Khâzad-Zâul

Having been tied up with work and building the mother of all flower troughs for "She Who Must Be Obeyed" (large and sturdy enough to withstand a siege I reckon - the flower trough not "She Who Must be Obeyed"!) I haven't had much time for painting over the last week (or even whacking some golf balls!) - a sad state of affairs I know...

Some new stuff is on the painting table and has a coat of undercoat on it, so hopefully there will be something new and exciting later this week on Bleaseworld, but in the meantime I thought I'd share some pictures of Saul's Dwarf Army which I've painted up over the last couple of years.

The bulk of the army comes from the Skull Pass set with a box of Dwarf Warriors thrown in for variation. Whilst there have been (many) snippy comments about the miniatures in the GW starter boxes I think they are fine and some are really good like the Thane pictured here:

The whole look of the Dwarves is inspired by the Saxons in the naff Clive Owen King Arthur film. The only redeeming element of this awful film is the Saxon's attacking across the ice. Now they don't look like Saxons (pretty cool Chaos Marauders maybe...) but that dark look was one I wanted to replicate on the Dwarves. For this I switched to using a black undercoat (after twenty odd years of using white) and must confess to finding the whole painting process a damn sight easier and quicker doing this (consequently I haven't used white undercoat since on any miniature).

The army has been supplement over the last couple of years with some artillery pieces picked up off eBay. I'm quite happily mixing old and new models as it gives the feeling that Dwarf smiths create one-off weapons rather than have a mass production facility, which seems more in keeping with the mythos concept I feel.

There are still a number of miniatures to be painted up including another unit of Miners with three mining wagons pulled by ponies, an Automaton of some sort from Privateer Press's Warmachine range that fits in perfectly, a heavily converted unit of Dwarf Rangers and some flying Dwarves with rocket packs (!) to act as Gyrocopter proxies as I don't like the 'copter model. Hopefully it won't be too long before these get painted and make an appearance in Bleaseworld!