Zebraoutrider lets slip the Dogs of War

Another quick unit to add to the Dogs of War army. This time it’s Lucrezzia Belladonna (Citadel Miniatures’ DoW 2000). I should say it wasn’t that quick. I needed to clean off the dust and refresh the original base layers with a Carroburg Crimson wash, Reikland Fleshshade, and repaint the rather sickly green with Lothern Blue followed by a wash of Drakenhof Nightshade. I also opted for some unicorn transfers from the old Bretonnian Knights’ kit.

The base is another 50mm square Arcane Micro Art Studio. As with the General’s base, it was drybrushed using Mournfang Brown and blended with Wraithbone. Agrax Earthshade was used as a wash and Retributor Gold for the metalwork. Unlike the General’s base, I decided to make the recess full of clearish water. This was achieved with three layers of ‘ardcoat and a little splash of Thraka Green wash around the floating leaves.

I wanted to give Lucrezzia Belladonna a companion and toyed with the idea of another halfling. It didn’t look right next to the steed, so I opted for a human-sized scout/bodyguard and pulled out the Citadel Miniatures’ El-Adoran Sureshot – CO1 Fighter (1986) from my pile of shame and painted him up in the same livery colours as his Mistress. In gaming terms I thought they could act as one unit, but would enable Lucrezzia Belladonna to have a ballistic bow and arrow attack before she enters melee combat.

When I took the Freebooter unit off the shelf, my heart sank. I thought I’d finished painting them, but to my disappointment the layer of dust simply hid the fact that I’d given up on them – why? I can’t remember back that far, but I guess after painting the Mordheim vampire (as the unit leader) my interest waned and I was distracted elsewhere. To add salt to the wound I dropped the whole unit whilst cleaning them and so working out a decent configuration of the ranks of soldiers took a few attempts.

These plastic minis were constructed using the Citadel Miniatures Empire Militia kit, the Chaos Marauders’s kit and the Mordheim Accessories sprue to produce a unique, pirate-themed unit.

So, once the dust was hoovered up and the minis were painted up using the same mix of random colours on my work table and a series of washes and we have ‘Bloody Mary’s Marines’. These are not elite Ultra Marines, oh no! they’re more like cannon fodder to distract and slow down the enemy.

All armies need ground troops and so for this growing force I’ve added a unit of veteran swordsmen commanded by Baron Otto Von Auerswald and a unit of crossbowmen to provide him with appropriate missile support.

Again, these minis were covered in dust which my portable dust buster dealt with quite effectively. The movement tray had no rear edge, so a created one by cutting down old blister plastic packing and supergluing in place. To fill out the spare spaces on the movement trays, I glued down recycled 20mm square bases discarded from the Pikemen of Pugno upgrade, but I also added a Scibor Ancient Ruin 25mm square base to add a bit more character to their environment and to help with moving the trays on the battlefield.

The minis themselves were refreshed simply with washes of Nuln Oil, Reikland Fleshshade, Baal Red, Carroburg Crimson, Drakenhof Nightshade and Cassandra Yellow.

I acquired the miniature of the DoW General in a mixed lot of minis on eBay years ago and he sat in my pile of unpainted for just as many years. He didn’t have his horse… but again I was quite lucky because as many DoW miniatures sellers today seem to want to extract as much dosh out of punters as possible. So I found one of my old, damaged Bretonnian horses(first edition plastic) which was missing its rider and initially its tail as well (further digging in my bits box and one surfaced) and whose paint job was not that bad (in my biased view!). I needed to work on the damaged transfers but I felt the Minotaur head would be apt for this Tilean Mercenary. For painting of the general, I kept it quite simple using black and white as the theme to align with the horse and gold to align with the other DoW units.

The dog companion is actually 40 years old and comes from the Citadel Fantasy Special Range FS49-2 Barking Dog. I’m imagining it to be a whippet/greyhound hunting dog used by the General to secure his meaty dinner each night. He was originally painted using Humbrol Enamel grey for the skin tone and brown for the base. I’ve opted to paint it to contrast the black horse by using Wraithbone over the grey undercoat followed by drybrushing White Scar.

Both miniatures are mounted on a 50mm square resin arcane base from Micro Art Studio. Base was drybrushed using Mournfang Brown and blended with Wraithbone. The open pits were painted to look like pools of water with Lothern Blue, White Scar, Drakenhof Nightshade and ‘ardcoat varnish. Retributor Gold linked the general to the metalwork on the base. The dog’s original lead base was clipped down and that vibrant flock was used to tie the base to the rest of the army, yet allow this base to link with potential other Arcane bases I may want to use on other units.

