End Of The Week - Not My Best Work (15)

Earlier on I was expecting a much busier day. The time of year and the end of daylight savings time, with some lack of sleep made and with what I was expecting to be doing today made time look a little short. Sunday is usually the day I do any last minute work to finish of my plan for the week. So I was was relatively happy when on the way to a jog I tripped over the curb, skinned my knee and fingers and did some damage to my foot. With all plans out of the window it was back home to put my leg up. And paint.

Despite some misgivings I have achieved my plan and surpassed my expectations. The New, New Cruelty is happy. I have tinkered about with some terrain and got along way through the prepping process for a load of figures. Not a bad week.

Some of the figures this week have been a bit entertaining to paint. The Rebels and the Star Saga scientists suffer from some flatness of detail. Nothing wrong with this but it is difficult to make them shine. The three Malifaux figures were good fun to paint. Lots of nice detail. At the end of the process I was quite happy with what I had done with them. Although looking at them now I can see there are a couple of missed details. These were for the Viktorias crew and until this week one of the Viktorias was missing. Now that I have found the figure I remembered why I didn't do it at the time I got them, one of the figure looks almost impossible to glue together (with any hope of the bits staying on and being apparently impossible to pin). Lastly there is a lonely cowboy which I started last week. Despite being on the table for over two weeks it was the last figure to get finished.

Next week is looking like a freeish week. Currently I have a plan to go to Salute next weekend. This will be the first time I have been to the biggest show in the country. Painting wise, I have a couple of figures that I have been using as background projects. Background projects have not figures highly just of late so I think I might grab some figures for that purpose. As for the main working objective I want to work on some blood bowl and I suspect that there might be a range of odds and sods. Some cowboys, the odd modern figure and post apocalypse seem appealing. Maybe some terrain might make in there somewhere.

Distracted By The Weather And Other Stuff

It has been a busy week and I am now doubting I will make my target for the week. It's all been good stuff but I hope I can get on with it now. Whilst looking for my passport I have found a load of figures I really need to paint right now.

For the first time in ages it has been good weather for priming. So I put some effort into getting figures prepped. Although a lovely sunny spring day here it is actually a lot cooler. Just too cool for priming. So I took 6

Still At The Blobby Stage

Work is going well. I think. Maybe. 🙄 It's Wednesday and I hoped to be a bit further along. The four genres of figures are more interesting than others so there is differential progress. The Malifaux stuff is currently my main focus which is why they are already looking a bit better.

With the rebels I want some a bit more rag tag. More like freedom fighters than a regular army. What do you think? I have another three sets to do yet and I am open to suggestions.

I was given another one of the GW painting handles as a present last week. I like the first one I had but I don't like switching between them and my usual paint pots. Now I have two of them I feel the urge to try them out again. If I had more I would probably use them all the while, I just don't want to pay for them. Maybe I should try and cultivate some more gifts?

Quick Start

Another week of working hard looks like it is in the offing. Already I am getting static from all quarters and I need to find even more paperwork. Still, enough griping as I also have some painting to do.

So another mixed bag this week. Last year I was all about getting blocks of stuff done. This ended with big queues and feeling just a little demotivated. At the moment, this really is working for me. So four more Mantic Star Saga figures are on the table. I did a little bit on these last week. There is one Artizan Designs cowboy which has been hanging around as well. the biggest chunk will be the Star Wars Legion Rebels. These have been staring at me for a few weeks now so probably time to crack on with them. Lastly there are three Malifaux figures. I plan to spend some extra time on these and get them as perfect as I can. It's about time I did something with them. They cost enough when I got them and they have been gathering dust for ages. Maybe it will push me into doing something practical with them.

End Of The Week - Too Tired To Stand Up (25)

I have managed to make most of my goals this week and exceeded a few of them. So all in all I am quite happy with myself. This was going to be a simple week. I was expecting to be busy. I was. Tired now and ready for bed and it is not yet 9pm.

The week began with a plan to paint ten figures. At some point I added one on the quiet because I thought it was going to be easy. Most of what I planned to paint this week was from the Star Saga game by Mantic. From the first time I saw it I liked the idea of buying it. It was the right price, there were plenty of figures and a decent amount of usable terrain. There were many sci-fi games they would work for. I had some ideas for the X-Com game that has been on the gaming burner of a low heat for about two decades. Mostly at the time I thought they would be good for what I had planned for Titansgrave: The Ashes Of Valcana, a game I really like the idea of but doubt I would get too many players.

