I have started through my Basilean ships now, and am adding in crew using what I learned from the first passes on the Orc fleet…
…the poses on the Gunbrig are all reused from my Orcs, but I did narrow their widths down to have a little more contrast between those races. They do not stand out as much as the Orc crew did, but I did want their colors to be more muted, and keep the striped sails as the focus on this group. Also, I did not glue the mortar in place, but set a magnet into its mount so it can be freely rotated to face its target.
Again, the raising the masts to allow space on the deck caused no end of troubles since I lost the connection points along the railings of the ship, but I did run wire through the cross sail and secured it with green stuff to firm up that contact.
Here is a Gur Panther from the starter, with risers on both masts to allow room for filling out the decks with crewmen. A lot of pinning through the masts and another outer pin will probably still be needed as well for stability, but the Basileans next to each other look good.
I tried planning out my color palettes by fleet for sails, details, and crew to differentiate them all which did not leave a lot of choices left for the Basileans topside, but I am trying to balance out their muted colors with numbers. There are 11 on this ship, and I need to come up with some more poses to raise that number for the next ones.
It took quite a while to get back to the Basileans, but I finished my first Elohi also with raised masts to allow room on the deck for crew. With all of the cannons below deck on this ship, the prior gun crew poses I had made would be out of place so I put on shields and swords instead. There were no shields to copy as I did from the Orc Smasher, but I used a pointed version as inspired by the men-at-arms regiments, just without the upper wings as these were already small enough.
The careful viewer will note there is only a hand wreathed in flame instead of an inch long staff… after several attempts at repairing the breakage I decided to cut my losses and cut down the figurehead. And then, I thought how hard could it be to just cut out the rest and make the next Elohis stand out?
Really really hard as it turned out… far more work than putting together crew and pinning up masts combined, but the existing figurehead is roughly the same scale as the Battles of Westeros pieces from Fantasy Flight. I have boxes of those, and picked out two to cut and fit into the front of the second and third Elohis.
The replacements took paint well and I do not have to worry about them breaking as they are incredibly soft plastic. For Basilea, I will probably always use multiple Elohis in place of an Abbess and the different fronts will make it easier for card management instead of the letter tokens from the starter. Also, I have literally handfuls of different weapons from the out of print BoW boxes that can be used for Elohi 4+, I just need a break for something with a little shorter build time.
Still, my first attempt at including the freestanding cannon that comes with these did not look right, so I will be saving the rest of those to fill out another larger Basilean ship’s deck, and just put an assortment of printed crew on each of the remaining ones.
I have been trying to work out some more ideas for my Basilea / Kingdoms of Men ships for some time and took a break to do this Hydra.
This one was a Vault print and was also the first organic model I have done in a while… I was very pleased with the detailing on the heads of the Hydra, and the seams between the pieces were very well engineered, with hardly any of the joints needing green stuff. The back and tail are separate pieces, and also with a good level of detail, but is the one issue I have with the model, and will not be using them as scaled if I print another. Overall, a good model, it just needed some more time with the art director.
