First of the Conquest Games Knights

I'm rolling them our now, this phase of the crusade is coming to an end.  Previously we had seen the pair below in WIP.  Now I have them based up and finished.

Below is the next pair of knights.  The one on the left I have converted, giving him an axe from the Gripping Beast Plastic vikings.  I think its a neat little conversion that works well.

Below a better look at the converted horses, and their cloth barding.

And a view of some freehand on the shield.

The Conquest Games stuff is nice,  and paints up fairly easy.  I look forward to seeing their long awaited infantry.

My Crusades Infantry Unit...

Well yesterday we had the meager infantry additions.  Today we have the unit thus far.   I think it looks pretty good.  Right now its at 23 models, I'm going to see if I can't squeeze a couple more before Adepticon.

I still have not gotten around to replacing the banners yet.  I will get there eventually.

Its a nice colorful unit.  The spear man in the front rank are getting excited about poking some Saracens at Adepticon.

Crusading Infantry additions...

More of the meager additions.  My Perry Miniature Infantry...it's a love - hate relationship.  I sure hope that Conquest Games releases some good looking plastics.  If you know me well, you know that a pet peeve of mine is metal miniatures, I generally dislike them. 

 In a lot of ways wish I would have taken the time to separate the spears from these miniatures.  The metal is so soft and one little bump bends the dug-on spear.  I like working with plastics, not this stuff.  Anyways, meager additions again.  3-more English like models, and 3 more infantry from Jerusalem.

They turned out okay for back rankers and quick paintjobs. No real conversion work, other than the use of some plastic shields without the bosses.   Hopefully next time we see these they will be with the rest of the unit.

Some more Knights...for my Crusade

My meager reinforcements for the Perry Knights.

I must have bent the legs on the one on the left, will have to fix that.  Amazing what you see wrong when you take pics.  The middle guy is actually carrying a sword from the Gripping Beast Plastic Vikings.

You cannot buy that Hospitaller like that from the Perry's, its a shame too.  Note I converted the sword arm using a Conquest Games arm.

Meager additions, that all it is.  Next up the Conquest Games unit or the Infantry.

Introducing Sir Roland the Gray....errrr Green

Well, another Reaper Knight.  Reaper names this model Sir Roland the Gray, but I have changed that to Green.  This model was another happy experiment. I've never really painted a lot of things green, mainly because I really don't like the color green. So I decided to dust off all of those green colors and see what I could with them, grabbing another of my Reaper knights to experiment on.

I think it turned out pretty good, I laid out all of the greens on the cloak. Then went to the yellows to accent it.

The helmet's head display is massively huge, appropriately fantasy. Was not really sure what to do with it at first, and decided upon a stone theme that I carried on to the shield.  For the basing, I recently picked up some meadow flowers and decided this would be a good model to try that out on. I like the looks of them, definitely going to use more of that in the future.

That's it for now, soon the Crusaders will be showing up.  Got the movement trays, put together today.

A new Knight...The Eagle

Been a long time, but the miniature is finished.  Its a Reaper Miniatures Knight sculpted by Werner Klocke, one of my favorite Reaper sculptors.  I was finishing up the basing on my Crusaders and decided to finish this miniature up.

I'm very happy with the reds, its the same paint combo that I have used on my Khorne Demons and always looks very good and deep.

I played around with some different metallics, namely a Reaper Master Series triad.  I'm not real convinced that there steel works, their highlight color is not working for me at the moment and I had to go back and blend in an old standby Vallejo metallic to make it look better.  I'll need to experiment with it a bit more.

I like how the whites turned out, again a Reaper Master Series Triad, warm bone triad of colors with a final bright white to make that final pop.

Basing materials are identical to what my Crusaders got, but for whatever reason it just does not look as good with this miniature as my Crusaders.

Next up more knights.