Anyway the first set of figures I decided to paint were the security guards. I played about with the fleshtones a bit and I think they came out ok. This is despite the detail on the faces being a little soft as they are plastic figures. In the end I was okay with them. Not my best work but acceptable for tabletop standard.

Then there were a couple of hero figures. Most of the heroes don't seem to work with many of my ideas but I think I will come round to doing them eventually.These models were, to my mind at least, nice to paint although the face on the female warrior could have used a but more details.

In my head there were three more dark age figures to do and I thought I planned to paint the three. I could only find the two though. I doubt the horn playing musician will get used a lot so I didn't put a huge amount of work into it. Some work went into both but not a huge amount. They came out alright though.

Another one of the big plans at one point was to run a superhero game. Whilst there is plenty of Heroclix stuff out there but the models, to be fair, a bit kack. Really what I wanted was to go for nice metal figures at around the right price. At about £5 this model from Reaper was not the cheapest figure I have ever brought. It did work out okay though and I am very happy with it.

By Wednesday, with eleven figures painted, it was all pretty much done. There was a few bits of detailing to do but not enough to keep me busy. So I had a rummage. Having enjoyed painting the guards I thought I would have a go at some of the others. So much for an easy week.

During the process of rummaging I some military types from Star Saga to do. These were an easy enough paint job. There were some mould lines that were hard to get out and so I ended up leaving them.  A simple paint job with mainly shades of green (I think five in total) and that was most of them done. These are pretty good for hard sci-fi and I can already see a number of uses for them.

Somehow I didn't stop there. What you call these figures, well I have no idea. Some sort of failed (or possibly successful) experiment. These are big hulking figures (with the faces looking not entirely unlike the big green wrecking machine).

So in the end there wa a total of twenty five figures done and dusted. This sounds like a lot but there majority are plastic figures with limited details so relatively easy to complete. Along the way I worked on some more terrain. For a while I have been wanting some standing stones. These are not yet finished. On top of that I have done a little bit of work on five of the fifteen figures I have planned for next week.

Working Quickly

It's a bit of a mix today Wargames Foundry, Mantic, Black hat, North Star, Artizan, Reaper, Gripping Beast, Fantasy Flight, Grenadier, Malifaux, Mirliton have all been primed. I am sure there are a few others in there as well. At least I have future proofed my painting schedule for a bit (well primed some figures for work in the future).

There has been a bit of painting done. One of the advantages to painting a wide range of figures at one time is that you can paint a lot of figures in the same colours without everything in the final genres looking the same. The superhero figure I spent a fair bit of time on to get right. The security guards took a little bit of time but I didn't want to put too much work into them. They may come out on tabletop but really there are there for a board game. They are already pretty closed to finished, just a few more details.  Maybe if I get back into Titansgrave or other Sci-Fi stuff they might come out. The giant robot is nice and the power armour looks good to. If would be nice to make a bit more of him but I don't see how I can make him look too impressive.

Attack Of Opportunity

It's a bit melodramatic for a blog title I guess but somehow it seems to represent what I have been up to today. I have been expecting really bad weather for most of the week but today the weather got up to just about tolerable standards for priming. Assuming of course that I warmed up the paint first and took the figures in almost immediately.

Despite the break I didn't manage to get everything I wanted to done but there was more than enough to go on with. It does mean that I have some figures to paint. yet more of the last of the vikings. A superhero and  a bunch of guards, a giant robot and a woman in power armour from the Mantic Games board game Star Saga.. I liked the game when it came out and I have only just found the figures from it.If nothing else there is a good few weeks of painting especially if you include the terrain

So Many Choices - Wargaming Without Regrets

There is a moral to most stories and this one has one right at the end.

I spent a lot of time yesterday basing figures. All sorts of figures. There is no real plan at the moment as I am not working on a particular project. That is mainly down to money but a good chunk of it is about clearing up the lead mountain. I hate to think how much I have in the lead mountain. There are too many small boxes to think about and they are everywhere I look

So what to do with it all. I supposed I should think about the overall plan. Many of the figures floating around have been part of a plan. There are few figures that I buy on impulse, they are always to play a role in one project or another.

