What's on the horizon.

Hi All,

Been back from vacation for a couple of days and just trying to get back into the swing of things. Here's a few pictures.

Looking North to Lake Tahoe from the head of the Desolation Wilderness trail near Echo Lake.

One of the parental Chipmunks that live in front of the cabin.

Three baby Chipmunks playing near their den outside the front window.

A Stellar's or 'Western' Blue Jay.

The house on the Eastern shore of Lake Tahoe, purportedly built by Adnan Khashoggi.

Site of some free pine bark for modelling terrain.

Back in the valley, 2 of the 3 Peacocks and a Peahen.

A cliff swallow peaking out. (Very lucky shot.)

So I only took 189 photos for this trip. As usual you get the scenic ones, as I am forbidden by SWMBO to show her or the kids.

Anyway we had a nice time.

I have to run off and prepare dinner as we have another online gaming session tonight on Roll20. Steve will be the GM tonight and we'll be playing Dungeon World. I had hoped to edit all my stuff from our Call of Cthulhu sessions already, but it hasn't happened.

I'm also intrigued by the concept of playing 10 games 10 times (the 10 x 10 challenge). We'll see if I have the gusto.

Oh! And check out the Google+ Oldhammer community. If you're into that sort of thing.

New Talomir Tales post and Welcome.

Got in another Talomir Tales battle here.

It went pretty quick, you'll see why.

Also a quick welcome to Geordie an Exiled Fog of Geordie's Big Battles I found his blog through some links to painting up WW2 Russians. Nice stuff.

And I found out why my flight was probably canceled. Here's a picture of one of the last flights getting out of Phoenix on Thursday night.

There's no Boob like Haboob.

Have a good one.

Sending Curt's Entry Fee

I finally finished those late war Germans! Here they are in all their glory.

Sorry for the shadows, I only had one overhead lamp handy and the light from outside was pretty weak and indirect. I also used flash and just the Macro (Flower) setting on the camera.

I like how they came out in the main, particularly the camo. I think the build up of grey was a nice technique, I will continue to explore the idea of shade, mid and highlight. To me the wash is still what made it come together. I used my grunge wash recipe (4 Raw Umber : 2 Burnt Umber : 1 Black) all over and just Burnt Umber on the flesh. I also mixed black into my ancient Boltgun Metal, because I wanted to be black but more metallic looking. I do have a metallic black but this came out better. I had difficulty with the hair on Steiner and Meyer. It wasn't really sculpted and I'm not sure my dabbed on highlights were totally successful. Schnurrbart's mustache may be a tad too subtle with the highlights in raw and burnt umber. Stransky's eyes were also a tad problematic, I'm worried that he looks a little too Tim Curry in Rocky Horror Picture show. The only other thing I did was use Vallejo Matte Varnish everywhere except on the Schmeissers, there I used the Liquitex Matte Varnish as it always comes off with a slight shine. This is something I wanted to try after dulling down all the armor on the Treyine figures. This seems to be a workable solution to "too matte" on metal.

These guys were fun to do and I learned a lot. Most important lesson? Get some decent brushes. I think this is probably the thing that is making my life the most miserable when I paint at the moment.

I will endeavor to keep doing some painting every day so I can whittle away at my pile and actually have nice looking, finished, stuff to game with.

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.