reports from the final California Gen Con...
This unit is the start of a new fantasy army for me, as I've never had fantasy humans before.
These figures are from the DemonWorld line, in The Empire range, now manufactured by Ral Partha Europe.
I'll often come up with my own color schemes for fantasy units, but in the case of DemonWorld, I'm often impressed with the colors on the product label! That's what I did here – you can see the catalog picture and compare.
Note that these are the noble pikemen. There's also ordinary pikemen in the range. The nobles get fancy plumes on their helmets, and probably count as elite troops.
These figures were painted for us by our good friends in Sri Lanka, Fernando Enterprises. They painted to match the product picture.
When the painted figures arrived from Sri Lanka, I based them on Mighty Armies plastic bases (Rebel Minis).
I lucked out with some bonus figures in my pack, enough to add an extra unit base.
I'm basing at three figures per stand, which is the 'new' standard for Mighty Armies.
I used spackle around the figure bases, to contour them in with the bases.
I then painted the base-tops muddy brown, as I find that flocking looks best if it has an earth color beneath. I like to color-code my armies, so I colored the base edges silver with a Sharpie marker. Then I applied glue to the bases, dipped them in flock, and sealed the bases with a matte clearcoat spray.
As you can see above, the pikemen come in two poses: pike at rest (vertical) and pike ready (slanted forward). I chose to keep the poses on different bases, so I can put 'fighting' pikemen in front and 'resting' pikemen in the rear. Of course, that's just for show. And one stand ended up with mixed pikes.
These are the fighting pikemen, front and rear.
And these are the resting pikemen, front and back.
I created a command stand using three figures in the pack: a leader pointing, a bugler, and a standardbearer. Note the nice job the painters did on the banner.
That's one unit down, many more to go!