Collecting John Pickford: Knightly Orders

White Knight have started spilling the beans of whats comming in 2013 and has given pre-view of his next batch of releases - amongst them you'll find goblin artillery, new halfling, some dwarf unit fillers and .... the heavy dwarf cavalry/Knightly Orders. Last ones are (of course) done bye John.

The Knightly Orders are such a wonderful little set of 4 core feathered pony riders and a command set.


White Knight Miniatures: Knightly Orders


Vanilla Knightly Orders



Command set

 All you could ever want, should you like to field heavy armered lance knights on your table. The core knight looks stunning with good hands and heads options and the command set will really make them stand out. Excellent, excellent work from "the duo".

WK plans to do more specific themed Orders and if you look carefully at the command set, a good guess would be an Order of the (white) Boar. I'm a huge dwarf/boar fan, so will be looking much forward to such an upgrade :)

But what probably got me excited the most was the new barded ponies.

One could have questioned that such small creatures could wear heavy armour without the concept falling appart, but I couldn't be more wrong. The "turtles" turned out beautifully and I'm really looking forward to give them the "clamshell" treatment - and who know, might even come something "chaotic" out of them.

But check out the White Knight's Miniature Imperium at http://whiteknightminiatureimperium.blogspot.com to learn more - and see some assambled ones as well.

- but I'll warn you all, as over there you'll see stuff like this:

And once you have seen it you can't get it out of your system - and will start seeing white boars in your (wet) dreams - now how disgusting is that? :-D

Three Wise Men

Again an entry for Brush Slave League - the "Three wise men". Probably a mixed bag as it's a 30 year old miniature mixed with ultra fresh sculpts - but I actually don't find them that much different - as the style and size of these dwarfs are quite similar.

The miniatures used here is an Aly Morrison MM10 Dwarf advisor up against two of the absolute best Igor Karpov sculpts ever - the dwarf Scribe and the Librarian.

What these miniatures have in common - other than being "Wise men" - were their limited availability. Marauder Miniatures have been OOP for a long time, and if you didn't buy them in the early nineties they are rather hard to find. This one here was picked up from at a "decent" price a few years back, but could easily cost you £6-8 at eBay.

The other two are Igor Karpov dwarfs. It was love at first sight when Igor showed his brown wax dwarfs back in 2009 over at Bugman's. The miniatures however was cast in resin and made for Ratnik Miniatures (Russian company) and rather difficult getting out of Russia, but in 2011 Ursa Major Miniatures closed a deal with Ratnik and seemed ready to bring crisp metal cast to the rest of the world - now was I excited about that? But after waiting months for my order to arrive it was suddenly cancelled and my money was just returned to my account :(
How disappointed I was, finding out that these miniatures was - yet again - out of reach. But then LAM (www.lead-adventure.com) came to the rescue, and in a joint venture with Ratnik Miniatures the started selling Igor's wonderful dwarfs and in 2012 I finally got my "beloved" librarian :)

So now that all the wise men has been assemble they had an empty slot in the painting queue - lol

So here they are - in all their colours - "Three Wise Men *cough* Dwarfs" :)


Marauder Miniatures: MM10/3a Dwarf Advisor

And then the Scibe and Librarian by Igor Karpov.


Lead Adventure Miniatures: DWA-01 In the Forgotten Libraries

Collecting John Pickford: The secret is out ... (Iron Mask Miniatures)

People that follow me on FaceBook already knows, but for the rest of you ....

I've been sitting on this far to long.

I guess you all remember this box, right?

Well, I had an email this week saying "The secret is out‏" - telling me that the project has now been taken to "the point of no return". So this project is no longer a little personal secret, but is meant for something bigger ...: The ..

.. Iron Mask Miniatures

Iron Mask Miniatures is "another" historic fantasy miniature project. It's goal is to develop a range of swashbuckling adventurers for RPGs, dungeon crawling, and skirmish war games. But also plan to have core troops made that can be used to build units for massed battles.

The project has been inspired by White Knights Renaissance Dwarfs so no real surprise that the project had to involve Multi-part Specialist John Pickford.

First set of miniatures will be a range of swashbuckling dwarf duelists modeled after the legendary King’s Musketeers of 17th Century France. A set of figures armed with rapier and gauche daggers.

So, it was a set of these swashbuckling adventures that came in my box :)

Iron Mask has kindly let me have a copy of these first casts, so they could get documented here (and on the Wiki (soon to come)).

