Full Circle

It's time for a blog post, Miercenaries! Here I will be telling you a little bit about my nefarious past, a little bit about the backlog Brutal Beasts and a little bit about October's hálftroll heaven...

How I Started / How I'm Going

Many, many moons ago, in the days of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain before even God was young, I began painting miniatures of the Citadel variety thanks to a friend at school. Entranced by crocodilian lizardmen, orcs in armour and Baldwin the giant, my pocket money bought a metal goblin wolf rider and, with the Humbrol enamel paints I used to paint aircraft model kits, set to work with gay abandon. I found that I wasn't too bad at it - or, at least, pretty good for an eleven-year-old lad. So much so, in fact, that schoolmates used to get me to paint their models every now and again.

As I grew a little older and realised I could actually make money doing this, I advertised my skills in the local model shop (the much-missed Morton's Models) and, rather naively, the newsagents I had a paper round with. No takers later, I advertised in an RPG magazine called Arcane (anybody remember that?) and got some bites - notably Joe Dever of Lone Wolf fame, which impressed me no end, having been a gamebook lover for a long time. He was a really lovely man, and he - alongside many others - proceeded to ensure my pocket money went a lot further in those years.

Lord Loxlo the Slann Mage! Yes, I used to varnish with gloss. A legacy of being Mr Hamfist

Needless to say, this improved my skills rather a lot and after a hiatus thanks to discovering breasts and beer, in the mid nineties I started painting and playing again. Lizardmen were my first love and when their army book came out in the late nineties I was hooked; after a couple of years I switched to High Elves, and then Chaos, and then Beastmen, and then... well, let's just say these were the times that formulated Baalor and then Darklands. Those armies are long gone, unfortunately - the elves were sacrificed on the altar of Need-a-New-Boiler, the chaos were sold for a holiday and the lizardmen... truth be told, I don't remember what happened to those. eBay, no doubt.

My first High Elf army, which featured in White Dwarf no less

Back to the painting. I got pretty good at it, I enjoyed it, and then somewhere along the way I just... stopped; probably because of fatherhood, more than anything else. A couple of years back I managed to take a bit of time off work and paint some Khthones miniatures, and now my son is at college, I have even more spare time; and with the sales of the studio painted auctions, I have decided to use all these amazing new paint ranges and brushes to... well, paint some miniatures again!

Shaaros of Baalor. I even had a baalor.com website. Those were the days... of having spare time!

So I find myself completing the circle; I started out painting miniatures for people, and now I'm doing the same thing, a long, long time later. Funny how life works out.

Watch out for my latest paintjobs (Fir Bholg) next week... hopefully...! I'm also DEFINITELY going to paint the corpse-dragon when he's sorted...

Backlog Monsters

...which leads me neatly onto the saga of the Brutal Beasts. The backwhale is out there now - not all orders have been fulfilled, but we're getting there (not helped by France being on holiday for all of August, it seems, ensuring rubber / resin was in short supply) - and the corpse-dragon has had to have some last minute changes to its base to be cast in resin properly. The mushrooms are now separate parts, people.

The first corpse-dragons will be sent this week - which is definitely welcome for everybody, I know...!

The mighty Ilkulkaag

Ilkulkaag has been printed in full and is awaiting my ministrations to get him ready for rubber; that should happen next week. Iskarnos will get the treatment the week after next, so very shortly those guys will all be winging their way to you. There is the small matter of the new jötunn, too...

I am planning on doing some kind of kickstarter project for the monsters that aren't yet in cast resin - I'm looking at you, Fornjötr - simply because rubber is so expensive; watch out for that soon.

Háftroll Víkingar

So, let's give you the run-down on what you can expect in October. It's the Norse, as mentioned previously, and for the Jötunheimr realm...

Hálftrolls galore, as you can see!

October's release will include:

• Great Axe Sigundr, Hálftroll Jarl
• Two Axe Sigundr, Hálftroll Jarl
• Guntrún, Hálftroll Hag
• Guntrún, Hálftroll Hag [Pin Up]*
• Trolls of Gorheim, Great Axe Hálftroll Unit (7x warriors w cmd)
• Trolls of Rusheim, Two Axe Hálftroll Unit (7x warriors w cmd)
• Trolls of Vartheim, Leiptroll Unit (5x warriors)
  
• Trolls of Hafheim, Sjøtroll Unit (3x warriors)

The observant among you will have seen the hálftrolls with shield, axe and spear, in previous blog posts; but I'm going to keep my powder dry on those for another day. This time around, you get hálftrolls with great axe and two axes, including for the warchief, Sigundr.

Here's a couple of images to get your juices flowing...

More on these later on in the week. Thursday, in fact, as it's bloody October already...

Stars in their Eyes

It's been a while since the Khthones had anything new at all, and while there is a desperate need for new gorgonar, in November I will be unleashing the many-limbed, many-eyed star beings known as the lískar.

These creatures are not of planet Earth; they are, in all senses of the word, aliens; highly intelligent, incredibly powerful and very, very old. Think The Thing old, but not buried under the ice. They can't absorb people, mind, but they can turn them to stone with a single gaze. Nasty!

Now, Pétroyos and Mazikílías have been available for a long time, as you may well know, but I've never fleshed out the lískar more than those two. I've added a couple of profiles to the Khthones muster, and that's about all you guys know, so I'll give you plenty of loreful words through October to get you understanding what they are and how they fit in to the Khthones; for now, here's roughly what you'll be getting in November...

• Pétroyos, Lískarchon
• A pin up of some sort...
• Breaker Lískar Unit (5x warriors w cmd)
• Attacker Lískar Unit (5x warriors w cmd)
• Lískrothar Unit (3x warriors w cmd)

The monster will of course be a new vasílísk!

You need a snippet, right? Here you go...

That'll do for now, methinks... more next time!