Empire of the Dead!

There is nothing like getting a nice big box of soldiers in the post (unless you are my wife who is trying to persuade me to pay for a new kitchen floor, a new bathroom and an extension and therefore hates me spending money on anything at the moment).  In addition, Charlotte's old school has written to me suggesting I donate a useful item to the school.  They have suggested a lacrosse goal set (£3000), or an infrared spectrometer (£7000) or perhaps a 2D laser cutting machine (£20,000 - no wonder 4Ground buildings are so expensive).  Good grief!

Anyway, I could, truthfully, claim that these were ordered months ago. Yes, my big box of West Wind's Empire of the Dead has arrived.  I think it is about fifty figures (or about six month's painting if I really go at it).  They are a bit slimmer than the Northstar In Her Majesty's Name figures but, critically, they are the same height and the heads appear to be a similar size.  I haven't even taken any out of the box yet as I have literally just got back from Copenhagen (I have to return next week).  They look very nice and hopefully I can get one started, at least, at the weekend.  I intend to mount them on washers rather than the slotta bases they came with (I hate slotta bases) but this will involve some tricky trimming of the metal bar at the bottom.  However, I managed this OK with a samurai figure I ordered the other week so hopefully it won't be too tricky.

I managed a bit more painting on my Lost World characters last week and hope to finish two of them this weekend.  Yes, I have now dropped from aiming at six figures a week to two.  Oh well.  

Back from the Future: Lost World monster hunters for In Her Majesty's Name...

Lord John Roxton tracks something that has escaped the plateau

I've been wondering about putting together my own company for In Her Majesty's Name but every time I think of something someone else has already done it.  Now, however, I have an idea of something that might work and which will also help start me on another project I have had percolating away for some years now.

Neovenator: the Isle of Wight's very own dinosaur

I have been planning a Lost World project for some time and have been steadily collecting model dinosaurs from a variety of sources, including Copplestone Castings, the British Museum shop and various seaside shops on the Isle of Wight which is, of course, officially Dinosaur Island this year.

Copplestone Castings figure from the Dinosaur Hunter's pack

It was just a matter of finding the right figures for the Lost World characters.  Searching through the lead pile I found figures for most of the characters I need from Foundry's Darkest Africa and Copplestone's High Adventure ranges. So here is the first from my Lost World/Monster Hunters company, Lord John Roxton, who I painted over the weekend.  I really like this figure, with his backpack and blanket roll, but the shorts are really wrong for Victorian times.

Conan Doyle's version of the four adventurers

The Lost World project will look at the successor to the Professor Challenger expedition which, at the end of The Lost World novel, was going to include just Roxton and Malone.  I will have both Summerlee and Challenger join the expedition at the last minute.  I found figures for Malone and Summerlee quite quickly but Challenger was, er, a challenge.  I needed someone, ideally, with a very big beard! The problem is now solved and I hope to finish painting all three, plus the usually forgotten character of Zambo, in the next week.

Jill St John in The Lost World (1960)

This also gives me the opportunity to field a suitably feisty female character.  Every film or TV version has added a gratuitous female adventurer to the expedition: Paula White (Bessie Love) in the 1925 version,  Jennifer Holmes (Jill St John) in the 1960 version, Jennie Nielsen (Tamara Gorski) in the two John Rhys-Davies 1992 films, Amanda White (Jayne Heitmeyer) in the 1998 version, Marguerite Krux (Rachel Blakely - rather splendid) in the 1999 Canadian TV series and Agnes Cluny (Elaine Cassidy) in the 2001 BBC version, which is probably my favourite dramatisation even if it does, as do all the versions, play fast and loose with the plot and characters.

