Musician of the month: a tambourine player

One interesting part of the "musician of the month" challenge is, from times to times, to paint an unexpected figure.

I think that, this time, the aim is achieved :)

Here you are my tambourine player, with friends.

Beyond the subject itself, one part in this exercise was to paint different skins, particularly for the man and the woman in his arms.

Figures from Linear-B set 75 Roman Port 2.

Mini World Lyon

Hi!
I'm currently enjoying a few vacation days at home with family visiting us in Lyon. Yesterday, we all went out to visit a miniatures museum which is called Mini World Lyon, located in Vaulx-en-Velin in the suburbs of Lyon.
The permanent exhibition contains several worlds full of thousands of miniatures in the following themes: the City, the Mountain, the Countryside and the City of Lyon itself.
There was also a temporary exhibition, Star Wars Lego.

Since the cameras are welcome in this park, my sister, my daughter and I took all the necessary to take pictures, and we spent at least two hours shooting as much as possible - the only restriction was that there were at lot of people, particularly children, because of the autumn holidays. A wonderful exhibition nevertheless: hundreds of little scenes, vehicles and characters disseminated in the various landscapes, and a light cycle representing day and night in 20 mn... I can't wait to go there again :)

If you want to know more about this place, here is the link to their official website, it's really worth a look... and a visit, at least !

Orcs - size comparison

Hi, a small update today. I was asked in a french forum (Addict Figurines) to tell how the Dark Alliance Orcs compared to 1/72 humans. The easiest way is of course to take pictures showing the minis side by side, and this is how I answered.

1. Small Dark Alliance Orc / DDS Landsknecht

2. Caesar human (painted as a vampire :)) / Average Dark Alliance Orc  / DDS Landsknecht

3. Caesar human / sample of Dark Alliance Orcs

The result is that these Orcs are equal are smaller to humans in size, which is perfect in my eyes. What do you think ?

Hope it helps :)

Orcish tribe

Orctober is for Orcs, so I decided a few days ago to add some troops to my 1/72 Orcs army.

I painted the Orc set #1 manufactured by Dark Alliance/Redbox last year, as you can see in the related post here, and even if I think that they are not the best minis ever, I was interested in having more poses in this warband, so I bought sets #2 and #3 lately and began to paint some of them.

I keep on increasing my painting rate, so I worked on a batch of 8 guys at the same time, coming from both sets.

The result, tabletop standard:

And some close-ups:

Love this one - maybe my next avatar :)

The hornblower is an extra musician of the month !!

In this last picture, you will recognize the drummer I painted last year.

I used the same color scheme as for set #1, so that they easily mix with one another.

Last picture, starring my favorite orc so far, an allegory of the pain of war, or the headache, as you wish :D:

Too much dwarfbeer at the Orctoberfest

The Orcs are definitely fun to paint.

Technical adjustments on this blog

Hi everyone!

Since I've started this blog, I've found it a bit boring that less than half of my laptop's screen (definition is 1920x1080) was used to display pictures and text.
After a few tests, I modified the width of the blog to 1000px so that it fits on the devices I could test with.

But this modification might not work properly on your device, so I would like to ask you if these new parameters have an undesired effect or not. If your display is 1000px or higher, you should not experience any trouble.

The main difference is the size of the boxes to show the pictures. Let's have a look:

Size before change

Size after change

Is it worth modifying ? Have you got any trouble ?
Please let me know.

Oh, and a few words about the minis involved. You will have recognized a druid from Hät set 8138 Gallic command, together with the carnyx player already shown here, and a slinger from Hät set 8089 Gallic warband. On the background is my DBA Gallic army.

Regarding his clothes, I searched for info on the web, but we must admit that very little is known on that subject. It is possible that the druid wore white dresses as sacerdotal clothes, but it might only be a tradition coming from the 19th century. All I could read on the subject (Dumézil, Le Roux/Guyonvarc'h, Persigout) is rather old and not very scientific, in my opinion.

So I chose white, off white, as usual :)

A few more pictures.

PS: I also resized the pictures of the previous post but not the others, I'm waiting for your feedback before doing it.

EDIT: Thank you all for your answers ! I understand I can keep this format for the blog, so I can now change the other posts. All right, there's some job to do :)

Early Imperial Romans: Auxiliary Archers

My brother and I have painted an Early Imperial Roman army some years ago, in a time when washing only had to do with the dishes in camping - only flat colours, without any lightening. But we were very proud of that army, in which we mixed Esci legionaries with Airfix Romans as auxiliaries.
One of its weaknesses was the lack of archers, since we only had one pose of archer in the Airfix set.

Years later, Hät released a set of Auxiliaries troops for Imperial Romans, and I bought it  because I was first interested in getting more poses for my Germanic warband. I was a bit disappointed with the archers that were too different from the Airfix - I thought it would be in contradiction with the uniformity I imagined for the most powerful army of antiquity.

Some more years passed, a few books about the Roman Empire had been read, I began to realize that uniformity, as we can imagine it today, was not a practice in antiquity - soldiers of the same corps were similar but only to a certain extent. And last week, as I was painting Germans, I suddenly remembered that I never used the Hät archers, and that they would probably look great together with the Airfix ones. I only had to find a good (and if possible, original and accurate) color scheme to paint them. Don't ask why, an off white tunic immediately seemed to be a good idea.

This is my unit of auxiliary archers for DBA, two 4xBw elements.

I guess you easily recognize the Airfix minis in the following pictures (the second from the left). They look good together with the Hät, don't you think ?

And last, this is a picture comparing two newly Airfix painted archers with the equivalent in the old standard. I would say it was worth repainting them.

Hope you're not fed up with the off white tunics :)

Musician of the month: Gallic Carnyx player

I'm back in Ancients these days. After the Germanic warband, I found inspiration to paint a Gallic warrior that was on my desk for... years.
It's the problem with Celts: you cannot just paint them, you have to cover their clothes with tartan patterns, and since they were sort of individualist, you cannot paint the same pattern twice !!

So, what does our mini look like ?

Nothing extremely original here, but the combination of green and red (complementary colours) is always nice to see. And NO, I didn't even try to add another tartan pattern on the trousers :)

Maybe you ask yourself: what sort of thing the carnyx might be ?

The carnyx is a celtic wind instrument from the iron age. It was a sort of trumpet made of bronze, and was used on the battlefield to frighten the enemies before the clash (according to Polybius).
According to the Gundestrup cauldron (a richly decorated silver vessel dating from the Celtic era, and found at Gundestrup in Denmark), it looked like that:

And according to modern reenactors (from the french blog Les Lemovices en fête):

I never heard someone playing the carnyx, did you ? Must be a little monotonous, don't you think ?

Hope you like this little musician :)