Rich at Dead Earth Games has sent me a couple of sample castings from their Warbears and Stagriders Kickstarter campaign, which starts on the 1st of November. I had offered to paint a set up for him.
The two pieces are a stag rider and a bear rider. Firstly lets take a look at what you get.
It is worth pointing out at this point that Dead Earth Games miniatures are true 28mm, so they may seem a little small compared to some of the modern 32mm scale minis. However, I like them at this size and they are beautifully detailed.
The stag rider comes in eight parts. The rider with a separate left hand holding a spear and of course the stag, which is cut into six part (body, head, two legs and two antlers). The casting is very crisp (these are early casting so you would obviously expect no less). The legs fit very nicely onto the stag as does the rider. The stags head needed a little work (to remove the locating pin), bt once that was done it was a perfect fit.
The spear hand and antlers both had very small areas for the glue surface so these were a little more challenging, but nothing that a bit of patience (and Zip Kicker) couldn't sort out...
The bear rider kit comes in seven parts, four parts for the bear and three for the rider. Once again a nice crisp casting. All of the parts fit very nicely. The bear has two separate legs. Once glued these do need a little filler to hide the joins, but nothing unexpected. The bears lower jaw is the fourth part and this finishes him off nicely. The rider fits smoothly onto the bear and is finished off with a right arm holding a raised sword and a flowing cape on his back.
I assembled both beasts first and finished them off with some liquid greenstuff.
As these are samples they were not supplied with bases. So I had a play around. The stag could fit onto a 40mm base, but the bear really needs to be on at least a 50mm base, however, I felt that the heroic nature deserved something a little special so I used a couple of 100mm discs of 4mm MDF and built them up with cork and slate. On top of the cork/slate I slapped on a generous layer of textured modelling paste and left them to dry. This took a good 24 hours (and even then it was abit soft in the middle).
Once the bases had set I played around with positioning and then glued the figures in place. As you can see in this photo I had also under coated the figures with a grey primer (my preferred colour).
On to painting. I have started giving the figures and beasts a base colour, before moving on to detailing.
The stag is going to be a basic reindeer colour scheme.
With the bear I have decided to go for a Polar Bear. It may be a bit more of a challenge than a brown or black bear, but I think it will be slightly more dramatic.
With both beasts coming from cooler climates I think I am going to do the bases with some snow on them.
Look out for the next instalment very soon.
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