The Warrior Protects

After I sculpted the saint's statue for Rusus, I did another one for myself:

The Warrior. He represents one of the aspects of the Faith of the Seven, the primary religion of George R. R. Martin's Westeros.
Funny little guy. Reminds me a bit of the figures of the "The Settlers" PC-games.

A Lannister Always Pays His Debts!

Centuries ago I promised Rusus to sculpt a little statue for his roadside shrine.
I nearly forgot this until yesterday, when I found a copy of the shrine.

Well, a Lannister pays his debts and I felt obliged not to dissapoint Rusus, so here it is:

The statue measures 10mm and is loosely based upon a statue of Elisabeth of Hungary which can be found in St. Elisabeth's Church in Marburg.

Hear Me Roar!

Inspired by these great Stark bannermen made by Frank Becker, I am hooked on the whole Ice and Fire topic and have given some thoughts to ASoIaF-themed Impetus dioramas.

My first intension was to paint parts of the Stormlands army of Robert Baratheon during his rebellion against the Targaryens. Meanwhile I will go for a rather all-purpose "army" consisting of some major houses which will be able to cover most battles from the Blackfire Rebellion to the War of the Usurper.

 After sorting my lead-chamber for fitting miniatures I found my old 5th. Ed. Bretonnians which will make great Westerosi knights. I painted one of them as a test-miniature, since most of my miniatures will consist of the Perry "Agincourt to Orleans" range but are still in the mail.

The miniature pictures a member of House Lannister. As I said, my army will consist of contingents of every great house, mixed with heroes of the Blackfire Rebellion and the War of the Usurper. This lord suits as Damon or Tywin Lannister and might be used in both periods. He is accompanied by a squire who carries a great wooden chest with unknown content. According to his posture and the fact that his master is a Lannister it's probably gold...

The miniature is based on 1,5mm plasticcard with the measurements 6x8cm which relates to Impetus Fantasticus hero basing. The paper pennant is adopted from Tankred's Feud of Kronberg cavalry.
The reason for using armour styles around 1400 is to be found in this letter from GRRM himself, which can be found in the "So Spake Martin" section of westeros.org. I actually will try to stay closer to the 15th century as the author himself did, but thats my personal preference.

Last but not least: The famous words of House Lannister, embroidered on the lord's crest.

Pimp My Cardboard Building - Part III

 I finally painted the buildings:

All in all I spent two evenings with this project, casually watching TV. To my mind a quite acceptable amount of work.

Pimp My Cardboard Building - Part II

The farm-house is next:

Again I started with the wooden parts. I cut some balsa stripes with 3mm thickness and remodelled the framework printed on the building. Of cours you could do this technique with evey other skeletal structure as well, but the printed surface of the cardboard helped me as a beginner to get used to the sizes and measures.

 The half timbered work was filled with Efaplast Light, an air drying modelling clay. You dont ncessarily need to use the light version. Classic or Terracotta would probably work as well, but this is what I normally use for basing my miniatures, so I had it at hand.

 Next I had to get rid of the chimney. I didn't like the position and wanted it to bit a bit smaller. I rolled out some of the Efaplast and let it become touch dry. I cut some bricks from this and masoned a new chimney from that. Wasn't even as hard as I thought. Maybe I'll try this method with castle walls some day...

 Last step: The roof was done with paperboard shingles.

 And done... Never thought terrain building could be that easy... Maybe the most anoing part is the roof, because it takes centuries to affix every single shingle, but I like the scattered look of it and that's probably worth it.

Pimp My Cardboard Building - Part I

I never built a lot of terrain for my games... Most times I use the tables of friends because my terrain building skills are really not that evolved...
So far I only painted some of the plastic ruins from the LotR Starter Boxes and built the cardboard houses from the 5th Edition Warhammer Starter Set which I found again last week, when clearing out the lumber room.

These buildings were no beauties, but I used them a long time, since I was not talented enough to build something on my own.
Forunately I found this article from graphixx at the German LotR forums. graphixx uses a simple but effective way of modifying cardboard models into great looking pieces of terrain.

I tried this method with the old houses and it proofed to be an ideal way even for terrain-no-skillers like me...

First, I worked on the shed. I simply glued some stripes of balsa wood to the walls. The printed surface of the paper model already tells you, how to do it.


For the broken door I added some hinges cut from plastic card.

The roof was made from thin cardboard (I used the wrapping of some chocolates...).


Done...