ImagiNation: None shall drink wine...

...unless authorized by the Captain of the Wine Guard!

I don't normally show off models that are not 100% finished, but I ran out of woodfiller to do the bases, so I decided why not.

This is a one-off "battalion" for my ImagiNation project.  When I reorganized the structure of my project, I was left with a random assortment of Crusader and Front Rank Hungarian infantry figures.  Five musketeers, one standard bearer, an officer and a drummer... what could I do with this I pondered to myself.  After a bit of math, I came up with three plans:

1.  Order enough figures from Crusader and Front Rank to fill out an entire regiments worth of figures.

2.  Use these figures in conjunction with two spare officer models on their way from Crusader (I only needed the mounted commander) to make a sort of "Honour Guard / Lifeguard" battalion of 10 figures to follow my overall commander around.

3.  Sculpt some sort of icon to convert the standard bearer to a Sergeant styled model and then make a single battalion.

Of course, I chose the cheapest, but possibly most difficult option #3.  Why would it be the most difficult? I'm not a great sculptor and I wanted to have the icon be a bunch of grapes.

As you can see, my sculpting job was half decent, it sort of looks like a bunch of grapes.  I my ImagiNation world, this represents the Icon of Saint Trifon the Pruner, patron saint of winemakers, a perfect patron saint seeing as this is the "Wine Guard", an elite unit raised by the Wine Merchants Guild to supervise and protect the supply and sale of wine to the field armies of the Duchy of Libations.

I quite like the purple and blue.  I was very hesitant about how it would turn out, but like pretty much everything I paint, it somehow managed to pull itself together right at the end.