Evilstu's Fantasy Progress 2020

Was looking at my ‘placeholder’ beastman hero (I’ve pretty much resigned myself to the need to do an order to Avatars of War for some of their character models in the coming months so will get a beastmen leader then…) and lamenting his lack of a great weapon. The ‘sword and board’ armaments made him look more sylvan than bestial. So I got the idea of getting a great weapon and slinging it along his shoulder to make him look a little more primal. Couldn’t find anything appropriate in the bits box (this mini is probably 40mm tall…) so thought of using a barbecue skewer chopped down to size and gluing some axe blades on either side of one end to make a double handed axe. naturally I was struggling to find axe blades big enough until I remembered what was always a reliable source of oversized blade weapons and clipped some form some space orks sprues. Trimmed the back of one of the axe heads down so it was flat and then glued the second blade along the flat edge with plastic glue. Then went to glue on a handle. Sized the weapon along the characters back and realised it would just get caught in his antlers (curse my stupid lack of a suspension of disbelief in fantasy gaming…).

…And then I changed my mind.

Thought I would put the great weapon in his left hand instead and have his shield strapped over. Regrettably on investigation the shield was held in the hand and too far down the arm to look believable. Just wasn’t going to happen.

…And then I changed my mind.

If the mini couldn’t have a great weapon, then  ‘Maybe I could just glue skulls to the base to make it look grimdark…’ i smirked to myself. Am quite sure I have a bunch of sprue skulls scattered about the place but wasn’t going to go rummaging (am going to start setting them aside in a jar or ziplock bag from now on though…) so had a look on  my workbench at the big pile of ‘parts that fell on the floor under my workbench when I was assembling a miniature and couldn’t find and then found three weeks later when I was looking for a part I dropped just now for an unrelated miniature’. Plenty of spare heads but no skulls. There were however three of the large monstrous skulls from the 6th ed beastmen kit to use as banner toppers, so I decided to get a couple of those, glue them on barbecue skewers and affix then to the back of the model crossed over one another, as though the character was standing in front of, or defending, some sacred ritual grove. Sorted.

…And then I changed my mind.

Saw I also had a metal Khorne Bestigor banner which was likely not going to get used (at least for the foreseeable future) so determined to glue this one on to a cocktail stick as well and add between the other two markers, which were now no longer going to be crossed over. So mixed up a big block of brownstuff (the excess of which went on filling gaps in the resin steam tank), filled in the base and glued on the parts. The hero could now act as a warband leader until such time as I had obtained a more appropriate mini, at which time he would be moved sideways to become a battle standard bearer.

So a bit of an iterative process but reasonably happy with where I landed.