Old Citadel & Ral Partha RuneQuest and D&D Figures

Here are images from a recent order Allison painted up of some old school Ral Partha and Citadel miniatures for D&D and RuneQuest. The RuneQuest miniatures were from the box they put out far too many years ago. We have several of these in our collection and I recall painting them many years ago. Needless to say, mine don't look anywhere near as good as these do. For the rougher sculpting I think they turned out wonderful!


First a few familiars from Ral Partha. These are very tiny; the rat is only the size of your little finger nail:

The group of adventurers arrayed:

Beginning of the close-up shots sweeping from left to right:

You can see the one figure which was included in the first Battle System box in the center. I was amazed he still had his mace after all these years!

The mage in this picture had the top of his staff broken off. I dug around in our massive bits pile and found something to top it off. A bit of drilling and pinning gives him a new staff topper:

The RuneQuest duck front and center. NEVER mess with a duck in a dungeon!

You can definitely see the late 70's in the figure to the right of the duck:

Freehand work on the shield:

The customer was absolutely thrilled with these. Allison at first wasn't too happy with how they were turning out. She started painting on Reapers and Games Workshop figures and the quality of miniatures made today, especially from those two companies, is light years beyond these. These figures do have a unique quality, and maybe a bit of nostalgia makes them a bit of a favorite. At least they now have a coat of paint that can show their potential and give them a place of honor in their owner's collection.

Third Batch of Reaper Miniatures Shipped

This is the third batch of a larger Reaper order we are doing for a customer. These actually shipped a little while ago but this is the first chance I've gotten to update the blog. I'm pressed fro time, and Allison is doing a full-time sub position for a local high school that lasts until February so this post will be a little brief.

First up is the Jabberwocky. This model was a pain to assemble! It's all metal and somewhat fragile with the tendrils that come off the face. As for colors, she mulled it over a bit and finally decided to go with a color scheme along the lines of the most recent movie with Johnnie Depp in it. Using blacks, greys, and the RMS Dark Elf Flesh triad she came up with this:

Now we get into some more adventurers:

 

 A close-up of the dark elf:

 Some miscellaneous animals. Great for druid companions:

 The order also included a box of the arabic-themed miniatures:

 She took her time and put a little extra into this for the customer, working on the patterns on the cloth as seen on the vest on the figure on the left:

 Again on the figure on the left she really went to town creating a pattern on his robe:

 Close-up of the robe:

That only leaves 9 orcs for me to finish off. Unfortunately, while unloading the van after the show I managed to pull my back out. I honestly think I pulled it once while loading the van by myself on the Thursday before, then continued to do it in unloading/loading at the show. While the four large bins I use make it fast and easy to load and unload they really make it a two person job due to their weight. A 36 inch by 18 inch by 24 inch bin filled with metal figures gets quite heavy! I lost a little over a week trying to let my back heal up.  It feels much better now though I may have to rethink my packing strategy if I am going to do a show by myself.

28mm Perry Wars of the Roses Commission

One of our customers wanted to do the Wars of the Roses (WoTR) in 28mm using Perry Miniatures. Here's images of the bulk of the order so far. Missing from the images are the leaders from both the Lancaster and York houses; I somehow skipped taking pics of them.

First up are a few artillery pieces. These are all metal. The arc gun is a bit of a pain to put together. As you'll notice in the pics, its two bars are still slightly bent. While I normally don't like plastic all that much this piece would probably be better off made in plastic. Trying to get everything aligned just right while gluing it is no easy task. I did manage to get them a little more straight before delivering the order but they still had a slight bend to them.

Next is the cavalry. I did two command sets: one for the Yorkists and one for the Lancastrians. This will allow the customer to do either a unit of cavalry for both sides or one larger unit for one side.

We used several boxes of the plastic infantry to make up the foot troops from both sides:

Perry makes some swell figures and they are always a joy to paint up. Though I'm not normally a plastics fan they do a good job with their plastic sets. Now that the mercenaries are out we may do a few boxes of them to bulk out the customer's armies a bit. There's also a few more different artillery pieces we can add. In addition, some more foot would really round out the infantry. We'll see where they want to go from here.