Soap Dodger's Kings of War.

Second time writing this so I will be brief.

I needed to plan the project so thought long and hard on what rank and file to play and decided on KOW. I think I may still do 28mm ancients and 6mm Napoleonic. KOW is also great as it’s miniatures agnostic.

My initial self-brief was to create an army with each model given as much attention as my skirmish models.

I set out finding an army and after much thought aa great freeing suggestion was made of the Nightstalkers. Good points are that the faction is a faction of nightmares leaving my scope open to do pretty much what I wanted. I don’t want a complete joke army like doing the Tory party and their followers. Little men, woman or things are serious business.

I dislike the official models, something on each of them I dislike strongly. That left me to find models I wanted. I started with Scarecrows. These seemed like a good unit you would have a lot of. Sadly, I looked at a few of the options and they were not really what I was looking for.

So, I thought, lets sculp 40 unique scarecrows with pumpkin heads. (You already scoffed but at this time I thought I could be bothered.

You have choices these days. like mediums of old you have digital or physical and different techniques. As it was probably about 1am and I couldn’t be bothered moving I started digitally.

I started with Blender. I had never really used this program much for making anything original. So, I thought it would be easy. I have previous experience in other programs, what could go wrong? I wanted something quick so spent 3 hours getting to grips making a pumpkin and my initial plan was to make 40 moulds of various pumpkins from a master friction cast in Sculpy and then stamp a face in it and clean it up.  I didn’t like the end result and could have stuck with it but if it took me 3 hours to do the first one it would have taken an eternity to do 40 and that’s without bodies.

I felt that blender was too mathematical for me. It removed a lot of the creativity added complexity, so I turned to a free browser based took and done something in 20 minutes. I was not happy with the results but hey it didn’t take 3 hours.

Then as I was falling asleep, I made something in about 3 minutes from a blob of white tack that I was happier with.

I thought I was set… I has also found 3d files for the bodies but was reluctant due to breakages.  https://www.myminifactory.com/object/3d-print-harrowhaunt-fryghtener-pack-163578

I thought I would give making the full thing a go through.

Idea was to have a sack as the body and use wood for the limbs. It looks Janky as I was trying to find the best fitting method and tries a different option on each limb. I think I could honestly finesse this. However, it was very fragile. So I may need to fill and cast it. This was turning into a job at this point and also the scale of the project needed more thought.

After rethinking I went ahead and just purchased and printed one of the scarecrows, I also got some ABS like resin to try which seemed on these models much better and more flexible. (It is, I like it but it’s not a silver bullet).

I still don’t like the cartoon heads. This is much more cartoony than I really wanted. But it did come with 5 sculpts and a variant of it with a cloak so that’s 10 sculpts and if I mirrored them that’s 20 unique sculpts meaning I would only have a duplicate two if I went with 40 for a hoard.

On my test model I initially thoughts let’s not use metallic paints and NMM all of them. This looked ok but was a bit jarring. Then though lets then use rust on them and this clashed. So ended up deciding on metallics. Also, the brown cape thing also clashed so moved the orange tones to there instead and made the wood greyer.

I went on and done the base as well. This was done from a scrap bit of wood. I wanted them in a field and after a few in progress changes I was pretty happy with that basing idea in the end.

So I had my first unit planned. During all of this I had also downloaded the free  getting started rules and setup my rough army list using easy army.

I then realised I had a lot more work to do to get a 2000-point list. This again scaled down my initial brief.

But at least I would get started!