Chris' Spring Clean 2025

I bought this Regiment of Renown Mengil Manhides Dark Elf company back in the 1980s and managed to paint one of the witch elf troopers back then. Since I returned to the hobby 4 years ago I’ve slowly painted the rest of the box. I even bought the standard bearer when I was more active on the facebook oldhammer groups (in case you weren’t aware, this iteration of Regiments of Renown were ‘blind buys’ in terms of the command figures : you got 8 troopers and 1 command figure per box). However, I never knew what to put on the shields, so I left them off. 

Today I’m going to finish them.

I started by getting 10 round shields from bits box. Most are modern ones from Old School miniatures (I think), there’s also a couple of original Citadel plastics, a 3D printed one from etsy and one from a viking kickstarter. 

I blue tacked all the shields to a piece of wood, and primed them with black, brush on primer. Then I painted the rim of the shields with citadel leadbelcher.

At this point I still wasn’t sure what I was going to put on the shields. I know I haven’t got  enough matching transfers (decals) and my free hand is terrible, although I could manage a half and half or even quartered pattern. I decided to do one more google search for inspiration and found an 11 year old forum post that had textured shields that “look like stretched skin” according to the poster. I had a quick search for something similar, with no luck, but then remembered a recent video by Peachy  wherein he used masking tape to make cloaks. These miniatures have cloaks made from flayed humans, so why not add another flayed enemy to the shield? 

I started by fixing a length of masking tape to my cutting mat. I cut a strip from this, about a centimeter wide, rotated that by 90 degrees and cut that in half. Next I cut out an arc from each long side to make a hour glass shape. Then I cut out a V from the top to make the ‘arms’ of the man hide. I attached these to the shields with tweezers and crumpled them a little to add some texture. Generally the masking tape glue was strong enough, but I did add a drop of super glue here and there where it looked like the tape would come away.  I painted these with a mix of 4 drops Crusader Skin to one drop Warrior skin speed paints. 

Here’s the final regiment, unless I get around to hunting the Champion and the musician, in front of the obligatory John Hodgson backdrop.