Tuesday, January 26, 2010

FOG Gaul Battle Group Challenge - Day 5

Here is the final product after 5 days. Sorry about the shoddy lighting in the photos, I didn't realize my flood lamp was too close until I got back to the PC to post this entry. I'll try to get better pictures using natural light as soon as I can. Here are my thoughts about the Old Glory 15s Gaul figures:

Pros: affordable, animated, Lots of variety in poses
Cons: some of the animation comes in the form of just bending the figures over, one of the poses has a base that's 16mm long, which is a bit difficult to fit on a 15mm deep base

I was very worried that my color selections would end up being too dodgy, but the end result looks pretty good thanks to the shield decals and some creative basing to hide the bits I don't like.  While the variety of poses makes for a wild looking bunch, it does present somewhat of a problem in deploying the unit in a two-deep formation as the chaps leaning forward on the rear base get in the way of the spears of the chaps in the front. In hindsight, I should have based most of the spear-throwers on three bases and the sword-swingers on the other three. Between the shields and the clothing I think they look wild enough to hide the fact that I only added stripes and plaids to 25% of the figures.




I still have two days left. Here is a quick snapshot of one stick of the next unit on the painting table. So far I've only blocked in the tunics and flesh, but there's not a lot on these figures to paint and it's a small unit. I'm hoping I can finish painting this in the next two days. If you haven't been following Scott MacFeee's blog, he actually finished painting his 247 ACW figures for his personal challenge A DAY EARLY! Check his work out over on his blog.


4 comments:

Scott MacPhee said...

I like the finished bases very much! I was fond of the OG Gauls when I painted them about a year ago. The certainly look like a savage warband.

Iowa Grognard said...

I like how this unit pulls of the look of a fierce warband in action.

I'm usually very conservative when it comes to color schemes. My conservative nature comes from me being unsure if I could make colors like these work well. If I painted Persians I could guarantee a rather drab outcome.

It amazes me when painters are able to accomplish work like this with these colors. Very well done and inspiring me to take a step out of the conservative color box someday.

AJ (Allan) Wright said...

Like you Iowa, I too am very conservative with colors. These were definitely out of my comfort zone in that regard. What I did was barge forward, ignoring my natural instincts to 'tone them down'. I'm sure there are some faux-pas in color combinations in this unit, but then again that's the point I think. I wouldn't want to do a whole Gaul army, or Persian for that matter. I'd have a melt down!

Galpy said...

Love the look of your wouldn't want to be facing them on the fields of death and glory. Nice detail