A rather gratuitously wet Elaine Cassidy in the BBC's The Lost World from 2001

Conan Doyle was not always very internally consistent with his characters so, while she isn't mentioned in The Lost World, in The Land of Mists (1926) Challenger has an adult daughter, Enid, who Malone takes a shine to and eventually marries.  I have a few feisty females for my Darkest Africa Zambezi project and they would work for the late nineteenth Century setting of IHMN but not so well for the just pre-WW1 setting of The Lost World.  The Copplestone Female archaeologists pack has some good young ladies but the two best ones are wearing jodhpurs, which did not become fashionable wear for women until Coco Chanel wore them in 1921.

She designed her own costumes for the series, you know

I think there is also a place for a plateau-stranded wild beauty, like the potently named (for the Legatus, anyway) Veronica, as played by the lovely Jennifer O'Dell in the Canadian TV series Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World (1999-2002).  One of the several not Jane figures will work for her, I think.

There is also the opportunity, as hinted at in some of the later Challenger books, of including German spies out to discover the diamonds of Maple White Land.

So, that's The Lost World project nearly sorted but how do I get characters from around 1910 back to the late nineteenth century?  The answer of course is a time portal.  I did toy with the idea of some kind of stargate but have settled instead on a sparkling anomaly.  This will transfer a plague of prehistoric creatures onto the streets of London followed, fortuitously by the group of experienced dinosaur hunters who ran into a similar anomaly up on the plateau.  It is a London slightly different from the one they experienced in their younger days, however.   In Conan Doyle's books Lord Roxton was a friend of Sherlock Holmes so there is no doubt who the consulting detective would call in to deal with the flocks of feral reptiles terrorising the East End as well as some of the other monstrous creatures abroad in the fog-bound alleys of Whitechapel.  Roxton was a great anti-slaver so it would be quite possible for him to appear in the Zambezi taking on the Arab slavers, who appear to have captured some form of monstrous creature: She-who-must-be fed.

The real problem will be working out statistics for the IHMN company but the authors of the rules have supplied (I think) the means to calculate these. Also others are creating their own, rather excellent, companies which can now be found on the In Her Majesty's Name site.

So, another project!  Hooray!

Follow the yellow brick road...

White Horse, Road, London E1

Steve the Wargamer (I can't link to his blog because I am getting a malware warning) and Scott have wondered, following my previous post, whether the yellow bricks seen in the East End of London are a post-blitz phenomenon.   They are not.

St Matthew's vicarage Commercial Road, London E1 (1871)

These yellow bricks are known as London Stocks and were extensively used in the nineteenth and early twentieth century before being largely replaced by the machine-made, red Flettons.  The London Stock brick was handmade and the colour came from the clay used in their production, many of which originated in Yiewsley (incidentally, where the Rolling Stones, Ronnie Wood grew up), Hillingdon, in Middlesex.  Similar bricks were also made in Kent and Essex.

Fournier Street, London E1, where two of Jack the Ripper's victims were seen before their demise.

Brickfields were opened in Hillingdon in about 1815 and in 1876 a branch of the Grand Union canal was cut from Yiewsley to West Drayton to transport the bricks into central London along the Paddington branch of the canal to Paddington Wharf.  The brickworks were churning out 5 million London Stocks a year at this time.

Anchor Brewery building (1872) Whitechapel Road, London E1

By the beginning of the twentieth century the clay deposits had become largely worked out and production dropped to 2 million bricks a year by 1930. The last brickfield closed in 1935 and now you have to pay premium prices for reclaimed London Stock bricks.

The trees mark the former course of the canal

The special branch of the Grand Union Canal, known as Otter Dock was closed and filled in.  Trees were planted where the canal had been in what is now Colham Avenue, Hillingdon.

The Royal London Hospital, Whitechapel Road, London E1

So, I want to see some yellow bricks from the likes of 4Ground for their Whitechapel to Baker Street range. Much of London was yellow!

Whitechapel Station (1884), London E1 

More for In Her Majesty's Name...including a police station

I managed about twenty minutes painting on some of my IHMN figures today which is more than I have done for about two months.  I am working on two companies: the Scotland Yard one and the Egyptian one.

