Year End Recap 2017

Hi All,

I just sifted through the blog and found out how productive I was this year. In looking through this year's posts I found my plan for 2017 written back in January here. I probably should have referred back to it during the year.

Figures Painted: 

Total 71, 51 of which were painted in the last three months of the year. 25 Sci-Fi, 27 Fantasy, 18 Monsters and 1 Chibi.

Terrain:

9 Pieces total. One resin skull altar, 3 resin objective markers, 5 scratch built foam monoliths. I meant to make Terrain all year, but somehow forgot that was a focus this year.

Games played:

The numbers may be slightly off as I haven't blogged all of our WFRP sessions, but it looks like 29 games were played. 15 WFRP sessions, 3 games of Shadow War: Armegeddon, 3 games of Rogue Ops, 1 game each of Battle Fleet Gothic, Mordheim, Necromunda, Rogue Trader, Donnytrader, Heroquest, Pikeman's Lament, and Broken Lances.

Zines created:

2. I made Vol1 Iss2 of the Oldhammer in the New World Zine and The Emporium of Rogue Dreams Abdul Goldberg challenge compendium. I fell down in getting out two more OitNW zines this year, sorry. It seems if I actually hobby it's harder to get the zine out.

Although I missed Oldhammer in the Jerz, I played a ton of Oldhammer at Kublacon and Monolith-Con. I only made one shirt for Monolith Con, and that had a typo :(

So in the end, a fairly productive year.

I'll hit you with my plans and update my various pages in the New Year.

Happy New Year everyone.

Paint Table Saturday 217 - Vacation painting

Hi All,

Well, despite the general angst I managed to complete my 26 figures for this month. I can't show the finished products right now, due to challenge rules, but you'll be able to see them on http://thepaintingchallenge.blogspot.ca/ and http://oldworldarmychallenge.blogspot.com/
respectively when they go through.

Here are some pictures of the last few days almost done figures.

Lighting is always a big issue when travelling. I think I'm going to investigate a better travel light. As usual I had to just push through and learn to live with things that would  keep me from calling things finished.

I'll probably just update the G+ community with the finished pictures.

Thanks for looking.

Paint Table Saturday 216 - Epic Fail of a week

Hi All,

This week was mostly me fooling around trying to cast up some shields because I was absolutely convinced I didn't have enough. I was wrong and wasted the last couple of days trying, and failing, to make a mold.

I did do some painting over the weekend. Here that is.

As you can see I finally fixed the Standard bearers hand, put a finial(?) on top of the banner pole and primed him grey. The mounted Knight needs a little more work and priming.

I went with variations of red and blue for the peasant archers. I have until the 30th to get these guys finished. This is how far along they were before I packed them up to go on holiday.

 Now I'll take you on my diversion of trying to make a mold to cast some shields. I was convinced I did not have enough to do all the figures that required shields. Over a year ago I had bought an Alumilite casting kit at Michael's and then approximately a year ago I bought a Classic Lego set to make a mold box. I thought that it was all just rectangular blocks. What is pictured is 95% of the blocks in the kit, so fail #1. Fail #2 was that my B part resin bottle has cracked and leaked, but I never made it to the resin stage. As you can see I used plasticine to make the bottom and was going to make a two part mold.

I had some trouble mixing the right amount of silicone, but got that sorted only to have the sprue bend and lift up one corner, thus ruining the mold. This silicone has a 24hr cure time, so I was basically screwed.

Then I remembered I had some Amazing Mold putty, cure time is about 30min.  I made this mold fairly quickly, but didn't notice I had some areas that were voids under at least one of the shields.

I went ahead and made the second half, thinking it could be saved. The second half was as bad if not worse. So double the putty, and time, wasted.

I demolded the first one, if it hadn't flexed like that it might have been usable, but you can see some other problems with how I made the mold.

After all this, someone offered to help me out with shields. I did another count and actually looked at all the models that had a stud to hold a shield, turns out I do have enough. So double Doh!

One good thing I did is tried out my Green Stuff World rivet mold with the excess green stuff I had from fixing the standard bearer.

I need to work on my technique, and will probably buy their metal scraper in my next order. I made the top three sizes of hex rivet.

Oh and if you need plain flat shields for knights Magister Militum has some shields here. (Hopefully that link works for you, I had trouble finding it this time.) For the style of shield used by the Knights of the Realm you might try these from Fire Forge.

Also welcome to Tilean Merc. I see you are a person of taste by the blogs you follow in addition to this one. If you have a blog let me know, I'll link to it.

Thanks for looking.

Paint Table Saturday 215 - Still Bretonnians and I learn something

Hi All,

Some progress on the Bretonnians this week. I laid down base metal leather and flesh and then started on the surcoats.

I've decided on the colors to use for the knights, I'm going to use combinations of Blue, Red, Yellow and White on these guys. As you can see I started on the two knights on the right. The blurry one is half blue and the one with the axe overhead has a blue bend.

I still haven't totally considered what I"m going to do with the heraldry colors for these guys but I was going to use some greens and ochres on their clothing because they are peasants.

When doing the knights I had some questions about how to do the surcoat for the bend and found out I had been doing my half and quarter wrong. As you can see from the illustration, the divisions look the same on the front and the back. I had always continued the color around the body, so the division would appear reversed on the back. This is how I did the Brigands and all my previous 1/72 knights and men at arms.

The idea is that things need to be coming from the same side from my point of view whether I look at his front or back. Also the main design stays above the belt and then whatever color is on the torso just extends down the skirts.

Fortunately I only have to fix that first, halved blue, knight and not all of them.

Thanks for looking.

