The Spearmen are Fortress Figures plastics, a bargain at 16 for $10. They look ... inexpensive. One in five had a missing jaw, and their clothes are somewhat tattered. But a decent paint job covers up a lot of flaws - and did I mention their price? I never found a shield design I liked, but one of these days....

They are led by a Reaper elf miniature, actually painted by Jen Engle. She is a bit more blue than the rest of the army from all the tattoos, but she wasn't originally going to be leading this unit.

These are my Treemen and Tree Spirits. They are very effective in AoA, the Tree Spirits being especially nice against monsters with fixed armor. They also are great for wasting an opposing troop's high strength on their fixed armor.

The Treemen take a good amount of killing, and the arrow immunity makes them a great threat to archers.

I made these from scratch to make up for my lack of decent cavalry. The horses are actually the former Glade Rider's Horses. I usually put spearmen on a hero or two on them. Right now I have a wizard on each. The Wizards are from Reaper (water) and GW (Nature, though originally bought as Amber)

The chariots are made from a balsa platform with shields glued to it. The wheels are GW shields I think, with the horns from a Bretonian Knights silly helmet. The shaft is actually two plastic palm tree trunks wrapped with kite thread and painted to look like rope.

They are built to hold 3 models.

This is a Harlequin Griffen, with a GW Glade Rider weilding the flaming sword from the Reaper Wraith King. I decided to do something different with my griffen than the normal lion body. So I went with a White Tiger for the cat portion, and some sort of white hawk (can't find the picture anymore)for the bird part.

This is a great mage hunting model, as the griffen has plenty of attacks on its own, and with a champion or lord on its back, it has a lot of mobile power.

This is the GW forest dragon. In small games I'll use it as a wyvern as well. I just noticed that it's face is obscured by an upraised sword from the GW figure in from of it in "The Pose" (a term given to any number of GW figures standing with an upraised weapon, looking up, legs planted wide in a pose that is probably supposed to look defiant or victorious but has always made me think the figure is saying "Kick me in the NADS!")

Anyway, there is nothing too special about the dragon - it has no conversions, no alternate posing, and fairly simple painting technique with multiple dry brushing layers. Nevertheless, it is constantly ooh'ed and ahh'ed over, often at the expense of what I consider much better painted figures around it. The colors are sharp, with black and gold scales down its back, a tan belly, green skin with golden brown wings that look fairly translucent because of the dry brushing pattern. The gold nails and horns are a nice touch, too. But really, anyone could do this pretty easily and early on in their painting life if they took the time to do such a large model.

I think this is the best figure I've ever painted.

I decided to make the Forest Lord in fall, instead of all of the green spring colors normally seen for the figure. That meant a cloak of fall leaves, browning skin, and hair that had green roots but rapidly turned gold then brown.

Much of the metal was done by painting it gold then washing it with a red wash. This gives the arm bands their distinct color, and does awesome shading things with the glaive he carries.

The skin started from green and was dry brushed 5 or 6 times to its top color.

One of these days I'll make his own stats for him, but I usually play him as a demon lord with Nature magic and no flying.