The End Of Another Week - The Catch Up Continues (25)

The New, New Cruelty is very happy with me this week. I have hit practically all my targets and exceeded. Obviously you are not too interested in most of them but as far as figure painting has gone I have done pretty well. Twenty five more figures down and set against the tally for the year. I would like to be at 80 and could settle for 40. Another two weeks of producing at this level would mean that I have caught up with wear I want to be.

At the beginning of the week I was starting to get a little discouraged with the Stormtroopers I wanted to paint. There is a good solid plan for these soI am relatively well motivated to pint them. White is not my favourite to paint. this time around I think I have managed a fairly good job of it. I am not saying that I couldn't put some more effort in and improve these but for now at least they are good enough. These have been painted for an RPG so I doubt i will be painting more any time soon although it looks to me that there will be plenty more Star Wars stuff in the pipeline. These are a relatively recent gift so to my mind haven't made a big dent in the mountain.

For most of the stuff I paint I have a solid and clear plan. With these Frank figures this is not really the case. When I got them they were, and still are, going to be bad guys. I think I probably brought too many. Still they were there and I wanted something to paint. The Frank models have been sat around for at least two years if not more soI am happy that brings them to my attention.

The week ahead sees another mixed bag. There are 14 28mm figures above and a few larger figures below that are my main queue. There are some primed Home Guard I could move on to and some Blood Bowl stuff if needed.

All in all things are on the up.

What Next?

So I am in the middle of the biggest painting binge I can remember and I am worrying about my mojo going. It's not quite irony but I can't think what else to call it.

I was saying that I have been enjoying painting figures for my Viking game. Viking history has been a big part of my life during this process too and I have learned a lot and enjoyed the process. Over the years gaming has caused me to do a lot of reading especially in the area of history so it has to be a good thing. So I guess I am looking for the next thing to catch my imagination

Part of me wants to say that I am running out of figures to paint for this game (I think have painted at least 550 figures so far). Obviously I am not running out of figures. No figure painter ever does. There are boxes of the things, some older than most of the gamers I know.

The thing is what I have isn't lighting my candle much into a few weeks away. Having been subject to the random shaftathon that is life I have gone from being relatively wealthy to being the poorest I have ever been. Taking inflation into account I haven't been this poor since I was a student.

Now is the time to look back at my annual plan. Titansgrave (with some double use for Shadowrun) is on my mind and I like the idea of painting this. At the moment I have no players that are interested this game so it isn't lighting my fire. Post-apocalypse is lighting my fire but I don't think I have figures to paint. I have plenty of plastic Frostgrave stuff but again I don't have a game to run and they don   't fit with the dark-age vibe of the Viking game or anything else. Some of the gnolls were expected to go into Titansgrave but, well, erm...meh. General fantasy is a way to go but I lack the energy and enthusiasm for this. X-Com is still floating around and whilst I would be happy to work on that I don't think I have any actual figures for that project. I have a load of Star wars Legion rebels to do. My plan was to convert a load of them so they were more useful for an RPG I just can't find the stuff  I need to convert them as almost everything is still in boxes.

Last year saw my worst ever output in terms of figure painting and the start of this year hasn't been good either. My plan, for now at least, is to catch up for the year so quick wins would be nice. There are a ton of zombie and zombie related figures to do. These should be reasonably quick. This is kind of more appealing. A few months ago I primed a load of Home Guard. These two should be fairly quick. There are a couple of Blood Bowl teams ready to go but this will take a lot of work so not a quick win.

So the time where I am looking into the lead (and resin and plastic) mountain is here. Having made a lot of inroads into the mountain in the last few years I feel I should be working on that (especially as this needs to be a frugal year). Somehow I can't help but think there is a new project out there for me.

Clearly The Bad Guys - Frankish Warriors

Tired of Stormtroopers today. Will come back to them soon.

In the fantasy RPG game based in the Viking era the Franks are a bit of a hard luck story (imagine a Frank being a hard luck story 😕 because I can't). They are being hammered by all their neighbours except those to the North and they hate them more than anyone else. The only thing between the Northmen and the Franks is the heavily defended pass and the biggest actively defended wall in all of Europe. It is also the only way they have to go without killing their own.

I wanted a barbarian like race in the Viking game (it's good enough for Skyrim). The models themselves are Roman era Germanic tribesmen so in many ways close enough in geography and equipment to what was probably there at the time. Not so outrageous that they wouldn't look out out place in a Conan film or even Thrud the Barbarian either (way too D&D for me).

Part of my plan for the game involves running a mass battle system. One of the battles would be the war against the Franks as they try to slip over the border to get away from their impending doom at the hands of the Carolingians. These figures have been in the queue for a while.