All of what you see has been caught my eye for one project or another. There have been a lot of them over the years. Some of these were brought for Conspiracy X, a variety of post apocalypses, weird war 2, Titansgrave: The Ashes of Valkana, X-Com, and many others. What is most important to me is that none of these projects really got off the ground. They stick around and keep my attention for years but never seem to get to a stage where there is enough figures to make a game of it.

Some time ago I promised myself that there would be no more gaming regrets. There have been figures that I have brought and never really used much. They were all brought for one game or another and I enjoyed painting them. What I really regret is buying figures for games other people have suggested and then, after spending the money, the games just disappeared, usually with the player who suggested it.

I got back into painting 28mm miniatures because of someone suggested doing some weird wild west in Savage Worlds in the form of Deadlands. That got me to buy some regular wild west minis. I brought about forty and only one of them has been used in a game. The ones I bought didn't all get painted. That said I enjoyed the process. I found a few of the unpainted ones last weekend and that got the juices flowing. Right now they are what I want to paint the most. Not the most expensive project but enough dead money.

Then there was Malifaux. I love the figures, I really do. I have about five sets and quite a few individual figures. Not to mention some terrain, a deck of cards, rulebooks and a lot of odds and sods. This has cost me a bit more. They are a bit bigger than most of my minis so don't really fit in with anything else. A few have made them into other games but have never been used. Again not the most expensive but perhaps the most unproductive of all of the projects. But they are so pretty. My guess is that I will be doing these in a few weeks. These will probably have a bit of work to do on they, there is quite a lot of detail, so I might go to town on them.

In 6mm there is a similar thing with Napoleonics and WW2 Americans. The Napoleonics really got to me. There was a big overall plan. We spent probably a day over the course of a few months discussing the details. I spent a load of money on rules, bases and figures for a French army. Then the rules changed so I had buy another set of rules. And bases. Then needed more figures. Then one of the players brought a pre painted French army. Then we were going to use a Board Game called the Napoleonic Wars for a base for an ongoing campaign. I heavily invested again and spent ages working on converting one set of wargame rules to work with the boardgame. Then one of the players objected to everything I did. So I gave up on that. I spent close to two hundred pounds. Painted about ten bases of figures (maybe ten percent of what I had bit probably less), never used any of them but I did actually play a couple of games. The WW2 Americans again never got used. I got talked into buying a GHQ army because they looked good. I already had a Heroics and Ross army that had seen a lot of use. I spent a load of money on bases as well. I painted the majority of the army after being sold a load of stuff by one of the other players that I didn't need. Right now I have no idea where it is. They have never been used.

This time around though I am a little more hopeful. I am paining stuff for my own games but I am also choosing to paint figures for games that other people are already playing and seem likely to keep playing. I have played in a Star Wars game recently and that made me want to go to town on that as a project. Although I started the Weird World War for myself maybe five years ago, I started priming them last year and got the urge to finish them off for a Weird War Cthulhu game someone else was running.

I said there was a moral. Gamers love stuff. Especially stuff they think is shiny. Magpies all of us. Manufacturers would have it a lot harder if we all only purchased new figures when we had completed what we started. Any plan that depends on you may well take plenty of time to come through and may well fail. It is the case though that any plans that involve anyone else are much more likely to fall flat. So to be honest there are a few regrets but nothing too major

End Of The Week - Insert Eyeroll Here (18)

The week started with a plan to paint eighteen 28mm miniatures. In the end I managed all of them. There was also a big guy in the "shape" of a water elemental. Finally I got some supply tokens done. some of the scatter terrain I have been working on is probably finished as well but I guess I will wait on that. There has also been a little bit of terrain done to. I have managed a game this week as well and it was even one I ran. Depending on how I wish to work things out I am now two weeks ahead of the plan for the year. This really has been the most productive phase I think I have ever had. The New, New Cruelty is satisfied.

These are a mix of odd figures. I think two, the man in brown and the, ahem lady in red are Crooked Dice figures which I think are supposed to be 19070s era. The man in Brown will certainly do double duty for the 1940s that I have done recently. The other two are a little more Victorian although they may well do for the 1930s.

