Good day all.
I'm find of stumped right now to come up with some witty banter, so I'll launch right into it.
My movie entry is San, from Princess Mononoke. Here's an screen grab for anyone who has forgotten.
The base figure I used was the Privateer Press Tharn Wolf Rider Champion, who looks like this when found in the wild.
Although
all of the posters on the Circle forums have called out the
similarities to San, just being a gal on a wolf is not enough. Light up
the Bitz Signal!
So,
the thing is Privateer Press has a very restrictive conversion policy
if you are going to keep using the figure on the table, so the bulk of
the figure needed to remain unchanged. Also, the Champion is a bit more
adult than San was in the movie, but there wasn't much I could do to
change that.
Stage one was to dig a GW furred cloak
out of the bitz box, which came with the Empire Knightly Orders box set.
I decided to use San's masked head as the inspiration for this project,
so I needed a mask. As my sculpting is still pretty rudimentary, I used
a map pin as the basis, with the eye and mouth holes drilled out with a
pin vise. Green stuff fur was used to blend the cloak to the head, and
two chips of plasti-card were used to make the ears. The movie informed
the choice of colours.
There we go, no internet drama, no loss of blood, no man glutes, just a straight forward entry.
Sean.
So this one needs a bit of 'splaining.
So why is this seemingly dead man by a wire fence evocative of "home"? Pull up a chair, youngins, Pappy Sean has a story from the old days on the farm!
So the missus has a great idea, let's surround the scrub lot with a T-post fence so we can let the sheep and goats nibble it down to a golf course. Serves two purposes; first is it provides some free food for the livestock; second, it allows us to clear out the scrub and nettles to access all of the old tires and scrap lumber the previous tenants left behind. The catch, because there is always a catch, someone has to pound fifty+ T-posts into the ground to hang the fence from. That's where I come in.
So there I am on a hot humid Ottawa summer's day, pounding away with the thumper, setting each eight foot post two feet into the ground. Now, being the thrifty farmers we are, we've got out hands on a good batch of used T-posts. T-post goes into the ground, the fencing is secured with three strands of locking wire, move over 10 feet, start over. However, the missus couldn't get enough used posts, so she had to buy some new ones. And bless her soul, she found a new type, with some built in hooks to hold up the fencing while you tie it in place.
 |
| A 'T' Post |
So on the very last "thump", on the very last post, I manage to unseat the thumper, and bring it down with all of my might on the top hook. The thumper (the thirty pound, grey, steel tube with handles seen discarded by the fence) ricochets back into the next most dense object in close proximity - my head.
While I did not lose consciousness, like the subject in my somewhat stylized terrain piece, it was a close thing, as I do have a small spot of missing memory. I must have thrown that tube 10 yards, cursing with all of the words I had learnt up to that point as a sergeant in the Army, then making some new ones up. I felt like I needed a tall glass of water, as sweat was dripping into my eyes, but it was a much more crimson fluid that was leaking from my melon. Head wounds are the worst, so stitches were required, and showing up in the sergeant-major's office to explain why the top part of my haircut was missing did not make matters better.
So, not a diorama of some poor soul cut down while emplacing wire, but my efforts to get one step closer to becoming the War Amps poster child for Farm Safety.
Good Day, Eh!
Taking
a break from my winter screening of Strange Brew, here is my entry for
the East Challenge, a 30 man Ashigaru unit with yari, from various
manufacturers.
I
was inspired by colour palette of the Oda arquebusiers pictured the
Osprey "Samurai 1550-1600" colour plate F, which was also used in the
Ronin ruleset, although I will not pretend to have Kev Dallimore levels
of talent. The bulk of the unit are 25 Ashigaru from Wargames Factory.
These definitely show the benefit of experience, and are a much cleaner
offering than the Celts from my first post. The only soft details are in
the arms, there really isn't much besides the armour plates to grab a
drybrush or a highlight. There are three poses; at rest, kneeling and
advancing, and you are pretty much locked into the arm options based on
the pose.
Note
that these yari are long, not spear sized, but pike sized. This causes a
few ranking issues, but overall, like the Celts, they consistently stay
within their bases.
The
first rank are a mixed bunch. The musician with the conch shell and the
bannerman are EM4 pre-paints that have had an arm swap and a weapon
swap, respectively. They are here because a photo with two blank files
would just look awkward. The leader is from a manufacturer I can't
recall, the chap with the spear above his head is from Old Glory/West
Wind Samurai Wars and the guy with the one hand grip is from Reaper. I
tried to add some colour to these guys, as they would have better gear
than the munitions kit of the rank and file. Plus, they had to make the
bannerman not stand out to much (fail!).
I hope I'm getting better at this photography thing.
Anyways, that is 28 - 28mm figs for the East Challenge!
TTFN,
Sean.
