Hammerers and Lord Work In Progress

I'm not a big fan of the metal hammerers' figures from Games Workshop. They all have the same pose, and the pose isn't believable to me because it doesn't look like the dwarf can reach high enough over his head to actually finish swinging the hammer. So I decided to model my Hammerers using the the plastic Dwarf regiment set and a few conversions.


I also decided that since I would pretty much always field my lord on shieldbearers in the hammerers unit, that the shieldbearer figures should match the hammerers. It also seems appropriate since the shieldbearers are the epitome of "bodyguards" and the hammerers are supposed to be the Kings bodyguard.


The lord himself is a cross between the two "unit champion" bodies from the warrior and thunderer sets - I like the winged helm for my lord, but I wanted a long braided beard and the winged helm figure didn't have the right beard for it. I also wanted the figure to be as unique as possible (considering they are all from the same plastic set), so the helmet swap helped with that. His shield is a thicker piece of styrene sheet cut and filed into the right shape and then I sculpted a triple-horseshoe relief on top and added gems into the middle of the U-shapes. The pins are to give me something to attach his long braids to after I sculpt them - the idea is that they will go down to the shield and the dangle over the edge of the shield. He will have a great hammer in the right hand and a stein of ale in the left.

All of the hammerers have the cloaked bodies from the warriors and thunderers sets. I've added a bit to the edges of the cloaks where they sort of "disappear" due to limitations in the casting process. I also decided I wanted to have lots of gems on the hammerers, tying in with the gems on the lord-bearing shield. To this end I found some hammers from the older edition dwarf regiment, to which I could easily add a gem in the middle and really had the look I wanted. The trick will be finding more of these hammers for the rest of the unit.

I used the leather-wrapped handle from the champion's axe in the warrior box for several of the hammers, it matched the similar handle end of the banner pole from the thunderers box quite well and added a nice feature to the otherwise long and boring handles. For the Hammerer champion figure I wanted to do something unique, so I went for an over-the head dynamic pose, similiar to the metal hammerers, but I wanted to make sure it looked more believeable. I had to find just the right arms and hands, file down the shoulders a bit and do a lot of test fitting and redoing before I got the final result, but I'm quite happy with it.

I took a few more pics than are posted here, you can click any of the photos to head over to Flickr and check them all out.