Most of the weeks work has been done on what I thought was the last of the Viking/Dark Age stuff I have been doing for most of the last decade. Whilst doing some clearing up and prepping today I have actually have two more. Annoyingly there is one that I had even prepped, based and primed but forgotten about. Most of these were planned as Saxon farmers. As a GM I wanted an Op For that maybe the players could take on and win.

In the box were a couple of monks/friars. I enjoyed painting one of them, the other not so much. There is always the odd figure that I find almost impossible to paint and I will never be happy with. It's not through a lack of trying. At the moment I am looking at it and wondering where my hammer is.

Lastly there was one more Frankish warrior to paint. There is a load of shields to do for these now.

Today has mostly been about prepping for next week. The weather here has been too bad for priming for a while. The temperature has just been too low. Next week is looking pretty much the same until about thursday when the temperature is going to shoot up to a temperature that priming will be more than.

At the moment I don't know what I am going to do this week. It looks busy already so I doubt that I am going to make a lot of progress but I should hit my ten figures. At the moment I have nothing, well almost nothing, primed but I do have about eighty figures on textured bases waiting to be sprayed. All in need is for it to stop raining and warm up a bit. I will be happy if I get ten figures done and maybe finish a little terrain.

Supply Markers

The Walking Dead: The Walking Dead by Mantic Games is my favourite apocalypse game at the moment but nuclear war (especially Fallout) and other forms of zombies are pretty close. Does that sound a little insane? Maybe I am a little insane. I am comfortable with that :)

Anyway, I like the idea of skirmish gaming and post apocalypse skirmish gaming is particularly appealing. TWD:AOW is still drawing me in although I have only played a few games of it. I keep looking at it and want to buy more of it.What has been on the list of things to do for a while is the supply counters.

Supply counters, or something like it, seem to be a facet of a lot of skirmish games. I was looking at doing something like this for Scavenge, Skirmish, Survive. This made me think I should put some effort into these thinking I might use them in other games as well. If nothing else they will do as scatter terrain. The bases are either basically painted green or sand. Over time I have developed a box of basically green and basically sandy terrain so I might as well make stuff that would fit for either.

Elemental

Although my painting plans for the week are almost complete, I decided to finish off another project piece. I am pretty sure I got this large . elemental about three years ago. It's a Reaper Bones model. I am not sure I would pay for something like this in metal as it probably isn't going to get a lot of use but for a good chunk under £10/$10 I thought it was worth while.

It has been sat around, primed and on a textured for about two years so it is probably about time I got around to it. There is a fairly simple paint job. Primed light grey and painted a mid blue. You can't really tell the mid blue is there after heavy blue wash. If I was doing it again I probably would put the original base colour down and just use the wash. Lower down the model and in some of the crevices but mostly on the bas I put on a heavy green wash. You can just about tell if you look hard enough.  Then there is an old GW paint, Ice Blue for a highlight. It really needed something to bring out the details and finally a white high, highlight.

Really Yesterday's Post

Having spent much of the day shivering and sleeping I thought it was time I posted what I did yesterday. Things planned for the week are now getting close to completion. So all in all I am feeling quite happy. Despite the shivering.

I am even getting close to finishing off the terrain. There are loads of bits to do, enough to do three linear feet, which has kind of put me off so far. Still it's there and and I want to get it done for a couple of game I have planned.

Now I thinking about next week. I have found eight figures that I think I purchased in 1992. This would be a nice thing to get out of the Lead Mountain. Not the oldest thing I own but probably the oldest thing I can find at the moment. They turned up a few years ago but there is one missing. I was hoping to find the missing one before I started but what the hell. If I do get round to painting them I have no idea what I will use them for. At the moment I just want to.

30 Years Of The World Wide Web And Being A Gamer

I have been gaming for a long time, a lot longer than 30 years than the World Wide Web has been around. There are people in my social circle that have not known the world without the web. I remember a time when it was new and exciting. Now it is just a tool  that has replaced mail order.

When I was studying for my degree it was something that people were talking about but nobody seemed to know anything about it. It was largely academic. By the time I got online at home, in the mid-nineties it was starting to become a thing. I mean more that just pron and news groups. It had stuff about gaming.

Back then it was pretty basic. There were a few photos but they were fairly low resolution. You could get bigger files but who had the time for them to download at 28.8k (which sadly is pretty close to the kack service I get where I live now). Pretty much everything was done by people who could create a webpage as there was little choice to do anything else.

