Bretonnian musician & Infinity Nomads

It's been another busy week of painting as I've moved onto the next job in the queue, the Infinity Nomads from the Operation Icestorm set. I painted up the Pan Oceania models a little while back so it was only fitting to get the Nomads done before cracking on with the Infinity stuff that's waiting. Nice models again but unlike the PO figures, these didn't fit together too well. It's really just the ones holding rifles in both hands that were a problem. Fit the arms onto the torso and the wrist is a mile away from the hand cast on the underside of the gun. That left some pretty big gaps around the arms that needed filling. Anyway, three more models from this set to do.

I've also managed to nearly finish off a 5th edition Bretonnian musician for myself. This thing has been sitting almost finished on my desk top for months! I can't remember when I started it but I know I've painted some Bretonnian crossbowmen since leaving this piece so it could well be over six months ago.

Anyway, the thing that stumped me was the lion heraldry on his tabard. It's supposed to match the unit leaders so I got it all quartered up and nicely painted and then the plan was to use my homemade decals as a base and over paint them. Well because the quarters are all different shapes and sizes I needed my lion decals to be stretched and compressed to look right so that was a pain in the arse to begin with. I printed some off and tried them out but they looked too 'stuck on' and didn't really mesh well with the shape of the tabard. So off came the decals and the model was put to one side while I figured out how best to tackle it.

Sometime later (probably months) I decided to try freehanding it. Now my freehand skills are somewhat limited. Some things I can do really well, other things not so. Heraldic lions are more towards the 'no fucking chance' end of the scale but I thought that if I really put my mind to it and focused really hard I might just pull it off. The red quarters of the tabard had to be repainted as they'd got a bit scuffed when I'd removed the decals. I had a few attempts at painting the lions but finally gave upas they were looking a bit shit in comparison to the rest of the paint job. The model got put back on my desk top along with the spare slotta bases, rubbish and dust.

Again, here we are some months later and this model has become a real bugbear for me and is holding up my completing my little unit of foot knights. I was again considering the freehand option but quickly dropped that idea and went back to the original plan of using decals. The crappy freehand lions had to be painted out as well. I found the spare decals I'd originally printed off so decided to try using them but this time rather than applying them whole I cut them up into three or four pieces so I could pose each lion better to fit the shape of each quarter. It was fiddly but no more time consuming than messing around with freehand. The decals were just black outlines at this point so I needed to paint them in once dry. Really they were more of a guideline than a coloured in decal but they did the job and have enabled me to get the model finished.

Enough waffling, here's a pic.