Zebraoutrider lets slip the Dogs of War

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).