Monday, December 3, 2012

Charlock The Hunter

If there is a theme to this blog, (and if there is a pattern to my meanderings I am not sure I have yet discerned it), then this figure may be a bit of a departure.

Who is that sinister figure with the unfeasibly large sword? No, that's not Michonne,the Samurai Girl from The Walking Dead. She's the figure from the Bloodflower Nymphs pack, sold by Wargames Foundry and part of their Fantasy Range. I ordered some of Foundry's excellent ACW figures recently and decided to add this pack to my order. Why was the good Padre tempted by a bunch of wild woodland nymphs, I hear you ask. Ummmm, errr, well ... lovely figures, ain't they?

I suppose the real answer is that I wanted a change from painting 100 ACW figures, which can get monotonous after a while. Also, some of the first miniatures I ever painted in high school were fantasy figures for Dungeons and Dragons, so it felt like returning to my roots. It's not often I focus on painting a single figure, and this one was a lot of fun to paint, a great break when I couldn't face another twenty musket and carbine barrels.

The paint scheme was unadventurous, a rather slavish copy of Simon Bradley's palette choice on the Foundry website. However, the leopard skin was great fun to paint, and took some experiments in mixing orange paint before I was happy with the result. It doesn't quite show to advantage in these iphone photos, but you get the idea.

A tisket, a tasket, what's that in the basket? Eeeeekk! How gruesome! Charlock has indeed been hunting.

For now Charlock graces my display cabinet,frowning at the Nazi werewolf nearby. I'm really not sure what to do with her. The Minor Projects part of my brain is thinking that she and some of her sisters might make a terrible surprise for some Uruk Hai warriors from my LOTR collection if they blunder into a particularly enchanted part of the forest. Nymphs and dryads aren't specifically mentioned in Tolkein, but they might be logical neighbours for elves and tree ents. I'm not going to make the leap to dark ages skirmish gaming, like most everyone else in the hobby, otherwise Charlock might migrate to an Alt Dark Ages game. And that head in the basket does look vaguely Celtic ...

4 comments:

  1. Very nicely painted, slavish or not that's a fine paint job. After hundreds of gritty WW2 minis and plain green 40K Guardsmen I can't paint any bright colours like that. Very vibrant, perfect for a one off display model. You've got me thinking now, what were my first models? Really can't remember! Anyway a very nice job, thanks for sharing.

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  2. Yes: a very nice and attractive figure, and your paintwork does it justice. Dunno about the sword in one hand and the basket of goodies for Gran'ma in the other, though. Mixed messages and ambiguous motifs? Maybe Little Red Riding Hood is all growed up and armed for wolf? Or there some sort of Freudian gig going on? H'mmm... :-)
    Cheers,
    Ion

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  3. Thanks chaps. Glad you liked her. Milord Archduke, I hadn't considered the Little Red Riding Hood aspect, that's quite funny. Beware of girls with swords in forests - Freud would do something with that image to be sure!

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    1. I think I must be wired for it. Saw the Bond movie 'Skyfall' the other weekend. Whether the scriptwriters had them in mind or not, I don't know for certain, but Freudian and Jungian motifs came through very strongly, I thought... At any rate seeing Charlock there, all sorts of (possible) meaning came to mind. She's actually quite an evocative image in many respects.

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