New Year 2022 odds and sods

 Goodbye 2021, hello 2022. (And bugger you ‘22 for bringing along a sodding beginning of the year head cold!) 

No end of year round up here, I pretty much bumbled along and managed to get up 24 posts - not bad for a year’s worth. My only pledges are to try to get up more posts than that for this year, buy fewer minis and paint more to reduce the Dreaded Lead&Plastic Mountain (And in turn complete a project or two). Should be simple enough, right?

On to the pics! 

A bit of painting done recently. Strayed a little from the Burrows and Badgers kick I have most recently been enjoying and so a mixed bag to show off today. 

First off a late 90’s (I think) Games Workshop offering, this is a Necromunda Ratakins gang Shaman. My very good friend Derek gifted me a small collection of the original Necromunda minis a while back and I got the bug to slap some paint on this fellow last weekend. I thought he’d be pretty straight forward but bow was I wrong… so many (in a typical GW fashion) sculpted details to pick out! Took me ages. Still, the finished effort will work and gives me a place to start off with for the rest of the Ratskin figs in my collection.

I felt a pale skin colour was more logical and less cheesy than the American Indian style studio paint job. The denizens of the Underhives don’t get to see the light, so it doesn’t make sense at all to me that anyone would have tanned skin in those areas with false light and polluted time-and-again-refiltered air. 

With so many sculpted details to pick out, I didn’t have the energy to try to add previously planned tattoos. Seriously, painting this guy was exhausting! 

Second in line is another Burrows and Badgers miniature, the third Holy Mouse I mentioned in my last post, Sister Tomasina. Like her brothers (Both in the cloth and by blood - see last post), she helps maintain and protect the church. Her Holy magics are as potent as her quick temper, woe betide the brigand attempting to thieve from the church coffers!

A grey nun’s habit with white veil. Pretty standard really. I also have her the same green holy book as I’d done for my Mole. I’ll get a pic of her with her brothers together done soon. 

Kept the pages of the book simple. No extravagant lettering , just simple script effects. Works for me.

Appropriate gratuitous mouse bootie shot. Wait! She’s a mouse-woman of the cloth! I’ll burn in hell for typing that…

Last off the paint station is a mini from a long neglected project. After seeing all sorts of great Dark Ages blogposts I decided to grab a couple of my Jomsvikings minis out and get  them done. Well, I only managed to finish one, the other should be finished before the end of the week. It’s a Gripping Beast metal sculpt from their Saga line. I think the official paint job has the animal pelt painted as a wolf, but it looks too small to be a wolf’s pelt so I decided to paint it up as a Scandinavian Red Fox fur instead. 

This one had more detail sculpted into him than the average Gripping Beast metal sculpt that I’m familiar with. Took a bit to get him done but I feel for a rank and file Bondi he looks good enough.

This pic doesn’t show it well but there are at least four layers of shading in all that orange. The lighting messed it up. 

That’s it for now. These three were part of the Paint What You Got challenge ran by Dave Stone on his blog. Not a specific challenge like others I’ve joined, more a “get stuff off your unpainted mountain with the rest of us” effort, which works just fine for me. :)

Hope all are well and safe out there,

- Dai

Zomtober 2016 (Week 3 FAIL)

Rubbish migraines and neck pain ruined all my plans to get any painting done last week, so I'll have to try to make it up at a later date. So no new zombies or even painting in general to show. Apologies.

I did get to play a couple of game of Saga with my friend Stewart in honour of the 950th anniversary of The Battle of Hastings, which illustrated just how much Saxon face can be smashed in by Norman cavalry... Yes, I, the Saxon player lost both games. O well, keeping it historical, right? :)

My battle plans were great, it was the dice gov', honest.

This Thursday will be my 40th birthday and so I'll try to get something done for my next post amongst all the planned celebrations.

JomsViking Warriors

Here's my 1st unit of JomsViking Warriors. They all get the same shape shield which in turn is painted in the same shade of red to make them easily identifiable on the tabletop. Am sure the shields are entirely unhistorical, but they'll do for me.

Newest member is in orange with the pointy helmet and horsehair plume. Nice to have these off my table! Now only another 16 to go before I can call this 6-point Saga warband done..... -__-

Couldn't find examples online of any vikings "Joms" or otherwise with this big board-style of shield so kept it all simple with a nice primary colour to keep them similar. Small rune in black on each shield is for "Odin", next unit will get the rune for "Thor".

