Medieval Archers (for FROSTGRAVE and Mordheim)

Happy (almost) Christmas dear readers!!

Well with the festive season in full swing and my recent commission for Osprey Games (FROSTGRAVE) complete I decided to celebrate by continuing with one of my own projects. If you remember a few months ago prior to my hiatus I was painting up some small units of Normans, well I have wanted to get back to these for a while and so I made the decision to give each of these two groups some ranged firepower.

FROSTGRAVE: Necromancer and Warband

Well last week I posted photos of the 'good guy' FROSTGRAVE warband that I had painted up as part of a commission for Osprey publishing; which means that this week it's clearly the turn of the baddies!

The second warband Joe and the FROSTGRAVE team asked me to paint was for an Evil Necromancer and his band of miscreants.

The Necromancer and his apprentice were metal miniatures from the FROSTGRAVE range, whilst the rest of the group were drawn from the Cultists box set produced by North Star.

Here we have the evil Necromancer in the midst of casting a wicked spell, assisted by his apprentice who wields a tome of unspeakable magic!

Official FROSTGRAVE Warband

As regular readers of this blog may know I was commissioned earlier this year by the author of the award winning game FROSTGRAVE to paint some figures for his ongoing project (the game continues to go from strength to strength)!

Joe (the aforementioned author) tasked me to paint up two full warbands for use with game system. It has been a long project (thanks to house moves and promotions at work during the intervening period) but I have finally managed to get this models completed!

I will do a post for each of the warbands, so first up we have the 'goodies' consisting of an Enchanter, his apprentice, assorted soldiers and a wood construct/golem.

New 6x4 gaming table... For less than £20

Well now I'm settled into my new home the time has come to set up some new games boards for battling in the far future.

Usually I play the majority of my games on a 6x4 table or smaller so it was this size of gaming board that I needed. Now as most of you gamers know most modern kitchen tables are annoyingly not the correct size for war games. It seems that for some crazy reason furniture manufacturers insist on designing tables for families to eat meals on rather than for grown men to push vast armies of toy soldiers around...madness.

Hence the need for the creation of sufficient game boards to extend this meagre table into something approaching a decent surface area for gaming on.

MAN CAVE ALERT - New Hobby Home

Well as you have probably noticed I have unfortunately been absent from the blog for the past few months, something for which I must profusely apologise! This hiatus has been due to a variety of external factors including undertaking some pretty horrendous professional exams at work as well as spending time working on my forthcoming rulebook for Osprey Wargames (I am so excited about getting this published!)

However the biggest cause of my AWOL status has been down to the fact that my wonderful partner (who many of you have met at Oldhammer Day and other events) and I have finally managed to buy a house! That's right, after years of saving we are officially homeowners.

Needless to say whilst the purchasing of a new house has been tremendously exciting... the moving process has been far more emotional. I have spent many, many hours crawling around with a sealant gun in our new bathroom and kicking the sh*t out of flat-pack furniture that simply refuses to look anything like it did on the website. For a man that can assemble and paint models to a fairly good standard I am horrified to admit that this talent doesn't stretch to Argos wardrobes or IKEA couches!

However....finally it has all come together and our new home is good to go!

One of the benefits of having such a hobby-friendly partner is that she understands how important that this little past-time of mine is to me, in fact she is so supportive that she has let me have a dedicated 'man cave' for hobby activities in our new house!

Thus one of our spare bedrooms has been magically morphed into a GW store from about 1991!