The Oldhammer Dwarf Army - Part 1 (Longbeards)

The phone rings in 2010.

It's mum.

"Matthew. What do you want us to do with your gobtrolls?"

"My what?"

"The insurance company is underpinning the foundations, we're clearing out all the rooms - and there's a drawer in your old bedroom that's so heavy that your father can't lift it. It's full of Citadel stuff"

The Warhammer Armies card. My artwork based on a Perry Imperial Dwarf

My dwarf army so far

I'd played with toy soldiers from pretty much as soon as my fingers started working, but there was probably a point around the age of eighteen when I went to University that I took a fairly long hiatus. Don't get me wrong, I was always a military history enthusiast and wargamer at heart - it just took a backseat for nearly two decades. I still went to Salute and (sometimes) Colours every year. I still went to the Model Engineer exhibition. I still never walked past a Games Workshop without going in, not even in my Uni town of Guildford where the GW was tiny and difficult to find.

I still often bought White Dwarf and the other three or four Wargaming magazines, it's just that noisy guitars, pubs, girls and far too much football prioritised themselves for a long, long time. Sometimes I even painted. But not often. I trained with one of two football teams three nights a week and played an 11-a-side game at 3pm on a Saturday and 11am on a Sunday morning. Neither my ankles nor my knees do not thank me for it today.

That call from my mum in 2010 took me home to a big wooden drawer - ok let's not lie about it - it was two drawers and some wardrobe space - I'd barely touched for...well a long time.

Inside were around a hundred (at least) Starblazer mini-comics (remember them?), a comic photostory of Battlestar Galactica - and lots and lots of toy soldiers. Mainly Citadel but also a ton of Grenadier, Asgard, Mithril and Essex. To my shame, I'd left toy soldiers unpainted and unplayed. I'd all but destroyed their soul.

I was what Rick Priestley calls a "Wargames Butterfly". I would flutter from project to project and from period to period and from scale to scale. Amongst my Citadels I had Orcs and Goblins, Dark Elves, Wood Elves, Eternal Champion, Chaos, Blood Bowl 1st and 2nd edition, Humans and of course dwarfs. The dwarfs were the first models I had and were my favourites. Dozens and dozens of the Perrys' finest.

I set about selling off almost everything, I'd just come out of a relationship with a toy soldier hater. I'll write a controversial post at some point in the future called something like "If you partner asks you to give up your hobby it's time to find a new partner" - but I wanted my large collection to go to people that were going to appreciate it...people like you. Some of these models show up every now and again. Like this one on Stuff of Legends. The ogre on the far left below is my effort from when I was 13 or 14. The brilliant thing is that Darkblade who painted most of the rest of the ogres is now my mate, and our models were pictured together probably before we drank our first pint as pals!

The difference in painting quality is easy to spot, but "I was just a kid, bubblegum on my shoe"

The dwarfs, my beloved dwarfs. I just couldn't bring myself to sell them.

So I didn't.

I'd painted sporadically for two-decades. I still had the old plastic toolbox my Grandad had given me when I was a teenager to keep my paints in, but my dad showed up at my apartment one Saturday and gave me four Daler "Dalon" model brushes. I went through my pots of acrylics and threw away the ones that were unusable.  

I sat down and over ten nights I painted my first unit for a looooong time. I'm starting here not because they are my best painted unit, but because they were my first unit back in the hobby. I'm hoping that by going through the units in the order I (re-)painted them that there will be some kind of progression in my painting skills, basing and techniques.

So after that characteristically rambling introduction, my first unit for my dwarf army is a unit of Longbeards:

"Prince" Grimm Krabbscratch's Imperial Dwarfs

Prince Grimm is not a prince at all but is in fact a dwarf thane from an obscure dwarf clan. His clan however, once upon a time intercepted a warband of the Opengashh goblin tribe returning from a raid on Bugman's brewery. Grimm and his followers recaptured a large consignment of Bugman's "Extra Special Dark Ale", and for this reason he has a loyal band of outcast Imperial Dwarf nobles who allow his delusions of royal birth in return for the occasional victory gulp of the rare ale.

The full unit of twenty Imperial Dwarf Nobles

I have genuinely forgotten the order I Painted these chaps in. I know I painted in two to three figure batches but the order itself escapes me so I'll just picture in five figure groups. Although I love the look of units and armies all in the same livery I always felt that Oldhammer in many ways often showed units where every model had it's own colours and character. I'm a great believer that a unit can be cohesively brought together by its basing. Please forgive the painting quality, I was re-learning how to paint.

The "Command"

Purple is not a colour I paint very often. I wanted to tie together Prince Grimm and his standard bearer and musician by using the same colours on shields, banner and drum. I have this thing in my head that some units in my army have musicians displaying red and white halves in some way, hence the drummer has a purple drum but a red and white tunic. At some point I am going to add a very complex design to the drum so I have left it plain to allow this work at a future point while making him "game ready".

I have a large variety of shields in the bitz box. As this was my first unit for some time I thought I'd take the shortcut of using sculpted shields. These three are plastic marauder shields.

One of the issues with dwarfs (and all the old lead in general) is that flagpoles were either incredibly delicate and breakable or were stupidly short and impractical. As such I've chopped off the flagpole and drilled in a piece of brass rod to make the flagpole big enough for more banner. This isn't a particularly professional job as the part below the hand is slightly fatter than that above the hand. But again, it was my first time back after a while. The flag is a tomato paste tube as I described in an earlier post - this one is free-handed. I drew the fleur de lys on the primed metal with a pencil and then painted it. This rather unforgiving close-up shows the paintwork, the knotwork on the edges have been clipped from a Little Big Men Studios banner from the bitz box.  

The guy on the far left-hand side of this group of five is one of my favourite ever dwarfs. If not "one of" then definitely my favourite. He's one of a handful I didn't re-paint from my childhood army. He is painted in the same colours as I saw him in WD 95 in November 1987. Three of these guys have plastic marauder shields, but oldhammer devotees of a certain age will notice a couple of the old citadel metal shields on the right. My dad painted "Angus", I added the targe at the time of painting.

four more models I love, and one marauder model that isn't quite as good as the Perry ones. Plenty of Oldhammerers consider Marauder Dwarfs to be "the best ever" but I suspect much of that is to do with nostalgia. Most Marauder dwarfs are bulky and lacking in animation, although they maintain some of the Perry dwarf character. There. I've said it. Marauder dwarfs just aren't as good.

It's even more obvious where you mix them in a unit with Perry masterpieces. With these five there's just the one plastic Marauder shield and x3 Citadel metal shields. The green guy has an Essex Miniatures metal kite shield. 

The last of the unit. Three plastic Marauder shields, one 80s citadel metal shield. Plus an Essex metal heater shield with a free-handed crown. 

As a post-script to this unit, and indeed to this post. I chose to paint two models from this unit in enamels. I did this for purely nostalgia reasons, to take me back to the 80s of breathing in the spirit fumes. The pics below are of those two chaps, and although I think they came out ok (I suddenly realised that I hadn't painted the base on one!) it's not a method I think I'll use very often.

Until the next unit, 

MX