I got these a few years ago with the idea of using them as bad guys for the game and painted about thirty. These are what is left. Not sure the plan would be to get any more but who knows. See how the game goes. This game has taken up most of my painting time since mid 2013 and still seems to draw me back to it.

Progress On The Stormtroopers

I don't seem to have done much other than painting white today. My love of Star Wars as a child was legendary. This process is testing that love at the moment. There has been a little bit of progress since then and I guess I could now paint the base rims, do  a bit of touching up and a few more details and I could call them done. A bit more work would get them above tabletop standard. I am probably going to move on to something else tomorrow but I will probably come back to these at the end of the week.

If I get what I have on the bench done (including what I am starting tomorrow) that will be fifty five figures completed in two weeks. This would be almost a record if not an actual personal best. By my reckoning I am now doing better than my minimum expectation for the year although I am still a little way off what I have aspired to.  Another couple of weeks of this rate of production would see me caught up. The other stuff I have to do is a little less inspiring or a lot more intensive which will make catching up a little harder.

How Much Do I Hate Painting White? - Or Stormtroopers Part 3

I haven't painted anything involving this much white in a long time. Come to think of it possibly ever. the are two reasons for this. 1) There isn't actually that much that is mostly pure white and 2) It's such an awkward colour and I normally don't forget this fact which I have since I started this project. Still better than yellow I guess. It didn't really start out as a project for me either. A friend was running Star Wars and the figures were a bit limited as they were using either tokens of the old Star Wars Miniatures game figures which I personally hate.

Still in need of a bit of work

So the Stormtroopers. Too much damn white. They are primed, details and washed. I am shading the white which is taking an age. This is a little discouraging. Even more so is the fact that I am probably going to have to do the whole process again although that should hopefully be a briefer process. Then I will have to look at basing them and I would be much happier basing the on discs or 2p coins as this takes much less time.
The truth is I am never going to be happy with them. At the moment I am hoping that I will get to the stage that I am happy enough.

Modernish Barricades

The post apocalypse is never far from my mind, at least in a gaming sense. Despite Bethesda recently ruining my gaming experience, I do not feel that the world is about to end. I think my interest goes back to reading The Postman by David Brin after reading a review in White Dwarf of all places. A quick reading and rereading of Day of the Triffids and I am kind of a fan of the genre. Zombies and nuclear war seem to be my preferred way to end the world. The Walking Dead and Fallout out gave been my most recent influences in tabletop gaming but I have a lot of love for ideas from the old RPG Aftermath and almost anything done George Romero and a number of other books and computer games.

Finding players has been hard in the past so I haven't pushed it. In there here and now things are not so bad on that score.  So I am looking at this as a possibility again so I figured it might be time to do something about it. I don't have many figures left to paint and those that I do have I can't find. What I can find is some terrain.

In the end (so to speak) it's close enough to the modern era that the terrain at least should be able to do double duty. What is available is a bit of a mixed bag. I wanted them to all tie together and look relatively uniform and with a lot of the longer I wanted a bit more stability and I wanted it to match what I had done in the past. If I do get X-Com off the ground this year I will need some terrain for that. I have medium terms plans for a zombie and one based in post nuclear war London. Part of me wants to get into 28mm modern but I have a few reservations about that.

I wanted a range of sizes some of which, if not all could be used as barricades and general scatter. Large quantities of tire piles seem to figure highly in a lot of games so I purchased some from Crooked Dice. These first four are produced by them although there is a crate found in my bit's box (I have no idea who by) added to make up the length. Then is is also an oil drum which I think is Tamiya.

The crowd barriers are from Ainsty Casting. I love these guys for terrain. Hopefully these will hold up to the punishment but will need to be carefully look after.

Most of what I have to hand is from Mantic's The Walking Dead : All Out War. Nice details on the terrain as I am starting to expect from Mantic. Some have been added to with stuff that I have handing around to make up the length. Some of the barrels are from a Tamiya kit I got back in the 1980's and other bits have been around for well over a decade. It's nice to get some of things used rather than just hanging around.

In total there is just short of three feet/ninety centimetres of stuff. It's never enough but it's a distinct improvement. I have some Mantic supply tokens to be done. These are a lot smaller but have a bit more detail. Think these will be a project for next week as I expect the Stormtroopers are going to take a lot of work.

Stormtroopers - Part Deux

Not much of an update today. I have primed the stormtroopers. A base coat of a light grey followed by a good hard zenithal of white. Hopefully this will give them a bit of pre-shading, so I won't have to go overboard on the washes. Then I did the black bits and that's where I am.

Still way too much like Mr Blobby for a closeup

Things look like they are progressing for me so hopefully I will get these done pretty quickly. The big man is in the background. I need some black primer which I haven't got. I have painted a few things primed in blackin the last year or so but they were probably primed a decade ago. Will have to go out and get some.