Saturday, February 8, 2014

Heresy Era Thousand Sons - Prospero Spireguard test minis

As the wait for the orks drags on (now a week beyond the original delivery window), I spent a little time fiddling around making some Prospero Spireguard to accompany the Thousand Sons in their defense of Tizca. In the book A Thousand Sons, they are described as wearing crimson greatcoats, heavy boots and silver shakoes lined with fur cut from the wings of the snow-shrikes, an indigenous bird used by the Avenians as weapons. Officers were noted to wear crimson jackets decorated with brass buttons and gold frogging. They were also outfitted with silver helmets, curved sabres and laspistols.


I had a bit of a rummage around in the Closet of Doom and pulled out some various bits and bobs and before I knew it I had a command squad built and painted. After spending so much time batch painting, doing these five guys took almost no time at all! I'm not happy with the GW head mixed in with the Perry Miniatures heads, as he ends up looking bulbous or the other all look a bit pin-headed. For the 'real' build they'll all get Perry heads, so they all match up scale-wise.


I'm still trying to find a good set of bases that I want to use for the Thousand Sons and by extension the Spireguard. In the meantime they just got the basic mud and grass - worst case scenario, they'll match my 40k guard and can be used as an allied contingent of some variety there!


Put together a couple basic troopers wearing shakos as well, then ran out of bits. Doh! These are all just proof of concept miniatures however, and based on how they turned out I ordered a mess of bits from Maxmini (torsos), Victoria Lamb (arms), Blight Wheel (legs) and Perry Miniatures (heads). The packages are starting to trickle in, so there will be plenty more to come!

14 comments:

  1. Lovin' these guys, tons of character! Great work brotha.

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  2. Cool! And good for you for putting so much work and resources into them!

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  3. A very inventive use of lots of different systems, I think they work rather well. And excellently painted as well! You're right, heads are the trap. I had real problems getting a cool warlord mini to fit a GW head, but I think yours looks fine for the tabletop. The slight disconnect is a price worth paying to get a model that nice. Always love seeing what you have on the desk!

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  4. Those shakos look excellent, can't wait to see them painted up in this scheme. GrimDark napoleonics win out for me. :)

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  5. Looking forward to seeing the future war Naps painted up. Excellent blog btw. Taken me a good while just pouring over your piccies :-)

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  6. Woah where did those shakos come from?? Awesome! Liking the theme and colours, looking forward to seeing more!

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  7. Solid conversion work there - like they just stepped out of my mind from the pages for the novel!

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  8. Nice! I'd quite forgotten that the Prospero Spiregaurd eschewed the Egyptian motif for red coats and shakoes.

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  9. Always late to the party and always left adding nothing more than I agree with the other lads - great work there matey - you've stuck to the described fluff really well and as Zab says, these could have stepped straight out of our imaginings.

    On the oversized head, you could always fluff that as a failed aspirant who got part way through the transformation with some genetic growth hormones and what not and now has a position of honour leading a unit of Spire Guard.

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  10. Oh, that is awesome!
    On the point of scale and head matching, I think it all mostly comes down to a connection between the hands and the heads.
    You might consider painting the all of the hands as gloves (even on the models that don't appear to be wearing gloves). That would correct the disconnect between the size difference. That way the model would look like a well scaled person that is wearing a think coat and gloves.
    It is actually only a small point and not overly important.
    As everyone else has said, these are really really cool.

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  11. @Jugger: Thanks, man!

    @J.D. Brink: Hah! Yeah, they're not going to be the most cost-effective models of all time. :)

    @Col. Scipio: Thanks mate! I think sticking with one manufacturer for all the heads will end up looking right. There are some cool ones to be had on the sprues, too!

    @Dai: I appreciate it! I'm really looking forward to getting the units built, still waiting on bits to arrive though. Curses!

    @Blaxcleric: Thank you very much!

    @Buffer: Cheers! They're from the Perry Miniatures Austrians kit (one of several that offer shakos, I just happened to like the Austrians look), which comes with four or five other, different sets of heads to choose from as well. The one box I bought ended up having over a hundred heads. Hah!

    @Zab: High praise indeed - thank you very much, man! I'm having another read through the book to try and match up as much of the detail as I can!

    @#2501: Indeed! The shako-wearing Frenchists did campaign through Egypt in the Napoleonic era, which I think is a fun thematic connection for the allied force!

    @Frothing Muppet: Haha! "Sir, the sergeant's come down with a bad case of Psycheunin. His heads gone all bulbous."

    @Col. Ackland: Thanks, mate! Excellent suggestion about the gloves, buddy of mine made mention of that as well and I think you're correct. The VL hands are a little chunky, much more suited to be painted as gloves - the melta gunner looks much more proportional than the medic in the pic, and that's just down to the color. Cheers!

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  12. Boot e full, as Bernard Matthews would have said. I've got a pile of Meridan bits that fit the description. But they're way down the list of things to get done.

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  13. Very sharp build on those models with shakos. The non GW kits are much closer to the true 28 of the Perry heads and fit flawlessly. Best I could do was Praetorian and mordian bodies :(.

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  14. @Zzzzzz: Hah! Oh the lists of projects - they never end, do they? :)

    @Horridperson: Thanks man! It's always dicey mixing bits manufacturers, but by happy coincidence the bits all sort of fit together!

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