3rd Bloggiversary Prize winner and a Welcome.

The internet Chimpanzees at Random.org have spoken!

So Asslessman has won! I think this is the second time he has won a giveaway from here. Perhaps he is not as unlucky as he thinks? What would the opposite of Assless be?

Although it is possible that I still have your address from the last time, you may want to contact me with it again. I will try to pack up and ship out the figures forthwith, I still need to contact Ed at THW about getting you the scenario (and possibly the updated version of the free Swordplay rules).

This week should be a busy one as we get ready for a short Summer holiday. I will be working on finishing Curt's figures and playing out my battle for Talomir Tales. Over the holiday I'll probably work on the gameplay audio and video and think more on how I want to present it.

I'd also like to welcome Neil Andrews to the blog, sorry I missed you last post. I don't see a blog listed for you in your Friend connect profile, so if you have one please let me know and I'll post a link to it.

Splittermuster, how I did it and some thoughts

So I'm working on these late war Germans and I wanted to do some camouflage. One is obviously wearing the Zeltbahn (tarp) and the Schnurrbart character in the movie always seemed to wear a camo helmet cover and later a jacket.

Farnsworth has it as Base (Vallejo Light Grey 990 or Deck Tan 986), Brown (Vallejo Ger Camo Black Brown 822), Green (Vallejo Luft. Camo Green 823)

SHQ's guide had Base (Luft Camo Green 823), Brown (Vallejo Mahogany Brown 846), Green (Vallejo Pastel Green 885). Just looking at these colors I would probably swap the base and green from this guide.

After I had painted it i also looked back at this excellent resource. The paint guide for Splinter camo there gives: Base Color (pale) Pastel Green 885, Base Color (dark) Russian Uniform 924, Base Color (marsh) Buff 976, Brown Color Beige Brown 875, Green Color Luftwaffe Cam Green 823, Raindrop color Black Green 980. These are all Vallejo colors if it wasn't obvious. I wish I had remembered to look at this before I painted the figures as, in the movie, Schnurrbart is definitely wearing a darker base color camouflage. Oh well. This seems to be my modus operandi.

I think I also mentioned that I had no Deck Tan or equivalency, but it looked sort of like a Grey Green to me. I thought I found a comparable Americana color in Silver Sage Green, but of course I couldn't find it in the store. I ended up using Folk Art Italian Sage 467, but it's not really equivalent, it's just a light color. It may actually be close to the Pastel Green, but that is just luck since I didn't think to look until now.

So here they are:

I think the Zeltbahn is more successful, but they both look pretty good. Schnurrbart's helmet and extended arm gave me a little trouble  but look all right. I'm also going to dirty these guys up with the Grunge wash, so the shocking brightness will tone down some.

Getting close on these, I hope to send them to Curt before the end of the upcoming week.

A winner will be selected tomorrow (Monday) morning my time. Good luck to all the entrants.

Before I go completely insane, here's some progress.

Well I started making a list of the colors from the various catalogs and so far I have this.

Brand	Color Name	Swatch	R, G, B	Hex
Vallejo	German Dark Grey (995)		26,48,45	1A302D
	Grerman Field Grey (830)		94,88,67	5E5843
	German Uniform (920)		36,94,77	245E4D
	Russian Uniform (924)		99,108,79	636C4F
	German Dark Green (896)		47,80,71	2F5047
	Desert Yellow (977)		180,144,67	B49043
	German Camo Red Brown (826)		110,41,38	6E2926
	Flat Brown (984)		117,67,57	754339
	Luftwaffe Camo Green (823)		87,104, 57	576839
	Light Grey (990)		158,161,154	9EA19A
	German Camo Black Brown (822)		91,54,37	5B3625
	Deck Tan (986)		199,205,184	C7CDB8
Folk Art	450 Parchment		228,211,189	E4D3BD
	939 Butter Pecan		223,192,150	DFC096
	942 Honeycomb		184,132,68	B88444
Delta Ceram.	Trail Tan 02435		220,181,139	DCB58B
	Spice Tan 02063		186,143,98	BA8F62
	Territorial Beige 02425		162,132,86	A28456

Using Color Hexa I calculated the Nordalia mix that is supposed  to be the equivalent of Field Grey:

Apple Barrel	Delta Ceram.	Americana		Color Hexa
Pewter Grey	Wedgwood Green	Lamp Black
20580	02070	DA067
109,110,112	116,158,118	0,0,0		100, 113, 103
6D6E70	749E76	000000		647167
			=
6 parts	3 parts	1 part
60.00%	30.00%	10.00%

So we see that it is not an exact match.

