“Coz’ he’s worth it” (part 3)

Right well as you may (or may not, as the case may be) I left you last week with my “Direwolf” badge finnished and en-route to its new owner “Dennis”. Well I’m pleased to announce that he was very pleased with the finnished article. Now he had cut me a six inch circle of aluminum, for me to mount this up on, but after trying this it turned out that the wolf was just over hanging the sides a touch, so another would have to be cut slightly larger. Well to cut a long story short just before I had arrived at his house last Sunday he had been spraying up the pieces of armour (a gorget and a pair of pauldrons) he’d made out of some foam tread-plate style floor mats (he’d seen a video on youtube explaining how to do this you see), and one of us (can’t remember who) suggested that the wolfs head would look good mounted in the middle of the front part of his gorget. So in due course it was indeed “hot glued” into place, but as the gorget is curved I said I would have to fill around the edges of the head to remove the gaps, as the “cross belts” that hold his cloak in place could catch under it and either damage it or pull it off, also I thought the aluminum spray paint he was using looked a bit “bling”. So before I knew it the gorget and pauldrons were in the back of my car and I had been assigned with painting them (how do I get myself into these things!).

Anyway back home I began by filling in around the head with the ever faithful “greenstuff” before spraying everything black. Now after much deliberation I decided that rather than painting the whole this silver again I’d have a look for a more muted grey palette, so a trip to the paint shop (well B&M discount store to be honest) was in order, originally I was looking to get some silver grey “Hammerite”, but came home instead with a couple of emulsion “match pots”, one a Johnstone’s “Steel Smoke” and the other a Dulux “Warm Pewter”, Basically dark and light grey.

So taking the “Steel Smoke” I dry-brushed this liberally all over the pieces and once dry did the same, but a little lighter with the “Warm Pewter” this was (to my eye anyway) a vast immediate improvement over what had been there before, but to add a bit more of a metallic edge I then very lightly did another dry-brush this time with my old “Miniature paints” silver, now we were really getting somewhere! Next we had already discussed that the “wolfs head” and the rivets around the edge of the mantle would look good in gold or bronze, so after retouching these areas in black out came my bronze and a good dry-brushing of this was applied, and once this was dry a lighter dry-brushing of copper went over this.

Now Dennis had insisted (against my better judgment) that he wanted two paper wolf heads (each facing forward) stuck on the sides of the pauldrons (now I didn’t really like these and to be honest I think they don’t sit well under his cloak, and it looks better without them. But obviously it’s not my decision). So two of the wolf-heads were printed (one reversed) and cut out, then after painting the area of the pauldron where they would sit with PVA wood glue, the were stuck in place then painted with more PVA (I’m still not that keen on them).

Finally I got out my tin of “soft tone” Quickshade and gave everything a coat of this (yes I even Quickshade human beings now!!), and once this was dry gave it all a blow over with the tin of satin varnish I bought a few years back that was supposed to be matt (remember that Simon?).

All of this had to be finnished ready for Sunday, as we are off to “Liverpool Comic-con”, I’ll try and get some pictures and maybe even write up a quick report about how we got on. Now just before I go I thought I’d mention something else (and this one is even wargames related!), back when we went to the Ellesmere Port comic-com a few weeks back I bought myself a smashing new leather “Dice Bag” complete with hand painted “Dragons eye” from a very nice lady by the name of Mandy Brace, now we had a good chat about this and that and it turned out she had never heard of “wargames shows” (talk about missing your target audience!), anyway I sent her the list of UK shows and she said she was going to try and get into a couple to see how she got on. If you would like a look at her lovely work here’s a link…

https://www.etsy.com/shop/embraceleather

I promise to get back to painting miniatures soon.

So till next time. Cheers Roger.

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