I picked up Saga back at Historicon, and I’ve been looking forward to putting it on the table and rolling them fancy dice around it.   The plan was, initially, to use Gripping Beast Saxon Thegns as Hearthguard, Gripping Beast Dark Ages Warriors as, um, Warriors, and one of those sweet Aenglish models I got from one of Tre Manor’s Red Box Games Kickstarters as my Warlord. (Worrying about Levies later.)

I’ve had some Saxon Thegns on my workbench basically ever since.  

When one of my several August trips was postponed, I jumped on the chance to power through converting and painting a new unit for the NoVA Open.  When I finished that with time to spare, I chugged some crazy juice and decided to paint a model specifically for the Capital Palette. I’d had Captain Whistlelock prepped, so it was on.

The plan for him early on was to paint him up using Rush heraldry.

It’s anachronistic: unless I’m turned around (possible), this is Tudor-era, quite some time after Normans and Vikings were stabbing each other over rule of England.. but who cares?

He came together quite quickly.  Because I was doing him for competition, I went with more and thinner layers of everything. I also gave into the impulse to keep highlighting lighter and lighter basically everywhere.

The metallics are my usual lazy drek, but fortunately there’s not much metal, so it’s tough to spot.

The only stumbling block I hit was with the shield. I’d printed out some decals with the horses from the above image at ~4mm wide, hoping to use them as a guide to get the shapes roughly the same. Well, that didn’t work out at all… so, after a moment of panic, I put on my big boy painter pants, did a couple of test freehands, and then did them on the shield.

I’ve never really done much in the way of freehanding before: mostly just fake text on books; never shapes like this. They’re not perfect (and boy does it show up close, like in these pictures) but they’re really, really good for a first try. I’m super-proud of them.

It was worth the effort: not only was I pleased with him, he was able to place Silver in his category (Historical – Small).  It wasn’t the most competitive Historical category (single figure / small is usually the most competitive category, but there was so much amazing 54mm figures, especially in the historical group), but still: that’s a huge achievement.  This is probably the biggest win I’ve had, yet.

(I think he looks best in the lighting in that picture immediately above.)

I’ve had some difficulty getting a good HDR glamshot, however. This is thwarting my using him as a permanent Facebook profile pic.

This also means that I’m pretty leery of carting him around to game with: particularly because that dang sword’s broken off twice. Just means I’ll have to build and paint another one.  I’ll get over it.  (In fact, I’ve already done the first half of that.)

I will say that this means dire things about how quickly I expect to bang out Hell Dorado minis.