As a gamer I am a bit of a tinkerer. The web initially gave me access to a huge range of ideas from other tinkerers. It gave me knew ideas and gave depth to ideas that I had myself. It really was more about substance over style. To my mind, some of the sites back then were driven by people with passion. There seemed to be a spirit of open co-operation where like minded people got together. I see that a lot less now with perhaps the exception of YouTube.

Back in the day I was a really bad painter. I look at some of the stuff I did back in the eighties and I want to cringe. What I have really taken from the Web is the ideas about "How To".This has been particularly important when it came to painting figures and making terrain. Now it is even allowing me to have my say and watch what people are doing.

On the downside it is now all about commerce. The old free days are long gone. Now I start to fear the way it works and I worry about my privacy.  If there was a sweet spot it was maybe a decade ago. That said YouTube is now the dominant form in which I consume media. Not just gaming but books, history, news and basically everything else.

My biggest fear is not that is going to turn all big brother on me. No, the biggest fear is that it is all going to go away. In Europe Article 13 is coming. What is actually going to happen is uncertain. What might happen is potentially quite scary. This can only mean bad things for smaller content providers as they will be the ones that ultimately will be pressured by bigger businesses.  I hope that the future of the Web is secure but I hope that the degree of freedom kind of remains the same.

Today Is A Grind - Embracing The Bugs

I never used to get bugs. In one of my former careers I used to get them all the time. This was down to the clientele. Over time I became pretty much immune to all forms of cold and flu and I didn't get one for years. Now I just catch them from kids. Insert eyeroll here. Even with every cold and flu remedy I can take in my system I still feel like hammered poop.

Between sleeping and complaining I have managed to do some painting. Maybe not as much as I would have liked. My head has been a bit fuzzy and there was the sleeping, the complaining and of course the eyerolling. That said, there is plenty of stuff that is getting pretty close to having a base coat of paint and I still have time to do a bit more work.

One tip I feel I can give is to keep it varied. Traditionally I have done a lot of batch painting. Ten pretty similar figures. If not identical in uniform at least pretty similar in period. When I do this for figures in irregular clothing I complain that they all look the same mainly because i tend to use a limited colour palette. I tend to find that changing colours seems to add time to the overall process.

What I have started doing recently is painting figures from a variety of eras. My output doesn't seem to have gone down. My interest is staying high throughout the week as I have different things to do. The range of figures I end up is more varied and I end up happier.

A Mixed Bag Kind Of Week - For Figure Painting

This week I am hoovering up some more of what is hidden in the lead mountain including Crooked Dice, Gripping Beast, Crusader and what I thought was Ironclad but now I am not so sure. This is the last of the Viking Game stuff I got half  a decade ago and the rest rest is also about that age or a little bit older

This should put to bed the Viking project. The Crooked Dice figures I think were designed for the 1970s TV show concept but I figure that they will do for the 1940s Weird War 2. I did dally with the idea of Victorian skirmish games but the person I thought was going to get involved with didn't follow through. This seems to happen to me a lot. I buy stuff to play games with others who then play a single game, maybe two but generally don't play any at all. Still a friend of mine runs a game (intermittently) in that era and they might just do for the 1930s although they will look out of date for the 1940s.

This will put me at least ten figures ahead by the end of the week. At the end of last year I was lamenting the fact that I wasn't going to get much done. Now I am knocking on the doors of over achieving. With a following wind I will have managed to have painted as many figures this year as I did in the whole of last year.

End Of The Week - Actually (32)

The end of another week of painting 28mm miniatures is here again and his week it has all been about the 1930s and 1940s be that VBCW, Weird World War 2 or Call of Cthulhu.  It has been another record breaking week (well maybe personal best is a better phase), for me. I am thirty two (plus a big figure) 28mm closer to the bottom of the lead mountain. As I have said, this is perhaps not the hardest work ad the paint jobs on most of the were fairly uniform. I have also got some terrain finished although it was not the most taxing work either.

I would say that these are the last of the Wargames Foundry Home Guard but for the fact that I am sure that there is one missing and I would like to buy some more to make up a full unit (a platoon with some support) for a VBCW force. There were a few that needed a little work and they were a bit "flashy" but they are older sculpts. The process was enjoyable, especially the character figures.

