Off with the Old and On with the New: Fantasy Adventures

Yet another of my repaint projects in the works.  This one is from the pre-slota base era with some Fantasy Adventures.  These two lads are FA-24 Anti Paladin and FA-22 Evil Cleric.  I seem to recall that these may have been Citadel miniatures manufactured and distributed by Ral Partha in the US under their imports brand.  I have a few more in the range that I'm sure will meet the same fate as these.  Here they are in my pre-teen paint jobs.

 Not as bad as I would have thought, clearly I have moved from the Testors enables to acrylic paints but no real detail work like shading or highlighting.  Now naked lead, remarkable they came out very clean

Primed up and apex painted.  I'm beginning to like the results that I'm getting using this technique and much thinner paint and ink coats.

 

I haven't decided on color palette yet, on one hand I actually like the red/black/yellow scheme but I might want to try something new.  I'll have to play around with some different looks to figure out how to proceed.  More WIP soon.

Off with the Old and On with the New: Iron Claw Chucker

 As I was filling the new IKEA display cabinet with miniatures I realized that my old Iron Claw goblin chucker was in poor shape.  Not sure when but at some point in time it appears that I lost the catapult arm.  Clearly I was aware of this because as I dug through a bits bin I found an extra one!  My memory of the whole event is very sketchy but I'm glad that I was smart enough at the time to order a replacement one from the old Bitz Service that Citadel/Games Workshop used to run.  For those that lack the requisite amount of grey in their beard, you used to be able to buy any part of any metal model that they made.  This was an incredible service that lead to unlimited opportunities for conversions!  I dont always say this but in this case I do miss the good old days.

I digress, back to the project.  Clearly this was a bit of a later era paint for me as the quality is better than some of the other OwtO projects I have in the queue.  Here are a few of the Old pictures

My biggest concern was trying to match up the wood colors to the new arm so I just decided it was time for a re paint.  Here we are stripped down to naked lead

And here they are queued up for painting

Let the painting begin!  Base coat on everything and in some cases a 1st highlight

Next WIP soon.

Off with the Old and on with the New-FTS

I think this is the second or third installment of my project to strip off old paint jobs from when I was a wee lad and update to something more modern.  No question the old FTT troll with the female captive on his back looks much better.  As I was rummaging around I ran across an old bag of mins that go all the way back to my first purchases ever, something like 45+years ago.

Yes these guys need some TLC! 

These are pre-slota base skeletons from Citadel's Fantasy Tribe Skeletons (FTS).  I have always been fascinated by skeletons especially fantasy miniature ones.  I place that blame squarely on Ray Harryhausen and the skeleton stop motion scene from his 1963 classic Jason and the Argonauts.  It seems that this has been mentioned by many other hobbyist similar in age.  As noted in my Digging Up Bones post, I've been collecting them for my entire hobby career.  Citadel was clearly head and shoulders above most miniature companies in terms of quality, detail and variety of their products in the late 70's and early 80's.  The Fantasy Tribe series dates from 1979-1983, after that it became the C series of codes.

I immediately knew I had to get some of these great miniatures.  Wargaming and RPG mins were not easy to come by back then but I was relentless in my search. Whenever I went on vacation with my family I would comb the yellow pages (if you dont know what those are I dont know that I can explain them to you!) finding any and all hobby shops in our destination.  If they were close they would indulge me, if not I could only dream of the treasures that I was missing out on. I'm fairly confident that these miniatures we actually ones that Ral Partha produced under license from Citadel and distributed in the US in the Ral Partha Imports line.  I managed to find a pic of one of my actually mins on ebay still on the blister.

I had these guys in an old 2L bottle diorama that I learned how to make from an copy of Military Modeling magazine back in the day.

 

They had what I thought was a brilliant idea, nowadays I think it would be referred to as a hack.  Back in the 1900's, (okay 1980's but using 1900's sounds older) the the 2L bottles of pop were a two piece creation.  They had a clear bottle that was rounded on the bottom and a black or appropriately colored bottom that squared it off so it could stand up.

The article shows you how to pop the bottom off the bottle, cut the top off where it started to taper and then attach the bottom to the freshly cut piece, instant display case.

Or you could attach it to a wooden base and accomplish the same thing

There guys were in a similar work with lots of cotton balls stretched out to simulate fog.  Actually quite brilliant of my younger self if I don't sound too boisterous.

Fast forward to today.  Like anything old they clearly need a fresh coat of paint.  So off we go.  First are a few close up starting pics.  Clearly I had no knowledge of inks, washes, or dry-brushing yet.

 

 

You have to love the menacing red eyes!

After a good soak in Green Stuff for the better part of a month or two.

 

Primed black in preparation for apex shading.

 

Some apex shading with pure white.

Next update will have some color blocking.