0Matt over at Laser Dream Works was kind enough to send us over a sample of their new 28mm Viking longship kit.
If you’re in the market for this or any other sort of naval power the good news is that Laser Dream Works are offering Model Dads readers a 10% discount on any order until the 31st of August 2012! Just quote the following code when ordering: MDLDAD
Great eye-candy for Saga or any Fantasy table, check out the review here:
0Pictured below is my little boy’s Gloster Meteor that we made at the Airfix Roadshow’s ‘Make & Paint’ event during last weekend’s Farnborough Airshow:
OK, he did have a little help with the buliding and the painting (he is only 4!) :)
Fair play to Airfix / Hornby, this is cracking idea. You turn up and they give you and the boy a sprue – could be a Spitfire, could be a Meteor or any other kit they’ve got going – and presuming you think straight through the fug of glue-fume – you can relive your childhood building and painting kits together before going to watch the real things bomb about the airfield:
Nostalgia, it’s a powerful drug despite the rain :)
0And relax: Battlefront Official Events Update.
People power or damage limitation? However you interpret it, positive reinforcement and the status quo seem back in fashion.
Trouble is, like curry, some stains just never wash out however hard you try…
0
Last weekend, I discovered that a slug had crawled over my Viking battleboard. Don’t ask me how this happened, I thought my man-cave a bastion against the humdrum of ordinary life (except when it needs dusting…).
Clearly, this molusc knew no fear of the víkingr. It had careered wildly across the cover of Northern Fury before criss-crossing a trail of industrial strength mucus over the enclosed battleboard.
Imagine my howls of anguish as, when I sought to separate the two parts, I tore off a large stip of sweet Valhalla. Wronged, my wrath knew no bounds.
I sought solace on the Saga-Tomahawk forum where Mike from South Wales took pity upon me and contacted the lads over at Gripping Beast. After a few courteous emails a replacement board arrived lovingly packaged within an A4 ziplock bag.
Lesson learnt:
So, 3 cheers for Mike and the chaps at Gripping Beast. In an era such as this, when a games company’s word is not always its bond, this is surely a corner of wargaming integrity that is forever proud 
0In my last post, I wrote abit about the range of colours available from natural dyes in Anglo-Saxon England. Whilst this gives wargamers a pallete from which to work, I’ve noticed that the best painters skillfully combine these colours to produce outstanding results. Whilst I can’t match this standard of painting, I think I understand some of the basic principles that make such colour schemes work.
The colour wheel or colour circle is the basic tool for combining colours and was first designed by Sir Isaac Newton in 1666. The colour wheel is made up of primary, secondary and tertiary colours. Figures painted with the primary colours of red, yellow and blue can be pretty intense:
Fortunately, primary colours can be combined to make the secondary colours green, orange and purple. Tertiary colours are formed by mixing primary colors with secondary colours and commonly include amber (yellow–orange), vermilion (red–orange), magenta (red–purple), violet (blue–purple), viridian (blue–green), and chartreuse (yellow–green).
Why am I boring for with all this? Well, by following some basic rules you can produce some pleasing results.
It comes as no surprise that colours on opposite sides of each other on the colour wheel are considered to be complementary colours:
As the Viking bondi above show, the high contrast of complementary colours creates a vibrant look. Complementary colour schemes can be tricky to use in large doses, but work well when you want something – or someone – to stand out. Copying one of the paint-jobs on the Gripping Beast website (itself a derivative of the Angus McBride’s painting of a 12th Century Siculo-Norman knight, c. 1130), I used this principle in the base colours of my Warlord’s conical helmet:
Analogous colour schemes use colours that are next to each other on the colour wheel.
Analogous colour schemes are generally quite harmonious and can include two or more adjacent colours. Choose one colour to dominate with a second to support. Make sure you have enough contrast. I’ve applied this principle to one of my Comitatus’ leggings and shield rim: 
Triadic colour schemes use colours evenly spaced around the colour wheel:
Triadic colour schemes tend to be quite vibrant, even if you use pale or unsaturated colours as I’ve tried to do here in the base colours for the helmet, cloak and tunic:
To use a triadic harmony successfully, the colours should be carefully balanced to let one colour dominate and the other two accentuate.
Things start to get clever with split complimentary colour schemes where the base colour is used alongside two colours adjacent to its complement:
This color scheme has the same strong visual contrast as the complementary colour scheme, but with less tension. The nearest I’ve come to applying this principle in practice is on the shield of another of my Hearthguard: 
Shields can be important part of a figure and you can see here that I’ve opted for muted analogous colours for the leggings in deference to the red-blue-yellow busyness of the shield.
Your options don’t stop there. You can opt for rectangle (tetradic) or square colour schemes, but I’ve yet to apply these to my figures:
This rich colour scheme offers plenty of possibilities for variation but works best if, like the examples above, you let one colour be dominant.
Whilst following these schemes will give you complementary colour schemes, it doesn’t guarantee an historical outcome. The range of dyes available in the Viking Age rarely produced colours as vibrant as those illustrated in the wheels above. By means of a summary, I’ve found the following colour wheel useful to work from as it includes a range of less saturated tints, shades, and tones more appropriate to the naturally derived colour pallete of Anglo-Saxon England:
In the third and final piece in what now appears to have become a mini-series after a relative drought (doh!), I’ll explore how I’m thinking of combining the natural colours of Anglo-Saxon England with the priniciples of colour combination and what we know from the archaeological and historical records to produce what I hope will be a relatively convincing warband, or two.