I had a form of “painter’s block” for awhile – partly because work has been incredibly full-on for the past …3? months and just increasing, and partly because painting the Mantic Ogre Shooters was such an un-fun experience that I really haven’t been incredibly keen on revisiting it.

Same colour scheme and steps as last time, with the slight difference of going with muted red tabards this time. If I do a third set, I’ll either go green, blue-and-white, red-and-white, or most likely, blue-and-red. 

Here’s the second unit of Crossbowmen, WIP:

Hot water assembly and bending of parts (straightened up the central guy’s stance a little with widened feet), some GW 40mm bases and a shot of Army Painter grey. The amphora-style jugs came from some dollhouse accessory seller on eBay for a couple of dollars – they’re here to represent the magic item “Jar of the Four Winds” which in the context of Ogres is clearly going to mean some kind of magically-imbued alcoholic beverage.

With some base colours and washes added, they start to take shape. You might notice that the head on the middle guy isn’t a Mantic head and is in fact an Ogre Kingdoms head – it’s one of the very smallest of those, and while slightly larger than the Mantic ones, not excessively so – especially since the Mantic Ogres are a bit disproportionate across their various body parts anyway in a Johnny Bravo kinda way.

As they are now. The brass/gold trim on their weapons obviously needs to be toned down, their armour needs a slight highlight, and the skin is barely and very roughly basecoated. I’m trying a bit of an experiment on the Jars, which I’ll show in more detail once it either fails miserably or works decently.

…and the second unit of Blunderbusses, WIP:

Because these sculpts rapidly become – let’s face it – boring when you need to paint a bunch of them (6 of each is already too many for my sanity) I tried to make this unit a bit distinctive and different from the first Blunderbuss troop. I did this by changing the pose of the leader, and adding a shield in his off-hand. I originally had pictured him to be holding one of the Jars of the four winds with his other hand (which is doable with some kitbashing) but then it turned out that the crossbow unit were the ones getting boozed up. So he got a shield instead.

So after I’d assembled the leader, I needed to work out which head to give him. Since the GW Ogre Kingdoms head had worked okay on the crossbowman, I found another couple of heads that might work, and gave the less impressive of the two helmeted heads to this guy, saving the better one for another model down the line. It still works, and makes him a bit more imposing than his peers.

After all that, and just before undercoating them, I had the idea of adding a couple of small shields to the grunts. I pictured the perfect small metal buckler that I remembered was in my bits box. It took me about 30 minutes to dig around and find it, and I wasn’t even sure if I still had it. I have no idea where it came from, but it worked just fine for the leftmost Ogre’s forearm. I then poked about until I found something suitable for the last guy, and ironically, it came from some OK bits I’d picked up off eBay almost randomly a year or two ago. Now all three had shields, and their boss, a helmet with a slightly more interesting (less boring?) pose.

Obviously the brass on their weapons looks hideous right now, but as stated, it’s not finished. But let’s face it, while I want these guys to look good, they’re not going to be competition pieces – they’re going to be tabletop wargame models. And being some of many, many pretty-much identical Mantic restic Ogre models that I have, they’re not going to get the same love, care and affection that my old individual Jes Goodwin metals do. Still, I’m basically happy with the way they’re coming along. And once they’re finished, I can start working on the fun stuff. You see, I’m holding the real cool and fun stuff hostage to finishing off these guys.