CONAN...how many names do you need?

I've been waiting for a new Conan movie since the last Conan movie. And finally for better or worse, its arrived. I'm looking forward to it. Back when I was a very young kid, I aspired to be a comic book artist. That dream has long since past, I can draw better than most people, I just have a hard time telling a story with sequential art and I am just not good enough to be a professional artist. But one can dream. Back in the 70's, I remember seeing the images of Conan by Frazetta, I was in awe of those images. They shaped what I liked. Then I found Big John Buscema and his awesome Thor and Conan and Avengers images that further shaped my love of artwork and Conan. I always read the name as a kid, R.E. Howard, and I wondered who this man was that created Conan. It was a long time after all that, that I finally sat down and read his novels and short stories. The writing did not really hook me. It was always the images by Frazetta, Ken Kelley, John Buscema.

In the 1980s, I discovered Bart Sears and Tim Truman. Both of them in much different ways further shaped me. Bart's art style especially. If anything my line work is a poor imitation of couple of his styles.

Those artists led me to Keith Parkinson, Larry Elmore, Brom, Luis Royo. Later came Simon Bisley and Zook.

Frazetta and Buscema have both past away, so has Keith Parkinson who I met at GenCon a couple of times, but I horde books about them that displays their work.

Now both Bart and Tim are doing some Conan, along with a great artist in Tomas Giorello, love that guys work also. It is the only comic that I occassionally read nowadays.

Over the years, I have managed to collect some of Bart's and Tim's artwork. I actually own a few pieces of Tim's Conan art.



The piece to the left is a page of Tim Truman artwork for an issue of Conan that I own.

Tim has a cool style and flair about this work and is a great storyteller. There is usually nothing overly flashy or explosive in his style. Its sort of old school.




The next piece is also by Tim. When I bought this on-line and received it from a reputable dealer, I just sat for a long time staring and studying every line and every little nuance of it.



I love the old school ink washes in it. It is a very cool page in person and shows just how technically talented he is in the medium when it comes to comic style artwork.


And below is something that I did many years ago. Not really a Conan, but a barbarian nonetheless. And its in my best imitation of Bart's style.

Now...if you are paying attention to the details in the above pic, you will probably understand why I so love Tre Manor's sculpting on his barbarians.

Next Chaos Marauder....Tre Manor's Helvaskt

This is another of Tre Manor's Red Box Games Miniatures.  And its quickly become another favorite of mine.  I think it has a rather cool pose, I can see the awesome downward swing of that cleever like sword.

I'm continuing my paint scheme throughout everything, so the panels on the shield just had to be that glowing like blue.

The musculature of the back practically paints itself.  There it is again giving me that Bart Sears comic book art feeling.  Bart recently did two issues of Conan, absolutely stunning artwork in those books.

Decided the backs of these shields need a fake painted wood grain.

So another of the barbarians in my growing collection of Tre Manor miniatures.

The Blade Itself.....

Just finished up Joe Abercrombie's book The Blade Itself ater getting delayed and setting it down for a bit.  So no this is not about a miniature.  I set it down not because I found it boring, but because I got busy doing other things and finally found some time to actually for a little bit.  I normally read lots of books, but lately my time just has been short.  I have been looking for something to fill that awful void left between Bernard Cornwall's Saxon stories and George RR Martin's Ice and Fire.  And I think I have found that author.  I thoroughly enjoyed the book from Logen Ninefingers to Glokta to the Dogman and the crew that he travels with.  Very fun and very well done for his first major novel in print.

Redmanphill over at Subject to Stupidity, linked here on my blog,  did a much better review than I could do on this book, I recommend you give that a look if you are looking for a good novel to read... http://subjecttostupidity.blogspot.com/2011/03/blade-itself.html

For me I plan to pick up George RR Martin's Dance With Dragons next...I've been waiting a long time for that.

WAB Tournament Results - La Crosse's River City Hobbies

With a relatively short amount of preparation and notification to people interested, we managed to pull off a tournament in Warhammer Ancients Battles with help from our local Fantasy Guru who is well experienced with doing Warhammer styled tournaments on the Fantasy side of things.

We managed to generate a good amount of interest, having at one point 16 individuals signed up to participate in the event in the worst time of the year for a tournament being summer, which is good considering that the Warhammer Fantasy tournaments sometimes struggles to fill 28 spots for a much more popular game.  We did not want to collect entry fees and such and have to go about doing refunds to people on such short notice, so we just allowed verbal commitments, which allowed for people to back out at anytime.   In the end we had 10 people show up.  With the short notice and poor timing of the event we considered this to be a success, as we anticipated having 10-12 players. 

The tournament was a 3 round event, using victory points to convert to battle points.  Round 1 was Take and Hold the center, Round 2 was a Flanking attack, and Round 3 a pitched battle.

