I joined the demo team for Reaper Miniatures because I love their paints and minis and I've been upgraded to running the paint events at my local store. Since I'm doing demos and events anyway I might as well earn points for them, right?
They also have a ruleset for a miniatures game that uses their miniature lines. Not a shabby idea and I've liked the game the few times I've gotten to play it.
I do have figures for armies for myself but I really don't want to subject them to the hamfisted local gamers on a regular basis. With the points I had banked up and some advice from experienced players/demo team members I settled on the basic composition of a demo army:
Sergeant
4 swordsmen
2 archers
2 spearmen
Monster
I was on the fence about the monster but was persuaded by "They look cool on the table and bring people over to see what's going on." Good enough for me.
I created my rosters and then placed my order for three demo armies (three different factions). Which arrived yesterday. Yay packages!
I started to sort out the minis so I had all the different factions separated and when I sat down to paint I could grab-and-go. But something was odd about the elf figures and what ones were in the package. I checked my order and found out that somehow I only ordered archers. No swordsmen, no spearmen. Hrm. That ain't gonna work.
Oh well, I'll fix it with my next order and use the extra archers as giveaway figures to people who show up and play the game. Not a big deal at all and what the points are there to be used for.
Which leads me to the "The way it always goes" part of this post.
Elves were the only faction with a defined color scheme right now. I hadn't thought out color schemes for the two other factions, thinking I could do that while I painted up the elves. (Note - I'm painting the demo armies in the same colors as my personal armies.) Now all the figures I really can paint and complete are ones where I don't know what colors I want to use.
I went into a couple of online chats about this kind of thing and got ideas. I looked at what other people used for those factions. I know I don't want to use the colors that are used in the rule book as everyone seems to use them and it isn't required to use any particular color. Plus, I don't have a personal army for one of the factions. So that color scheme has to stand alone and not be similar to any of the other ones.
I'm hoping to spray some primer on some minis to use as test subjects for the color schemes. Then I can have the dual satisfaction of seeing how the color scheme works and getting a mini painted.
By the way. The faction I'm working on first is the Crusaders so it's a lot of guys in armor. Armor is easy for fast painting. They have the flowing skirt-things (tabards or some such) to soften them up a bit. I'm looking at ivory as the main color for those, accented with a light green. And then the armor being mostly gold/brass/bronze. My original scheme had a brighter, warm green instead of the light green but when I looked at the figures it would have put the green and gold too close for comfort and made me think of the Green Bay Packers. Not a totally bad thing but not what I wanted on my gaming table. Plus the other faction that I did order correctly is Overlords which is more guys in armor. They're getting silver armor (I have a personal army of those but haven't settled on a color scheme. I'm thinking orange. Maybe.) and I needed the other set of armored dudes to contrast on the table. Otherwise it would have been rather confusing and monotonous.