About to charge into their unpainted mates on the shelf ahead. 

Also managed to finish up the Warhammer 40K Ogryn commission previously previewed. Ended up having a lot of fun painting this mini and am quite happy with how he came out. Forgive the crude pictures, I took them prior to leaving to work this morning in my back garden prior to watering our vegetable plants. The client seemed well pleased with it, so I guess mission accomplished.

Client prefers to base his own stuff, so hence the Dai-paw in the picture.

Loads of fun bulges and folds in this sculpt to make it interesting and fun to paint.

I also got started on some more 15mm Confederate infantry to be able to use in my upcoming ACW Longstreet campaign, but there isn't much to show just yet, so no pictures until next post.

Much loves and stuffs to you all!

Confederate Brigade (And some other things)

It’s been a bit quiet on the hobby desk of late in Chateaux Dai. Moments to pick up a paint brush have been a bit few and far between in the past… 2 weeks or so since my last post. Until that is, this weekend….

Exciting, eh?

Not much done mind, but enough for a wee post I think. First off, the flags I ordered from Stone Mountain Miniatures arrived for my Confederates. Of course, silly ol’ me neglected to order some classic Army of North Virginia “Diagonal Blue stripes over Orange background” Stainless Banners (Not that every Southern army born them in any case, but they are certainly instantly recognisable)… But they do have some earlier “Stars’n’Bars” efforts for the now (And a Florida State flag.) which will serve for our earlier games in mine and Stewarts’ (Who’s playing the Union boys) campaign next month.

Pedisclaux's Brigade

Better pics of the starting Brigade were promised and here they are – the campaign will follow a fictional duel between two brigades over the years of the war in 9 meetings (Per the Longstreet “Grand Campaign” rules.). The Campaign encourages that we both name our Brigade commanding General and it’s component regiments, which I’ve done below. Each side begins the campaign with 3 infantry regiments of 10 bases, 1 cavalry regiment of 8 bases and a 3-gun battery of artillery. 

Everyone's eager and ready to kick in Northerner face. 

Artillery on the left. LA 3rd and 4th infantry top and bottom at center, with the 12th FL in between. On the right are the 26th Florida Horse with their "Dismounted" version at the rear. 

My splendid boys marching on.

Guns ready to deal out death to the Northern invader!

The dashing and debonair  General Jean-Claude Pedisclaux moving his boys onward from horseback. Although generals play no part in the Longstreet rules, it's fun to at least have a fig on the table to represent them.

Stewart and I will get the first games of our campaign started on June 18th in a day long (thedaybefore)Fathers Day gaming extravaganza! AAR to be posted thereafter. 

I also finished up a couple of Dark ages figs - a Saxon Thegn and a Jomsviking Warrior.

Saxon Bondi to bring my Saxon Thegns up to 3 units of 4 for Saga. Shield's a bit pants, but I just wanted him off my desk.

Jomsviking warrior with a large red shield. His face was a crappy sculpt with almost no nose whatsoever, so I left the red wash on heavy so it looked (At least to me) like his nose was all scar tissue after a nasty wound or something.

Some work got done on my commission too. A 40K metal Ogryn and a sculpt that's pretty fun to paint. I liked this version of the Ogryns as they were less cartoony than their previous releases. Still to do armour/metal plates and ammo-belts. No idea what colour to paint the plates though...?

Lighting makes his skin look well messy, but it's not in real life - promise.

And last, but certainly not least - I finally (After a year of sitting on my shelf) fixed my mate Dave's Heroclix Great Cthulhu mini/statue. This thing's huge! It was handed to me after his son and my own were sneaking into Dave's hobby room (Whilst we played Kingdom Death) and one of the little sods knocked it off it's shelf, breaking off the wing... Dave tried to fix it with some pinning and wire, but the wing was far too heavy and it bent right off in no time. So I offered to sort it out and with a wood screw and some grey stuff (dries harder than Greenstuff) along with a little paint on the putty it looks pretty good and as long as it's not dropped again, should stay on there for years to come!

The Great Cthulhu's very presence will drive a man mad. And take up far too much space on his hobby desk.

And that's it for now. The Ogryn commission is my priority right now, then back to some more Confederates in case my brigade is lucky enough to receive reinforcements between games in the upcoming campaign. But otherwise, my focus will be 28mm Soviets for Bolt Action. 

