ByronM - Burrows & Badgers

 Today's second entry is one that I have been looking forward to for a while.  I happened across this game last year and picked up a bunch of the figures as the game looked like fun and the miniatures even more so!  I mean, which of us didn't grow up reading Wind in the Willows, watching Disney's Robin Hood, or watching way too many Saturday morning cartoons with anthropomorphic animals in them?  Seeing these bits of memory from childhood turned into a wargame fills me with memories and was way too much fun to pass up.

I wanted to paint them up as soon as I got them, but set them aside for the challenge and for new glasses so that I could attempt to do justice to them.  Having got my new glasses mid-December, and having booked holidays from late December through mid January, the time was right to spend way too much time painting these lovely little miniatures, so without further ado here is the first batch of my Burrows & Badgers collection.

This is the first of the base warband sets, which includes Shrew-zerker, a mouse nun, a squirrel archer, a rabbit archer, a barn swallow scout, and an otter pirate as the leader.  Quite an interesting mix of characters which will form the core of my rogue force.

I painted all of these miniatures as one offs, meaning by them selves and not in bulk with others.  This allowed me to focus on each one and give it its own character and look.  As an added bonus because I had such an interest in these figures I spend a bunch of time on each one (thanks to having the last few weeks off since the challenge started) and as a result I am actually really happy with them all, which for me is not very common as I am often my harshest critic.  I am super thrilled with the look of all of these figures and am only disappointed that I can not get around to the terrain that I printed up to go with them while the challenge is on, due to Curt dropping terrain from the challenge this year :-(  Oh well, I will get it done once the challenge is over.

This is the second of the base warband sets which includes 2 mouse (mice?) knights, a squirrel caster, a serpent caster, a weasel archer, and a rabbit knight.  These will form the core of my Royalist faction.

To not bore anyone with pictures of each figure separately, here are just a few of the ones that I really like how they came out.  First is the squirrel witch, and I think her red brown colouration really looks good against her green forest cloak.

Next up is the ferret crossbowman, which reminds me of the archers in the Disney Robin Hood cartoon. I know they were not ferrets in there, I think they were wolves or something, but it still makes me think of the show and I think he would fit right in there.

Technically, this one is supposed to be a sparrow, but while looking up picture of birds to go from for colours I saw a picture of a barn swallow and liked the blue and tan colouration so decided to go with that instead.  In person the blue really pops and makes the model stand out.

I still have about a dozen more models to paint up for this game, but will probably do them piece meal over the challenge, but I promise to put them all together for one big group shot at the end.  At some point I will need to go back and add some more basing elements to the rouge faction models as I 3d printed the ferns and plants for the loyalist models a while back and have since misplaced the files for them, so could not print up more.  That will be rectified shortly.

Overall there are 12 models here, but the shrew-zerker was submitted earlier in another post so only 11 count towards my points here, so 55 points (unless some of the bigger ones class as a different scale as they are quite big on 40mm bases).

ByronM - Germans & Jellyfish??

 For my 1st post of the day I submit for your amazement and wonder Germans & Jellyfish.  I know, they make a very strange combination post, but that is part of the fun with the challenge coming up with some strange bedfellows.

The Jellyfish warriors are part of a project that has sat in limbo for years, a Wrath of Kings force or sea warriors.  These Jellyfish come from an undersea kingdom that has all sorts of sea creatures anthropomorphized into humanoid type warriors.  If I get around to them later in the challenge you may see shark, fish, whale, and crab people from this faction, but no promises as they are pretty far down the queue.  I had to get these warriors done though as I did the unit leader a few years ago for a theme entry and he has sat without his squad in my case since then.

These were a lot of fun to paint, as they are a very different colour and shape than most models.  However it showed me very quickly how my painting has dropped off after 2 years of not painting much, as try as I might I could not get them to the same painting quality of the captain that I painted a few years ago.  They are still ok, but not the same.

Next up are 20 more germans from my old second edition Bolt Action set, which I must have bought an extra box of since looking at the core box set it said it only came with 10 and a half-track, but I still have 10 more after this to paint up, so not sure how or why I ended up with 40, but it's all good.

These were done quick and fast to just get them on the table after all these years hiding in a box, so nothing fancy.  10 more to go and then I will need to find some civilian models to make up the Van Trapp family so they can hunt them down across the fields :-)