Hibernation

Sorry for the long silence; reports and the joys of a new school term have seriously cut into hobby time. 

The first casualty has been my next vignette. That's going on to the back burner for the moment but I wanted to share the one thing that's been done for it:

The chances of anything coming from Mars are... Well, pretty good, actually. 

The Martian is sculpted and the tripod is designed. This and the four brave chaps will get popped into a drawer to be ressurected as and when. 

I'm trying to clear the decks of my Rohan chaps so here you can see them (and Theoden King - whose armour is a cast-iron, gold-plated sod to paint, incidentally) with their base coats:

And then with the final glaze on the cloaks. 

And why am I clearing the decks, dear reader? Next week I officially enter middle age as the clock rolls over to 40 and - if everything goes according to plan - I should have some new toys to play with. 

See you on the other side, chaps and chapesses. 

If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and-- WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?

It was in the long hot summer of 1898 that caravans started going missing to the south of Wadi Phukwa'zaht. Harassed by the Colonial Office and - perhaps more importantly - seeing the gifts and gratuities he had become accustomed to receiving from various businesses vanish like a mirage, the Governor General suggested an investigation was in order.

Thus it was that a small section under the command of one Lt. Keene was dispatched to find out who or what was responsible for the disappearances. He and his faithful Sergeant Cordwangle were quite unprepared for what they found...









Well, here it is. I'm eternally grateful to everyone who's supported me in my efforts to get back in to the hobby. Your compliments and cheerleading have been vital to the success of this little project.



I am quite happy with how it's turned out; perhaps more importantly, aside from the few places where the brushwork isn't up to much, I'm glad that I have started to built up my confidence and remember some techniques after the long gap.



Perhaps more importantly, it looks pretty much like what I had in my head when I had the idea for it in the summer looking at Mr Awdry's wonderful Whitechapel CD-based vignette at 28mm Victorian Warfare. 

The last few in progress shots are:

The bases were blended in with some simple basing sand which then had a wash applied:





And the last details were added to Barney




And then finally some static grass was added to give some variation to the ground cover. I would have liked to add some moss to the rocks but I can't find my flock anywhere.




The total cost for the project was a quarter of a box of British Line Infantry, so call that a fiver; an old PS2 game, 50p for Barney and £2 for the aquarium plants. Everything else was offcuts and leftovers.

 See you all next week for the next project which is a little bit Hammer and a little bit folk horror...

Paint Table Sunday.

Paint table Sunday. It's a thing.

Just leave it, OK?

My wonderful other half kidnapped the children this morning so I got a chance to paint in daylight which is always handy when doing skin tones (I've got no odea where my daylight lamp went in the move).

I went with fairly dark skin, operating on the assumption that the chaps have been out in the noonday sun with the mad dogs for a while. As I mentioned in the comments, the faces are by far and away the best part of these sculpts, being even stronger on the plastics than on the metal officer.

So, basic shading (good old washes) and then highlights. A final shade where required. I got to practice some wet blending on the backof the uniform coats before I attempted the faces. Again, all done with a limited palette of a red, a white, a blue and a black  with Bone to mix in for highlights.


Quite happy with the faces but the brushwork is still a little sloppy in places so I'll have to do some touch ups here and there. The blending on a couple of the highlights is still too harsh but that was the first couple of ones I'd tried it on.

Here they in a suitably cinematic ratio atop the hill:


Annoyingly, there's a whopping great mold line I missed on the sergeant's arm that I only saw in hard sunlight.

And here that are a little closer so we can all the little imperfections.


No time tonight - must finish resources for tomorrow! - and unlikely to do anything on Monday; but moving on to landscaping and terrain this week with the target of having the whole thing wrapped up by the weekend ready for the next one.

I'd just like to say thank you to everyone who's viewed and commented so far - it makes it a lot easier to keep up the momentum.

Thin Red Lines

Crikey, that was troublesome. A decent session tonight, broken up for a rather splendid episode of Doctor Who, allowed to start picking up where my long break has left me. As I said, brush control is a problem. It was getting better by the end of the evening but there were some awful cases of slips and blurring lines at the beginning. Anyway, by the end, I'd started to get into the swing of balancing paint consistency, brush loading and control. I think that tomorrow I'll be up to the fine detail work. Here you can see the chaps with main colour blocked in; the second coat of lighter red gives some depth to the coats and grey undercoat pays off with the thinned blue coat over the trousers. Basic detail work on the webbing and packs is also roughed in: And here's where we leave them this evening with all base colours in and some gross detailing on the faces, webbing, packs and what have you. I've decided on black cuffs and facings for the full Zulu feel. Overall, I'm quite happy with the sculpts. As I mentioned to the fine Mr Awdrey in the comments to a previous posts, the poses are a little limited but easy enough to tweak for vignette purposes. There's a few soft details around where the hands meet the rifles and 'round the back of the packs; all fixable in the painting, I suppose, but I'd want something a little sharper if I were building full on character models. But for rank and file? You can't argue with the price and the quality. Mark me down as a fan of Warlord, and I look forward to playing with the ECW chaps for the next vignette. So a slight break and I'll be painting some more Monday or Tuesday. Shading and detailed should see the brave chaps done.

The Dark Continent Takes Form

I played around with lots of different ideas for foliage to get that Lost World vibe. I was going to construct some palm trees with wire and fabric, a technique I'd had some success with in the past; but I decided that it was more important for me to get the first thing actually finished to get the mojo flowing. So, thanks to Dave (@thefrugalgamer) who reminded me of aquarium plants, I popped onto the Bay of E and awaited delivery. A bit of chopping and sticking has started to give me a pretty good bit of visual interest to frame the figures on the ridge: And with the valiant chaps of the Prince of Wales Own Volunteers in place, facing the monstrous spawn of the Dark Continent: So tomorrow it's time to dip the brush into the wet stuff. I'm intending to start easy by working on Barney do I can get back into the swing of blending. My plan is to do the whole thing with a rather muted, realistic palette to really make the redcoats pop. Of course, I might ditch that and go for one of the more garish recent suggestions for what a tyrannosaur might have looked like...

And so it begins...

This will, eventually, become a diorama of a section of men from the Prince of Wales Own Volunteers in Deepest Africa coming face to face with the past.



The basic construction is quite simple, as you can see; a DVD base with blue foam carved into rock. Some filler will be added for texture.




The most valuable lesson I've learned over the years is to plan your composition before you start sticking anything down.

More to follow; next steps are undercoating the miniatures and sticking some foliage down - awaiting delivery of some aquarium plants from ebay.

A beginning is a very delicate time...

Hello there.

I've been wargaming and painting since I was 14, on and off. I even worked for a wargames company for a while developing game lines and writing rules sets.

Now I'm settling in to middle-age with fairly bad grace; with the advents of kids, wife and a time-consuming job - like seemingly everyone else with a wargames blog I'm a teacher - and I don;t really have the time to organise games. Especially seeing as most of my gaming group have drifted away over the years.

But I'm determined to, at the very least, get back in to some painting. This blog is a possibly misguided attempt to keep my mojo flowing. If you like anything you see, please leave some feedback to help me stay motivated.

First off the blocks will be some Victorian SF.