Mounts and Riders - My entry for the 2nd bonus round.

I didn't submit this, but I wanted to.

So for this round I went back to 20mm for a bunch of Cavalry that had been stalled on the desk for the last couple of years. They were casualties of trying to gear up to get in a game of RrtK and having to scrap the painted army idea as I was taking too long.

I had intended to do four orcs and four Anglo-Saxons but three of the Anglo-Saxons already had the metal bits done so I set them aside.

They mostly came out how I wanted, I think the Liquitex matte varnish that I transferred to the dropper bottle may actually be drying more matte now. It seems to be killing the shine on the metallics a bit.

So take a look and vote for your favorites here.

EDIT-

I apparently forgot to include info on the figures, all 20mm or 1/72 to be precise. The Anglo-Saxon was from Revell set 02551. The Orcs are from Dark Alliance PAL72001 (I'll note here that Hannant's has the half orcs now), while their mounts are metal Ral Partha wolves from Ironwind Metals.

I'll also take this opportunity to welcome Blaxkleric to the blog. I know him from A Tale of Several Gamers and The Painting Challenge. I see he has several other blogs and a deviant art account, which I will check out when I'm not so harried.

My 2nd regular entry - The Mother Crushers

Or is that Muvva Krushas?

I decided to spare you all the shots of the back of the figures. If you want to see them you can find them here.

I assembled a travel kit for painting while on vacation and it has been rather difficult. At my folks I had to clean up my painting station so they could entertain every other day. At me in laws the lighting is atrocious.

I also really struggled with the white primer. When I started painting, around 1990, white was all I did. Now I mostly do Black, Brown and sometimes Grey. The little white specks from paint not flowing or not painting all the the way to the edge at the transition between colors. Gah!

I also took the pictures with my cell phone, as I felt that it would be too frustrating with the Nikon.

Hope you like them.

Oh yeah, here's a picture of Eeza Ugezod from the unit that I finished last year.

Meowy Christmas!

Just some silliness and wishing you and yours a joyous holiday season.

Not me, but an awesome idea.

I'll be feverishly trying to finish up my entry for tomorrow and the bonus round on Sunday.

Update and holiday travel.

Hi All,

While I'm on pins and needles waiting to see my score and voting tally from the "Cold" round I figured I should let you all know what's been going on the last few days.

The finished cast.

 So I completed the axe. I think it looks pretty good. The main advice l would give is to let the mold cure. I followed the video I found and pulled the mold apart to early to try and reduce the flash. Just let it harden and trim it later. 24 Cigarettes also suggested putting a wire in the mold to help with axe handle rigidity.

$9 sculpting tools.

  I've only used two of the twelve tools from the set I got on sale, but they are already proving very useful. I spent most of my available time doing base work so that l could continue painting over the holidays. Although I missed my submission deadline for this week, I hope that I will be able to make up for that by not missing the next theme round and the next two weeks.

Cthulhu says "Drink this or l will eat your soul!"

I found the house woefully lacking in Rum, so I bought some Kraken. This is in keeping with my penchant for buying quirky bottles. I was fortunate to find another bottle at my parents local grocers. Skal!

Stevo's Age of Arthur competition!

Hi All,

The frenzy that is the painting challenge, combined with the realization that Christmas is almost upon us, has consumed much of my consciousness. I therefore have had even more than usual flooding my brain to the point that it has been difficult to form a coherent post on a single topic. Let's see how I do here.

Stevo, of Stevo's mini Soldiers, is having a giveaway here. It is for a copy of the Warhammer Historical title "Age of Arthur". He has the usual requirements for a giveaway, follow the blog, leave a comment with the addition of showing some of your Dark Age figures. This is where I put it off, because I'm embarrassed at how my Dark Age project has stalled. So, without further ado, here are my Saxon and Viking warbands, armies, what have you.

The Dark Ages, ages darker than anyone ever imagined:

Saxons from Imex and Revell with two MiniArt Germans.

A mix of Imex and Zvezda Vikings.

