Elves and Spiders and The Vulture Legion

I haven't posted much recently but I've painted a fir bit. I keep putting off posting things so that I can make each post a bit more interesting. So I've been putting things aside and now I have a whole bunch of stuff finished.

First! ~ I finished a box of Oathmark Elves. The unarmored/light elf box. These are great figures and I wish I had made all the armoured elves to be spearmen but I did some of them as archers. I would prefer to use these unarmoured figures for missile troops and keep the armoured figures as heavy infantry. But too late now, I have a mix of each. Maybe one more box of armoured and one more of unarmoured and I'll have enough elves to call them an army (at the moment I have enough to call them a pretty large warband).

I made them up as 16 archers (two lots of 8) and one group of 12 swordsmen/medium infantry (so I have two left overs). I made the banner with strips of thin plasti-card. I'm not really happy with the design or colour but it's okay. The shield devices are left over 15mm Macedonian shield decals.

A few weeks ago I painted a couple of giant spiders and a couple of days ago I painted some more. After the first few came out okay, I put out the word that I was after some more of these GW things and a friend from my club, Ants' had some spare figures on hand. Thank you very much! I've said it before: I am a hopeless arachnophobe and even half decent models of spiders scare the crap out of me. However, these figures don't. For some reason they look, to me, like stylized crabs and I'm okay with crabs.

So, I wanted something to act as cavalry to go with my orcs and these fit the bill perfectly. As it is the more I can get the better because I'll turn them into a nice big evil cavalry element. Goblins on wargs is so predictable nowadays.

And then... I painted more Granbretanian Vulture Legion figures. I did some previously and I've had a bunch of them sitting on my bench for a while. These figures are not easy to paint. They could be easy if you wanted to paint them all the same colour but I don't want that. I designed and sculpted these figures for Eureka a few years back and my concept for them was that they should look like Landsknecht mercenaries. In Moorcock's Hawkmoon books, from whence they originate, they are Muscovite mercenaries so the tip-of-the-hat to Landknecht seemed fitting. But it does make them bloody difficult to paint.

When they are put together they look really colourful and a bit crazy. But that's how they're supposed to look. I've got a bit more of a handle on how to approach painting them now which makes it easier. Instead of trying to batch paint them 6, 8 10 or 12 at a time they need to be done 2 or 3 at a time otherwise the individual colours get overwhelming and it's hard to keep up with what I've done and what I need to do.

Anyway, I now have 24 of them which is enough to fill 3 sabot bases or enough for 3 units of warriors for Saga ~ AoM. Whenever I can manage to get back to Eureka I'll see about getting more of these. At least enough to make up another few bases as well as a unit or two of their "flame lances" to add some ranged weapons to their ranks. 

Here they are ranked up on some sabot bases. I think they look better this way. One thing however; these figures are hefty and they make the sabot bases pretty heavy. If you just go by weight alone, then these guys mean real business!