Taking good digital photos of 28mm and 15mm miniatures is difficult at best.

www.twfigurines.de is a German site with superb miniature photography. Fortunately the author also includes a small tutorial that describes how he gets these lovely clear photos.

The only thing I’d add is consider investing in a couple of blue ‘daylight’ bulbs for your lamps, because then you won’t have to mess with the white balance settings on your digital camera.

The new Warhammer Plastic Giant is released soon and I’ve got to say it looks pretty good and I may have to pick one up depending on the price. My only concern is the slightly odd looking belly on the beast…but that could be fixed up with some green stuff, or maybe a few carefully painted wode tattoos.

The Ogre Stronghold forums have a thread that contains some photos of the actual sprues which I’ll reproduce here. As always click the image for a larger view.

The sprues look very interesting, I love the plastic running peasant that appears on the first sprue and in the photo above (the same model that graces the front of the latest White Dwarf I suspect). I’d really like that guy for my Mordheim games.

Separate plastic arrows are also great fun for modellers and there’s no less that twelve of them on this sprue.

But it’s this second sprue that really catches my eye. Look at all the great stuff on here! You’ve got a complete gibbet with victim, a barrel, a two part dead cow, a dead pig (I think), what looks like a three part dragon skull, a couple of tiny birds, various shields and two of the always useful plastic banner pieces.

This sprue is a veritable cornucopia of useful plastic bits! It seems a shame to use them all on one Giant…the gibbet alone would make for a great terrain piece.

Since I started building a New Zealand 2EF North African force for Flames of War I’ve been scouring the web for a good supplier of 15mm North African terrain. I’ve found a few but nothing that has really grabbed me so far.

That was until I stumbled across ‘Crescent Root Studio‘ and the superb 15mm North African terrain they create and sell.

I was considering sculpting my own, but if I can get some of these buildings into my garage at minimal cost I don’t know if I should bother!

I placed this order on the 18th and it arrived in my mailbox on the 24th. Not too bad! That’s less than a week for airmail from Germany to New Zealand.

Here’s a photo taken at ‘head’ level for the figures and gives a good indication of scale. The raw metal figure is the Freebooter Miniatures Mercenary, on the left is a metal GW Necromancer for Mordheim and the figure on the right is constructed from the Empire plastic Militia regiment box. I used these figures because they’re human and both represent fairly small figures in the GW line as they’re both quite old sculpts. I’m assuming more recent figures will of course be slightly larger in GW’s fine tradition of scale creep.

The Freebooter figure is definitely taller, even accounting for his thicker metal base. However his head and hands are certainly similar in scale to the GW figures and I believe once painted he’ll blend nicely with my warband.

This three-quarter shot really just shows you the large, textured metal base that Freebooter supply. I think I’ll discard this and place him on a standard plastic base. His child companion (a son or apprentice maybe) will probably get his own base because he’d be a useful separate figure for Mordheim scenarios.

Having held my first FreeBooter miniature I suspect I’ll be ordering more in the future! I believe they’re certainly compatible to GW’s ‘28mm’ (a more accurate description would be 30mm ‘heroic’) scale figures and they’re just lovely figures to own.

FreeBooter work is always very well sculpted. The other bits and pieces I ordered are fantastic and I’m particularly impressed by the absolutely minute and detailed skulls, skeletons and bones that appear on the ‘Battlefield Bases’ metal pieces. They’d be great for special characters and hero figure bases.

Werner Klocke of Freebooter Miniatures is a superb, independent sculptor of 30mm figures. I frequently visit the site to check up on his latest greens.

It also seems he may be posting some sculpting tutorials in 2006 on the Freebooter forums which should be very interesting to follow! Most of the forum is in German, but WIP photos tell the story anyway for sculpting.

In case you missed it, Harald from Netterrain.de commented on an earlier post about Old Crow and linked to this image of his recently purchased 15mm pipeline set next to some familiar Games Workshop 28mm figures.

It’s a good indication of how these pieces would work as 28mm terrain ducting detail. Thanks Harald!

I’ve always loved the look of Werne Klocke’s Freebooter Miniatures but I’ve always been a little unsure of the scale of them compared to Games Workshop’s Fantasy lines.

However I’ve just bitten the bullet and ordered this gentleman, along with sundry other accessories.

I intend to use the mercenary figure in my Reiklander Mordheim warband, assuming he mixes well with GW’s Empire Militia plastics which is what the rest of my Reiklanders are made from.

If he’s out of scale it doesn’t really matter…I’ll just have another nifty figure in the collection!