Over the Summer Golem worked alongside Spanish hobby legends Avatars of War to release their first plastic boxed set – Dwarf Berserkers.
Avatars are renowned for the high quality of paintjobs on their Studio models, and Tommie and I would have to paint the regiment to stand alongside the gorgeous paintjobs on their character models. But it wasn’t just one model we had to do. It was twenty.
We’d been supplied with the Wayne England box artwork.
Oh, should we base the paintjobs of that. Erm? Blue steel?
Avatar had asked for non-metallic metals throughout the regiment – which is normally reserved for super-special character models. But they were willing to pay so off we went to layer faux-reflections on twenty sets of bling Dwarf axes. And these axes are true bling, look at the details on the champion’s.
He’s so bling he decided that one axe wasn’t enough, so he has a second axe – a two-handed axe. This chap also decided to show off by attaching gold coins all over his cinglulum and scattering silver tankards about his feet.
The mysterious temptation was to paint every Dwarf with vivid orange beards, but we scattered a selection of hair colours throughout the unit. My personal favourite’s this chap (again playing tankard football).
The standard is a great piece. We spent a while wondering what it would be made out of – the Wayne England piece suggests bronze or wood. However, with the abundance of NMM in the unit would bronze stand out? And though wood seems the most sensible if you need to hold it in one hand Tommie plumped for stone and big green dragons. It’s very striking and suitably over-the-top. The Dwarf must be super-gruff lugging it about.
The project created a little déjà vu as Golem had previously done the Mantic Abyssal Berserkers.
Actually, the true challenge is to resist buying them. Whenever I finish a commission I have a craving to go out and buy the model’s I’ve painted for my own personal collection AS THESE MODELS ARE TEH BEST THING EVAR. But then the hobby butterfly flutters off to sample nectar from a different hobby bush and the impulse is forgotten. The urge to paint more of these Dwarfs has not yet faded…
You can buy them from Avatars and all top banana shops.
