My next batch of models are a set that I started over 10 years ago. I distinctly recall sitting on the floor of the lounge room of Howard Street, assembling these models and trying to cut off some of the extra protuberences of their horns to make them look less… well.. shit.

The plan at the time, was to use them as Warg Proxies in Lord of the Rings SBG. (now Middle-Earth SBG). As I’d long left WHFB behind, and KoW’s rules were only a pamphlet in a box of disappointing plastic Orcs and Elves at this point in time.

I had then intended to use my can of what we called “the dip”. Something I’d used on a small group of Tyranids in our previous rental in Carlyle with the assistance of a hand drill. Just paint in the base colours and the dip would take care of everything else, bar the final matt spraydown and basing.

For whatever reason, I got distracted and that never happened. Instead, these models got loaded into a KR Multicase and came along to the next stop and then… nothing for almost a decade. I guess I must have taken them out and based them at some point, but it wasn’t until recently when I accidently found them again in that case and decided that I should finish painting them.

Completing these models at this stage was then just a matter of knucking down wih the “get’er’done” mentality and powering through them. Individually they’re nothing special, but they look reasonably good as a group – which is the point of them, really.

When I found them I did decide that the upcoming (at the time) Monster March would be the ideal bit of motivation to get them done, since Swordmaster is always quite flexible in his approach, and every year someone is painting a regiment for WHFB/9th Age or Kings of War. Here Berkeley provides scale – I figure a bunch of 40mm-based critters composed of spikes, teeth and claws that are twice the heft of a human should count as monsters, right?

At this point, I’m very unlikely to use them as Wargs, as I now have a whole bunch of actual Warg models – so they’ll instead be used to bump up my slowly-growing Beastmen warband – either for skirmish games, AoS, or (eventually) a KoW “The Herd” army (once added to a MDF multibase rectangle or three). As such they also count toward my broader painting goals for 2023!

I do have some metal Chaos Hounds to get painted eventually. They’ll require a bit more work to rebase onto something other than the old-school ugly rectangular horse bases they’re on right now, so not something I’ll be working on anytime soon…