Bronzino’s Galloper Gun was my last purchase from the DoW range. At the time, I could afford one gun carriage and by the time I’d read the rules that additional gun carriages could be added, the GW range was no longer available. So we are stuck at one unit size, but that’s okay because for this potential army (as it’s becoming) I’ve already got in mind some further ballistic firepower…

Bronzino was already base-coated black so he needed to be painted up to match the rest of the crew using Retributor Gold and washed with Nuln Oil. In homage to and inspired by my community friend @horati0nosebl0wer I’ve attempted a dapple effect on the horse… it’s okay but not on par with his Mordheim Freelance on his Workbench blog.

The base was flocked with the same vibrant green as the Pikemen of Pugno but with the addition of some natural tree lichen to provide some cover and context for the overall base/vignette.

With a bit of freehand computer image editing, I was able to create a 25mmx30mm standard insignia to simply glue on to the existing banner that I had previously created.

I did indeed ferret around my bases boxes and found a load of Micro Art Studio Arcane square bases but in doing so I opened another old shoe box and found around 30 semi-painted or unpainted Knights of the Avenging Flame old GW Regiment of Renown which would be ideal for these resin bases and would create another Dogs of War unit for this project. So, instead I decided to recycle three plain 40mm square Ogre bases for the pikemen two front rows.

First I had to carefully remove the 20mm square bases, clip off the metal stability tab and individually superglue each miniature into three groups of four so that they would fit together in a ‘natural’ pose. Fairly straightforward, although I did all the gluing in-situ to ensure the miniatures fitted in their groups and that I had fixed the original stability issue of the front row.

Once solid, it was time to give all the miniatures a fresh splash of colour with a light wash of Reikland Fleshshade for the faces, Drakenhof Nightshade for the blue areas and Nuln Oil for the armour. The edge of the base was repainted with Abaddon Black and left to dry ready for reflocking of the bases and the creation of the insignia for the standard.

The cleaning process was fairly straightforward once I had decided to use a mini hoover! Rather than simply brush the minis with a soft makeup brush or to have dipped the minis into water – both methods of which would not guarantee that the dust didn’t simply displace to other parts of the model, the mini hoover allowed me to literally suck up the detritus. This was a USB powered mini hoover the size of a fat finger normally used for computer keyboards (Brand – SIGNALEX). I have to admit, with the power boost on, the minis cleaned up better than I expected.

The three back rows of pikemen formed up pretty well. One has a slight damage to the pike tip, so I may repair that with a bit of green stuff. The front rows are where the stability issue arises which means I need to decide whether to use recycled 40mm blank bases to base up four miniatures per base or ferret through my base collection for appropriate resin moulded bases. 

Another of my mini projects in the Spring Clean Challenge 2023 and my continuing rehabilitation from the depths of despair to a new sense of normality. This time it’s the resurrection, repaint and rebasing of a couple of units of GW Dogs of War units that have literally sat on a shelf collecting dust for the past five to six years. My plan is to get them back into a decent state to so that they can join the ranks of my Army of the Free People.

First up, we have 30 pikemen from the Alcatani Fellowship. However, call me eccentric or simply weird but I didn’t want to simply copy the colour scheme of the Alcatani troopers when I first started the unit 18 years ago and decided I’d create a new Dogs of War unit from Tilea known as the ‘Pikemen of Pugno’ with a blue rather than red theme. I never finished the unit properly! I never got round to drawing and painting the freehand standard either…

One reason they ended up shelved was that the Dogs of War range fell out of favour with GW and disappeared from their stores post the Lustria campaigns and as with many great GW minis ended up as prey for the auction-site scalpers and their exorbitant prices (they still are!) so my plan to create a huge pikeman army collapsed.

It seems a shame to keep them shelved and as I very much like the sculpts from the Perry Twins, so now is the opportunity to give them some proper TLC?

NOTE: THEY ARE NOT FOR SALE. THEY HAVE ALREADY FOUND A GOOD HOME! 😁

Another big problem with these particular miniatures is that individually they simply keep falling over despite resting in a customised movement tray, so my plan now is to carefully remove them from their current 20mm square bases and remount them on larger bases (x4 per base – either 40mm or 50mm bases).