What has occurred to me during this exercise is that there discernible patterns in the RGB color codes that could be helpful to approximate shades. Right now I have been stumbling about looking for a way to approximate Deck Tan (986). I've been inputting percentages of wedgwood green(there is no second e in the official name) and parchment. It may need a darker tan, I'm not sure.

So all that's left on these guys is the camo on the helmet and smock of Schurrbart and the Zeltbahn of #2, who I like to think of as Lieutenant Meyer. The last two are Steiner and Stransky, well sort of.

I've got to run, I'm late for our next session of Call of Cthulhu.

Welcome; adventures in paint mixing and figure progress.

First off let's welcome a few new followers to the blog:

Jason has several links in his profile. The one that comes closest to a blog is J's Notes.

Wargames News and Terrain of the eponymous Wargames, News and Terrain. I've been a follower of his blog for some time and it has all the latest news on figure and rules releases, as well as some pretty good terrain tutorials. Check it out.

Austronaught of Attempted Gamer, the top post right now shows some pretty cool planets made for Battlefleet Gothic.

David, who has no blog listed in his Friend Connect. If you have one let me know and I'll link to it.

On to the paint mixing!

First off just let me say, this is a royal pain in the ass. Following the Nordalia guide has proven difficult as some of the shades are out of production and stock of even current colors is variable. I have been to five different stores in my area and still could not come up with a couple of the colors. It appears that some may still be available online, but I wanted to get started so I ended up trying to buy the next closest equivalent. In some cases there really wasn't one so I just chose a color. My methodology for this was to use a color picker program. ColorZilla works well but only in your browser. Color Finder from sourceforge is the one I ended up using the most. If you click, hold and drag it gets the color from wherever your cursor is. You can also input the RGB or hex value and it will show you the color. At my leisure I will go through the paints I have and try to determine their numeric values. These are of course approximations of the actual paint color, theres only so much you can do on the web or in a graphics program.

My first mix was to make 830 German Fieldgray. I had all the colors, no problem there, but my method of measuring and mixing turned out to be problematic. I measured out the parts as mL in an old antibiotic dosing syringe and the paint is hard to draw up hard to pour down into it and just generally frustrating. For this color I put the paints directly into the dropper bottle, big mistake. No matter how long or hard I shook it the paint did not fully mix. I ended up having to dump it out and mix it in a separate container, then put it back in the bottle. I ended up with this.

Recipe calls for 6:3:1 ratios of above.

DO NOT do it this way.

Just comparing the base to the mixed color.

Finally working on Curt's figures

Or how to really procrastinate and then take the long and tortuous route to complete a simple task.

As you may or may not recall, I'm beginning to become hazy on the details myself, I was supposed to do some Cross of Iron themed figures for Curt as my entry. I'll ignore the shame I feel at not only not doing them during the competition, but also taking essentially three months off.

As usual I had a vague plan but I have dragged my feet at every step. I bought four Artizan late war Germans from FRP Games. I sculpted a mustache on one to make him look more like Schnurrbart and then I decided I would use the paints and techniques from the Reaper “Learn to Paint” Skin tone set.

So that was done while watching Spain vs. Chile, I'm not 100% happy with the results. I think I put too much highlight and covered the midtone. I may give it a glaze or a wash we'll see.

What I spent (wasted) most of my time today doing was looking up paint and conversion charts for craft paint to vallejo  (or is it the other way around?)

With the Farnsworth guide (here) as my source, this is what I found:

The chart at Nordalia, while not wholly inclusive, is pretty good. When I made my list though I had a little difficulty finding the colors I wanted as they were spread across “brands”. As it turns out Apple Barrel, Delta Ceramcoat, and Folk Art are all made by Plaid. Americana is made by Deco Art.

As I was writing this it also occurred to me that I could use a color picker to look at the computer colors used to represent the paint colors in the manufacturers published literature. I added ColorZilla to my Chrome browser and downloaded colorcop for reading colors from the pdf catalogs. I also looked into a color mixing program which I downloaded as a zip file as well (Different Color Software). My idea is that looking at the color codes for these various things will help get me in the ball park.

This post is getting long and rambling, so I'll wrap it up for now and give you some updates as I progress. Yesterday I bought most of the colors I needed for the Germans, so I will press on with that.

3; 152; 323; 2209; 115158

Hi All,

  That's going on 3 years; 152 followers; 323 posts; 2209 comments and 115158 page views as I'm writing this.

So let's get this party started. I really like doing giveaway's, but I've struggled with the question of what could I really give you all that you would actually want?