I knew there was another rules supplement for IHMN due called Heroes, Villains and Fiends but now there is another one as well: as Osprey has revealed on it's 2014 preview on its website. They mistakenly call it Sleeping Dragon, Rising Surf in their website announcement.  I assume they meant Sleeping Dragon, Rising Sun and that it presages all sorts of oriental fiendishness.  Unless, of course this is the opportunity to create my Baywatch army (I have seen one on the web somewhere). "Yasmine has the special ability "distraction" which causes her opponents to freeze and be incapable of action for one move.  This increases to two moves if she is running."

In addition, North Star have announced figures for a sixth company: the Brick Lane Commune; a right bunch of anarchists and pinkos if I ever saw them.  I'm tempted to order them immediately but I think I better finish some more figures first!  Nothing particularly steampunk about these which, I suspect, could make them the range's best sellers to date.

Meanwhile, I continue to fret about scenery but have the beginnings of a layout in my mind.  Scott is making great progress on his second Victorian terrace but my modelling skills aren't up to that and so I cheated this week and ordered 4Ground's Victorian police station which arrived very quickly, I have to say.  It's a big heavy box and was absolutely stuffed with bits including, entertainingly, wooden clothes pegs and rubber bands to assist in construction.  It's what Warlord Games would call "replete" with wooden sprues.  Incidentally, the word replete is being used more and more lately.  When I was younger it had a more specific use meaning a person who was full of food but now it's used to just mean full, which although technically correct I find annoying, for some reason.

I haven't built a laser cut building kit before and am now thinking that maybe I should have started with a cart, or some such, first.  The instructions for the police station are on four A3 sides with one being a diagram of the parts and the other three being colour photographs of the assembly.  There are 146 stages in the construction!  The instructions were good but missed one or two stages, missed some of the part numbers out and even gave the wrong one once (so far) but they were pretty good on the whole.  The other problem I encountered were bits falling out of the sprues (are they called sprues if they are wood?) when they were handled which means some careful checking of loose parts against the diagram was sometimes necessary.  I also had one small part missing (or I lost it) but fortunately it was easy to replicate in using some left over wood.

Anyway, I got it out on the kitchen table this evening and started work on it. Some of it is quite fiddly as you have to hold together and place things at the same time but I was very impressed how well things went together with only one or two slight bits of trimming to get things to fit in the holes.  As the thing came together what had felt quite flimsy became increasingly robust.  

What I hadn't realised about this kit is that it includes some interior detailing.  I don't think any of the initial publicity shots showed these interior features, such as the cells and what I take to be a mortuary.  Anyway, after three and three quarter non stop hours I have got the basic structure of the ground floor done.  I would imaging that there is at least another eight hours work to go before it is finished.  It's really nice, though and my only complaint is that the outside is red bricks whereas nearly all East End Victorian London buildings have yellow bricks.  Yellow bricks in this area are much more common than red ones for buildings of this period but people think red bricks equals Victorian. Something that Ripper Street, which is filmed in Dublin, of course, perpetuates.

Here for example, is Brick Lane in the East End and most of the buildings have yellow bricks.  Never mind, I am thinking of giving the finished building a good coating of "soot" anyway.  The next part of the assembly looks like really fiddly doors.  Not looking forward to that!

Dr Watson and Tart with a heart and a gun for In Her Majesty's Name

Here is Dr Watson to go with last week's Holmes.  He is also depicted in country attire but Nick Eyre at North Star has dropped a hint that they may work on a "town" Watson and Holmes, perhaps based on the look of the characters in the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes series.  This is good news as it indicates that there will be more figures in the range.  Watson from the Scotland Yard Company was, like the whole of this new company, sculpted by Mike Owen rather than Steve Saleh who did the first four companies.  There is no discernible difference in style or size however.  Possibly the faces are better on the new figures.

I also wanted to have a go at one of the ladies so here is the "Tart with a heart and a gun" figure which was one of the stretch goal figures for those who signed up for the pre-order.  She does not appear in any of the official companies in the book but rules author Craig Cartmell in a comment on his excellent In Her Majesty's Name blog says he is working on a new list which will include her. 