Ciao.

Penned up

A short post.

Health issues of late have again stymied my efforts to get stuff done, but I did get some few things done.

I painted up these Renedra plastic Wattle Fencing pieces for my 28mm Dark Ages project (That I believe could also be used in Bolt Action WW2 at a stretch?). The designs were very crisp and easy to clip and clean up from the sprues and painted up easily with a dark brown spray of enamel household paint and dry-brushed with some P3 Trollblood something-or-other named grey. I then spray varnished with first gloss varnish and then once dried, Testor’s Dulcote. The small dirt areas also got a swift drybrush with a mud colour. I’m still trying to decide whether I’ll add some flock or the odd grass tuft or not?

Here are my brave Saxons defending this small farmstead from... who? Fencing fits in nicely I think.

No pictures as yet, but I’ve also been working on my first 15mm ACW Infantry Regiment. They are just needing basing and the odd highlight here and there until I can call them done. It suddenly got a lot easier to paint them when I ceased to worry about all the normal attention to detail I’d put into my 15mm WW2 Commonwealth infantry. It’s made the whole process far easier to stomach, as I find batch painting to be an ‘orrible slog….

Hopefully will have a post up of the finished regiment in the next day or two.

Lastly, I’ve got my first game of Bolt Action set for tomorrow evening. New gaming pal, Travis is supplying the armies for a learner game at our LGS and I’m really excited. Along with this, I’ve also a learning game of Bolt Action to play against my mate Densmol with our unpainted forces arranged for Saturday morning. So maybe some AAR’s and pictures forthcoming of both!?

Ciao.

Different things (NSFW - Or maybe it is? I dunno, I'm not sensitive to this crap)

This week has been somewhat quiet on the hobby front, mostly due to health issues again, but I persevered and got a few things finished.

First off, another Viking Bondi, now bringing my Warriors unit up to 6 out of 8. He was fun to paint and I thought some woad face-painting was fun to add, as though he was a foreigner who's been inducted into the ranks for some reason or other and now fights for viking fortune and fame.

the shield design is a strange one that I'd not seen before. Almost an old Roman design and nothing at all like the more well-known round shields. saying that I like them and this unit of warriors will all be armed with them to help tell them apart from the other two units of warriors that I will be painting in the future. (The red has far more depth and highlight in real life - the lighting has washed it all out....)

Both fur lined and deep blue, this fellow's cloak is rather resplendent if you ask me.

*I realised after putting together this post that I have forgotten to add washes to face and hands which I'll take care of later this evening*

Next Warrior on the painting bench will be this bloke. Here's a WIP pic.

Here you see the shield again, which like the last fig has been sculpted in. This one is going to be about contrasts - boring grey quilted jacket with fur-lined green hat, pink under-shirt and striped trousers. Yeah, with that bright red shield - he's stylin' alright.

My mate Steve also asked that I paint up some random critters he somehow purchased, so I started on this tiny Tortoise. Cute little bugger.

This fellow came from a Reaper Miniatures Animal Companions or Familiars pack or something. Very nice sculpts. 

This base is a 20mm if I recall correctly. Others in the pack include a penguin, fox, racoon, skunk and armadillo!

Lastly what could be seen as NSFW though I'm rather ambivalent where this stuff is concerned. so that's yer warning.

My mate Dave put in far too much money pledging on the Kingdom Death Monster Kickstarter. He's not much of a hobbyist and so I offered to put together the newly arrived expansions that he'd ordered for the game - a task that was rather daunting as there are no instructions to be found anywhere on how to assemble the monsters anywhere!

First up was the disturbing baby monster called a Gorm. This loveable beast includes a vagina-like mouth and a set of large testicles hung betwixt it's rear legs. no penis to go with them though, instead he has a mouth. Yeah - freaky.

I like to think it's a monstrous opera singer.

Next up is a large model, the Sun Stalker which is equally as strange. The main part is the flaccid tentacle penis prominent in front of it and the man-boobs. Flippin wierd and a pig to put together - had to be extra careful with this one to get it all put in correctly and in the right order too.

Flappy hands for hair or whatever they're supposed to be.

