Iron claw mutants - complete painted set

Another quick one for today, Do any of you have those sort of projects you thought were finished and you realise afterwards you can still add a little something ? Well that happens a lot to me and it's just happened ot long ago.

Some of you might remember that a year ago I painted a warband of Rad mutants based on Iron claw pirates right ? Well I just happened to miss one of the mutants from that set. I'm not exactly a completist collection wise (despite some attempts) but since there are 5 mutant models in the set I thought it'd be cool to have them all as 5 makes a better number for a squad than 4 (or at leas tthat's how I feel).

Another Oldhammer WE Debriefing by a bloody french...

So here we are, it's been a month since I last blogged and a tad longer since I painted anything...

Why is that ? Well just throw moving house, holidays, business journeys and the fact I still don't have internet at home and you rapidly come to that sort of results.

Does that mean I haven't been doing anything hobby wise all this time, noooope ! I certainly haven't been painting much (but that's going to end soon) but I've had the occasion to make myslef anothr hobby place (probably the only upside of moving home) PLUS I've had the occasion of attending BOYL 2015 (aka Bring Out Your Lead, the Oldhammer event in Newark) this year.

This year, I made myself a little present by staying 3 whole days there and I can tell I never got a minute spare or got the chance to get bored.

As usual, it seems the only games I have are abroad, last one was in Montréal in Febuary with the most Excellent Iannick. This year, just like last year, I managed to get 5 games in the WE and all were very different and yet very fun.

Let's have a look at those games :

GAMES I PLAYED :

Inquisimunda : The quest for the Golden Phrogg

This game was a spin-off for the Campaign organised by Andy Hoare from Tales from the Maelstrom, and it was the occasion for no less than 9 players to gather around a table for a huge Royal Rumble.

The Game took place at the Warhammer World which I had never visited before and was organised by Job from Magpie and Old Lead and it was extremely nice to game on such a lovely table with vintage lead (you could see some people being very intrigued).

Players were divided into 2 groups : Graham (Greater Harlequin) and his genestealer cult, John (or Just John if you want) with Space Santa and Chris (Antipixi) with his ash waste nomads. Facing them were Gadge with his rogue trader, Colin (Whiskey Priest) with an inquisitor, Paul (Cheetor/Sho3box) with another inquisitor and Myself with my trusted Sensei warband.

Great table, great guys in a great venu, what could go wrong ?

Rad mutants - Iron Claw pirates

At last I finished some models !

These have somehow jumped to the top of the paintqueue (well, greatly thanks to The one for sending me Captain Dunbar as a gesture of kindness) and as always with Bob Olley's sculpts, I just let the models paint themself without worrying too much.
I've already told you how I strongly believe you only truly know a model once you've painted it, well that is even more true with Bob Olley's sculpt. I called it the "Bob Olley effect" earlier, you may not like what the sculpt look like (I've been like that a lot in my earlier days), but the minute I painted one (I was kinda forced), I realised it was a tremendous pleasure to work with his models and I have come to be a huge fan of his work. I just love sculptors who work for painters. Just like Jes Goodwin (my own personnal favourite), Bob is a very painter friendly kind of sculptor and that's what makes his work so great and favoured.

But let me tell you about those particular models. They are Iron claw pirates dating from the time when Bob had his own studio producing models for Games Workshop (just like the Morrissons had the Marauder studio).

There's a full range of pirates to pick from, all particularly characterful :

I have most of this range except maybe 3 of 4  and I expect to paint the full set in due time. Looking at the picture above, I just feel frustrated to not have collected Ooglorg the cruel yet as it would have made a set of 5 aliens which would have been pretty cool but anyway... (if any of you feels like trading him, I'm your man)

As you can see, those models all bear the distinctive style of Bob with organic shaped weapons, very detailed faces (you may not be able to spot them but if you've ever handled one of these you surely know every single detail like eye lids and nose hair are sculpted), wrinkles and wrinkles over wrinkles and guns you don't know what to count as.

You may have noticed I didn't place the models in a random way. you can clearly see the one on the left is far more humanoid than his colleague on the far right. This is because I've decided to treat them as mutants. But not the chaotic sort, no, just like my Rad chimera, I want these guys to be the offspring of radiations and fallout of some nuclear holocaust. The further you get to the right, the more the mutant and his ancestors have been exposed to radiations.

That was a way to unite all those models by giving them a similar paintjob to tie them a little. I voluntarily left some remnants of "human" pink skin and coloured red the overgrown or most mutated parts (the heads in most cases).