So, as you can see, they need some work. You may have noticed that I used the gamey convention of color coding.  I was painting these for the Talomir Tales Rally Round the King (RRtK) project for the forces of Tereken (Anglo-Saxon) and Mirholme (Viking). Initially I was the Viking player, but I defeated myself in a series of battles with the Anglo-Saxon kingdom. So now I am them. Bother.

The Anglo-Saxons (Tereken) are ostensibly Green and Yellow, the peasants more subdued. The vikings are supposed to be Red and Blue, I can only make out Red. I just found that, looking at multiple Saga battle reports, it became increasingly difficult to tell who was who with realistically painted figures.

And to prove that you can actually win stuff from Stevo, here's a picture of the Zombies I won that arrived yesterday.

The box was a little worse for wear, but everything inside was intact. These guys look like good, campy, fun. They might even make it into the challenge. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Two more items.

I set foot in a Games Workshop store for the first time ever yesterday and it was a pleasant experience. The guy on duty was nice and helpful and the two gentlemen seemed normal, aside from being there in the middle of the afternoon. Perhaps they were on their lunch break. (I do note the irony in my judging people for being there at the exact time that I am.) I bought some basing materials and listened to detailed space marine list recounting in the background. Although I still get some sticker shock at the cost of models I do like some of them. The lure of free shipping on orders I place through the store is a good one too. I'll go back, with my son in tow, in the new year.

Lastly, I'd like to welcome Baconfat of Baconfat Log. He is a fellow challenger and has painted some really nice Riders of Rohan.

Thanks for stopping by.

Ia! Ia! The cold challenge round Fhtagn!

You need to go over to the Analogue HobbiesVth Painting challenge bonus round and vote for your favorite entries (mine) immediately. In all seriousness you don't have to vote for mine if it doesn't tickle your fancy, but there s some really cool work being done and I think there may be prizes for fan favorites at the end (in March).

So show some love to the painters out there. Everyone is trying really hard and showing some good stuff.

Here are the pictures I sent to Curt.

I reasoned it was "cold" at the bottom of the sea.

Here are some glamour shots I didn't include in my submission.

I really had fun with this one. Thanks for looking.

I'm a green stuffin' fool

More of an update than any real pearls of wisdom.

After several tries I got a decent mold with the Instant Mold. As you can see I still have a bit of flash and I bent the cast trying to pop it out too early. This was only my second time ever using green stuff and I'm not sure if my yellow to blue mix ratio was off. The axe is a tad bendy, I thought it would be harder.

I also did a bunch of gap filling and repair of a void in a miscast figure. I can't show them to you yet, as they are for the challenge, but I'll reveal them shortly. I had meant to show them before base coating, as I was really proud of my work.  Of course I got carried away and sprayed them before taking pictures. I learned my lessons from my first experience and kept a little bowl of water to wet tools and fingers. I just used my craft store Sculpey sculpting tools and they worked great. I did see some fancy sculpting tools on sale for $9 on Amazon, so I splurged.

I usually focus on what went wrong, but I had a really positive experience this go round. It really made me want to work on sculpting more.

Bugbears from The Painting Challenge.

Hi All,

Here's my first entry into the Analogue Hobbies Vth Annual Painting Challenge. The link to my specific entry, should you be a glutton for punishment, is here.

I added this size comparison shot to show how they scale with other 1/72 (20mm) figures. Fladnag is 28mm from the bottom of his base to the top of his hat.

Yesterday was the first day since the challenge started that I have not painted something. I went on a class field trip with my son and then had to rush to the gym not long after we got home. More volunteering today may cut into the hobby as I also have to get in a run, take my son to karate and go to San Soo class tonight.

Don't forget the Splintered Light sale code xmas14.

Splintered Light Miniatures Sale

Hi All,

Even with the best intentions i seem to have trouble posting as frequently as I would like.

I wanted to draw your attention to a sale going on over at Splintered Light Minatures. In addition to some sale items on the front page you can also enter the code xmas14 at checkout. If I recall correctly it will give you a 20% discount (I could easily be misremembering the amount, but a discount is a discount.) I've got my eye on some 20mm Kobolds and Goblins and am considering the Hill Giants from the 28mm line.

