I'm seeing double

Hello everyone,

No, no, I didn't drink too much; I rarely drink alcohol anyway to be honest .
It's just a way to show off some of the recent conversions I did.

Maybe I need to explain why I'm doing this:
When I decided to do a Rangers of Shadow Deep project in 15mm, I checked what I had already laying around. Turned out I had quite a bit of monsters and villains, most meant for sci-fi or 28mm, and barely any heroes. To remedy this I bought some adventurer packs from Alternative Armies. I
have to admit, it got a little bit out of hand after this first order. G
through my order,  I noticed a few doubles and many models with a similar role.
Quite a few Men-at-arms, enough Wizards to start a council and the beginnings of a decent Thieves Guild but no archers or models suitable to be used as rangers.
And like I already mentioned in my previous post, I really like to have two of every follower.
So, in order to get myself all the companions I needed, I knew I had to do a few conversions.

Now, the best conversions are the ones where it's almost impossible to spot the original from the one you changed. I'm far from that level but I'm still quite pleased with how some turned out and I feel like I did a decent job. Some are better than others, but that's just the way it is.
One word of warning though, a few of the models are a lot smaller than others. Many are close to 18mm, but others are actually closer to 15mm (barely). Which means you can paint eyes on some but it's near impossible to do on others.

First up are a Tracker and an Arcanist, both started out as some kind of Druid. Strange enough he was carrying around a shield which didn't like, so I removed the arm holding it on both of them and gave my Tracker a bow. The Arcanist also got a headswap with a head I removed from a Blighthaven Southern Death Cult model. As I noticed a severe shortage of female characters among my companions, I also gave the model a sex change. The book, made from some leftover putty, didn't work out as I wanted but decided to keep it anyway.

Second is a Men-at-Arms and his converted Guardsman version. The idea was to give him and helbard, only after glueing on the blade I noticed how overly large it was and changed it into an axe. After all, the description of the weapon only says: "Two-handed weapon", so it could be anything from a spear to a helbard or a large axe. These guys are pretty small compared to the rest which is why they look a bit wonky ;-).

The Templar on the left was the most extensive conversion I did on a 15mm model so far as I had to remove large parts of the Knight's body to change it. I cut the head from one of the models with the winged helmet (I got three of those) and put this in place. The arm holding the spear is a bit long but it doesn't really bother me that much.

That's it for this time, thank you for reading!

Music please!

Hello everyone and Happy New Year,


I'm not going to start by summing up new year's resolutions, because I know I probably would fail them all anyway ;-).
Looking back at 2019 I think I went through one of the hardest years of my life.
I'm consider myself as either a realist or an optimist and it takes a lot of me to get depressed, something that happened quite a few times during the last year. Hopefully I will find a job this year, but at the very least I'm going to do some courses that will give me an extra edge and it seems to be something that's more highly regarded than experience here.

On the hobby-front I have done a lot less than I actually hoped for and I played a lot less games with my kids than I had actually planned to do. True, we did quite a few games of Burning Sands and a Rangers of Shadow Deep try-out, as well as a short RPG campaign for Hero-kids and many board games (7th Continent still being my favourite). However, not as many as I would've liked.

During last week of the holidays I found myself spending a lot of time entertaining my kids.
In the little time they left me to spend at my hobby-table, I managed to finish these two.

When I first started reading the Rangers of shadow deep pdf, I found myself thinking on how to represent the recruit companions.
While looking at the lot of adventurer models I got from Alternative Armies I noticed one of rogues was carrying a lute and it occured to me that there's a bard class in many roleplaying games. They may not be the best in combat but they are useful in other ways.
Also, if brave sir Robin was allowed a whole troupe of minstrels then why wouldn't the Rangers that venture in the Shadow Deep be allowed at least one. At the very least the bard could try and keep the morale up and record all the heroic deeds as a poem.

As I like to have at least two of every type of companion, so both my son and I can have our first choices when it comes to picking our followers. I decided to convert an excess Woman-at-Arms, from the adventurers pack mentioned above, into a musician. So the one on the right is a conversion I did.

I started painting some more models but these will have to wait until next time.
All the best for 2020, have a good year!