FireForge Games - Teutonic Knights Kit Review

I had the extreme pleasure of unpacking a package from Fireforge Miniatures the other day, their first release to the miniatures world. The package was their new Teutonic Knights in 28 mm scale. Much like the Gripping Beast Plastics and Conquest Games plastics that I have reviewed previously, the sprues from Fireforge come out of the molding from Renedra. Renedra’s quality is extremely high.   In this kit are 12 multi-piece mounted knights, I simply love the fact that they are multi-piece and allow me to mix and match and change things as I see fit. They come with an assortment of 12 heads mostly Teutonic styled helms, 5 different hand weapon arms, 4 different lances, 6 different shields, 4 different torso poses for the riders, 4 separate capes/cloaks per sprue.   They also include a command sprue with many options on it in the kit. Excellent piece in itself, having flags, a musician's horn, and a cross.    A good look at the sprues and box contents can be found at the WAB Corner, where Dean broke open a box of them, if interested follow this link: http://wabcorner.blogspot.com/2012/03/fire-forge-teutonic-knights.html The horse sprue, has two different horse poses that can be mixed and matched, and three different heads, so fairly nice variety. When assembling the horses, the two halves join up nicely, and don’t have a real big seam in the rump. I had small issue with that in the Conquest Games miniatures horses, that was easily correctable. On these though the rump is good, the saddles can be a bit of issue, but like the Conquest Games miniatures, easily curable. By the way the Conquest Games horse just comes with a blanket and strap, because the actual saddle is molded on the rider. This saddle is on the horse the rider is added, much like GW’s Bretonian Knights. I assembled 5-different models to get the hang of them and to let them fester in my mind to figure out the look I want for a future army. I must say, I have been doing this a long time and I’m seriously impressed by these models. They are not only the best I have ever seen for a first release from an upstart company , they might just have become my favorite kit of all time. There was very little flash to remove, like with so many of the plastics coming through Renedra. Games Workshop could really take a lesson from this. Very crisp detail on the sprues, excellent undercut. Great looking mail armor, kudos to their sculptor, just when I thought I was getting really good at sculpting mail armor, this kit comes along and changes my thoughts. They do have the rectangular plate shoulder pauldrons as a separate option for those that wish to use it. Everything fits very well and is easy to manipulate at the joins.  I’m not much into the Teutonic’s, so I have removed the head dresses from the helms on mine. This should not be a problem in the near future as they are getting ready to release their 2012 follow-up kits of mounted sergeants and Templar knights at or around the end of April is what I heard. Fully assembled, I absolutely love the looks of them. I have been waiting for a very nice looking plastic knight kit for this era, and they have really fit that bill. Unfortunately for Conquest Games, I do not see myself buying and converting any more of their miniatures. As good as they are, they have not been able to follow up their first release. Quality level is high on them, but not as high as what Fireforge’s first release is, and that is unfortunate as I did and still do have hopes that Conquest will find the capital to release some more plastics. Period wise Fireforge is in what I see as an untapped niche, with older metal miniatures from Gripping Beast, that are kind of chunky looking, and less popular miniatures from Curtsey as their main competition, a much easier road to follow than what Conquest Games has took in competing with numerous manufacturers in a saturated Norman era. Now the size comparisons. Pictured below from left to right, a Conquest Games Norman, Fireforge Teutonic, Perry Norman/Crusader, HYW mounted Sergeant, Fireforge Teutonic, Warlord Games Roman Auxiliary Below, Conquest vs. FireForge Below, Perry vs FireForge  Below, Perry vs FireForge  Below, Warlord Games Pony vs FireForge   Next Pictured from left to right, Warlord Games Barbarian, Perry HYW Spearman, Fireforge Mounted Knight, Perry Norman Spearman, FireForge Mounted Knight, Warlord Games EIR, Warlord Games Giant Auxiliary, Gripping Beast Viking with a GW Flaggellant head. And not to forget my Fantasy audience out there that are looking at this kit for use with Bretonian armies, a Fireforge knight on the left and a Games Workshop Bretonian Knight on the right. For you WAB guys that’s the difference in historical 28mm and heroic 28 mm scale.   Bottom line, a great looking kit, well worth my pennies, I’m extremely impressed and I am very much looking forward to more from Fireforge in the near future. Now I need to figure out which WAB army I want to build using these. Capetian France, Later Crusades, Early Medieval English, Holy Roman Empire????

Old Stuff Wednesday - March ... Wargor ...Let there be War 2

Last month I showed the my wargor/beastlord from my 2003 Beastmen Army, this month I have his buddy. This one is only slightly converted not as converted as the previous one was, but based on the same model, basically the regular model with paint. 

Below you can see the differences between the two models, even though they are based on the same model.

I was happy with the paint schemes that I used for this army, and again this was back when you could actually play the beastmen with chaos marks. So, due to my dislike of magic, I went with an all Khorne marked army and no magic.  

I painted the Khorne marking on the axes. The paint scheme is, in that so-called NMM painting style (only miniature painters could come up with such ridiculous painting terms like ‘non-metallic-metal’, whatever, I feel a rant coming on that I would like to avoid at this time, it’s almost like miniature painters have an inferiority complex, so they have to make up these terms to feel more important or something).

So that is two of the 4 wargors from that army. I still love the looks of that army, I felt everything I did with it really clicked well with the exception of my Chaos Ogre unit and the Chaos Trolls. Back then I spent a lot of extra time painting the characters, more-so that the foot soldiers. Nowadays, it’s about equal as my painting speed has picked up tremendously.