Check them out. As you know I'm a fan of their sculpts, I wish they had more 20mm versions of their 15mm stuff.

In Painting Challenge news I'm going to varnish and flock my entry today. I've been good about painting every day, something I lacked last go round. For me it's color choices and technique that really hold me up. I seem to be unable to lock onto a palette before I begin. I only had to paint over a couple of areas that didn't work. But of course I also came up against the issue of "that moment when" the flesh color I've painstakingly mixed and layered, ends up looking like I painted it with another color straight out of the pot. :p

I hope to get on a bunch of figures for the next steps in the challenge. I have one outstanding order that I need to track down.

Curt's Challenge has started!

Whaat!? I haven't even finished prepping!

Sorry I couldn't resist posting a picture of one of my first attempts at painting human eyes. Seems like it would qualify for "Pro painted" on Ebay. He, and his pals, were probably painted around 1991. I'd like to think I could do better now, but since I have only re-found the hobby in the last few years I have a lot of catching up to do. At some point in the future I will revisit these figures and fix them.

I need to do some serious blog updating. I have a spreadsheet, a general plan, and even forced myself to put paint to figures last night before bed. I have a few bins sorted. Primed and based, primed, unprimed, washed, and unwashed. We'll not mention the ones in box, on sprue or in blister/ bag.

The entries have already begun (gulp!), you can read about them here.

A pox on Miles, Curt and Iannick I say!

Caught with my paints down.

Well I procrastinated again and had to play out another battle with unfinished figures. It was over quick as the forces were definitely in favor of Treyine. You can read about it here.

In addition to droppingthe ball with the Talomir project, I have lagged with a Tale of Several Gamers and the Vth Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge. I did figure out what I might paint to reach my goal of 1,000 pts. I still have a lot of work to do, bat putting it to paper makes it seem more achievable.

 Welcome to Brigadier General of Brigadier General Wargame. An interesting looking set of rules. I'm currently travelling for the holidays, but I hope to catch up with the blogs soon. Happy Thanksgiving!

The quest for the King's treasure!

Lords and Ladies! Please gather round and hear the daring tale of Sir Waffles and Sir Chicken as they vied for the hand of the fair Princess Gunnora.

Well, we finally wrapped it up over the school holiday yesterday. It didn't take long. Sir Waffles was generally unlucky and took a lot of damage from goblin and troll alike. Sir Chicken was generally more effective in combat. The system worked fairly well but my son didn't feel the need to gang up on things until it was a little too late. I wonder if the Tough attribute of the Trolls was too powerful. Essentially a 50% chance to shrug off damage. I also need to do a better job of tracking what dice characters and monsters are on. I did it in my head, which became a tad problematic coming back a week later. Fun was had. I think we need to use some of that treasure to hire some men at arms or a wizard. I'm also wondering if just setting out the whole dungeon is going to break the game or not. Setting it up as discovered didn't seem to add much for my son.

I used Comic Life 3 for the comic. I feel like I am getting a better feel for the interface and tried a few different things such as the curling paper captions. My photographs were all weirdly dark, so I ran them through the auto white balance in gimp. Unfortunately the figures still remained dark so I applied a rotoscope filter to all the images. It makes them a little more interesting. I'm still struggling to find good settings for quick game snapshots so that I am not interrupting game play more than I have to.

The 5th Annual Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge

It's heerre...

Thanks to Edwin King and Dave D for posting about it on facebook. I looked just the other day and it wasn't posted yet.

Head on over to Analogue Hobbies and check it out. It's great fun, you can shoot the shit with other hobbyists, and see some inspiring work. Ok, you don't have to participate to see it, but you get the point. It's incredibly inspiring and it got me to paint more in three months than I'd painted in 20 years, no joke. You also don't have to be a master painter, I'm certainly not. just a desire to get some figures done and the ability to follow some fairly simple rules. Hell,the only real deadlines are the end and the fortnightly challenges, which are completely optional.

So I hope to see you there, either participating or voting, for my entries of course ;-).

My post on last years challenge is my all time popular post. I thought it was because you all are just so interested in Curt's challenge until I re-read the post and saw that I had a word that rhymes with gits and two pictures of a salacious nature at the bottom. Mystery solved.

