16 Viking Hirdmen came knocking on my door

In Saga, the Hirdmen are your best troop.  They're expensive but tough as nails and able to deliver a knockout blow.  I  assembled these with sword & axes to differentiate them from my spear armed Bondi warriors.

These were primed black, drybrushed chainmail, block painted, washed and highlighted.  Skin was done with the excellent Foundry triad for skin tones-Flesh shade 5A, Flesh 5B and Flesh Light 5C.  This is going to be my go-to combo in 28mm. I can see why the Foundry triads are so popular.  They take the guesswork out of jumps between the base color and the first and second highlight.  If I were to add more Foundry paints to my paint bench, I'd have to swap them out of the paint pots and into droppers.  The amount of work that would take puts me off the idea for now!

The LBMS shield transfers look brilliant as usual.  Here's a final shot of them massed up.  Knock, knock, Vikings calling!

I think Saga is going to get heavy rotation on the tabletop this year.  When I was shopping at The Source Comics and Games, the clerk asked me what I was working on.  I told him I was finishing a Viking warband for Saga and he replied that I was the 3rd person he'd spoken to who was working on Saga. 

Next week, for the first time ever, I'll take a Dip with 12 Gripping Beast Viking archers. I was hoping for the Swedish Bikini Team but you have to go with what you've got!  

You never forget your 1st - Saga warband!

Thanks to a sprawling collection of Vikings and Normans I scored at Bartertown, I've got a bunch of Saga painting under way. It's a nice change up from my 15mm work and soon, our club will be taking the Saga plunge!  My first warband is made up of Gripping Beast plastic Vikings. GB plastics are a treat, with tons of options off the sprue.  I'm following the Dark Ages Color Palette created by John at the 1000 Foot General blog.  It' hard to stick to muted colors but I think I managed. Thanks John for doing the heavy lifting for the rest of us!

Berserkers-1 Point.  Berserkers are best portrayed as shirtless, even pantsless, madmen running around in an animal's hide.  For the purist or pedantic, grab a box of plastic Celts and do a Viking headswap.  Boom, you'll have a shirtless madman.  You won't be able to use the 2 handed Danish axe though.  I love the look of these guys with a huge axe so I used my GB fellows.  Throwing 4 dice per figure in combat, my Beserkers are going to tear up the house!

Burkhard from the excellent dhcwargamesblog, gave me his advice on fielding berserkers:  Those are the men you need to perform a surgical strike (but they will most likely only survive one or two of those) that can serve as a game winner. Hide them behind a unit with higher armor values until they get close if your opponent has ranged weapons.  Sounds good to me and thanks for sharing, Burk!

Soon, you too shall be painted!

 Sven's Tree Removal,  at your service!  

Sorry boys, the pantsless berserkers got here first.  

Bondi Warriors-2 Points. Not much to say about except they went down well.  At the finish line, I realized they'll be handled roughly on the tabletop so I brushed on a protective coat of Future acrylic polish followed by Liquitex Matte Medium to take the shine off.  I did think about freehanding shields but I was desperate to get my first warband on the table.  Shields are the excellent LBMS transfers.

After years of painting 15mm, I confess that there's something deeply satisfying about working in a bigger scale. With a larger canvas, you reap a greater reward.  It's much slower going, in part because I've hardly worked in this scale in years.  Some of my 15mm color combos don't scale up well but with as many figures as I have to paint, there's time enough to crack the code! Skol Vikings!

Creating Corvinus' Carpathian camp

Sometimes, you just get lucky.  When it happens, it's best to smile and say it all went according to plan.  You can't see it but I'm smiling as I type!

Rummaging  through my hobby supplies, I discovered I didn't have a medieval tent for my Later Hungarian camp but I did find 2 Essex wagons.  I added cardstock and 15mm Baueda ancient supplies to load out the empty wagons.  I then tried to make a supply train with the 2 wagons but even corner to corner, I couldn't fit them both in the footprint of this Field of Glory camp.

As a fallback, I decided to try capturing the flavor of the Carpathian mountains.  I remembered I had a large piece of bark socked away and bark worked well in my last 3 camps.  So, it was back to the bark!  I cut the bark  at a 45 degree angle to created a switchback that allowed both wagons to fit into the camp.  I used Durham's Rock Hard putty to raise up the rear section of bark and hold it all together.

I primed in black and highlighted up with browns but brown failed me at the finish line.  Once I set the brown wagon with brown horses, brown supplies and brown driver on a brown mountain, I knew I had to start over with a different color. Ouch!  Out came the black and I repainted the mountain in 50 Shades of Grey.  My painting adventure bore no resemblance to the trash novel that's a such a hit with bored housewives, or so I'm told.

The 2nd wagon made the camp very crowded so I put it away for another day.  I used Vallejo Burnt Sienna pigment plus a glaze to make the oxidized runoff.

I used to dread making camps for my armies, putting them off until the very end.  The fact that I had fun with this one means I've finally whipped this bugbear. Bark has turned into my "go to" product for camps lately!