This is the last of the Royal Marines I got (also from Wargames Foundry) as character figures for the Weird War 2 game. I did not enjoy painting these at all. The faces have really soft detail which made they difficult to painting. The poses were good though and they were what I was after.

Pulp Figures is one of my favourite manufacturers and I would like to paint a lot more of their figures. The cultists from the Weird Menace Range are nice figures. A quick project as there is little to do on them. There is a leadership set and I might get another set.

Another Pulp Figures miniature from the Weird Villains, again in the Weird Menace Range (I assume it's the Crimson Scorpion). I thought I would paint him up in a similar style to the Cultists.

Another Weird Villain is the Stahl Mask. If the above figure is a major bad guy, this could well be a recurring henchman. A nice easy figure to paint.

Another French resistance figure from Warlord. I am not sure if he is the last one but he is certainly the last one I can find. I relatively quick job that fits in well with what I have done this week.

The big figure was another simple one and something that I have been working on for a while.I am pretty sure that it is a Grim Reaper Miniatures figure that I retrieved from a bargain bin for £2 last year. It is definitely not a D&D purple worm. Definitely not.

Next week is going to be an interesting one. I might have a bit more time on my hands but I am not sure what I want to do with that time. There are some modern stuff to do which was purchased for a superhero game. In reality I probably need some more of these before you start the project or they will all look wrong. There are some Star Wars Legion rebels to do but I want to make some alterations to them and I need some green stuff to make that happen. What is more likely that I will work on some more dark age stuff. Whilst I wouldn't put money on it, I think this last dozen figures are actually the last of the stuff I got for the Viking game back in 2013. This should probably end the project but I doubt it. This may change yet.

All this assumes that I can get some figures primed. Despite easter being around the corner, it looks like this is going to be a bad week for the weather. There are weather warnings until the end of the week. It might be difficult to use spray primer in the wind even if the temperature goes up.

By my reckoning (and the blog title is really starting to sound like a name with a purpose) I am actually ahead of even my most optimistic target. I am pretty sure that this brings me to just over a hundred figures

Early One Morning - End Of The Week, Well Almost

I work up early this morning and have been painting RPG and wargames miniatures since well before dawn. Getting up that early is unusual for me, let alone getting anything done. In terms of painting minis this is getting on for the most productive period of my life. If I could keep this rate up I could have a thousand figures done by the end of the year. Roughly the same output for the last three years. I think even my lead mountain would have run out by then.

Almost there

In terms of output, total number of figures and terrain, this is going to be a new record week. I have a little detailing on the skin to do on the Home Guard, do a highlight on the weapons and I need to paint a cigarette on one of them. Then they will be done. The cultists need much the same but there is much less of that to do.  here are a few "more characterful" figures to do but they are mostly done.

I guess I have picked easy figures to paint this week although I hadn't figured on them being this easy. Now I am wondering what to do next. There appears to be no immediate chance of me getting any priming done because of the weather. Too cold or too wet for a while at least.

So far this week I have already done some scenery for my Monday night game and I have worked on some smaller pieces of scenery as the background project

Looking Forward

Everything is easier when you have a plan, especially when it comes to dealing with the day to day "grind" of painting miniatures. My current plan for the "grind" is The New, New Cruelty. I am back at it and not just on the gaming side of things. It's not just gaming either. It works for other aspects in my currently interesting life.

The exercise is making me push on through. Figure painting is what I want to do so I am doing it. It would be a lie to say I am not enjoying it. Currently I am working through my lead mountain. Although I have brought a little bit of scenery this year I haven't acquired any new figures. So arguably I am now almost a hundred figures into my lead mountain. Part of me is thinking it's time to ease of the accelerator as I might actually start to run out of figures. I am already starting to think I am going to run out of figures I actually want to paint fair soon.

What I need is something to look forward to. Every year I have my plan. It gives me something to strive to much like The New, New Cruelty. Right now I am struggling to figure it out. Part of it is money but I suspect that this isn't a big part of what is going on.

Sooner or later I am going to run out of steam. When that happens the pace of my output will drop. What I need is something I am passionate about. Right here and now I don't have that. There are a few games that I have done a fair amount of stuff for. What I seem to be doing is my figures for other people's games. None of those games are currently running or appear to be running any time soon.