I also realize now that I should probably re-read my post challenge post to see if I can learn from my experience last year.

Shaking off the digital rust

Hi All,

Long time no post. The run up to Halloween and the culmination of Zom(b)orctober had me a little out of sorts. Just one of my moods I guess, but I was just struggling with trying to keep up so I took a step back. So what I have for you are a few random things that have come across my plate and, hopefully, some direction for upcoming posts.

I've been acquiring bits and bobs and hope to have some good stuff to share with you soon on terrain making and what not. Hopefully some figures and bases will be here soon as well.

I've been trying to get another Cthulhu game together but schedules are not lining up right now. One of the players is not jazzed about the Basic Role Play (BRP) Sytem that Call of Cthulhu uses, so we are going to try FATE. I ended up buying a PDF of Present Day Cthulhu Powered by FATE, by Starbright Illustrations, from DrivethruRPG. I mainly wanted to see how the FATE principles might be applied directly to a Mythos game. Perhaps I could have figured it out myself, but they have some good background and monster stats that I can use as guidelines. Hopefully I'll get my act together soon and release the 7 or so hours of audio, and slightly less video, of our sessions from the first adventure. I like the Call of Cthulhu setting but am not so married to BRP that I'm unwilling to try a different system. I do feel that perhaps part of the clunkiness of BRP is more due to my lack of experience GMing it and having not played or GMed in decades.

We did play the first half of the intro Goblinquest scenario, I hope to finish it tonight. We got a little bogged down in dice rolling, I'll give you the report thoughts in a separate post. I think it may be mainly my son's short attention span.

I also rolled up two Warhammer Orc Warbands using Erny's awesome rules, Warlord. I think these could easily be extended to all the races of Warhammer. I hope to use these warbands as a jumping off point for the Tale of Painters thing, which I need to check in on.

6 Zombies and 5 orcs is all I got done last month, so lets hope I can get rolling on painting. I am planning to start prepping in earnest as Curt's challenge tends to get announced in mid November. Last year I was woefully unprepared.

Lastly I will get back to giving opinions etc about photographing miniatures. Hopefully you can get better performance out of your setup, the juries still out as to whether or not I really have improved my photography with what I've learned. And look for the 2nd issue of Wargame Bloggers Quarterly WBQ to be released into the wild soon. If you were a member of the G+ group, you'd already have it.

Here are some random pictures of stuff you may, or may not, find interesting.

A few pickup trucks for Hugh. Closest is a Chevy Silverado, my Toyota Tacoma and I think a Ram 2500

 Hugh was asking about Pickup trucks awhile back, here are two I parked in between. The top of my cab is about 6 ft off the ground, I have the jacked up TRD suspension. The two on either side are full size pickups, mine's a 3/4 ton, and you can see they are considerably larger.

A silly book I saw on the shelf at Barnes & Noble

Oh yeah, welcome to Roy Williamson of RW's hobby blog. I could have sworn we were already following eachother. It looks like he may have lost his blog and had to restart it. Anyway welcome aboard and go check him out and follow him. You may have been before.

Update and Goblinquest

As I may have alluded in the last post, I seem to be busy with kid activities of late. Today is another Flag Football game followed by two separate kid Halloween parties. This coupled with working out and the final week of my fat cutting program are combining to make me feel quite harried and downright cranky.

I haven't cut as much fat as last year, I'm only down to 12% as of last weigh in, but I seem to be gaining muscle and maintaining body weight. For some reason I've been obsessed with getting rid of my beer gut the last few years and, let me tell you, it's been tough. Who knew how hard it would be to roll back the lethargy and poor food choices of my 20's and 30's?

Now onto more hobby related stuff.

My son's school art project

I wanted to show you my son's art project from school because it blew me away. Aside from just liking it I was impressed when he told me how it was 3D and how he used yellow and purple to show the moonlight shining on the pumpkins. So perspective and object source lighting. I don't think I ever thought of such things at 8 years old. Credit to the Art teacher at school.

