Julie Guthries’ Women of adventure box set

FIREBALL!

More than ten years ago I bought a bunch of miniatures on a closing sale of a webshop belonging to some game store in southern Sweden. This was before easy to use freeware webshops, so there was just a single line of text with the title of the product. It must have been very cheap because I bought a lot of stuff.

One thing I got was several box sets with RPG miniatures from the long defunct Grenadier Models. I recently pulled them out from the bottom of my pile of gaming stuff and thought I should write a couple of lines about them. First out is the Julie Guthries’ Women of Adventure Box Set! This box was released in 1992, and is a collection of minatures sculpted in the mid to late 80’s

For all of you who haven’t heard about her, Julie Guthrie is truly a veteran sculptor in the miniatures industry. She is probably best known for all the RPG miniatures she has sculpted for Grenadier, Ral Partha and  currently Reaper Miniatures.

As you can see in the top of the post the box art features a very 80’s looking sorceress who is just about to blast you with a fireball while looking fabolous, in the background a female fighter is charging forward to chop your charred remains in to little pieces. It also proclaims  proudly that it contains a limited edition miniature.

The box insert shows that the woman on the cover is a black sorceress. All the other archetypical are also represented.

No, I could not resist to start priming and painting until after I photographed them.

The sculpts are very nice even though they are bit dated. They are very finely detailed and well proportioned even though the heads are a bit big and round. The women are quite reasonably dressed and armed unlike a lot of miniatures you see. More importantly though, they are not posing for a pin-up photo shoot, which if most miniature lines are to believed are quite a common occurence in fantasy worlds.

So far I have only painted the rogue. I painted 80% of this miniaure ten years ago, let it sit in a box until finished up the details a couple of weeks ago. Hopefully I’ll get more done soon.

Finally, for all of you who haven’t heard about her, Julie Guthrie is truly a veteran sculptor in the miniatures industry. She is probably best known for all the RPG miniatures she has sculpted for Grenadier, Ral Partha and currently Reaper Miniatures.

Further Reading:

If you want to read up more on Grenadier the wikpedia page has a lot of info.

The excellent Oldhammer on a budget blog has post about Grenadier models as well as several links to manufacturers that produce some of Grenadiers old range. Unfortunately I have not been able to find anyone who manufacturers who has Julie Guthries old sculpts. So ebay is probably your best bet.

Reaper Miniatures has a lot current (and some very good) sculpts from Julie Guthrie.

Dirt Cheap: Em4 plastic orcs

I have bunch of really cheap miniatures in my collection. So for all of you that come across these cheap minis while surfing the web and wonder if miniatures that cheap really are worth your time and money I am starting a series of reviews called “Dirt Cheap”.

I am starting with the cheapest of the cheap. Em-4’s fantasy plastics. The range consists of six different miniatures, three orcs and three dwarves. They are sold in bags of 50 for £7.7 (!), which works out at rougly £0.16 per miniature! They can also be bought loose for £0.21 per miniature. As you can see this is mindboggingly cheap, and when I put in an order for some other stuff I couldn’t resist adding a few to my order.

First a bit of background on these minis. They were first released in 1990 as a part of the Fantasy Warriors box set, a game produced by Grenadier Models. They seem to have been sculpted by Mark Copplestone but imitating the style of Nick Lund.

As you can see from the pictures they are produced in a grey plastic and unlike other plastic miniatures they do not come on a sprue.

The orcs have one of the classic old school monopose poses, the weapon to the side and the hand close to the hip. Not very three dimensional, but very much standard for the time they were released, so no problem there.

The details are very soft, and these miniatures are not very detailed to begin with.

On the back of the miniatures, there are these weird round pegs sticking out. This is probably where the plastic was injected. These were quite easy to remove though if you are a reasonably experienced hobbyist since the plastic is quite soft and easy to cut.

The mouldlines are very heavy, but since these guys doesn’t really have any fine details, removing them was easy.

After a quick paintjob they do look quite good. The swordsman also turned out to have slightly better defined details in the face. Things like is hard to notice until you paint the miniature. I do like the look on the face of the left one.

It is hard to review miniatures that are as cheap as these because you are not expecting anything from them. Compared to other plastic miniatures from the early 90’s these orcs look fine. And that is probably the only standard you can hold them against without being unfair.  At this price, it is hard to say anything else than that they are anything but good value. But if you expect to them to be anything like a modern plastic miniature, you will be disappointed.

I don’t see myself getting more of these. They need some work to look good, and I simply don’t have the need for loads of cheap plastic old school orcs. But if you do, they are indeed very cheap, and EM4 is a very nice company with excellent service.

Links and further reading:

They can be bought from: http://em4miniatures.com/. A company that also sell a lot of very nice ex-Grenadier metal miniatures at very good prices.

In this thread at the Lead Adventure Forum, there is a very impressive project, where an entire army of orcs are made from EM4-plastics. Three monopose orcs into 147 unique ones!