The Fantasy Side Project Part 3 Hydra Envy & Bullshit

At this point in the exercise I sort of got a bit carried away. 

I was looking for some monsters to flesh out the Colchis Army for Fantasy Sword & Spear. The bulk of the troops would just be re-tasked Thracians, but I would need some “proper fantasy stuff”. Clearly the first monster would have to be a Hydra, but here I ran into some problems. 

The glorious owner \ operator \ proprietor of Asgard Wargames, (known to some as “Arkwright” due to the way people are sometimes seen staggering out of the shop with a glazed look on their face grasping a carrier bag full of toys they never intended to buy until they fell under his commercial spell)  - anyway he has a really nice Games Workshop issue Hydra in his Dark Elf Army. I wanted something at least as impressive. The problem is most “modern” Hydras seem to have legs – very different to the Jason \ Greek ones.

Legs!

I also needed it to fit onto a 6 cm wide frontage if possible. Lastly I needed it to be cheap if I was going to stay anywhere near the £50 project  budget(!). Much searching through internets resulted in three possible options, none of which were ideal. Firstly there was the Steve Barber version, Which I think is too big for my use. The same can be said for the one I saw on ebay from Second City Games – too big (but beautiful) and also £30. Lastly, there was Foundry again, but their Mythos range Hydra was a bit small when compared to the others - particularly Arkwrights! I decided to give the whole Hydra thing a bit more thought and look for something else.

In this rather distracted frame of mind I saw some Reaper miniatures Minotaurs on Ebay. They were the new “Bones” plastic range, so much cheaper than metal. I impulse ordered three different ones. OK not really Colchis, or even Argonauts, but sort of Greek Myth so not too far short. Cost for all three was £8.90 plus £5.58 p&p was I ended up ordering from two different sellers. They all arrived pretty quickly so I painted them “quick & dirty” using a spray undercoat (Fur Brown) then some blocking and a heavy dose of Vallejo sepia dip \ wash. I was rather happy with the result. These are going to be based together as one unit as my Heavy Infantry types to give the army some much needed steel (err bronze)

Of course the cognoscenti will be shouting "Bull!" at this point. Yes I later realised what I really needed was a Khalkotauroi, the legendary bronze bulls of Colchis. There is supposed to be two of them. Luckily I found both Reaper and Foundry do them, so I ordered the Reaper one (again Bones plastic) as it was the cheaper. This is going to be one of my monster options. A giant fire breathing bronze bull - what can go wrong?

Added bonus being it was not exactly a challenge to paint either :-)

Total spend on miniatures is now £20.85 Rules £15, postage £13.27