I need some pondering time...

Starting The Week As I Mean To Go On

My week is already spoken for. It's going to be an all Weird War 2/VBCW. As hey are almost all in uniforms (well after a fashion in some cases). This should be pretty quick work as there will be a very limited colour palette. So I am going to shoot a bit higher this week and aim for 32 figures. I am sure there are some bits and pieces left in the boxes for this project but not too much. Most of these figures are a little on the odd side so might not get done.

Whilst I can see the sun outside, it is very cold here. Too cold for priming. Looking at the weather forecast is pretty grim. Too cold (or too wet) for priming outside. Wednesday looks like the least grim so I won't be able to prime the cultists till then. 

Terrain is still going to feature this week. I have a small project for the game I am running at the moment but will post about that after it has been used. 

End Of The Week (21)

At the moment I am all about playing catch up. The New New Cruelty tells me so. By my minimum standards I am doing okay. In terms of what I wanted to achieve for the year I am now only ten figures behind where I wanted to be. The New, New Cruelty is griping a bit but basically happy.

Again, at the moment, I am not really sure where my head is at in terms of a project. I have no clear path ahead so I am painting what I have to hand. Right now that is a bunch of the stuff I got for Weird War 2 which I might get away with using for a Very British Civil War army. It has been a while since and what I have will fall a little short of what I want for the unit but not that far off. I still need to buy another ten figures or maybe more to complete the unit. This is on top of what I am planning to paint next week.

These are more weird war types. I guess they will do for Weird War Cthulhu which is a game I am playing in at the moment. there are even a few that will do for other eras as well I guess. A while back I had big plans for my game but not so much now. That said I have really enjoyed the painting of them. There are some more about so I might get round to painting these next week.

There are three fantasy figures done. I am not sure why I have painted the one on the right, probably because she was there. All week I have been assuming she is something from Frostgrave but to be honest I have no idea. Dress like a native American in a Daniel Boone hat with a crossbow? Why? The two dwarves (or dvergr as I keep calling them in the game I am running) are both CP Models. I need some more none mage or warrior looking dwarves and some female dwarves to found out the collection My current thinking is to establish that there are no female dwarves but I am not sure. It would be simpler and a lot lot cheaper.

Lastly there are some military types. The Marines, some sort of American and a couple of figures that would probably do for VBCW/WWW2.

Background Projects And Painting Fatigue

I mention background projects all the time. These are the things that I do when, for whatever reason, I can't or don't want to work on my current project. Most of the time this has to do with letting wash dry. Sometimes it's because I have poured out a bit too much paint out. More often than I like it's just because I wanna do it.

This week I have done some work on a three Reaper Bone bookcases. Lots of books needs lots of different colours. So this makes the ideal background project. Every time I have a little paint to use that is the right colour, then I paint a few spines. The paint usually comes from when I am doing some detailing on one of the figures in this weeks batch.

One of the things I hear a lot about on YouTube is painting fatigue. As I get it all the while I assume that most of you get it as well. Along with having a target for the week and the year, I find that having a background project also helps. Maybe this helps to cleanse the metaphorical painting palette (but not a real one).

Coming Along Nicely

Not a bad day all round but tired now. This weeks batch of figures is coming along nicely. Most of the figures are pretty much done. I think everything has a base colour and a wash and nearly everything has a highlight. Apart from one figure I am just working on some odds and sods and putting on some finishing touches. The one figure is kind of naffing me off. I am not sure where I got it from but it is probably a Frostgrave mini. It looks more like a native American with a crossbow so I am not sure where it fits in with anything I do. I am pretty confident that I am going to make my target for the week.

At some point this evening I got a little distracted and started working on some terrain. I did some work on the post apocalypse barriers I started the other week. There were some Reaper Bones bookshelves that have been my background project that are getting pretty close to completion.

Looking forward to next week I have a small terrain requirement for the game I am running at the moment and I need to think about what I am painting next week. I suspect that there will be more Home Guard but not what else I am going to do. Maybe I should finish off some more of my interwar/WW2 stuff. Currently I am not sure where I want to go with this project and I don't see any new figures on the horizon. This makes it ultimately a dead end at the moment but at least I will have the basics for when I start it in earnest.