Sylvanian Village (November Pledge)

We'll kick off this evening with a commission job for one of my regular opponents. He wanted a Warhammer village for an upcoming 10,000(!) point game he's having. I was happy to oblige, though I didn't realise how much of the months (as it turned out, limited) free time it would absorb.

The request was for one Manor house and five huts, but as you can see he ended up with an extra building, after all what is a village without a pub? Or in this case a 'Gasthoff'. Most of the construction is foamboard, but the roofs are layers of card. The addition of a handful of plastic parts from the GW buildings sets finished the models off.

Painting was simple, building up exaggerated layers of drybrush, applied with a half inch brush no less!. Final detailing was done with regular brushes. According to the army book fluff Sylvanian villages protect their homes by daubing protective hexes on and around the doors, in pigs blood. Quite how putting blood on your house is supposed to keep Ghouls, Zombies and Vampires away is beyond me. Still I added such detail.

A Napoleonic soldier gives a sense of scale.

And so if those were the main effort of the month, I must be about to inform you of the pledge progress. It was a month of mainly terrain painting, with only a handful of actual figures being completed. The specifics:

• Improved trenches: 20
• Improved Russian/Finnish village: 10
• 6 Centaurs: 12
• 2 Dogs of War Commanders: 2
• Napoleonic wagon: 5
• 3 Guarde Chasseurs Aux Cheval: 6
• Gothic Village (above): 40

So that's 91 points to add to the running total to break the thousand mark, just. 1002 points. But I am aware that it is actually less than a dozen models, not so good. I assure you that I will make amens for that in December somehow.

A first drive towards that being the assembly of most of my Kings of War undead. Here we see the Zombies, great though not perfect models, the ball joints allow for a lot of posing but are ill fitting to say the least, putty would be of great value to those bothered by gaps.

The three leg poses can be swapped with those of the ghouls however to add variety, and I found it was an easy job to hack arms off to swap amongst models for more variation. Hence most of the lunging torsos were changed.

As a unit with only a few rags for clothes and a handful of weapons these should take no time to paint. I also assembled a horde of 40 Skeletons; as a spear armed Phalanx:

Note the undead dogs to the front looking for bones to gnaw on, yum. Time will tell how long these take to do.

Lastly, I'm changing the pledge again for 2011; this year, especially in the last few months I've been buying too much stuff and need to clear some of it out. But also I want to do some quality rather than quantity work, in some new theatres to boot. More details in coming posts...