Get your brushes and clippers, and welcome to the Space Dinosaur Hobby Table, where I cover what I've completed recently in the Age of Sigmar hobby, along with a mini-review of the sculpts, how easy they're to paint, and any tips or tricks I can pass on to make your life easier. Today's post's topic is none other than King Louen Leoncoeur, of the old Warhammer Fantasy Bretonnia faction.
Now, this post makes me something of a liar. In my end of year review post, I mentioned that I wouldn't be working on my Bretonnian army much. Well, here we are, and the second post of 2022 is not only a Bretonnian model, but THE Bretonnian himself. Confusing spelling aside, I love this model, and was fortunate to grab it when GW had a made-to-order run of it for a week some years back. Unfortunately for me, the model was cast in finecast and not metal, which I'll get into later.
As I've mentioned, I really love this model, and this was the first miniature in a long time where I've had the opportunity to use heraldry and bright, knightly colors. To that effect, I used the official paint scheme to draw inspiration, as it closely matched the vision I had in my head of the final result. So a lot of red and blue, neatly bisected along the model. The cape would be all red to offset the blue hue of the armor.
Originally, the sub-assemblies I used were to have the pegasus, rider, reigns, shield, and lance all separate. But, when I was struggling to paint the barding on the pegasus, I ripped it off the base which made it much easier to access parts of the model where brushed struggled to get but were still visible to the eye. Once the pegasus was complete, I slapped it back onto the base and touched up the joints.
Painting the rider was another story entirely, and we return to the aforementioned finecast. It's a garbage material and deserves the hate it receives. The lance and sword were both bent, and even after repeated attempts I still had issues with warping. The rider's knees were further apart than the lower legs attached to the pegasus, and I could do nothing about that. So after some finagling I was able to minimize the gaps that caused, but not entirely remove it. Some clever painting was able to hide it, mostly. Worst off all, it was very difficult to tell the difference between details and "fences" at some points. These are used to give excess resin a place to go in the casting process, and supposedly help to reduce bubbles (which I had to deal with as well). So at points in the painting process, I'd realize that there was still some of these "fences" left, and have to carefully cut them out, which sometimes ruined the paint around it. All that to say that I do not recommend finecast models.
Outside of these quality issues, the sculpt is good, but not great. It definitely shows its age, and likes the finesse and sharpness of more modern models. Of course, this is an older model so this is excusable. Thank Sigmar that they included a helmeted option. I much prefer it over the bare head version. Why you go into war without a helmet is beyond me, and if a model gives me a choice I always go with the helmet.
The base is my standard "human" base that I use for both my Heldenmarch and Arequine armies, but with the new dark brown rim I've started to use as of late. For the stone, I didn't want to use standard grey, so instead I went with a blue toned grey, and I really liked the way it came out. I will add this to my stone repertoire from here on out. The wings turned out lovely as well, in my humble opinion, and were quite easy to achieve with washes and drybrushing.
Now for my overall thoughts on the models, I will judge it based on two categories. Firstly, the sculpt itself will be scored on a scale of 0 to 10, with 5 being average, 0 horrendous, and 10 a marvel. For a reference point, I consider the Stormcast Liberator to be a 5, neither great nor bad. Just a passable, average model. Then I will score on Ease of Painting, between 1 and 5, 1 being a slog to paint and 5 being a breeze.
My King Louen Leoncoeur review:
Sculpt: 7/10
As I mentioned already, the age is definitely showing on this model, but despite that I think it holds up rather well. The fact that my version is finecast did impact my enjoyment of this model, but if you're lucky enough to find it in metal, you can avoid those issues. Metal has its own problems though, so keep that in mind.
Ease of Painting: 3/5
There's some hard to reach sections of the model, even with sub-assemblies. Throw in the casting issues and it wasn't the easiest paint job.
Final tips: Sadly, outside of the GW made-to-order run, you're only going to find this model on Ebay, and probably at a steep price. I honestly recommend that you get any of the fantastic 3D printed proxies available on the market. They'll be cheaper and some of them even look better than the original model in my opinion.
-The Space Dinosaur
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