Actually, I have an idea for my own company in which she will feature as Eva von Tarnhelm, an undercover spy for the Prussian Tarnhelm arms manufacturing company.  Daughter in law of Alberich von Tarnhelm her peculiar appetites have made her a liability even in German society so she was dispatched to London where, under the name of Hattie Eve she runs a superior brothel off Piccadilly.  This is located not too far from the United Service Club at 116 Pall Mall, the senior armed forces members of which are prime targets for the unscrupulous Eva and her talented group of Eastern European and very "professional" young ladies.

An aristocrat in her own right, the six foot tall Eva married the diminutive heir to the Tarnhelm fortune Michael von Tarnhelm (known to his family as Mime).  After just one month, however, after an evening of drinking too much Schanpps with Eva,  Michael fell down  the stone steps of his Bavarian castle; a vegetal folly of recent construction designed by Christian Jank and featuring massive underground laboratories where Michael, uninterested in arms, was trying to build a monumental organ which could replicate all the sounds of the symphony orchestra with just one player. He died instantly according to the second doctor who examined the body.  The first doctor who examined the body seemed to think that he had received several blows to the head as well but, unfortunately, he fell off the rampart of the castle into the gorge below while giving this opinion to Eva.  The question of whether either man fell or was pushed was never asked; not after Eva seduced her father in law Alberich on the evening after her husband's funeral, where he was immolated on a mountain top near the castle.  Eva, dressed in a black tunic, wearing chainmail and a black helmet complete with wings, sang Brünnhilde's "War es so schmählich" from Act III of Die Walküre in her thrilling soprano. She suggested that the laboratories in the castle be used to develop new weapons for the coming conflict, away from the spies which both knew the French and British had placed in their main factory.  Recognising a kindred spirit Alberich made Eva his heir and sent her to London to see if she could discover the extent of the British infiltration into his organisation.

Posing as a high class madam and recruiting as "operatives" a cadre of disaffected women from the minor Baltic regions of Europe her London operation is so successful she plans to open a sister facilty in Paris.

As a widow in Victorian London Eva von Tarnhelm would be expected to be celibate and wear black for the rest of her life.  Her alter ego, Hattie, enables her to satisfy her base desires and act in as scandalous manner as she likes.  She remembers her husband by wearing black underthings (as widows should do) and a cameo likeness of him around her elegant throat.  She is most grateful for everything she has subsequently been able to do without him.

When on less horizontal service she is armed with a Tarnhelm Blitzwerfer arc pistol.

Next up: there's constabulary duty to be done...

First two figures for In Her Majesty's Name

I sat down and painted these two yesterday.  The "Consulting Detective" from the Scotland Yard company and a cultist follower of Akhenaton from the Servants of Ra company.  Yesterday evening I also cleaned up and based the rest of the figures from these companies plus the Lord Curr's Company as well. Still two more companies to go though!

A number of issues have presented themselves, however.  The first relates to the quality of the figures.  Not the quality of the sculpting, I should add, which is characterful and excellent. There are two issues here.  Firstly, several of the figures have been slightly misaligned in the mould which necessitated more than a bit of filing and some actual carving with a knife to get the two surfaces aligned. Nothing fatal, but time consuming. Several figures were also pitted and all had quite prominent mould lines. The second issue is that the metal they are made from is quite soft (usefully given the above) but, as a result I am concerned for the durability of some of them.

Lord Curr himself brandishes a long and exotic gun but the top portion of this is very susceptible to bending to the extent that I expect it to fall off shortly. Likewise he dancer, Sairah, is connected to the base solely by one slender ankle.  She is also looking fragile.  The upshot here is that compared to the Perry and Aventine figures I am working on at present, they have used quite a low quality metal.

