House Stark musters for war!

I know, you're as surprised as I am, I finished painting some miniatures!

My first 8 finished miniatures for the Stark forces for the A Song of Ice and Fire project - a mix of Perry, Gripping Beast and Fireforge bits to get the look I was after (much more rugged than my Lannister troops!) and a Wargames Foundry champion to lead them (from their Baron Wars range, originally a Citadel sculpt iirc). And yes, the chaps in the back rank have the Wolf's head shields that I previously made a one part push mould for:

As my 'knight' miniature (knight in inverted commas, as the Northmen don't have knights per se as the Southern types do, if we're going to get mega nerdy) had a large blank shield, I took this opportunity to try using a waterslide decal for the first time. Ever. I know, it's kind of weird to be this old and have never used a waterslide decal before, but what can I say, I've never really needed to before and kind of shied away from trying them for fear of ruining a paint-job right at the end...

Filled with the spirit of experimentation and adventure, I did a quick bit of internet research and soon settled on making my chap some unknown son of House Cerwyn, and dug out the necessary bits and bobs:

I was originally going to use an axe decal from the Bretonnian Men-at-Arms sheet, but when borrowing a pot of gloss varnish to prepare the shield from Uncle Johnny, he offered me these, which were better (I think) than the ones that I'd originally planned on using.

A quick coat of gloss to prepare the surface, some poking with a wet paintbrush and minute adjustments where the decal split where I had perhaps over-zealously trimmed it, and a touch up with paint (and an application of static grass, it seems, as I forgot to take an 'after' photo at the time) later, we have a chap holding a suitably emblazoned shield:

Huzzah!

These chaps take the tally to:

13 vs 16 = -3

That sweet zero is so close now, I might even reach it! I suppose I should probably sort out some stats and point values for the ASOIAF project soon, so that I can start painting towards playable skirmish warbands rather than my current approach of 'a little bit of this, a little bit of that'...

In other news, Uncle Johnny gave me some random GW sprues (from 1998, if the tab on them is to be believed) that he thought would come in handy with conversions for the ASOIAF project, that I'd never seen before:

Has anyone come across these before, and know what they are?