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.