Skeletal giants from pound store toys!

As is my wont, I was in a pound shop some months ago. I saw some skeleton warriors that I thought would be fun; they were much too large for regular skeletons but I thought they might make fun architectural details or skeletal giants. Then I forgot about them, as I do.

A little while ago I started putting together an undead army for Dragon Rampant. I remembered that I had these guys and dug them out to make a unit of Elite Foot consisting of skeletal giants or ogres. 

Here they are in the bare plastic. You can see some more shots and a discussion of the models at the Fantasy Toy Soldiers blog, which is also a great way to waste an hour. 

I primed them with grey car primer, then drybrushed them up, first with a lighter grey and then with white. Here's what one of the drybrushed models looks like: 

As you can see, the drybrush basically takes care of the highlights. 

I then applied an overall sepia wash to the model; since they're mostly bone, this took care of the colour. Here's what one of the models looks like after the first wash, with base colours applied to his weapon and base: 

The 80s GW skeleton gives you a sense of scale. 

I then touched up the rest of the model, highlighting up to VMC Ivory, gave a black-brown wash to the weapon, added some rust and things and decorated the base. Once all three were done, they looked like this: 

Not bad at all! The sculpting is a little rough, the plastic is a little bendy, but I paid £1 for about 15 of them, so I figure I'm well ahead of the game here. 

I love finding and adapting these kinds of models. It means that I have a unit that's unique, which is cool, and it demonstrates that you don't have to spend a lot of money to have something that's eye-catching on the tabletop. I've spoken before about this principle, but as silly as it sounds it's actually something I feel fairly strongly about.