As you can see we had some good talent show up.  Bennett and Mike Butcher are very well known for being extremely good converters, army builders and painters.  Kevin and the Matts play a considerable amount and are very good tabletop generals.  In the end, Bennett won the overall, Kevin was as usual the most jovial, Mike Butcher took home the top spot in Paint since Bennett was the Overall winner.

Name	Army	Battle	Sports	Paint	Total
Bennett Blalock-Doane	Early Imperial Romans	10	11	16	37
Kevin Bruins	Carthage 2nd Punic War Italy	10	15	12	37
Matt Herrbold	Crusaders 1.5	9	11	14	34
Mike Butcher	Saxons	6	12	15	32
Shawn welte	Imp. Romans	3	13	15	31
Jerrod Horstman	Shieldwall Normans	4	12	13	29
Mike Bates	SW Flanders	7	10	11	28
Rich Nelson	El Cid - African Invaders	2	12	10	24
Matt Jayjack	Vikings	7	11	5	23
Abe Warpinski	Ancient Greeks	2	13	5	20

And as you can see with my 3 in Battle points my Romans definitely struggled, I drew Kevin in the first round and played to a draw, Viking Matt in the second round and minor loss, and Flanders Mike in the Third round to a crushing defeat. 

A special thanks to everyone that was interested and attended.  We plan to do this again.

Edit:  Its been brought to my attention by our Tournament Organizer that there are possibly a few errors in the paint scoring, due to a glitch in Xcel sorting.  The winners do have correct scores, battle and sports are correct, Bennett's score is correct, and my Romans did tie with Mike Butcher, but the others may be off.  We apologize for the errors.

More Marauding....the Horde grows with more painted minis

This model was a really old conversion sitting in my box, dates back to my beastmen army in '03.  Finally decided to paint it.

Even though its essentially a gor it'll work for my mutant marauders.

Pluse I kind of like the action of the pose.

The one below will be part of my great weapons marauder unit, another somewhat odd mutant.

And this pair.  Again a converted Gor from 2003 that I never used, so I popped off the head and fixed him up.  I have also used a few flagellants in the previous group of marauders so this will just be another addition.  The weapon head is actually from skaven left over bits.

 What's chaos without some grisly trophy?

Conradt the Crazed...the newest Marauder

There are some miniatures that are aptly named, and "the Crazed" is very fitting for this Red Box Games, Tre Manor miniature.  Just look at that face.

This along with the previous two are perhaps my favorites of Tre's sculpts.  You cannot help but have an evil smile on your face while painting this miniatures melon.

Like the rest of the Helsvakt line and some of his Reaper sculpts, I really love this armor and its what I would envision Chaos Marauders wearing to battle, spiky and gladiatorial like.

 The basing is typical of my Chaos Warriors army.  HO Scale RR ballast, the rocks are fake, and just broken pieces of cured Apoxie Sculp.  The base painting is five different dry brushed/stippled colors. 

A fall like burned out static grass from Woodland Scenics and a likewise burned out arid Grass tufts from Joefix.

There your are Conradt the Crazed!

A pair of New Chaos Marauders Painted...Tre Manor miniatures

Since I've decided to expand my Warriors of Chaos army with lots of new and different models and away slightly from just Games Workshop models, I have had absolutely no regrets.  I rarely...let me repeat that...I RARELY just paint models out of the package that that I have not converted in some shape or form.   The models below are two that I have not done any converting too, and I absolute love the looks and the detail to them.

This model is one of Tre Manor's Red Box Games, Helsvakt, miniatures and it is absolutely stunning in detail and a blast to paint.  There is so much detail on it.  The skulls on the cape in the back is really cool looking.  I'm really loving all of the stuff Tre is doing for his own company and for Reaper Miniatures.

The shield below had a bunch of scars in the surface sculpted into it.  So, I thought I would accentuate that in my color scheme and make the shield sort of glow a little.

The musculature is awesome, I'm a huge Bart Sears fan and his drawing style and this sort of reminds me of this style but in 3 dimensions.

Next up is another of Tre Manor's sculpts, this time from Reaper Miniatures.  This model is huge.  The Helsvakt is about 25 mm, this model is probably around 32 mm.  Which is fine by me, humans are not all the same size, and I'm already mixing GW Gors, Ungors, both new and old with both new and old GW Marauders.

I believe the name of this miniature is Kord the Destroyer.  The face detail just screams at me, I love it.  The model itself is very reminiscent of his Helsvakt models. 

I'll be using both of these models on the extreme flanks of the units.  I'm very much looking forward to assembling the units in whole.

The Blue and Burnt Orange paint schemes are getting carried all the way through the army.

Both of these models are really going to influence me in my conversion and sculpting work in the future.  Tre's technique for doing fur is definitely making me rethink how I have been doing it. The detail is top notch in my book.  I'm putting final touches on a whole slew more of the marauders, so much more to follow on my Warriors of Chaos.