Baldur the Stonecleaver

Painted

I worry when I broaden the coverage here that gain some new audience at the expense of boring some of core readers. There's no way I'm doing more than one blog, though, so I'll have to trust if you're interested in what I'm doing generally you'll likely be interested stuff you may not have signed on for. With that I'm going to post some Hordes Circle Orboros figs I painted back in 2008 but never got around to showing. 2008, already a long time ago. See, despite these being the newest figures I've shown they're practically vintage, or maybe even old school? ;)

Anyway, I can't call myself the biggest fan of Privateer Press and what goes on there today but back in the day I painted quite a bit of it on commission under the Null Horizon Studio aegis (what I've got around to sharing of this you can see over at my CMON gallery), and collected a fair bit of it myself. Maybe more on my mixed feelings about the Iron Kingdoms later but I'm excited enough about the particular figures I collected and painted.

Why share these today? Mostly because I ran into another Hordes/Warmachine player and may dust these figures off after years of dormancy, and also because I just happen to be photographing the stuff I never got around to before and have come to these by chance.>/p>

Of the armies I collected I got Circle Orboros to the table first as this was the least ambitious of the the projects, had fewer figures and fewer hard decisions about schemes and conversions. I've got a fully painted, playable force now and just a few more things left to paint for it before I can call it done done, but of course who knows if I'll ever get back to it.

So here's Baldur, done in a scheme that fits the canon pretty well with a patina effect on the leather somewhat in the Rackham style done with glazes and scratch-like mostly transparent highlights. In the course of painting this I thought about stone swords and whether a good idea, and after a time on wikipedia reading about minerals and the hardness scale and what not I think if you had the magical strength to wield it and the enchantment to resist shattering from a lateral blow it's a better idea than I thought at first.

I like this figure a lot. I've seen it catch flak for being static, etc, but that's kind of the point. He's got that immovable object vibe going, and his hands are just expressive enough to convey he's working some earth magic. Below he's shown amidst his shifting stones.

These figures were released 2006 and I'm not sure of the sculptor. Please drop a comment if you know.

As always, the collection can be viewed in its entirety at flickr.