Another small unit for Kings of War. Undead archers. Something I’d not even thought of until Marouda told me in no uncertain terms that she wanted some archers for her undead army, so I painted these suckers up.
The stars of this little show are obviously the single blister worth of Harlequin Miniatures Skeleton archers that I had sitting around from the early 1990s. The company either changed their name or sold most of their stuff to Black Tree Design years ago now. Not that it matters here. These figures are definitely on the very chunky, very heroic side of things, but they’re also very nice sculpts, and while they lack the fine detail of something like the Otherworld Skeletons or WGF’s plastics, there are no worries that these guys will easily break from normal game handling. They’re still available, it seems, but with just the three sculpts in the range, there’s little point in trying to make an entire unit or expand this one using them. For me at least in this day of easily available and reasonably-priced HIPS models, metals are great for individual sculpts and character, but I’ve largely moved beyond buying multiples of the same sculpt to make up units – at least when I can avoid it.
The Reaper Miniatures here are the Skeletal Archer figures from the 1st Bones campaign, and like the others that I’ve shown are good for roleplayers, kids, and unit filler. As usual, I’ve put the nice figures up front so the Bones aren’t as noticable. I also gave the unit early-1990’s style “redwood” bows, which both give the figures a splash of colour (it fits in with the army scheme) and draws the eye away a little from bad Reaper sculpts.




Looking very good! I like the sculpts… much better than the skeleton archers I have.
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Thanks! Those Harlequin figures are some of my favourites. Just a shame there aren’t more of them out there.
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I am surprised how well those metal skeletons work with the Bones ones. The bone colour is spot on and the red bows provide some good contrast. I can’t see it properly, but did you paint a red spot in the eye sockets?
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Keeping the palette pretty much identical and using the nicer figures in the front works as effective camouflage. 😉 A couple of the Harlequin skellies have a little “eyeball” (really a dot in their eye sockets. I painted those a pale greenish-blue, since the bows already provide a lot of red.
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Don’t know if you pledged it, but Bones II kickstarter contains more skeletons, and they’re more “characterful” (pieces of armor, clothes, etc.).
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Yep, I got the basic pledge with just a couple of the add-ons (since they seemed really random, with a couple of cool things each and then a lot of random filler). I haven’t had a chance to open them yet – hopefully on the Easter break I’ll have a proper chance.
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