis to come under the brush are orcs, goblins, and some of their larger cousins - mostly in the form of Ral Partha Europe’s catalogue, as I liked their dynamic posing and suitably toothsome looks.
First up, a combination of their Heavy Warriors, Light Spearmen and Tribal Orcs which I feel gives a good range of sizes and demeanours - mostly mail armoured, and with some sharp looking blades - so a good match for unwary adventurers - the Heavy Warriors in particular, being taller and heftier, look the part - Ral Partha’s Demonworld line has a pack of them described as “Dwarf-Eaters” !
http://www.ralparthaeurope.co.uk/shop/fantasy-15mm-singles-c-195/orcs-c-195_171/?sort=20a&page=1
I went for a fairly standard ‘green’ look for these guys - I don’t at this stage want to go down the rabbit-hole of “what colour should Orcs be….?” - I grew up on Citadel ‘Red Orcs’ circa 1980, so am fairly agnostic as to what side to take in the debate:
http://www.miniatures-workshop.com/lostminiswiki/index.php?title=Image:Citadel-FF-25-2.jpg
I stuck with a red leather colour for their clothing to sort of tie them together as kith and kin, and free-handed the shield designs very roughly - they are Orcs, after all !
The shield on the chap in the right rear in the photo below is particularly nice - with a clean, cast-on design, so no need for any of my daubing !
I added some notches into the blades of the Heavy Warriors with a needle file prior to painting, just to make them look more like the veteran evil-doers that they are !
The next quartet are again Ral Partha - this time principally their Skirmisher Orcs - which have loincloths and simpler looking weapons, so make for a more primitive looking bunch - for this reason, I went with ‘yellow’ skin (actually Army Painter ‘bone’ colour), to represent some more tribal cousins of the greens:
I’m minded to use these ‘primitive’ orcs as goblin tribesmen, as I’ve found it difficult to find goblin sculpts that I like - either they tend to be a bit on the small side, and not very well defined, or are burdened by being encased in lots of armour - alright in an ‘army’ setting, but not really as characters in a dungeon. I like to think of the goblins as being sneaky, hit and run types rather than the more belligerent, war-like orc…..besides, I’m a big fan of these sculpts - particularly their ‘mouthful of teeth’ sharp-toothedness - talk about having evil grins ! - so am happy to have more of them, whatever they represent…..
Overall, a great bunch of figures, and each distinct enough to raise the standard above being mere cannon-fodder in an adventure:
Next up, I moved on to what I am calling the ‘Heavy Mob’ - namely an Ogre and some Trolls and Troll-kin:
Gotta have some of these to make it a real D&D adventure !
There are a couple of mystery items in this bunch, in that the two mini-trolls are actually 10mm troglodytes that I recollect were made by Pendraken once upon a time, but I think are OOP since they went and re-vamped their Fantasy lines a few years ago - shame, because they are lovely hulking brutes, scaling well alongside 15mm:
https://www.pendraken.co.uk/10mm-12mm-fantasy-769-c.asp
Similarly mysterious is this fellow, who I cannot remember for the life of me where I sourced him - the sculpting, pose suggests Ral Partha, but in retrospect, I cannot find him in their voluminous catalogue:
He’s dressed in a really weird pair of trousers that have metallic cinching-bands at the top of the thighs, making it look suspiciously as if he is wearing cut-off shorts until you look closer, and has brass knuckles clenched in both fists - it’s as if he’s some sort of Troll gladiator or prize-fighter….. has a nicely ornate metal girdle as well - I’m sure it will come to me later where he belongs to, but for now, he remains as enigmatic as his paint-job - it was hard to get a handle on how to paint him, so I sort of fluffed it with the underwhelmingly grey pants, and in dotting on studs to his harness, made it look rather as if he is wearing a sort of leopard-skin crop-top ! - maybe he really belongs in an Eighties-era fitness video….. :-)
Moving swiftly away from that fashion disaster, I played it safe with a somewhat un-inspiring look for a standard Ral Partha Demonworld Ogre - he and the three or four other sculpts in the range have some lovely over-sized weapons:
Next up, another slight curveball for the final troll, in that he is not a metal miniature at all, but rather a plastic figure from a job-lot set of toy ‘mythical monsters’ that I sourced on EBay - he came alongside Medusas and Cyclopses and Hydras that are scaled around 15mm - maybe for some sort of board game ?
He is in a very bendy soft plastic that is hard to apply paint to, but I felt he had the look of a very traditional Troll figure, so I had to have him - I find that the output of most of the common 15mm manufacturers favour a sort of bird-jawed, long-snouted long-eared type of Troll, where I prefer his more brutish appearance - he wields a mean looking hammer, too !
Some satisfactory progress, then, and probably the majority of the ‘baddies’ done for the Dungeon Project - it occurs to me that I have yet to put together an overview of how the whole lot is looking when set out together, so will strive to get some decent photos of the layout as a whole soon, as well as finishing off a few more important terrain and scenic items, then the final push as I plunge into the individual player-character minis….. fingers crossed !
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