Boatmen of Lake Town

It’s nice to see the Lake Town men stand toe to toe with these orcs and actually look down at them, I suppose I too used to painting my Dwarf army.

Creating the army of Lake Town got me thinking about the bigger picture, who are these guys and what do they all do in the town. 

We have the Town guard and the warriors passing through, the merchants and traders, but I thought we had better have some boatmen and fishermen too.

These were easy to create by using the shabby looking bodies from the Frost grave soldiers box set and some suitable heads. The nasty looking boat hooks were created by mixing plastic spears and Warlord Games orc weapons. 

I also thought to give them a character all of their own by painting them very dark in blacks and greys.

 Ropes are another touch that gave them a boating feel and these were taken again from the Frost Grave soldier sprue. So that sprue really came in handy for these river folk with all its little detail pieces.

The sorry looking boatman above was created using the head and body from a Oathmark human but the arms and axe from a Perry box set.

Lake Town shields!

I searched eBay for suitable shields as well as raiding my on collection of spares. I managed to find some great ones on line including highly detailed Viking ones, perfect I thought. I even found a pack that were battle damaged, again these were great for an army that had just survived a dragon attack.

For the shields I thought a round Viking type was a good place to start. This isn’t a professional army so lots of variety in shapes and materials. Some wicker, but mostly rough wooden planks held by metal and hide braces. Very crude looking shields compared to those of the Elves and Dwarves. Also different sizes can help to break up uniformity, so some are no more than bucklers while others are very large kite shields. A real rag tag bunch this lot. I thought the roughness of the planked shield would give the army the perfect feel for Lake Town, with a few high quality ones mixed in. There’s even a few old Dwarf ones from times long ago when Dale was at its height.

To speed up painting literally an army of shields I thought I would spray them all brown to help get things moving. This will act as a base colour for dry brushing.

Anyone fancy a biscuit?

 These have just been painted with Army Painter and are still sticky wet. 

Here we see a lower member of lake town society, the humble boatman. However, can he survive the hordes of  hell with just a boat hook and a length of rope... only time will tell.
 

So here we are, a few hours have past since I started this post and we have our first shielded warriors.

Hooded archers, these will be in units of ten for Oathmark, well twelve with my basing.

These shots of WIP give a good idea of what the finished bases will look like.

So some more time has passed and we have some more progress. I’m touching up the face flesh colour and putting an edge on the weapons with silver paint, but apart from that they are looking okay.