Grenadier Fantasy Lords 1st series 134 Armoured Centaur and Garrison Sword and Sorcery SS76 Female Centaur

It’s been a while – a combination of work and then holidays has prevented me from posting – but I’ve still been painting. Here we have two figures on the same topic – centaurs – but with very different styles. The Garrison figure was bought as part of a job lot, and when I extracted it from the Lead Mountain I was NOT enthused… then I realised I was also working on the Grenadier figure as part of a HOTT Woodland army, and thought it would be interesting to paint them and show them together.

Garrison were one of the earliest figure manufacturers – I think this figure was sculpted in the mid 1970’s by the great John Braithwaite, and based on the Robert E Howard Conan novels. As consequence, it is VERY simple, and quite coarse, with some very strange proportions… maybe he was reading The Sun’s page 3 when he sculpted it! Still, out with the brushes… the main thing with the early figures is to keep the paint job simple, and I did exactly that – dark gray for the horse body and hair, then dry brushed white. The torso is just base flesh with Army Painter soft tone for shading, and then flock on the base.

I didn’t have any expectations of this figure, and I was quite surprised it turned out fairly well. It actually reminds me a bit of the primitive art, Neolithic paintings on cave walls, simple and a little bit child-like, but with a definite energy. I like this figure!

The Grenadier figure was done in the mid 1980’s, and shows just how far sculpting had gone. This figure was actually rescued from a junk pile at a war games fair, and had obviously had a very hard life – really badly painted and dented. Soaking it in Simple Green brought the paint off, but it had lost a bit of detail. Excuses, excuses….

I stuck to the same colour scheme – dark gray for the horse parts, dry brushed white, and then picked out the armour with white as well, followed by a quick coat of Army Painter dark tone and finally picking out detail with gold and burgundy. The face and arms were simply flesh tone and Army Painter soft tone again. I really like the mid-80’s Grenadier figures, the one produced before the oval flat bases and the Nick Lund era, and I think this is one of their better efforts – I’ll be happy to see him based up as part of a centaur Knights unit.