Zebraoutrider lets slip the Dogs of War

Another of my mini projects in the Spring Clean Challenge 2023 and my continuing rehabilitation from the depths of despair to a new sense of normality. This time it’s the resurrection, repaint and rebasing of a couple of units of GW Dogs of War units that have literally sat on a shelf collecting dust for the past five to six years. My plan is to get them back into a decent state to so that they can join the ranks of my Army of the Free People.

First up, we have 30 pikemen from the Alcatani Fellowship. However, call me eccentric or simply weird but I didn’t want to simply copy the colour scheme of the Alcatani troopers when I first started the unit 18 years ago and decided I’d create a new Dogs of War unit from Tilea known as the ‘Pikemen of Pugno’ with a blue rather than red theme. I never finished the unit properly! I never got round to drawing and painting the freehand standard either…

One reason they ended up shelved was that the Dogs of War range fell out of favour with GW and disappeared from their stores post the Lustria campaigns and as with many great GW minis ended up as prey for the auction-site scalpers and their exorbitant prices (they still are!) so my plan to create a huge pikeman army collapsed.

It seems a shame to keep them shelved and as I very much like the sculpts from the Perry Twins, so now is the opportunity to give them some proper TLC?

NOTE: THEY ARE NOT FOR SALE. THEY HAVE ALREADY FOUND A GOOD HOME! ?

Another big problem with these particular miniatures is that individually they simply keep falling over despite resting in a customised movement tray, so my plan now is to carefully remove them from their current 20mm square bases and remount them on larger bases (x4 per base – either 40mm or 50mm bases).