Minean Heavy Phalangites
These evil dwarfs are seafaring descendants of the Dawi Zharr hailing from the volcanic island of Min. Frequent, not always peaceful contacts with Elven and Human slave traders made them painfully aware of their own shortcomings which led them to form regiments of infantrymen wielding long pikes (sarissae). Their even for Dwarven standards exceptional discipline makes them sought-after mercenaries in the armies of the Dark Lands.
If you remember, this guy was my unfinished contribution to the Artisan’s contest in early 2022. I tend to have regular hobby breaks every few months, so I left him 95% done in my cabinet since I last posted. Very eager to start a new sculpting project, so I added some hands, finished the lacing and made sure that there are no problematic undercuts. The missing cavity in the raised hand is intentional to make him cast better as the hand will be drilled out anyway. I plan to cast up a whole regiment of them when the outside temperatures are warmer again and run them as heavy pikemen in the DoW list (and just have to accept that their stats are human). My hope is that if I add custom plumes to all of them they won’t look too uniform although phalangites are not very demanding in that respect.
Speaking of casting. I did cast up another 100 or so miniatures last summer (the Dwarf and the Hobgoblin sculpt from above) and I have to say I’m impressed about the mould material quality. I probably did around a hundred casts with the dwarf mould in total and it still holds up! The Hobgoblin was more tricky: The two legs + a small casting channel in between were not enough to allow enough mass to flow in, so I had a lot of rejects due to soft details. Next time, I will first try to increase the channel size. But nonetheless, a few of them are good enough that I can work with them.
For the regular chaos dwarfs, I’m a bit torn between sculpting the arms myself (still fed up with arm anatomy – I don’t know why but doing them in a multi-part fashion is 100x more difficult to get the scale right compared to just sculpting them directly onto the miniature) or using arms from various kits. However, there is distinct lack of unarmoured dwarf arms without long sleeves out there. @Admiral kindly pointed out the Avatars of War slayers although they are a tad too muscular for my likings.