Vikings? In Saga!?!

Nothing less than the sound of something that will make your opponents’ ears perk to take note… perhaps The Brown Note

Saga seems like a cool game. I buy into it and get stuck into my first big army project. It stall as I realize I have nobody to play against. I think for a while and conclude that I should paint a force and get a friend into it; this is all after getting myself a Kickstarter set of Amazons. I buy the Anglo-Dane box set, a supplemental sprue for extras and some other oddments to start on another army. This is a good thing until I hit “The Wall”.

Now I’m making my way through the backlog of stuff and going through projects is proving to be less of a problem as I get to the “ugly point” with figures which is essentially having only blocked in  colors. I realize that I tend to stop there and give up for a bit not caring that they have potential for better result. I honestly get irritated and disgusted with the results and myself until I get through a few other figures to the same point and then throw washes and highlights over the basic hue. Its here that I find my interest again as details start to re-emerge and I see what I loved about the figures to begin with.

I normally think that but this is different. I had no love for the simple models and looked to have a force ready for a friend. The thing I love most is the exploration of color. I did that to quite a degree with the Arabian Knights. I stepped into design work with freehand and transferred the experience of, what would otherwise be boring, foot troops to the Vikings and now to the Anglo-Danes.

Trollblood Base from P3 was my general color as there is still a whole pot of it from a previous commission I did. Its a rather nice color to me and I hope I can put it to more use in the future. Beyond that its all just support colors to have my “force” hue tie all the figures together and be something other than a medium hue of primary or secondary color.

The ornamentation of the figures will rely on Little Big Man Studios shield transfers and some sort of “embroidery” painted on the shirts. I might do something with the pants but I don’t want the figures to be too busy. I think that even the most hardcore paint detailer would have second thoughts on tartan and striped pants for Dark Age Irish. I have ideas that I’ll play around with later.

Here’s where I start to show off the things I meant to paint so long ago.

The XLBS award of the Golden Button on Sunday was definitely not expected. I am grateful for the recognition and I hope that it will be worth it in the eyes of people whogo through my projects. At present, much to Gerry’s consternation, I do keep quite a bit private. Yes, I am flattered he watches my privates hoping that one day I make them public. I have learned that one needs to arouse curiosity before exposing things to the world. Here is the sacred ground for the Anglo-Danes that I thought was better served just to get done so I could set it aside for Giftmas.

As the multibasing has worked so far to distinguish the leader from other figures I felt this was a good thing to continue. As this was a different set of Vikings I thought there needed to be a different air about it, not the “you owe coin” idea. In doing so I added a total of six (maybe seven?) varieties of tufts from Gamer Grass and Army Painter. I am definitely not a fan of the “Tiny” 2mm as they are way too damn small and took quite a bit of time to figure where I needed them and place. I do, however, need to buy more tufts from all that I ended up using.

In doing detail work I noticied it was a little bland so I decided to add some runic designs to make the figures more interesting from the player perspective. This is the impetus for the Lloyd shot as all the unarmored warriors got the same treatment. Owing to the fact that I made two units of slingers they both got different colors of flowers.

Using more of the Little Big Man Studios transfers, like all the last vikings shown, I had fun with the shields. Its pretty boring to have the same overall uniform for the 28mm scale figures so making the fronts more eye catching is fulfilling when looking at the tiny fighting men in the down time.

There will be one more piece to come with this all being a Saga Age of Magic project

The last touch to the starter set in order to make it viable for Age of Magic. You don’t get frost giants in regular Saga. This is from Reaper’s Bones SKU:44123 and stands about 60mm tall.