'Risk Taker' from BurkhardS - 'Murillo Gladiator'

I have to say, this theme round, as well as the theme for this year in general gave me huge headaches. So from the start it became clear, that this year I would enter my Curtgeld into the theme round. But what was it going to be. After long deliberation, I came up with this... 

A Murillo Gladiator. IMHO a Gladiator is a gambler in many aspects. For one, you are gambling with your life the moment you enter the arena, for essentially you are dead and are fighting to get your life back. You are also taking a gamble, based on your class of Gladiator and the class you are facing, for some of those might leave you at a huge disadvantage. And I think this hold especially true for the auctorati, free (wo)men who chose to give up their freedom to live as Gladiators. Sure you were well cared for outside of the fights you had to perform, but was it worth risking your life?

And in a way, this mini was a personal gamble for me. A few years back I asked Curt "what will the theme be for the next installment?" Reason being simple... the last show I attended that year was a couple of weeks before the start of the Challenge and I wanted to go shopping there. So Curt said, "probably Gladiators, but I cannot guarantee." In the end it turned out not be Gladiators, but I had bought this fine Murillo from Warlord Games. And I thought that after 2-3 year of spending his life on the lead mountain, he finally deserved his moment of glory in the Challenge. So here he is.

Paintjobwise, he is quite simple,but what was to be expected with a mini that is mostly skin and loincloth. I did choose to do the manica and ocrea in steel rather than a bronze colour. I wanted him to be an old Centurio who had to leave the Legions at the end of his tour of duty, but who had whored and drunk up all his money and had chosen to become an auctorati. So he was making use of some of the equipment he had to buy for his army job, which would most likely be less ornamental and more functional.

'Epic Fail' from BurkhardS - Jagdtiger

Epic fail gave me some headaches at first. I could only count out a Leman Brother Bank, since we are not allowed terrain in this Challenge. Then I thought about the Death Star, but my better half insisted we had no space for a PS 2014 from Ikea.

So it was back to the drawing board. But then I had an idea... World War II produced so my tanks, there must have been one that was an epic fail, at least in my eyes. 

In my humble opinion, this had always been the wrong type of tank for the time. It was very heavy and thus suffered from the same problems as its turreted brothers, the Königtiger. As such it took huge resources to build, was a nightmare to transport by train, had problems with terrain due to its high ground pressure and guzzled so much fuel, that the Germans did not have at that time. Even worse yet, most of them seem to have been used on the western front, were its 122mm gun was the overkill for any opponent, while on the eastern front where it might have been useful vs. the JS-2s and big ISUs there were hardly any.

But what really underlined its status as an epic fail was an incident that took place when a Jagdtiger from the 512. Panzerjägerabteilung (the unit depicted above) attack an allied column near Holzwickede in Germany, which incidentally was less then 10 kilometer from where I used to live until a few years ago. This Jagdtiger fired at a Sherman. By that time Germany had no smokeless ammo anymore and after the first shot, at maximum range, the whole tank was shrouded in smoke. Seeing this, the infantry accompanying the tank though that big beast had been taken out and ran. Without any support the Jagdtiger was forced to retreat as well. So in essence, the big tank, which should have instilled calm in its troops and could have taken out the enemy without them ever having a chance to fire back, had broken the units morale with a single shot. As such this was my epic fail.

Not much to say about the model here. It is a 1:48th scale Tamiya early model Jagdtiger straight out of the box.

Looking at period photos I found that most of them seem to have been painted in a simply soft edged three tone camo. So I went with a Dunkelgelb base with, red primer and green camo airbrushed on. Some chipped paint effects and washes & filters to enhance the worn look as well as the soft edged effect of the camo. Also added some rain marks to the superstructure to round off the slightly for look. (I do not like my tanks if they look like they have not been cared for for months.) Unfortunately I ran out of time, otherwise it would have received a slight coat of dust with the airbrush, but that will be easy enough to add in the future. While painting it, I remembered, why I usually hate to paint Königstiger or Jagdtiger. All those tow chains and spare tracks are a pain in the behind to paint.
 

Hope you like the final results.

'Nostalgia' from BurkhardS - Battletech Battlemaster Mech

The nostalgia round gave me something to contemplate. After all I am mainly painting historical minis these days, so in a way, it is always a bit nostalgic. But in the end i decided that it would be nice to go back to the minis I started tabletop gaming with over a quarter of a century ago (I had painted scale models before, but that would have been too nostalgic for my taste and I did not have the time for something like that). So it had to be a Mech from Battletech. I quit playing and sold my collection (well over 500 Mechs plus tanks, infantry and so on) between 2000 and 2001, so I had nothing left to work with.