I also got super excited about Goblinquest, a game designed by Rab over at Rab's Geekly Digest. He says that the current version of the rules has been tweaked from those posted, but they seemed exciting and something I read through in a few minutes. I of course then got bogged down in trying to make the dungeon tiles from another set I already had. After a couple of hours I got it to work, but only had two sections. So I decided this morning to go ahead and buy the Inked adventures set that Rab had used. They are on sale at Drivethru RPG right now.

I'm going to try to get in some games this weekend and into next week. Not all the figures may be fully painted, but I'm going to try.

I have been spottily painting and still need to push myself to finish some figures. I should have been painting instead of dungeon finagling last night.

Zom(b)tober 3

Well, it was actually yesterday but I got these three finished today with the varnish, gore and flocking.

Since the last time was sort of 1.5 there wasn't really a 2.

I tried to do three color style but I think I fell a little flat. I need to work on anatomy for these figures that don't have sculpted musculature. I also tried to paint on folds to the flat areas of the clothes, but it just looks like stripes on the bathrobe.

So I may revisit the glaze over grey again.

The other difference was I tried some splatter effects on them. Washes didn't work, watered down paint was better.

I also have 5 more orcs about 70% done but I didn't want to hold up the zombies any longer.

Sorry for the lack of posts, been busy with kid activities.

Zom(b)orctober 1

Well, I'm either a day early for the second week of Zom(b)tober or 6 days late for the first week.

Perhaps I used too much blue on the figures to use a blue background. I also reverted to no EV compensation, as I wanted a darker look to the photo.

I base coated these Burnt Umber using Liquitex Spray Artist Acrylic. I had actually started these with some Krylon and hated it. As you may recall I dislike spray primer as I feel like I almost never achieve full coverage while also end up covering detail. The liquitex had none of those issues and I would recommend it to anyone. It is expensive $11.99 per can, but if I can speed up my prep time it's worth it to me. Note to self - Don't spray prime at dusk. It is really hard to tell if you missed a spot.

I then wanted to work with a modified grayscale technique. The idea was to build up highlights in gray and then glaze colors over that. I feel like the drybrush was not wholly successful as it got that powdery look, associated with overworked drybrushing over surfaces without much detail. I then was hit and miss with thinning the the paints. I also used two different blues on the male zombies that didn't look that different. The flesh was glazed with Italian sage, which is a light green grey. The female had a green skirt and yellow shirt. For the skin I did a modified grunge wash of 4:2:1 Green: Burnt Umber: Black wash. The rest was my standard Grunge was 4:2:1 Raw Umber: Burnt Umber: Black. I tried to be subdued with the gore. First I used a little Tamiya Clear Red mixed into some sepia ink wash. It was too brown and lifeless. I then reapplied the clear red over those areas and that helped it pop a little more. The matte varnish may have taken the shine off the clear red too much.

They came out okay but I think I will mix greys into my color palette to achieve the look instead of painting in grey and glazing. I was working on a survivor at the same time but the techniques weren't doing it for me.

Next are the Orcs.

I drybrushed up the skin on these guys and I don't think I will do that again at this scale. These guys are 1/72 scale from the Dark Alliance. Set 1 I think. As usual I played with Bronze, Copper, Gold and Silver on them, just to make them more interesting. The eye motif on the shields is my fall back. On the Bronze shield I did it backed by Burnt Umber, the steel shield is backed by black.

I also felt like trying out a little vignette with these Orcs:

Fladnag and De La Warre lead their men to fight off the green menace.

I bumped up the EV to +1 to make it brighter and adjusted the aperture to f16 to try and get the forward figures in better focus. I used digicamcontrol 1.2 to help take all the photos. I must admit to rushing this shot. I should have played with lighting and position more.

I'd also like to welcome the two latest followers:

Tiny Basement of Tiny Basement Wars and pw, who does not have a blog listed in his Friend Connect profile. TB is doing some fun Oldhammer gaming with his kids and has a great Comic style report of his Space Hulk Dungeon Bash mash up. And if pw reads this and has a link just let me know.

Hope y'all like the latest. More to come, I hope.