As challenging as it was to try to assemble these sans instructions, the pieces were very well designed and once I worked it all out, they went together very snugly with only the Gorm's left hand needing trimming/sanding to get it to fit properly. They are also large models, the biggest I've assembled in a long time outside of terrain. Here's a pic to illustrate this next to a Kingdom Death White Speaker mini for comparison:

The White Speaker is a tall 32mm mini, for those that are curious. 

Wierdness aside, I have to say I'm very impressed with what the Kingdom Death crew have put together for their setting. I've also been asked to put together my mate's other large KD model, the Lonely Tree, which is an intimidating job to say the least. But my neck was done by the time I had finished the Sunstalker, so I'll save that job for another date. And no, I'm not painting them - I've too much of my own stuff to paint up already!

Oodles

Since my last post there were games played and less painted.

Let's start off with my first game of Saga Dark Ages Skirmish with a couple new gaming pals, Jess and Travis. Originally I had tried to make it to the shop to catch some Bolt Action gaming, but Travis had already packed up by the time I arrived, but luckily Jess had also turned up (To see the Bolt Action game as well) and thankfully had lugged along his Saga stuff too. We played a straight forward three-way-versus with my as Vikings, Travis as Welsh and Jess Anglo-Danes. It was a bloody affair that ended with me winning (Yay!) with only my Warlord and a single berserker remaining! o_0

Anglo-Danes to the top, Welsh to the right and my Vikings splitting between the two. 

On the right I sent my warlord and a unit of hearthguard to disrupt the Welsh Levy and Warriors. It worked with my berserkers running in to mop up.

Casualties amassed quickly especially when I uncharacteristically roll 6's aplenty! Travis had to leave early but his force only had 3 hearthguard left, which I duly used a wierd Viking ability to just "remove", somehow. Maybe Thor threw a lightening bolt at them from stormy skies?

Here lies the vanquished Anglo-Dane Warlord at the foot of aberserker whilst my own Warlord looks on with grim pride.

 Saga was fun and easy to pick up. I am eager to play again and have felt a little energy to paint up some more of my Jomsvikings so I can field my own minis next game. I'm aiming at having a 4-point force minimum fully painted and will expand to 6-points later on. So far I have my Warlord and 3 units of Hearthguard finished.

My hearthguard though, were down a man, so I added this fellow to my longaxes unit.

He's very proud of this burgundy dressing gown that his Mamma knitted him.

Shield in the same yellow/black that I gave the other Hearthguard.

 For my 4th point, my first warriors unit got some additions, so now they are 5 fully painted (Though minus shields as yet as I want to paint those all at the same time to give the unit a better cohesive look.

I like this mini, he stabs toes.

The pelt cloak looks to be from a highland cattle on a previous raid.

This fellow is somewhat more diminutive in stature compared to the other warriors. Must mean he's even meaner. 

Since these pics were taken, I've done some touchups, added slight pink wash to cheeks and knuckles and based them properly.

I was also lucky enough to play a game of Chain of Command in 15mm with my mate Stewart Tuesday evening. I'd gotten my individually based 15mm Brits to an at least usable state painting wise so was excited to not to have to plonk Flames of War based minis for the battle. This kept everything far easier to keep track of during the game.

We played a defensive mission where (After a lucky dice roll) I had to hold back the German advance from one short end of the table and make sure Stew's troops didn't make it to my rear-most deployment marker. I have houses to hunker down in and a pretty good setup to deploy my own troops from after the patrol phase, so felt confident that I could manage to keep him back. Then he rolled for support points, of which I got 1/2 of the dice total. 6 was the result, so I got 3 support points and decided, sod it, I've yet to try a flame thrower in this game. Stew took off table mortar support and something else that I've since forgotten. We both agreed that a tank each on top of this would make for a more interesting affair so he took a plain Panzer IV and I a Sherman V.

The white cotton marks the furthest edge of the mortar bombardment. Almost all of my troops were pinned by it for umpteen phases! >_<

 I thought I'd lose for sure. Stewart rolled amazingly to get phase after phase after phase and the offtable mortar support had 75% of my boys pinned for ages, but all of a sudden his dice rebelled and mine remembered that I had threatened binning for poor performance and so after some tasty Flame Thrower BBQing of one infantry squad and a couple lucky Piat shots at his tank, along with a good mauling of his flanking squad and I had managed to get his overall force morale down to a level that won me the game.

A sideways picture of my brave PBI mowing down a German Heer squad who were trying to run down the flank. They had though, made more saves than any squad ever up until that point. Their death signaled the end of the game with Stewart's morale level bottoming out.

