Keeping up appearances

I don't mean the tv show but here you go.

Some how I have just been super busy. We had four flag football games in a week to make up all the frosted out and rained out games. We actually won one, otherwise we've been taking our lumps at the hands of older, bigger and faster kids.

I've been doing some hobby related stuff but it hasn't amounted to much.

I did try to press on with figures for the next Talomir Tales battle, but I've been lazy. I did try some new stuff for texturing bases though. It is Liquitex Natural Sand Texture gel. I decided to try it instead of my Light Spackle. It worked fairly well, but like flex paste it contracts and settles as it dries. I'm wondering if a little spackle mixed in or some sculpy or green stuff type of thing might do the trick. I'm trying to consolidate steps.

Previously basing had been spackle, let dry. Then add sand for texture, let dry. Then coat the whole thing in diluted PVA, let dry. Then prime. A lot of steps for an already slow painter. So this texture gel was part of some new ideas I had.

So I glued the figures to fender washers with good old Aleene's Tacky Glue. (And let it dry.) Next was to glop on the texture gel. It goes on white but dries clear. While I was doing it I noticed that the grain of the sand in the gel was very fine and I wanted some more contrast. I thought "why not throw on some sand/ ballast while the gel is wet and see what happens?" Sure enough the sand sticks fairly well to the wet gel. After that dried I mixed up my not so secret formula of 1:1:2 Paint:glue:Flow aid. So I cut the number of steps roughly in half, not bad.

And here are some pictures taken with my new camera, a Nikon D5100. I had to reduce them to 20% of the original size. Hopefully now I can do justice to them with painting now that I can take very clear photos.

Caeser adventurer, Strelets Military Order with gel. Caeser Orc with Spackle.

Close up of Orc. I over did the sand on the Strelets figure.

Here you can see the gel shrinkage, maybe I under did the sand on these.

I have these guys primed now but of course ran the battery on the camera down, so I'll take pictures later.

I will be gaming more RRtK for both Talomi Tales and the Land Battle playtest as well as my Top Secret solo Contra campaign.

There has also been some progress on the Cthulhu front. A question came up on the THW yahoo group and Ed released some old notes about gaming Cthulhu using Chain Reaction which are now the free rules. I'm still working on Larger than Life (LTL) the pulp setting as I think that already has a lot of the elements I want.

Lastly, I'll be participating in the Play by Blog campaign over on Shelldrake's Zombie Wargame Blog. We'll be an Australian Infantry section fighting Japanese Zombies in a Wierd War 2 type setting using Bolt Action. Let's hope that yours truly not really knowing the rules or being tactically savvy will hurt too much. Pvt Harry Morant has a girl back home.

Hope to be blogging more soon.

Oh and Lunar (Chinese) New Year is Feb 10th so 恭喜发财.

I've also surpassed 25,000 views but my comments are lacking. Probably because I don't provoke a lot of thought with my posts.