Otherworld Sale and updates

Hi All,

Just wanted to let you know that you still have time to avail yourself of the Otherworld Miniatures birthday sale. I saw a couple of posts about it, but the one I finally found was on Wargames News and Terrain. It expires on Oct 11th, type in 8THBIRTHDAY in the coupon code box at checkout and receive a 20% discount. I ordered the demon idol diorama pack and the discount essentially brought the shipping to 50p. Not too shabby.

I also finally got the Marauder Giant and Azhag apart. The Giant snapped of the base easily, Azhag I had to leave in the freezer for several more days. The only bad thing was snapping the peg off the plastic wing. Now if I could remember where I put the other wing.

I forgot to take a picture of it, but the wyvern has Marauder 1993 carved into his foot.

I also dug out my zombies for zombtober.

The plastic zombies and survivors are roughly 40mm I got them off Amazon (not this one but similar) and glued them to washers for the Analogue Painting Challenge last year. In the interim I knocked the box over and snapped them off the bases. It's the white glue, but I've set myself up to, in theory, back out of my basing system.

The metal zombies are the 20mm Elhiem zombie horde plus a duplicate casualty figure from the survivors set. I got these from Syr Hobbs who I wanted to give a shout out to for excellent customer service. When I placed my order they contacted me with a question about what to do for items that were out of stock. When the items did eventually come in they followed up with me. It sounds like standard practice, but so many get wrong. So I applaud them for doing it well. Their website is in transition right now but they are responsive to email.  There is a TMP post here about the delays.

Best to get basing. October 5th is the first deadline to post a zombie/survivor and in my case Greenskin as well.

Zom(b)Orctober

So I've signed on to do Zom(b)tober and Orctober this year.

I add a b because it's Zom B's!

I think I signed on to this last year, and then produced a big fat zero in the painted Zombie department. So I'm going to throw my hat in again and try to get something done. I think I saw it first on Eclectic Gentleman Tabletop Gamer and am listed 10th there, while I'm also listed on Brummie's Wargaming Blog where I'm listed 20th. I also followed Brummie's Blog today as it was one I thought I was, but actually wasn't.

I see that Brummie and EGTG each have their own logo image with the text tying it together. Using What Font Is I found it was Bloody. The only thing I don't like about FFonts is they try to get you to download their installer. I ended up doing the zip file after it downloaded the installer.

So in keeping with the whole make your own banner thing, here's mine:

I am also fully aware that I am the outlier in spelling it with a B.

Next up Orctober.

By Zhu Bajie

You can join in at Erny's Place and there looks like there's even a prize to be had.  Of course the real prize for me is actually painting all the stuff I've had lying around since 1992.

So throw caution to the wind and join one or both of these. Your lead pile will thank you.

Space Hulk Mission 1: Beach Head

To get pumped up for play we listened to Bolt Thrower "Eternal War" first.




My son and I decided to play a cooperative solo style game. My wife offered to help us make decisions on where the genestealer reinforcements would enter. I the future I may try to incorporate some THW mechanics for moving the blips around.

Now onto the report:

Game wise we fumbled around a bit. My son and I deferring to each other led to some compound bad decisions which got Sgt. Lorenzo killed. We made up for it by bad genestealer decisions of charging down a corridor hoping for a bolter jam. In the end it was a draw. The Blood Angels still had 5 marines left. The genestealers were down to 4 but would have been mowed down had play continued.

As for the report, you can see I used Comic Life 3 again. I used the same "futuristic" template as the X-wing report, but I played around with editing the panels some and adding effect images for the first time. These are the lightning and muzzle flashes. I also helped myself out by pre-selecting the shots I wanted to use before sitting down to lay out the comic. I think that helps to plan the pages a bit more. Finally, i also learned how to add page numbers.

I still need to work on getting better shots. I was rushing a little so as not to break up game play too much and lose my son along the way.

The game was enjoyable but, as expected, some of the genestealer poses were problematic. They don't easily fit in a space so lining up and facing are difficult. I still haven't heard back from The Black Library so I'll have to figure out where to find more Space Hulk fluff. Perhaps there is more in the Mission Book. I only read the stuff before the first mission.