Shadow War: Armageddon - 3 Way Loot Battle

Hi All,

Just trying to clear the long overdue battle report back log. This was a battle that Lasgunpacker, Dai and I fought way back in June. I think I was still reeling from KublaCon a little bit and did an absolutely horrible job of documenting this game. I did an even worse job on the next game Dai and I played after Lasgunpacker had to leave.

You can read about Lasgunpacker's report here and more in depth about Kill Team Sakhalin here, here, here, here and here. Worth a read as his team was quite interesting and he had a lot of cool character cards and whatnot.

Dai had some great, wacky, chaos figures but I couldn't find any write up about the team specifically. I didn't look super hard, just the blog archive around the time we played.

My guys were the Children of the Comet, the Genestealer "Gang" I made and used in that huge Necromunda game at Kublacon, here. It looks like I never took studio shots of or did a write up on this team or Abdul Goldberg and Associates.

Anyway here are the blurry cellphone shots put together in as coherent a way as I could manage.

So there you have it. I think SW:A is a great way to play a lite Necromunda style game and be a bridge between older and newer players. Could we have played Rogue Trader, or Necromunda? Sure, but I think this worked in giving us a framework for our teams and keeping all the rules fairly simple. Dai didn't get a chance to finish his terrain, but it was effective and looked the part. I'm looking forward to building my own Pegasus Models Sci Fi sets.

The only picture I took of our second Battle. We both played as IG, he had actual Catachans and I had Abdul and the Chukk playing as Catachans. Fogh'Orn Legh'Orn managed to tear a few guys apart and there were some flamer shenanigans on the other side of the tower that were fun. But I did something dumb and either didn't take the photos or deleted them right after taking them.

Thanks for looking. More painting madness on it's way tomorrow.

Monolithcon 2017 - High Value Target Part 2

Hi All,

The first Black Ops scenario was so much fun we played a second one. This one follows on the heels of the daring capture of the Mayor of Hellsreach by the Orks and Abdul. The Dwarf Operators have tracked them to their encampment and try to execute a night attack.

Killing the objective early in the game sort of set the tone for this one. By the time we got enough forces to bear on the enemy, they bugged out. Still a fun game and it was interesting to try the guard and noise mechanics from Black Ops.

Bretonnians are slowly coming along. The one knight I'm putting together is being difficult.

Monolithcon 2017 - High Value Target Part 1

Hi All,

What with hobbying and trying to get back into my martial arts practice, I'm finding it harder to bang out these reports. Here's the next one, part of two scenarios we played using Lopez's Rogue Ops mash up.

Enjoy.

Thanks for looking. No idea what I'll be posting next. A lot on my plate these days.

Paint Table Saturday 214 - Finished, prep and a crack

Hi All,

A fair amount of progress this week, but probably not as much as I should have gotten. Such is life. I decided to do a bunch more prep so that I can focus on painting for the rest of the Old World Army challenge.

So I finished adding the flock and static grass to the Brigands and Chaos Warriors. I also brushed on some primer to some of the Wargames Foundry bowmen in the back there and I put everyone on bottle caps to try and cut down on the amount I handle the figures. I still touch them way too much.

Just below are the rest of the retainers with their basing done. I just need to seal the grit on and then I can prime these.

On the auxiliary table, I have the foot knights, Crossbowmen, Ordonnance and one Knight (totally unassembled. The Foot knight standard bearer needs to have his banner pole cut and some green stuff to fix his hand. Somebody had modified him in the past and his hand is messed up. I had a few voids in random figures that I filled with squadron putty. It's not the greatest but it works in a pinch. One of the gunners has some major flash/ mold seam that I'm going to have to be extra careful on, so I may do the cannon next month instead of my original plan to do it this month.

Finally, I noticed a large crack all the way around the waist of the leader of my retainer unit. Boo! I must have dropped him in all the back and forth handling I've been doing. There is a definite wobble in his upper half now, but it hasn't completely separated. I've waffled about how best to fix him. Clean break and pin, or force glue and or green stuff into the crack and hope for the best. Today I'm thinking glue, yesterday was break and pin.

I'm also getting a tad bogged down in planning. I'm not sure I have enough shields for all these guys and plain shields seem to be something of a rarity these days. I think I've found some on Magister Militum, but it seems stupid to have to order them from overseas. I also found that not only is one of the plastic knights horses miscast, but one of the knights is as well. It's his shield arm so it can be hidden easily, it's just annoying.

Thanks for looking.

Oh and check out Early Blazon, a great resource for 13th century heraldry.

Paint Table Saturday 213 - Brigands and Chaos Warriors

Hi All,

A lot of stuff finished this week. It was hard to get stuff done with all the memorial things for Master Xiao and trying not to have a pity party for myself. But, as we know, life goes on.

So I stayed up late Thursday night and finished my submission to the Old World Army Challenge. My submission specifically can be seen, here. I encourage you to look at other entries, as there are some truly masterful painters in this group.

The Normans, as I said, were finished Thursday night but both they and the Chaos Warriors were varnished yesterday. I plan to flock and static grass the bases sometime this weekend.

When All is said and done I'm not really crazy about these figures. Multipart plastics rarely go together seamlessly and ranking up units can be a little difficult. There were some odd gaps and things that I appear to have forgotten about in the push to get these done. If I had had infinite time I might have used a little greenstuff to take care of those.

This was also my first full use of the Winsor & Newton Galeria matt varnish. It appears to let the metallics still shine a little. The vallejo was so matt it killed any shine from metallic paint, so I'm glad that the Galeria has removed an extra step from my work flow.

I think I'm going to do the foot knights and Cannon next, but I'm not totally sure. I still have a ton of prep to do. I would do the mounted knights but I need to do some sculpting/ mold making for some missing and miscast parts.

Thanks for looking.