First off I'd like to give a home to some very nice 15mm figures that I purchased, but realize I will never actually game with.  They are these fantastic little Ratmen from Splintered Light Miniatures.

In addition to these, I will somehow include a copy of the Two Hour Wargames Scenario, Jewel of Murinae that I bought them for.

The next question is painted or unpainted? To me it's almost like the W.C. Fields joke. First prize is unpainted, second prize is painted.

There may be more, we'll see what shakes out as I get the gaming dungeon de-cluttered.

The usual rules apply:

1. Be a follower of the blog
2. Leave a comment that you want to enter.
3. A winner will be drawn using a complex algorithm involving a hat on Monday June 30th in the US.

One entry per person, and thanks for being a part of the madness.

That is all.

New Battle Report and Welcome!

Hi All, finally got the game played and report written for Talomir tales here.

I also whipped up a little banner for Talomir Tales using some techniques that I had forgotten how to do precisely. But I got it sorted.

Welcome to new followers:

David Billinghurst, who you may remember from his blog I Liebstered; The Inward-curving Isentropic Endoscope of Dr Cornelius or his other blog Waystar High Port which I am not yet familiar with.

Doc Grognard, who has no less than five blogs. The Book of Going Forth with Dice, Martin's Hundred, Hereiswhere, Making Friends with Big Data, Crawdads and Dragons. When I get a chance I will take a look and follow one or more.

Cluck Amok, whose blog Cluck Amok I also Liebstered.

The birthday swag is rolling in, so I will share that with you as well as my up coming Junetacular Bloggiversary giveaway!

I've been Liebstered Pt. 2 - (I'm a stubborn SOB)

Well, I've finally slogged through all 309 blogs that I follow in preparation for nominating some for this award. I used getting this award myself to finally knuckle down and do this as the list is getting unwieldy and I have many that now appear to be defunct.

As you may recall I was awarded the latest iteration of the award here. If I recall correctly the main criteria is for blogs that are under 200 followers. Many of the blogs I follow either don't include the follower widget or are WordPress blogs which also don't count followers. So I excluded those. I also wanted to be a little more restrictive and give some more love to those blogs that were under 100 followers, but with the stipulation that they had to have posted at least once in the last couple of months. Sadly I've noticed many of the blogs I follow not updating for 5 months or more.

So here are my nominations: (Please feel free to just accept it and not go through the hassle of answering the questions and nominating other blogs, I'm totally fine with that).

Avid Wargamer's House - A THW and Ganesha games player and battle reporter.

Steveo's Mini Soldiers - Warhammer, a guy having fun with miniatures. He's a new blogger so show him some love.

Luke: hoti to kratistos - Very interesting 1/300 modern and Dark Age gaming. Interesting way of making battle mats.

Amateur Hour - Great character development, figures and art. I also may have seen someone else nominate him but I can't see where right now.

Ancient Miniatures - 1/72 Ancients, nicely painted and a wide variety of ranges.

Oldhammer in the New World - Oldhammer USA style!

Cluck Amok - 54mm FIW with beautiful figures and Terrain.

The Inward Curving Isentropic Endoscope of Dr Cornelius - 15mm, RRtK and hexographer. Nuff said.

Brigantes Studio - Loki and Kev's painting service.

Toy Construct - Reviews of Cool toys and games.

Pushing Tin - Interesting looking games and the Valeur et Discipline Rules

So those are my 11, I don't think it specified how many. There were of course many more blogs, all deserving in their own right, but I've spent way to long on this as it is. I also wanted to give a boost to those blogs that are out there but not getting the exposure they deserve.

Have a good one all. An RRtK battle report is coming soon.

It is sooo on!

I've been working on lots of stuff, but nothing ready to share yet. Except for this.

Yesterday, after I got home from my martial arts stuff, my son told me that he didn't want to play with the neighbor kid across the street anymore.

They've had their ups and downs, but my son seemed to genuinely like the kid and want to play with him in general. So what was the difference? This kid, who is at most a year younger, has been teaming up with a girl who is almost 12 and going around with NERF guns. The pair of them seem to find it hilarious to shoot at my son. He has a NERF gun, that big revolver one, but can't find it right now.

When he told me of this I came up with a plan. I told him I was proud of him for not wanting to put up with jerks, and today I went out and bought him this.

It came with an 18 round magazine and can fire full auto. It's powered by 4 C size 1.5V batteries. I bought him a second clip and we may duct tape them together. The advertising says 75ft range, a youtube video demonstrated about 50ft.


We're going to work on getting comfortable with it and use it only if they want to "play" again. It's on now bitch!