Defenders of the Tavern - Kings of War Dwarfs

The concept was nailed down, bases were almost finished, furniture and accessories were ready to go, so all that left, was grey minis…lots and lots of grey minis.

Now as I’ve harped on about it several times already, you may remember that this was a Skull Pass model repurposing exercise which meant I already had some models painted from that set: 10 Thunderers, 8 Miners, a canon and 6 Warriors to be precise, which meant I already had the beginnings of a colour scheme. I didn’t want to strip them again, (they’d been through the Dettol twice already since I bought Battle for Skull Pass in 2009), so I decided to take the most dominant colour I’d done so far and make that the main theme. Therefore, the green of the Dwarf Thunderers became the colour that was to appear in some form or other the most.
Dwarf Warriors got the green on their shields, I did the Sharpshooters in multiple shades of green, (I like the ranger look), Berzerkers got some of their loincloths green and the Bulwarkers got green shields too. I even washed the Earth Elemental with a green shade to give them a hint of it before adding green grass tufts between their rock plates.

As the paint began to flow, I was still concerned about how I could satisfactorily have animals in my tavern. Also, the nature of the Earth Elementals meant that they had part of a log attached to their foot to raise their leg, and also my Ram mounts that were to be Berzerker Brock had baseplates attached to a couple of the rearing up goats.  That meant I was going to need to find a way to blend or camouflage the point where those bases met the flagstone floors. It took a day or two, but it finally dawned on me…straw! Anything that wasn’t a Dwarf, could have been bedding down in an annex of the tavern. Almost like a stable, or a cellar that might also have barrels of booze in it.
That was decided then, I could disguise the floor connection points of some of these models by having them standing in straw, and at the same time, it provided a visual aid for why they were where they were. I got busy cutting the bristles off a floor brush and started to PVA them to the bases.
I finally had all the components in place, I was happy with the overall look, and once I’d painted up a couple of bar maids, Pinky and Bluey, a few tavern drunks and even some tankards of ale to scatter about the place I was ready to stick it all together…