Warhammer Fantasy: Giants! or, "Regiments of Renown: Giants of Albion 2015"

RAAAAAAARGHHHH!!!

These two represent my longest continuous sculpting project. And the biggest, appropriately.

Being that they are so much larger than everything else I've shared on here, they're pretty tricky to photograph using the set-up I've used for most of my photography (phone, craft lamp, and white-or-gray paper). So bear with me, in the photos to come there may be some extreme variance in lighting conditions / other aspects of photo-quality.

In older editions of Warhammer, you could include mercenary units in your armies to fill gaps in the normal set of tactical options afforded by your standard army list. For example, a normally slow dwarf army might make good use of some hired cavalry, or an elf army might contract some ogres for extra muscle.

There were generic mercenary units, "Dogs of War", and named-character-mercenary units or "Regiments of Renown".

Dogs of War could be hired by other armies, or played as their own army list. However most Dogs of War units were pretty bland, having maybe an unusual piece of equipment like pikes or pavises, but being otherwise mostly ordinary, generic humans with base-level stats and no access to the army-specific special rules and Lores of Magic that made the mainstream armies vaguely competitive against one another.

Regiments of Renown were mostly "character" version of Dogs of War units. Meaning they had a fancy name and a named champion to lead the unit, and maybe an additional special rule or slightly different equipment. And being specific named guys, you logically couldn't have more than one of a given Regiment of Renown.

The original Giants of Albion were a Regiments of Renown unit of two specific named giants, Cachtorr and Bologs, and their druid handler, Hengus.

Do two giants constitute an entire regiment? Anyway, here are the original Giants of Albion

I've had these guys nearly as long as I've been involved in the hobby. They were part of my very first Orcs and Goblins army and made for a lot of fun. One or both would later be in my various Chaos armies.

For a while their pieces were used for a Chaos Spawn (with a metal Tyranid Carnifex body). Later the one-eyed head was used for a different Chaos Spawn, on the body of the Krootox that would serve as the base-model for my Night Goblin Boss on Great Cave Squig. I don't know how hardcore Citadel collectors might feel about this...

....but the one-eyed head ultimately ended up completely covered in greenstuff (serving as a sort of vaguely face-shaped armature) inside one of my Mangler Squigs...

This was a pretty cool kit, very characterful. And you got two giants for the same price as the then-current Orcs and Goblins Giant. The Giants of Albion were taller, but scrawny. The actual O&G giant was a lot fatter, and looked like he could take the both of them.

Here is the multi-part plastic Giant that would be release some years later, and pushed as a mercenary option to potentially be included in every army in Warhammer.

Unfortunately, Giants were considered to "suck" in the competitive scene, so that never really happened. They've got fun, quirky rules, but it is complained that they can't reliably "earn their points back" (i.e. kill a larger percentage of your opponents point total than the percentage of your you spent on them), and they die too easy to artillery.

On the other hand, for only a 200-ish point investment, a giant can ensure that every bolt-thrower, stone-thrower, cannon, and magic missile your opponent has is NOT directed at anything else in your army for the first couple turns...

The plastic giant is really pretty decent kit, it's got good level of detail, and is highly customizable. It also came with a variety of neat accessories and base accents (of which I have mentioned a few in my other posts) like clubs, a dead cow, a frightened peasant, a signpost, etc.

I never had the complete kit myself, rather I was working with someone's leftover arm, foot, and head options from the assorted bits included with an Orcs and Goblins lot I purchased on eBay some years ago.

Below, I'll post the rest of mine.

I worked on these guys over the course of the last two years. By my best estimation, they took me about 20,000 times longer to complete than I anticipated.

For both of them, I used brass rod to make the arms and legs longer, and filled in the gaps with a lot of greenstuff. I gradually had to make the limbs thicker here-and-there to keep up with changing proportions as the pieces evolved. The whole production involved many, many layers and re-imaginings.

Had it not been for my discovery of a technique even more revolutionary than the use of pastel shapers (described in my Hellbrute post), this process likely would have continued, and I would have probably given up on ever finishing these guys.

The technique in question is the use of the back (the not-bladed side) of my X-Acto blade to shave the greenstuff. Prior to this, all shapes were created additively (i.e. by adding MORE), and any unwanted texture had to be addressed before the greenstuff cured. If anything didn't look right, I would have to just sculpt more on top of it.

I can't even explain how much faster this technique made things.

I read once that greenstuff doesn't sand well, so I never really experimented. Using the blade of the X-acto does give kind of bad results. Even when you make strokes away from you with the blade-side facing back, the way commonly recommended for removing mold-lines.

That's not the "back" of the blade that I'm talking about. I mean the flat side of the blade that is not bladed. It's just a rectangle. Somehow the corners are just sharp enough to smoothly shave greenstuff without ripping it up.

Then you just give it a coat of Liquid Greenstuff (a "paint" of greenstuff that comes in a paint container. Another essential tool.) and you're good to go, as if it had been sculpted to perfection in the first place. I can't understate the impact this technique had on my sculpting.

Included for scale is my superfluous Escher-turned-Cultist from my 40k army. She's a bit shorter than a heroic-scale "adult male", but I didn't have a more representative model at hand that wasn't blatantly meant for a far-future setting.

****NOTE: The rest of this post is under construction! Check back for the rest of my commentary!****

*Bologs 2015 (the one with the big rock)*