The Leadheads of Darkness

This weeks painting ends with some of my oldest miniatures rebased and repair-painted. A wild mixture of mostly Essex and Copplestone miniatures I think. Right on time for Halloween.

 

Brandors Archers are ready

With the news on here the whole day, it's gotten really hard to focus on anything else. Programming is also very difficult for me at the moment because all the time I have the feeling that I am missing something. I really have to force myself to stop constantly following the news. Seems that I'm still hoping for a spontaneous change in the situation that will end the madness.

However, one thing is clear. After what has happened during the last days we will probably not be able to find our way back to that (relative) calm in which we made ourselves so comfortable. (Here in Europe) We must not again succumb to the illusion that our old enemy, the Soviet Union, is really gone. It was only sleeping. And so were we.

Well, besides that, by working a little bit on miniatures every evening, I still managed to get something done. Brandor's archers are ready, 31 men in all.

Next come these figures, which need a repaint and repair. They also will be part of Brandors Avengers. Most of the minis are so called 'Forest Warriors' from the World of Greyhawk series made by Minifigs. Meant as a kind of wood elves I believe. Even though some of them look more like Aztecs don't they? But I think in the 70's an 'exotic look' was enough to be seen as a fantasy figure.  Maybe also in real life.

These gentlemen are bandits who once followed a certain 'Robin Hood' on his crusade against the establishment. (Figures by Hinchcliffe). According to the Lost Minis Wiki, they were also sold as playing pieces for a boardgame.

I have not yet been able to identify these two guys. Any ideas?

A REAL time travel experience: Going back to 1987 simply by car (no DeLorean involved...)

One afternoon last November (2019) I got in the car and drove back to the year 1986 with no problems. Or was it 1987? I made a little trip and visited the shop where I bought my very first fantasy miniatures. The shop has a different name today and also has moved, but it's still the same company. And although they now actually operate a different business, there are still remnants of the no longer actively operated gaming and miniature business to be found in a corner of the shop. (Yes, strange but true...)

What I found was a big surprise: I found the matching figures for the wood elves from Essex Miniatures of which I only bought a few pieces in 1986/87 in the same shop. Packed in the same blue blisters as I used to know them.

 

When I told the shop assistant (not the owner but also an expert in the hobby) that I had bought figures from that series from them decades ago, he told me straight away that these blisters had been lying around since that time. And the blisters did look old, the outside was crushed and the foam inside had seen to much sunlight.

Back home and back in 2019 and I did a little research. Company reports published on the Internet showed me that the address on the back of the blisters was only used by the manufacturer (Essex) until 1995. After that they moved. And the shop I'm talking about also had a kind of 'business interruption' between 1989 and 1995. They did not run a retail shop during that period. (They came back as a producer of their own line of miniatures, but thats a different story.)

So it is very likely that the photos above actually show exactly the blisters that were hanging on the hook right next to my first fantasy miniatures when I bought them.

Seriously, I have absolutely no doubt: These minis were waiting for me for over thirty years! I am sure, I will never get that close to the feeling of real time travel again. A year later and I am still extremely happy that I made the trip.

The old group of wood elfs was always much too small to form a real unit and therefore didn't really fit in anywhere. Thats over now.  They will be part of a small army of brigands : Brandors Avengers.

This block of lead, that I also found, is of course not a wood elf but what was a "giant" back then. It is the Essex figure Q83 "Giant", modeled by Bob Olley. With its rather low height of just 50mm probably too small to be a giant in a modern game. But nice, a bit weird and I really like it. Very 'old school'.

 

Above's another look into the past: In the "Agamemnon" magazine No. 2 from 1986 I found the announcement of the wood elves shown above (FN103-FN107). Also look out at the masterpieces of modeling art from Citadel on the right. Even big ones start out small.

This is how some hobby magazines used to look like. You didn't had photos of everything and if you weren't buying in a store, you often would order the 'Dwarf with sword', 'Three different wood elf archers' and the 'Adventurer number five with a dagger' from a simple list and then you were really curious to see what you would get. Back then, people still had the courage to take little 'risks', don't they? 

By the way: As I wrote in a previous post, Essex has stayed true to itself and is still producing its old fantasy miniatures.

And now : Guess where I will go 'shopping', when the Corona-Lockdown is over...

Riders of the Retrocalypse

Another unit for the Copper Mountain Army. I had riders from here and there and alltogether they now make up the Horsemen of Copper Mountain. Or as I call them: 'The Riders of the Retrocalypse'.

