Spring Clean 2021 – Totally historically accurate fantasy Celtic army

Chapter’s six and seven cover mythical animals/monsters and women, respectively.

A main theme here is shape shifting, with human-animal hybrids occurring often. Half stag-human hybrids are mentioned, as are cat people. Boers, bulls and ravens are also important animals.

In latter Celtic mythology women aren’t particularly portrayed well. Although there are some interesting descriptions of mythical women/goddesses in chapter six (see pictures above). Celtic myth is appears to the origin of Witches, with magical shape shifting women, who could change between crone, maiden, and raven shape as well as make prophecies.

The last two chapters of the book covered mythical aspects of the land and water, and then concepts of the Otherworld. To be honest by this point in the book there was little new content that I had not read or touched upon elsewhere.

The Celts regarded some trees as sacred, particularly the oak – which is presumably because that would have been the tallest or oldest elements of the landscape.

With that my latest book under review has been finished. I get the feeling now that I would learn little new material by reading another book on the Celts. As I am interested in Iron Age Celts there is very little material to work with so the content of the three books I have read has become repetitive. I could perhaps learn more by reading direct translations of the Irish and Welsh Celtic myths, but to be honest I’m not interested in going that far.

A selection of images found on the internet both “historical” and fantasy.

It’s been nearly a year since I touched this project and the spring cleaning challenge is the perfect excuse to resurrect it. I’m not going to necessarily try to finish it during the challenge, but just do units as inspiration takes me. Overall I want to ensure I take my time with each unit to avoid burn out.

First up is a unit of Gaul Warriors that I will convert to be a generic Celtic warband.

This will form the “canvas” for my first unit. 20 assembled Gaul warriors from SPQR. Next I’ll break up the epoxy putties to sculpt on some unique fantasy elements.

I wanted to make my warriors unique, but as these are the most “basic” infantry I didn’t wanted to do too much on them. Also, I’m not very experienced sculptor so wanted to start with a simple change for these models.

I decided a creepy wooden mask would do the job.

I used brown stuff (kneadite brown/aluminium putty) as it is less sticky than greenstuff and supposedly works better for sculpting hard objects.

I started with a small lump that I squashed between my fingers to make a roughly face shaped and sized irregular oval.

I then pressed it on to the models face and used a sculpting tool to press it down. This also had the secondary effect of adding a wood texture to the mask.

I then used the end of the sculpting tool to bore out two eye holes.

Overall I’m very happy with the result. These celts now look far more menacing simply by hiding their faces behind a featureless wooden mask.

I ended up spending three weeks assembling all the models in the force, milliputting the bases, and sculpting a different type of face mask for each unit.

The method for making the masks were all as in my last post, but with a different shape of putty at the start.

Overall the scale of the masks is perhaps a bit off, but I’m still happy with them for my first real attempt at sculpting. Let’s see how they turn out after they’re painted.

It took me a lot longer to paint these eight minis than it normally would. I think it mainly came down to motivation, so I’m going to switch to something totally different next and see if that rekindles my interest. I made a deliberate choice with this project to take my time and not force it through.

For this project I’ve gone back to by pre-contrast technique, which is the Games Workshop base, shade, and two highlights approach.

The skin was painted rakarth flesh, washed reikland fleshshade, then highlighted flayed one flesh followed by pallid wych flesh.

The clothes were painted mournefang brown, washed agrax earthshade, then highlighted skrag brown followed by deathclaw brown.

The wood was painted dryad bark, washed agrax eathshade, then highlighted gorthor brown followed by baneblade brown.

The metal areas were painted mechanicus standard grey, washed nuln oil, then highlighted dawnsotne followed by administratum grey.

The hair was painted tausept ochre, washed seraphim sepia, then highlighted balor brown followed by zamesi desert.

The bases were painted stirland mud then covered in a custom basing mix following the technique given in this Gerry Can video: https://www.beastsofwar.com/featured/gerry-can-how-to-make-custom-basing-mix/

My basing mix consisted of:

• fine sand, which I believe was an old basing product from GW which I bought about 15 years ago
• green static grass, which again is the leftovers of a GW basing product from about 10 years ago
• green stuff world’s spring undergrowth
• green stuff world’s summer 3 colour clump foliage mix
• woodland scenics green grass fine turf