Saturday Night Is Zombie Night

Well...Painting is not on the cards today and probably not tomorrow. I have managed to do a bit of tidying on the bench. The house is clean for the first time since Christmas. The amount of bits of Christmas tree that has been brushed up was nearly enough to make a small tree. there has been a lot of household chores done and now I am too tired to paint. So I am sat in front of the TV playing on the laptop and all I can think of is zombies.

Not my best effort but not too bad. I am still learning.

Apocalypse Art

Some more art. This one is more distinctly post apocalyptic. Ruins, especially over grown ruins, always say end of the world to me.

Target Reached - What's On The Workbench

Sadly for last year on the blog, my current blogging target is to put up as many posts in January as I did in the whole of last year. Target achieved. So I am a bit happier. Hurrah. I have managed to put up some new stuff I have been working on and dig out a bit of all of the hard work that I should have blogged about last year.

Anyway, now I just need to legitimise this post and make it a post about something real, I thought I'd show what is the work in progress on bench at the moment. This mostly Frostgrave stuff with a couple of Crusader Franks. Some of the Frostgrave minis are the original run and some are from Thaw of the Lich Lord. I dropped one of the Franks and the sword dropped off. Which is a shame but I have a sword I can replace it with a Gripping Beast sword.

With the amount of time I have at the moment, These will not get finished this month. Tax return is pending I am have a lot of family commitments to see to will stop me getting too far.

So now I have two targets. firstly, I want all my paint in dropped bottles by the end of February. The second one is to paint two hundred 28mm figures in 2016. When I have done the paint, I might look at redoing the work bench, again.

Moving Towards The Target - A Viking Shield Wall

Playing about with CorelDRAW again. This time it's an attack on a Viking Shieldwall. This is another picture for my up-coming Viking game. Using photographs and images from TV is great but making something look a little more homegrown gives the players a little more of a buy in.

Viking Shield wall

I doubt I am going to win any awards for my artwork (or my painting for that matter but it makes me happy and it keeps me out of mischief).

Normans - Really Bad Guys

Norman Knights By Crusader Miniatures

My ideas about Dark Age fantasy really involve more people than monsters. So I am always on the look out miniatures that will do for human bad guys for my Vikings and Saxons to stand up to. For the British (apart from the southerns descended from them) the Normans make good bad buys (even though a lot of us are descended from them). Being from the North (and from an area that particularly hammered during the Harrying) and probably of Celtic/Viking descent, the Normans are the prefect bogeyman. I know they are of Viking origin but they are heavily tainted by being at least part French.

Must Not Quote Monty Python

I had a small binge last year on stuff from Crusader Miniatures (Northstar) with Franks and Normans being the main part of the purchase. The Normans got done as a batch whilst the Franks are getting done a few at a time. I really liked the posing of the Crusader stuff, they seem to have a lot of life.

Normans = Dastardly French/Vikings

The Normans were done as a batch mainly because I didn't buy that many of them (only 16) and they were for the most part they are a simply paint job. It's all chain mail and helmets. This wasn't a long job and it was fun. 1066 is probably the biggest date in British history. If I was going to do another Saga army (a game I have still to play) it would probably be Norman as it would be a quick job to finish.

Urgently Need Funnier Captions

Small Steps - Or Practical Procrastination and Prevarication - Games Workshop Night Goblins And Frostgrave

I have found a little more time to myself today to do some paint. The dog got walked and everything else that needed fettling got fettled. Not enough to get a meaty amount of work done but enough to do a fair bit of prep.

I got the Night Goblins base coated. I don't do a lot of base coating because, despite what people tell you, I prefer to paint on the bare metal and then give the minis a couple of coats of spray on varnish. By the time I have finished painting them, there is usually to to three coats at a minimum on all areas. To my (bespectacled) eye, this allows the details to show through a bit more. These are not especially dark age miniatures but with the shields, they are not so far off the mark and will do for some bits at a pinch. To me goblins are a bit smaller and I have some snotlings that fill that role nicely. I am sure that they would fit in well with a Skyrim module. Maybe they will do as hobgoblins but I have some old denizen half orcs that fit that role to. I guess I am going to do these because they are easy and they were cheap.

I have done a bit more painting of what is on the desk too. Not as much as I would like but better than nothing.  What I have done is stopped thinking about ordering some bottles and magnets and got on and done it. With what is going on, I am struggling at least as much with concentration on painting as I am with time to do it. I am finding it a lot easier to do prep work than actual real work.

I got to spend a bit of time doing other things I enjoy (such as blogging) so really not a bad day all round.

Saxons or Playing Around With CorelDRAW

I am redoing some rules for my Viking game. Which is still in the offing but is on hold for a bit. I was going to put a few more illustrations in it things time so I am occasionally doing some illustrations in CorelDRAW. This is one I was mucking about with earlier.

 It's a little cartoon like but on the hole, it's good enough for all gaming purposes.