Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Painting chart, Army theme, Characters and Tank names.



I finally got around to making a painting chart (Big props to Admiral Drax for this idea.) Putting it on "paper" like this was great to see how my force lines up. It also shows my build options. As you can see I don't have many basic guardsmen (riflmen) left. So building a traditional guard force is not a viable option. Sure I could probably build one full platoon. Then what, lots of heavy weapon and special weapon teams. Nah, I like the elite guardsmen route the army has taken.

This left me with quite a few heavy weapons and crew to spare. I mean, I'm not going to put one mortar in a veteran squad, so what am I going to do with all these crews? You can see what I did on the painting chart. They got drafted to be either carry a vox or a demo charge. The mortar crews are a good example of this I use the loader as a Demo charge guy, easily spotable. The gunner's "trigger device", looks like an oversided cell phone / walkie talkie that a vox caster would use to communicate, the lascannon gunners have the same "trigger device" so the vox guys have a similar look.

The theme of the army is BS4. With the preferred special weapon being the sniper rifle, and the preferred heavy weapon being the lascannon. I've added demo charges here and there to slow the advance. I could add one to all 6 veteran squad if needed as I have the spare mortar loaders.

I've added many of the named characters from the Sharpe series, and linked them with named character that best fits their style. I have "Inquisitor" Lord Wellington with his mystic command staff, not for the anti-deep strike...well that helps. But the Inquisitor Lord allows me to take a Vindicare assassin and call him, Rifleman Daniel Hagman. Those that know the series, know why Hagman has to be a Vindicare and not just another veteran with a sniper rifle.

Then there are the Tanks. It was hard to justify fitting Leman Russes into a Napoleonic themed guard army. I was thinking, maybe I could tie in the British Navy and treat the tanks like Ships of the Line. That lead me to using Knight commander Pask as Horatio Hornblower, and naming all of the armor in the force after ships that Hornblower commanded in his stories. Hornblower is currently in a basic LRBT, but will be moving over to the Executioner once I get it assembled and painted.

That just leaves how I named of the Valkyrie, but I'll save that story for another day. Though most of you will be able to figure it out.

Thanks for reading...

Thursday, May 20, 2010

Harker to Harper with Greenstuff


So some of you may not know who Sgt. Major Patrick Harper is...

From Wikipedia...
Harper is a large, fierce-seeming man from Donegal, Ireland. He joined the 95th Rifle Regiment as a rifleman. Harper and Richard Sharpe are enemies initially, but Harper becomes Sharpe's best friend and most reliable companion, rising in rank to sergeant and later to regimental sergeant-major. Along with Sharpe he is one of the principal protagonists of the series, and appears in most of the books.

As in an earlier entry I said I would be using the Harker stats to represent Harper. To see Harper in action... head about 3 minutes in and enjoy the rest. You get to see Harper and Sharpe do their stuff...note the multibarrel gun that Harper uses.



Anyway...I finally got some greenstuff, and converted my Harker mini to a Harper mini. I had to sacrifice an old commisar minii for the Epaulettes, I really liked that mini, but it was worth it. Plus there will never be a commisar in the 95th (Sharpe would kill them before they layed a hand on one of his Sgts.)

This was my first go at this amount of greenstuff. The camera really shows what my eyes couldn't make out for mistakes. I'll be going back and touching him up, but for a first try I think he came out OK.

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That's all for now...

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Found my Sharpe.

So after a year of looking I finally chose the mini I will use to represent Sharpe, for my Commanding officer. Turns out he was right under my nose all along.

I went back to the guard page on the GW site just to look around and I saw him.

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Figure I will paint him up to look like this...
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Still undecided if I will take the head off and replace with a Boromir head from their LOTR line. I probably won't due that, do to the goatee on all the Boromir figs.

Sharpe at times wore a great coat, but it was always muddy/dirty, so I'm not sure I will want my commanding officer looking like this...
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I'll be using the following website to assist my painting to be sure I get the colors right.
http://seanbeanonline.net/compendium/uniforms.html

And on a side note I have begun to assemble the Valkyrie. The paint scheme I plan to do for that is a story for another day.

That's all for now...