Some Essex miniatures, some RAFM barbarians (see last post), Excalibur dragon riders on Essex horses, knights from Nemo Miniatures...and the guy in front is of unknown origin, his horse is from Essex and his weapon is from... Games Workshop? Reaper? Who cares. He has a big axe, who wants to discuss that?

Only good glue and a great commander can hold these guys together.

By the way, I cover my minis in glossy varnish. I like the look. But it is not easy to photograph them, they are to shiny. Maybe I will change that, it is still possible. I once tried 'Anti Shine' from Army Painter and that worked really good.

Making this picture I realized that I need some backgrounds so that taking photos for the blog will be quicker and easier. That allready was on my 'list', but far in the future. I'm doing this earlier now.

Not that I am really working with a schedule or something. This 'list' is in fact a great amount of numbered (and titled) directorys on my computer related to segments of my projects and in which I collect textfiles, pictures, pdf's, ideas, notes, inspirational material and other informations for a single task or subproject. And a storage for everything that comes in. The numbers are used to produce a - more or less - usefull sequence of tasks.

The numbers of the directories are arranged in steps of 10 so that I can put one or more of them somewhere between two others to move them to a different position. From time to time I re-number all diretories to get the gaps again. Not manually of course, in the filemanger 'Thunar' (Linux) this task is done with a few klicks.

If you are a little bit older - I think (and hope) younger people don't come in touch with it anymore - you may remember this technique from BASIC programming. We sorted our source code like that when BASIC still had line numbers (later there were versions that did not need line numbers any more). 

From the time when men where real men and manuals were real manuals.
Nothing to romanticize, but it was kind of fun. And the manual was great.

I had not planned to do it that way, it came with the process of sorting the stuff I collected. And it works.

So writing unorganized 'Spaghetti Code' a long time ago teached me to organize something else today. Take the good with the bad. The other good part was : If you survived BASIC, you were able to survive nearly every programming language. (My opinion. But please don't start with it today if you seriously want to learn programming, there are better options.)

The Knights of Copper Mountain - my Fantasy Foreign Legion

If miniatures pile up for a long time and without a plan, then there are always some that don't really fit together and don't belong anywhere. Spontaneously I found a solution for this. I invented my private 'Fantasy Foreign Legion' that I called the 'Knights of Copper Mountain' and made this the home for minis that otherwise would not find one. This is especially true for older miniatures, which in the past were always bought a bit mixed up.

It started when I got my hands on the bronze paint and asked myself if I ever had used it for anything else than cannons. So I decided to made this somehow unusual color the trademark of 'Copper Mountain'. Miniatures that belong to this group now get bronze color on the armor or weapons, wherever it may seem to be 'appropriate'.

Oldies but gol... copperies(?)

So here are the first of the Copper Mountain troops. Miniatures mostly from Essex and some other Manufacturers. Decals (Axe) from Games Workshop.

More to come, there are still some guys somewhere who look for a home.

The knights who made the new beginning

And so it begins. I wanted to organize all the existing fantasy figures. Seperated into the good, the bad and the ones in between. Sorted by 'species' or 'race', nation, armies and units.

A handful of knights on horseback made the start. A friend had given them to me because they had been lying around for ages and he couldn't get up to paint them. For these guys I finally had to decide which color they should get. At first it was difficult for me not to drybrush the guys with silver color. Then I simply took the risk and decided that every knight had to get his own main color (yellow, red, green, etc.), which was to become part of his coat of arms and that of his soldiers. So these knights became the starting point for an organization scheme. I decided that these knights are the rulers of earldoms and leaders of the human army.

The weapons are not original and the decals are from Games Workshop.  I am using what's lying around.

The Miniatures are very old and from Essex Miniatures (Late Medieval Period). Just took a look at the series and found they are still available. I think if I am going to add minis, I buy there. I like that style.

Fantasy invites you to fantasize. You sit, glue and paint, your head goes empty... and names, places and these things come to your mind. I named the following earldoms or hometowns for my knights:

• Blue : Bluewater
• Light Blue : Isenstein (Isen = old german for iron = Ironstone)
• Gray : Blyburg (= Bleiberg = Lead Mountain)
• Green : Greenwood
• Yellow : Löwenstein (=Lionstone)
• Red : Zornburg (Zorn = rage. A city located near to a volcano.)

And I can tell you, once the head is clear, and you can create new things, the fun comes back. Feels a bit like in the past when the genre was new: An "unknown country" that had to be discovered. A form of fascination that is coming back now. 

Now these earldoms have to be located somewhere on a map. And soldiers have to be attached to these Warlords.