Iron Mask have already set up a blog telling all about this venture. It's quite a good read - and think you should go read it yourself: http://ironmaskminiatures.blogspot.com

- but in true "Clamshells-style" I'll also do a proper run down of what's in this first set, here :)

Iron Mask Miniatures: Dwarf Musketeer Duelists

Bodies

Heads

rapier and daggers

Other hand options

Wonderful kit with 4 different bodies, 8 heads, 9 left and 9 right hands ... a set that will give you a 1000+ different builds - spectacular :-D

And the sculpts themselves are nice and crisp as ever. Bodies are in such wonderful poses, heads are so full of character and personality and hands are all you could ever dream of.

And now, their availability.....? That's a tricky question right now, as I think Iron Mask Miniatures is planing on doing a Kickstarter campaign to get them out. So all depends on their success, of course But I can't really not see why they shouldn't succeed. These Dwarfs here are some of the best ones I've seen till day (and that says quite a lot - as I've seen more than most people) - and they will fit most fantasy settings - so anything from a Players Character (RPG) to skirmish Swashbuckling Adventures or mass tabletop fantasy battles will find the useful. Would really like to see this project getting a good start. I wish you best of luck, Gary - and remember that the hope, the struggle and all the hard work towards the goal is part of the rewards. Achieving the goal itself is not a reward in its own :)

Collecting John Pickford: 2nd Down and "Goal"

It's has been a bit quite about "Axiom/Exoditejon" (the guy behind the Gaming Cantina event miniatures), and his new Fantasy Football venture Beast Face Miniatures, but the 2nd set seems pretty close now and we can expect an official release of the first sculpted John Pickford Fantasy Football team soon.

Three lovely new Beasts - a three-armed thrower, an unhelmeted lineman, and a helmet/visor and claw-endowed blitzer. Brings the team up to 6 beautiful Beastmen in total.

Just love all the muscular structures and the dynamic poses, I'm really impressed and look forward adding them to my collection.

Not really into Fantasy Football, but shouldn't hold me back, should it? :-D

And speaking of what's in my possession ... :) I've actually already got one of the first set ones. Due to damaging during moulding the set #1 lineman's right hand thumb came loose and turned into a claw, rather than a thumb. "Axiom" have kindly let me have one of these for my collection of "John Pickford Obscurities"  :)
Not only is it a fun little piece to have, but also gave me access to a pre-view of the crisp quality of these fantastic new miniatures. Thanks, Jon :)

A view of the mis-casted right hand thumb

And you can, of course, read a lot more about Beast Face on the Official Blog.

Bring on the Party

Slightly delayed, but here is the miniatures I did for the Brush Slave League (BSL), round 2. Again it was a "free" round to do whatever you wanted to do.

So what better excuse then to build something I've been planning doing for quite some time .... a Bugman's ...  Pickford's Cart, of course - or shall we call it a scratch build Dwarfs Ale Cart with a converted WK Dwarf as a driver and a WK pony for power.

So, out with the green stuff and plastic card - all done during Christmas :)


Pickford's Cart - WIPs

Plastic card is used to give it the right form and all flat surfaces was then
covered with Green Stuff to give it a nice wooden texture.

Some old Citadel Cart Wheels are re-used

Driver is converted to be sitting by cutting off the legs and then re-positioned them

- and a right hand sculpted from ProCreate

And the finished Pickford's Cart ready for painting

So nothing special, but quite effective IMO. Ohh, and Barrel is something I picked up from fantastic Pardulon Models a few years ago.


Pickford's Cart - Painted

And here's the painted piece:

I am quite pleased with the final result, actually. Now who needs an original OOP Citadel Bugman's Cart when you can have a Pickford one (though, the right word would probably be "White Knight's Cart" - but that doesn't really "taste" right, does it).


And for those that knows the BSL format wound know that an entry can't just be this single miniature, so needed to find someone/something that would be needing all that "Ale".

First one I found with the right feel was an old OOP Marauder Miniatures MM15 Crossbowman


Marauder Miniatures: MM15 Crossbowman

Last one I found, that  fits the "bring the Beer, let's have a Party"-theme was White Knight Miniatures Zweihänder Sergeant, which is one of the absolute best Pickford Dwarfs till day. Such a great little character that I hope we'll see more of in the years to come.


White Knight Miniatures: WKD-13 - Dwarf Zweihänder Sergeant

Wonderful, wonderful sculpt and such a great pleasure painting.