I really like these rules and am happy I got to play again. I think I'll try to pick them up later this year.

Speaking of WW2, I got the ammo carrier for my Soviet LMG team painted up. He's in a pose to show him mid-way through tossing an ammo can to the soontobe painted gunner himself.

Red mittens were sent by his Mum. Aww.

Has a carbine rifle. These guns look great.

Now that I've got a growing painted Soviet WW2 army, it would be remiss of me to not have an Axis force to face against them on the tabletop. With the Easter sale on over at the Warlord Games website offering a very well sculpted resin Hetzer tank for a rather lovely $16 tag. It arrived swiftly from Warlord Games HQ and I was surprised that it was a single resin piece with only metal hatches and gun barrel to assemble and very minimal resin flash to remove. Colour me extremely impressed. It’s now scrubbed with soap and water and glued together ready for primer. Along with this, I picked up both the new Winter German Heer metal squad & HQ packs and SS-Charlemagne metal squad. These will form the backbone of my later War Polish defense force to count as those desperate German defenders who had to stand in the way of the massed Soviet attack after the Vistula-Oder Offensive in early 1945.

Hetzers featured in Europe and on the Eastern Front. I love the look of these things, a lump with a huge gun stuck to the front. The scale is spot on, after I got to see one in person at Duxford Imperial War Museum. (A trip that I'll show pictures from here in a later post.)

Lastly, my long planned and awaited Barbarian setting rpg campaign has begun. We’re now three sessions into the game and I think the players are enjoying my story thus far. It’s the first time I’ve GM’d a story of my own creation in about 10 years and I’m still nervous as all heck that the players are even into it, finding it interesting and/or challenging. Being a wargamer I have all sorts of gaming terrain that has made the table more interesting than our typical “draw on the game mat with a dry erase pen” efforts. Add in the minis I’ve been slapping paint on the past months and the visual appeal is at least winning the players over I think. J I plan to write up a more detailed post on the campaign including how the story's going and so forth up until the time of posting.

The heroes are ambushed in the woods by Goblins and Hobgoblins whilst tracking down a traitor. First proper battle in my new game and I almost killed two of the players cos my dice rolls were stupid good. I need to roll behind a GM screen from now on I think!

Will hopefully have another post up by the weekend as there'll been more painting going on this week. Cheers!

End of the Challenge

On June 1st the 2nd 6 Month Mountain Reduction Painting Challenge commenced with all sorts of rules and so forth in an effort for blogging hobbyists to try to get rid of their unpainted piles of metal and plastic miniatures and pledge to try not to make purchases during the duration and make their backlogs bigger.

The 1st Challenge (Last year) saw me largely painting my 15mm Flames of War Canadian platoons and I feel I did pretty well as far as limiting purchases made. This year... was different - I had different projects to get done and most in 28mm. In the end I think I painted up around 90x 28mm figs and around 30x 15mm. Not great considering I've had 6 whole months to get stuff done, but it could be far far worse. I think also I ended up about even with projects completed and new purchases made. Maybe a little off even, with more purchases made - but certainly not horrendous.

It's been a fun 6 months and a busy one and I'm happy with the work I've turned out and look forward to the next Challenge.

During the last week of this Challenge I did get work done! An archer that can be used for both my Frostgrave warbands and future fantasy rpg gaming.

I think she's a late 90's early 00's Reaper mini. 

One day I'll come back to this one and add a little freehand to her cloak as that is one large boring space.

I also painted up a couple of skeleton archers for my upcoming rpg campaign. To account for extra majicks required to get a skeleton to shoot a bow, I felt the bows themselves would need a splash of sacrificial blood too. No idea how those quivers are sticking to their hips though - maybe more of the same majicks?

These are the old late 80's GW sculpts saved from my bits box. I had glued them decades ago, so  hence who the one on the left has crap looking shoulder joints.

No pic makes a blog more interesting, than that of skeleton bootie.

 Lastly, got these Saxon Slingers done. They are initially to be used for my Dark Ages (Lion Rampant) project, but I'll also be utilising them for Frostgrave as Archers or Javelineers. Simple sculpts, simple paint jobs.

And that's that. So much crap going on in my work life with Union nonsense, it's hard to feel up to painting right now. Hoping that it all sorts itself out and that the membership vote goes smoothly on Friday - wish us luck!