Fighting Black Dogs with 10mm

Many moons ago I bought some 10mm dwarves from Pendraken because I’d never painted anything smaller than 28mm. I had this plan that they would get painted up as the Grand Armee of Khaz Modan. Highly unlikely to ever be played, 10mm just isn’t a scale most people here bother with but I like the look of vast armies and it was a reasonably priced way to do it.

Then they went into the cupboard whilst I worked on the Paint it or Punt it project.

As with 2020 and 2019 and 2018 and... For a while now, I’ve struggled with depression and the black dog likes to come round for periods and shit all over my motivation. I usually down the paint brush for months on end but this year I decided instead to just walk away from the projects and paint something that didn’t have any purpose.

Fetching the envelope from the stash, pulling out the very pleasing little bags and giving them all a quick soapy bath was in and of itself a relaxing little thing to do. Sitting down that first night, putting Time Team on in the background, cleaning flash and gluing them onto tongue depressors quieted the old noggin. So much so that I brush primed and gave everything a black wash the same night, working longer on them than I had anything else in weeks.

Now, given they were meant to be from Khaz Modan, I went looking for art. Most of the Ironforge Guard colour scheme is heavy metal armour with little bits of orange or red. I wanted a bright colour to be the dominant one here so went with red.

Base colours were limited, then a wash with Agrax over everything. Not a necessary step but I really wanted this army to pop on the tabletop so I went back and highlighted the red all over and a bit of skin tone on the noses, foreheads and hands (if they were front facing).

Basing was designed to look like the ground around the Ironforge; a mix of greys with a homemade snow paste (glue and two types of snow flock).

For a few evenings work, and most importantly, a few evenings of my mind quieting and actually enjoying something, this was an amazing little collection. There is some detail but not a lot. Sometimes the amount of detail at 28mm, especially on computer modeled minis, can be overwhelming.

Now I need to confess… the first photo is not of the first order. It’s of the second one which I ordered immediately after finishing this lot.