Fighting Black Dogs with 10mm

Earlier this month I did my annual charity 24 hour video gaming stream for the Edinburgh Children’s Hospital and it was glorious. The plan was to try and play through all three Mass Effect games in one sitting and while I still think it is possible, I only got to the end of the second game in 24 hours. Anyone who had donated more than £25 had the chance to make a rule for the playthrough and the chat and I were having so much fun at the frankly stupid way the game was going that I agreed to an extra 12 hour stream the following weekend to finish our story. All told, over both streams, I raised £800 which is a personal record and the event itself netted >£20k for the charity (donation matching from Rockstar Games meant they are now getting >£40k to go towards the fantastic work they do). It was criminally fun and I wouldn’t change it for the world.

However I have a very shallow cup of energy these days and back to back weekends of streaming on top of work etc left me absolutely destroyed. The kind of burnt out when for no reason you end up in tears eating your breakfast. Maybe it’s just me.

Anyway, knowing that I needed something to get me through the days, I cracked into the stash and divided the job into a few evenings of work. Something that when I got in from work I could courie into while watching some comfort tv (or comfort youtube in my case)

So here we have a unit of shooters, a command base and a base of druids. I couldn’t be bothered digging out a round/square base for them so I just stuck them on the same 20x40mm as the rest of the army.

The line from Pendraken are great but I don’t like how many spears down models you get in the warrior pack so I’ve been on the hunt for alternative models. That’s why I tried the Copplestone ones last batch. Recently I found that Kallistra carry a line almost identical to the Pendraken ones. Clearly done by the same sculptor but with slight differences. Most importantly their warrior boxes don’t have any spear down miniatures. They also do a deal of 6 boxes for the price of 5 (£30). October’s hobby budget went to add in new warrior stands and some fun extras, rounding out the army. I also threw in a bag of Confederates for the early planning stages of 2022 project plans.

Thanks to the Weekender OTTers for the golden button last month. It brought a wee smile to my face watching the show.

This big batch of warriors is roughly 50/50 Pendraken and Copplestone Castings. I only picked up two of the Copplestone boxes because they looked a bit slighter on the website. Sure enough, they don’t exactly fit. I tested the idea of mixing them in together but it looked much better to just keep them separate. The Copplestone ones are lovely models though, more delicate sculpts.

List of paints:

Skin – Kislev Flesh
Chaimail, spear tips – Army Painter Gun Metal
Cloth – Mephiston Red
Boots, wood and leather bags – Vallejo Charred Brown
Belt buckles and misc metallic details – Retributor Armour
Wash – Agrax Earthshade

By this stage, I’ve been painting these for maybe five weeks. It’s been a thoroughly enjoyable break from what I’ve done before. I’ve still got a command group, some wizards and one or two sets of shooters in the stash but I’m reluctant to dig into them too quickly. I’ve got other things that I feel more up to painting now and truthfully I can’t afford to buy them at the rate I’m painting them ? I think I’m going to try and keep some in the cupboard at all times and I’ll add to the project when I work on more.

…I might already be window shopping for a second army too. Maybe for Christmas ?

As I was starting to write up this project, this appeared in my Youtube subscription box. These dwarves definitely come under the “easy productivity” category. Worth ten minutes of your time.

The second order Pendraken contained more warriors, some shooters, noble riders, command and wizards and some cannons. Within days of coming in, the first couple of bags were being worked on.

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.