Fire Forge .... Deus Vult...

Shipped with love from Italia, my first two boxes of Fireforge miniatures arrived in good condition.  At a quick glance, I like the scale of the riders and they appear to be close to the scale of the Conquest Games Miniatures and Gripping Beasts Plastic Hirdmen.  Detail is superb, Renedra did nice work.  I'm very much looking forward to their next releases.  And Horses with caparisons, hurray.  I'm probably just about doing barding out of greenstuff.

I will do a full on review, and a Figure comparison against other miniatures, for all of you collector-a-holics. 

Conquest Games Knights in color WIP

Wow, actually have something in color for a change that does not have wheels.  These are a couple of the Conquest Games Knights that I converted up.

I basically have basing to do and final clean-up.  Spent part of Sunday painting heraldry on all of the knights and the additional Perry infantry.

I do like how the yellows turned out.  The caparisons on the horses will utilize cloth barding when an option in the WAB lists.

 This is my first oportunity to paint the Conquest Games Normans.  They are very good miniatures, very easy to paint, of course mine have a lot of conversion to them also.  The horses are some of the best plastics I have worked with.

The larger pictures definitely show where I need to touch things up.

Note to self, watch out for seams on the rump of the horse.   At some point I will probably do another box of these to further expand this army.

These two I also painted over white Primer.  About 90% of the stuff I paint is over black primer, but I knew I wanted ligher colored horses and to use yellow on these two, so I switched it up.  Hopefully next time you see these they will be completely done.

A Change to the Blog and Blog Recommendations....

As my blog continues, it gets a bitter harder to find things easily.  The labels off to the right are nice, but a bit cumbersome to sort through.  So, to account for all of that I decided to use the "Pages" feature that you see across the top directly under the banner, a new feature here at the Madhouse.  This will have such things as links to all my tutorial posts, tips on various hobby things, popular and some unpopular conversion how-to's and examples, and miniature / product reviews.  I would like to point out particular attention to the Tutorials, as I have planned to do additional tutorials and will accept requests also if there are things readers see that they want further explained.  Right now the tutorials are on how I sculpt armor plating, make tabards out of green stuff, make caparisons for horses, how I make my movement trays, and forest littered basing.

Eventually there will be other things added, I'm contemplating things such as the compliation of the Old Stuff Wednesday posts, Army pics, etc.  If you have further suggestions, feel free to let me know.  

Furthermore, my blog lists are expanding on the blogs that I follow and read.  I'm planning to reshuffle some of them a bit and organize them a bit better. 

A long time ago Sons of Taurus, was kind of enough to plug my blog as I was getting started, and he continues that tradition of plugging gems that he finds.  I have also done that since and will continue doing it also.  So, I recommend the following:

 
The Butcher's Bill...I have recommeded this blog before and more people need to follow it.  It's my buddy's blog, the infamous Old Coot himself, Mike Butcher.  His work has been in White Dwarf more times than I remember and has one more awards for his army builds than anyone that I know.  His current passions lie in historical Warhammer Ancients armies, so if you are a WAB guy you will be interested in his work.  He also has a ton of 40k and Fantasy stuff too.
The Butcher's Bill

Wappellious...I have met James once, he is an easy guy to spot and remember who he is.  He is one of the more prolific miniature painters out there.  His style of painting is one that I really envy.  And he is also into building armies.  Currently his blog is like this art gallery and that is probably his intent, but it is quite eye wateringly good.
James Wappel Miniature Gallery

Lost In the Warp...This another friend of the Madhouse Workshop and the brainchild of great hobbyist, James Craig, otherwise known as tkkultist.  James also has won a number of awards over the years.  I have a tremendous amount of respect for James' work, and to boot he is a very friendly dude.  And yes James I will build you a beastman...for exchange of one of yours....
Lost In the Warp

Laughing Ferret...Now this is a blog that has attracted my attention recently and I recently added it to my bloglist.  Very quirky and funny posts, but also extremely attractive miniatures and good conversions are present.  Recommended.
Laughing Ferret


  

Old Stuff Day 2.0 - I Have Old Stuff

Today is Old Stuff Day 2.  You loyal followers know that here at the Madhouse we celebrate old stuff once month on a Wednesday every month, but today is special as I join in with a number of other bloggers out there.  So, unto the old stuff. 

Chicago Gamesday 2005, I showed up with this thing under my arm for the open Golden Demon category.  At least there was one person that appeared to like it.

I was surprised that it did make first cut.

Edit:  Did some digging and found some additional pics of the above.  2D artwork is all mine also.