“A handful of Ser Gregor’s men emerged from the towers to watch him dismount; hard-eyed, hard-mouthed men, the lot of them. They would have to be, to ride beside the Mountain”
Jamie Lannister – A Feast For Crows
Four more House Clegane thugs join the two I painted last week.
I’m quite enjoying painting these guys, they’re nice and straightforward. I reckon I should be able to bash through the squad fairly easily, but before I do that I turned my attention to “the Mountain” himself, the infamous Ser Gregor Clegane.
In many ways this model is a bit of a missed opportunity. He’s a big lad – the character is always described as being an absolute giant of a man – but there are a lot of blank spaces on the model and the size of it only emphasises this. I’m not suggesting he should have been bedecked with skulls like a champion of Khorne, but adding something in all those spaces, particularly something characterful that reminds us of his barbarity, would have been worthwhile. Likewise obscuring his head behind a full helm seems like a mistake, it’s very accurate to descriptions of the character from the novels but this is surely a miniature who is crying out for a bare head on which to display an expression of furious and bloodthirsty rage. Instead we have a knight in House Clegane livery modelled at a larger scale than the rest of the range, and if it wasn’t for his sheer size there would be nothing at all to tell us that this is the feared Mountain himself. Overall the model is chunky and crude, which admittedly also described the character. There are a couple of new versions of the character which have been made since this one but without seeing them in person it’s hard to say how much this issue has been resolved. Still, stand him next to his troops and there’s no doubt why he’s been nicknamed “The Mountain”.
Brutal bastard that he is, he’ll be taking charge of my Lannister army – at least until I get around to painting Jamie Lannister.
Convert or Die 