The first Battletech model I ever painted was a Locust, but looking on eBay, those were either incomplete or selling for hilarious prices. So I asked my friends, but the best someone had was an incomplete one as well. But the same person also had a Battlemaster, which was the second model I ever painted for Battletech.

Back then I painted everything in the colors of my own private mercenary outfit, but I felt that I should do something different for that friend who kindly borrowed me this model. Since he had no clear preferences, I went for my favorite House, House Kurita. Namely the 9th Ghost Regiment.

They paint their Mechs in a light grey / off white with darker accents. The left half of the Mech is decorated with a Cherry or Plum Tree in full bloom. I chose a cherry for this one. I had done something similar for another SciFi model in 2014 and liked the looks. Only let down for me was... that other model was mainly black and the tree would really pop. With the off-white it is not as visually impressive.

The Kurita markings on the left shoulder and the Japanese symbol for "4", denoting this one to be the 4th Mech in its Lance are freehand.

'Antihero' from BurkhardS - 'Tyrion Lannister'

As I've mentioned before, I had huge problems deciding on an anti-hero at first, but in the end I could not pick between Discworlds Death and this one. So what do we have here. It is Tyrion Lannister from George R. R. Martin's "The Songs of of Ice and Fire” (or Game of Thrones for those who rather watch TV ;-)). I know at first he seems like an unlikely Anti-Hero. At first glance he seems to be almost more mischievous than everyone else in the series, which is hard to be honest. He does his best to gain personal power, advance his family at the expense of others and to lure those into traps that he can not manipulate. 

Not the nicest person, right? Well , but if you look closer he has many good aspects about him. He tries his best to reign in the sadistic and at time sociopathic character of his nephew Joffrey and when married to poor Sansa Stark for political reasons refuses to consummate the marriage not to cause her extra pain. When you look closely, most of the time his actions that seem to be in favor of his family actually are in favor of the people of the realm and usually he does to get the the appreciation he would deserve, but rather a kick in the behind. Being born a little person and having his mother die in labour he was despised by his father and elder sister from day one and still he always tried his best to win his families appreciation. Not that he got it. What he got instead was them scheming against him and trying to kill him. So he ends up with a huge scar on his face (from an attempt on his life, while saying the capital) and having to flee to a foreign land to escape a death sentence for a murder he did not commit. For me, he is a perfect Anto-hero and actually on of my favorite characters in the books (and I am entirely glad George R. R. Martin has not killed him off (yet) in half a sentence like he did with so many other characters.

The miniature by Dark Sword is actually based on the character in the novels and not modeled on Peter Dinklage from the TV series. At first I was a bit sad about this, since I really like Dinklage´s acting and portrayal of the role, but when painting him, it is actually a good thing, since I gave me as a painter much more room for artistic license. The mini itself is really great. Nice clear line and a characterful sculpt. The only thing I did not like was the Lannister heraldry. For one I felt that the Lion had a strange shape. And it is only weak… hard to make out while painting (constantly had their website open while painting it), but to strong to ignore and just make it up. Really looking forward to painting some more minis from the series, which I got off their Kickstarter last year!

Take care,

Burkhard

'Comedic' from BurkhardS - 'Ankh-Morpork City Watch'

Now the Comic rounds was an instant decision for me. Back when I was in the German equivalent of high school, one of my majors was English. We had to read a lot of English literature (of course). There was some stuff that was absolutely awful in my humble opinion (like Aldous Huxley) and there was good stuff (like Shakespeare). But the best one was when we read Terry Pratchett. We read "Weird Sisters" right back to back with "Mac Beth" and I loved it! Not only was his style of writing great, but his sense of humour was right in line with mine. Seeing how much his work was actually inspired by classical literature made him an instant win with me. I was grateful for being exposed to his work this way, since I would probably have missed him without it.

Now on to the minis. My better half gave these to me as a birthday gift a couple of years ago. I started painting them back then, but was really unhappy with the results. I wanted to keep close to Pratchetts description of the characters uniforms. But this meant lots of browns and too little contrast. So I never finished them, to the understandable distress of my better half. Now seeing the topics for this years Challenge, I decided to give them another try. So they spend a couple of weeks in Acetone. And aided by the much larger collection of brown paints I have these days, I am really happy with the results. 