The final two issues relate to aesthetics.  A large part of my interest in these figures was because of Kevin Dallimore's splendid paint jobs on them.  Unlike historical military figures, however, you can paint them any way you like and, yet, Mr Dallimore's artistic choices are so spot on that you are tempted just to follow his colour scheme.  If you did, however, you would just end up with an inferior copy of his figures.  This became an issue with my very first cultist figure.  Everyone knows that Pulp cultists wear red but I didn't want to go down that route for the reason given above.  Red would be appropriate for these figures too because of  ancient representations of the Eye of Ra (depicted on the mummified priest figure).  Instead I have painted mine a sand colour (Humbrol 121) as they look appropriately Egyptian.  This is the colour I use for my Sudan bases as it is very close, coincidentally, to the colour of the sand in Egypt and the Sudan, as you can see from my profile picture further down on the left.  The turquoise-blue shade is going to be used throughout this company to reflect the lapis lazuli used in a lot of ancient Egyptian jewellery.  I have decided not to attempt to paint the Eye of Ra symbol on their tunics as this would be beyond me.  I am amused to see that Mr Dallimore has used the Stargate version of this ancient symbol rather than anything more archaeological.

This wasn't such an issue with the Sherlock Holmes figure as a grey coat and deerstalker are common.  Jeremy Brett wore something very similar in a number of his Sherlock Holmes episodes.  I thought that the figure looked enough like the late Mr Brett to give him black gloves which he wore so often in the superb ITV series.  The other civilians, also, will be easier to de-Dallimore and I am currently researching late nineteenth century gentlemen's clothing which is rather more colourful than formal wear today.

The second aesthetic issue is more fundamental.  How do you depict the figures' bases when they may be deployed in both urban and rural settings?  Earth and grass would look odd inside a building (I am having grandiose thoughts about attempting to construct a museum interior).  Equally, a paved surface would be strange in the country.  So I have left the bases as a compromise bare earth.  I'm still not sure on this one.  My daughter says that obviously I need differently based figures for the different environments!  Given it took  me around seven hours to paint these first two I don't think that that is likely.

So, I have some more time today so try to get some more prepared.  All in all they are very enjoyable to paint but take a lot of time as I am using four or five shades rather than my usual three.  Watson is under way so maybe one of the young ladies next!

A post Salute frustration, Victorian fluff and nearly a nasty moment...

In Her Majesty's Name - not as much progress as I would have hoped

Usually on my return from Salute I immediately base a figure or two and try to get something painted straight away.  This is exactly what I intended to do today, given that I possess nearly five dozen new figures for In Her Majesty's Name.  I based a dozen yesterday and undercoated three today intending to finish at least one (probably Sherlock Holmes). 

In order to keep me focussed on a project I like to indulge in a bit of background fluff to engender the requisite engagement.  Usually this is just a bit of reading and appropriate music while I paint.  So I've been listening to the Hans Zimmer Sherlock Holmes soundtracks, the Patrick Gowers TV soundtrack and even David Arnold's Sherlock soundtracks.  Sometimes something more visual is needed and so the other night I watched the Sherlock Holmes (2009) film again as it is quite Steampunky in places.  I also decided to finish an episode of the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes which I had started but not finished some time ago.  Quite a lot of these are shot in and around country houses rather than the foggy London I imagined would feature more often (which is why I need to locate my unpainted model mansion which I originally bought for using in ECW games).  This episode, The Man with the Twisted Lip, did have some good dark alley Victorian London scenes however which gave me some  thoughts about a London scenic board (eventually).

Eleanor David in The Man with the Twisted Lip

However the scene which really took my fancy was when Holmes (the North Star IHMN figure really looks like Jeremy Brett) and Watson turn up at the lady in distress's house in the country.  Played by Eleanor David, one of a number of splendid actresses to appear in this series over the years, she offers Holmes and Watson a cold supper after their long journey from London.

They never eat it but this sumptuous looking collation of pie, cheese, ham on the bone and cold pork chops quite distracted me from the action.  I proceeded to shop for a version of this to have tonight with a nice bottle of claret while I watch the next episode...  Inspiration comes in many forms!