Teasers For Things To Come In 2013

It's been a while since any real update on what's in the pipeline and I'm not going to give you one now. Instead, I'll just show you a couple teasers and be done with it. Oh, and there is now a new facebook page where you can also follow updates.

Can you guess what these are?

And this?

This should be fairly obvious (painted figure for scale)...

I've also been playing around a bit more myself and completed the second member of the stretcherbearer team and added some bits that offer the option to use them as an ammo/petard team instead. We'll see if it looks halfway decent when it's moulded (if it doesn't, they'll stay in my personal collection).

Some heads to go with them. Only the best will go on to be turned into metal.

And I've finished mister twohands here (after tearing off parts of it more times than I can remember in order to start over) or at least got him close enough to stop fiddling with him. He'll get two optional weapon tops that will be spear and halberd, though he should look good with one of the dwarf standards as well.

Dwarf Core Infantry Command

For some reason I forgot to post these, although they were finished around the start of the year. They are the command figures for the core infantry, as always by John Pickford. These have been mastermoulded and productionmoulded and I should have castings ready in a couple weeks.

We've got three bodies: captain, standardbearer and musician and three heads that should be interchangeable with eachother as well as with those of the infantry set. The captain and standardbearer get some further options for customisation.

The captain has three weapon options - a sword, a pistol and a warhammer - and two different shields inspired by period iconography and the obligatory skull (it felt weird not having included one in any of the figures before as I hear skulls are the cool thing to do). His feathers will have more of a curve in the final castings:

The musican is a pretty traditional design, a drummer, 'nuff said.

The standardbearer has three different standard options, two of which reflect the design of the captain's shields. These should fit without much difficulty on the bodies of the first infantry set (WKD-01) if you like more variety and the halberds and pikes from that set should fit on the standardbearer's body, turning him into a pretty good captain or sergeant figure.

WK Dwarf sallet helmet conversions - Part 2

Following up on the previous post (and with John's consent), I have decided to follow through with the idea of converting the complete set of the action poses with sallet helmets and offering them as an additional choice for core infantry troopers. Since they are fairly uncomplicated conversions, these should be able to go straight into a productionmould, so it shouldn't take very long to get these released.

The last 3 went together a lot faster than the first one I did. Here 's a picture of all 4 of them:

Dwarf Infantry Front Rankers 2 (greens)

Postman delivered a package from John 'Poshgoblin' Pickford with the for the time being last two additions to the core infantry (except for command figures of course) (elites will follow). These are conversions of the two plug in style troopers (you know, these guys), bringing the number of variant bodies up to 4. They can be fitted with halberds, spears/pikes, sword and buckler, handgun or crossbow.

The one to the left is wearing a sallet with raised visor. The spear shown is a slight conversion (addition of the tassle), thus making an extra spear variant, just for the fun of it.

These will be sharing a mastermould with the Landsknecht Goblins.

Infantry front rankers (greens)

All those static "at ease" poses are very well for filling out the ranks, but you need some more active poses for your front ranks too. These should go some way towards meeting those needs:

Sculpted by the talented John Pickford as always. The halberd shaft has been slightly shortened since this picture was taken. After the moulding, the two bodies will be converted to add another two variants, thus allowing for 20 different configurations.

Pike, crossbow, handgun and sword greens

I got these (among other things) from John Pickford yesterday. They are based on mastercastings of the original 4 bodies and the head with the sallet helmet:


There are two variant arms for each weapon type, so you can do matching sleeves with the bodies. Currently, the weapon options include pikes/spears, crossbows, handguns and swords. After moulding, the pike-arms will be converted to halberd-arms for another option. The swords have been slightly lengthened since these pictures were taken.

Of course, the heads are fully interchangeable with those from the previous set, for maximum individuality. With hindsight, the crossbow variants are going to be a bit tricky to rank up. As it is, this set should allow for 128 different combinations. 256 if you throw in the heads from the first set. More if you mix sleevetypes (though that might require some gapfilling, I haven't tried).

Unobstructed view of the bodies, front and back:

First greens

I was going to sit on these a bit longer until I had some metal, but I can't just keep sitting in this pool of my own froth (I might drown). Having collected most or all the good models with a landsknecht theme out there, I still felt myself wanting more (addictions are like that) and it seemed the only way to get figures that would hit the right spot, was to have them made. I decided to start out with dwarfs, in order to fill out the incomplete ranks of (mainly) old Marauder figures and some modern Foundry (though the latter just don't seem to strike the same chord).

Now this is first and foremost a private project. These are figures I wanted made for myself and not everything about them may appeal to a broader public. This is not a commercial venture and there are no plans at present to make it one. Even so, I see no reason not to sell some to interested people once they are available (call it an act of charity, if you wish ;) ). There are no plans to become a real shop though.

First thing was to find a sculptor who could delivery the quality AND who gets what it is that gave those old school models of my younger years their charm and character. I immediately thought of John Pickford (of Otherworld giant fame) and I think he came through big time with the models. I can't stress enough how my pictures don't do justice to the models. They are very crisp and clean in the flesh. Any limitations designwise are my fault and not his, as I wanted to capture the look and feel of those golden age models, with all the good and the bad that that entails. In order to give him some time to get familiar with the subject matter, I suggested to start out the first ones with the most static poses, so don't blame the sculptor for that, it's what I asked. There will hopefully be many more poses and troop types farther down the road.

Since I hate units with loads of clones, I wanted to make the most out of my buck and get them to be modular: separate heads and separate weaponhands. For this first set, there are 4 bodies, 8 heads and 4 weaponhands (only 3 shown, the 4th is another poleaxe type weapon). All heads are interchangeable (as pictures demonstrate) (and of course, some heads are bound to look better with certain bodies, but all in all it works pretty well, without detracting from the final look. As said, more poses and trooptypes will follow and the aim is to make parts (especially heads) interchangeable between as many sets as possible for maximum customisation possibilities.

Anyway after this long introduction, some pictures featuring all of the heads on all of the bodies (and 3 of the weaponhands). They are just tacked together and in some pictures the hands have come away from the arm, but this would not happen if they were glued together.

Hope you will like them.