Bear Country

Remember the single bear model I painted a while back as a unit filler?

Well, fg gave me another D&D pre-painted plastic bear, which meant I HAD to get a couple more to create a whole unit...

After much googling, I settled on two Reaper bears, and here they are all painted.

L to R: Pathfinder Battle - Rise of the Runelords Dire Bear, D&D Wrath of Ashardalon Cave Bear with Perry WOTR figures as handlers, bear from Reaper Animal Companions pack with Reaper bard Alfred Redlute, Reaper Dire Bear.

For some reason unknown even to myself, I actually based each bear on a 40mm x 60mm base, and then made a sabot base measuring 50mm x 75mm so I can field them all as a unit of Demigryph Knights for Warhammer, which I probably will never actually field in a game.

One thing I've learnt from this project is this: it's actually rather difficult to gauge how big a bear figurine actually is without some point of reference. For most humanoid or equine figures, you *know* they are going to be roughly man-size or horse-size, but with bears, especially *dire* bears, all bets are off. A few of the potential candidates I screened turned out to be enormous when I eventually found pictures of them posed beside other figurines (well, non-prehistoric ones at any rate - why is everything in the Stone Age so dire?), and the bear from the Animal Companions pack turned out to be even smaller than I expected.

Here is another view of the bard figure. I'm not quite sure why I got the figure or why I included him in the unit. I guess it's partly because I have at the back of my mind plans for a band of four bards - three on lutes and one on drums... Now if only I can find a left-handed bard figure...