So here we go, I present you CPT. Carrot Ironfoundersson, SGT. Fred Colon, SGT. Samuel Vines and Nobby Nobs of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch.

'Hot' from BurkhardS - 'The Balrog'

Reading the topic for this theme round I had many ideas going through my mind. From flamethrower tanks, men sitting around a camp fire. In the end I decided to do a French Napoleonic field forge. But as they say… no plan survives contact with the enemy. In this case the enemy was life. I had to prepare a number of minis for a tournament in Hamburg last weekend and by spontaneous decision my better half decided we should visit her family this week. So this left me a mere two days to paint my entry. Not enough time to paint more then 10 men, two horses and number of carts for this vignette. So something else had to be found. Looking Moria deep under my lead pile I found the first version of Games Workshops Balrog from the Lord of the Rings range and honestly… what can be hotter than a Balrog? (Yes I know… naked ladies! ;-)) So in the words of Tolkin himself:

“The Balrog reached the bridge. Gandalf stood in the middle of the span, leaning on the staff in his left hand, but in his other hand Glamdring gleamed, cold and white. His enemy halted again, facing him, and the shadow about it reached out like two vast wings. It raised the whip, and the thongs whined and cracked. Fire came from its nostrils. But Gandalf stood firm.

'You cannot pass,' he said. The orcs stood still, and a dead silence fell. 'I am a servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the flame of Anor. You cannot pass. The dark fire will not avail you, flame of Udûn. Go back to the Shadow! You cannot pass.'

The Balrog made no answer. The fire in it seemed to die, but the darkness grew. It stepped forward slowly onto the bridge, and suddenly it drew itself up to a great height, and its wings were spread from wall to wall; but still Gandalf could be seen, glimmering in the gloom; he seemed small, and altogether alone: grey and bent, like a wizened tree before the onset of a storm.

From out of the shadow a red sword leaped flaming.

Glamdring glittered white in answer.

There was a ringing clash and a stab of white fire. The Balrog fell back and its sword flew up in molten fragments. The wizard swayed on the bridge, stepped back a pace, and then again stood still.

'You cannot pass!' he said.

With a bound the Balrog leaped full upon the bridge. Its whip whirled and hissed.

'He cannot stand alone!' cried Aragorn suddenly and ran back along the bridge. 'Elendil!' he shouted. 'I am with you, Gandalf!'

'Gondor!' cried Boromir and leaped after him.

At that moment Gandalf lifted his staff, and crying aloud he smote the bridge before him. The staff broke asunder and fell from his hand. A blinding sheet of white flame sprang up. The bridge cracked. Right at the Balrog's feet it broke, and the stone upon which it stood crashed into the gulf, while the rest remained, poised, quivering like a tongue of rock thrust out into emptiness.

With a terrible cry the Balrog fell forward, and its shadow plunged down and vanished. But even as it fell it swung its whip, and the thongs lashed and curled about the wizard's knees, dragging him to the brink. He staggered and fell, grasped vainly at the stone, and slid into the abyss. 'Fly, you fools!' he cried, and was gone.”

'Myth' from BurkhardS - 'Minotaur'

When it comes to the them rounds, it seems like those I was looking forward to and those I do not alternate. Fortunately this is one of those I was really looking forward to. I have for a long time been a great fan of Crocodile Games Wards of Ægyptus and Wards of Olympus ranges. So I had an abundance of yet unpainted mythological miniatures form both Egypt and Greece to choose from. And an easy choice it was. One of the mythological figures that always captured my imagination (and this was only enhanced by a trip to Crete as a child) was the Minotaurs and since I had one in my lead pile I chose it for this round. Now Crocodile Games actually have two Minotaurs, but I always liked this one better. You can still see the chains that were used to chain it to the labyrinth. But if you look closely at the flail he has, you can see that it is actually one of the stone blocks that he was chained to. He ripped it from the wall and now what used to keep him, is his weapon of choice.

But now on to something more somber. When Crocodile Games started off over a decade ago, there were many people that helped get things started. Deane P. Goodwin was one of them and over the years I found him to be a very kind person, who was always forthcoming with great advice and good natured comments. Although I never met him in person, he was one of those people whom I really enjoyed seeing on the internet. So I was greatly saddened to hear that he had passed away about a week ago. So I would like to dedicate this entry to him. Rest in Peace Deane, you will be sorely missed!!!