Yup, the last two characters of my night goblin army are done. Just squigs and artillery now stand between me and 2500 points of black cowled nutters. Nice! Respectively these two are one of the few remaining GW big bosses and an Avatars of War model called Skrig Dwarfmocker. A name so brilliant I am nicking it wholesale. Skrig is a wannabe boss, a buffoon who nonetheless sees himself as important and apes the Dwarfs that all Night Goblins hate in an effort to become as hard as they are. Sadly, Gobbos do not make disciplined shieldbearers and so Skrig's life is a series of embarrassing falls, recriminations and mild head trauma. Still, at least there's always a big shield handy when the going gets pointy. By contrast his colleague Bodgit Bonebreaker is that most dangerous of creatures: a quiet, clever, insanely violent goblin. He claims to have fought with Skarsnik below Karak Eight Peaks and from the collection of Dwarf scalps, skulls and beards he displays he might be right. Or he could have tripped over a picnicking Dwarf family and slaughtered them for trophies, who can tell? Regardless, of all the underlings in the horde, Rhagat has his eye on Bodgit as the most likely to challenge for leadership. Bodgit's taciturn countenance though is giving nothing of his plans away. Rhagat will have to sleep with one eye open...
We'll Start the painting talk with Bodgit as he is just splendid. One of my favourite goblin models, there's just such an air of menace about him with the tiny comedy touch of the pointy helmet poking through the tented hood to make him "goblin". The trophy rack also helps him stand out from the herd of ordinary gobbos. Painting started with the usual block-in-each-bit-of-cloth-a-different-dark-colour method, in this case Val German Camo Black-Brown and German Grey. Regular readers will not in any way be surprised by those choices, they're my go-to for black. :) Frankly, the method proceeds exactly the same as for the normal gobbos from the link. I just add extra highlight layers. The wolf pelt on his shoulders was Stormvermin Fur washed black and drybrushed with Longbeard Grey. Makes a nice natural mid-grey wolf tone. The skull with hair gave me pause for a little while, skulls don't keep their hair y'know. But after a while I realised I could paint the upper part of the skull as decomposing skin, as though from a badly preserved shrunken head. Eventually the scalp will part company with the skull and so will the hair, for now. Still Timotai Zombie. For reference, the bearded skull is just a severed beard stuffed into the skull to keep it on the pole so works perfectly.
Loved painting him. Worked a treat. Then...
I really, really wanted to love this model, I really did, the character of the piece is wonderful. I think it's great when alternative providers rock up and hate having to tear into them when they get it wrong. I'll be as gentle as I can. When you go to Avatars of War's shop they are still showing the green sculpt, not a finished, painted model. I now know why. You don't get the green from the cast. I don't know if it is a sculpting, cutting, moulding or casting failure but somewhere along the line it went wrong. The shield is not a nice dwarf ancestor head but an almost smooth thing that looks more like an Averland sunburst than a Dwarf device. The "knotwork" border isn't knotwork, the lines never cross but just waggle up and down one on top of the other. Oh, and change thickness around the border. The head is cut from the body to leave no neck, you need to sculpt one in. The arms attach badly, the fabric looks like lumps of green-stuff not cloth (from the only angle they don't show you on the store)... yeah. I'm stopping there. Functionally, there is nothing too wrong with the model. It oozes character and is a great concept. I just wish that AoW had taken the extra care to make it's quality match it's concept. I was disappointed to say the least.
All that being said, I did my best with the painting to minimise the problems with the shield. Ended up painting it Stormbourne colours with lots of rusty paint on top to give it some age, couldn't do too much chipping as that would draw attention to the design rather than diminish it. The rest of him was Standard Goblin with the addition of the shiny shiny crown slipping over his eye to draw the eye to the actually quite nice face. The torn, raggedy suit of chainmail under his robes is a nice touch too. He's going to make a cracking buffoonish boss but doesn't have the quality to be an army general. Never mind.
As I mentioned earlier, I'm now getting scarily close to completing phase 2 of the project. I've got all but seven squigs and hoppers sourced for the big unit of Deep Road Toads (mixing hoppers with regular squigs because awesome and variety). I've got three Roman Scorpion bolt throwers from Warlord Games that are going to get a mild goblin-ing and some converted crew and am in the process of scratch building the rock lobbers. I'm going to have one operated by the Skull Pass troll like the old Warmaster one but with the extra detail that 28mm scale can bring over 10mm. After that, probably a few more Dwarfs to finish off the Stormbournes:
Then I'm free and clear for the Rivver Pikeys and Averland Empire. Feels weird coming to the end of such vast projects. The Dwarfs are close on 5k, the Night and Spider gobbos together are 3.5k. These are not tiny projects! But that's all for today.
TTFN
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