Hunt for the Goeben

 My friends at Wargames Tonight gave me the opportunity to participate in their on-line WWI naval campaign, 'The Hunt for the Goeben'. There's a great video by them below. Enjoy!

Color Samples for GW Contrast Paints and Army Painter SpeedPaints

Recently I purchased the 'Mega Set' of Army Painter SpeedPaints. These are augmenting, and for some colors, replacing my existing collection of GW Contrast Paints. For me the two products are fairly similar in their role in my paint collection for painting historical miniatures. They each have their pros and cons, but for me they're pretty much equivalent so really the tones and shades dictated which brand to keep in my collection.

As you can see in the first photo, I prefer to apply an actual paint swatch on the cap of each bottle to give me a better idea of exactly which color I'm grabbing from my collection. As you can imagine, my collection of various shades of olive green and military greys is extensive, so this is an essential time saver and prevents many paint selection mistakes. With Contrast and SpeedPaint, there is a shading effect that isn't well represented using this method. Instead I primed craft skull beads with white primer and glued each skull onto the cap of the paint. 

I then painted the skull with the paint allowing it to "do its thing" and shade the skull. I think the value of this is apparent in the photos.  

This second photo is the full SpeedPaint 'Mega Set' from Army Painter. The colors are vibrant and with the exception of the 'Holy White' color none have any solid white pigment in them, so they mix with each other well to make other colors nicely. In general they seem to be more heavily pigmented than the GW Contrast paints, which means the included SpeedPaint medium is even more useful in creating less saturated tones of the same color, all the way down to making color shaded washes with these.

Here are the colors from the GW Contrast paint line that I kept. Note that I re-potted these into dropper bottles instead of the awful GW paint pots. I did this before I came up with the skull color sample idea, but since they were in pots already, adding the skulls wasn't hard. I have seen people use the skull idea on the GW pots after I posted the idea to the GW Contrast Paint Facebook group. 

Of the GW paints I chose to keep all of the fleshes and browns, both turquoises, 'Voluptuous Pink' and 'Apothecary White'. The latter being just a shade lighter than the Army Painter equivalent. I might use both depending on the situation. Of particular note, the 'Gore-Grunta Fur' red brown is fantastic for ginger hair and some horses, and without mixing, there's not a good substitute in the Army Painter line.

Re-canting GW Contrast Paints

Anyone who has EVER used a wash or paint made by Games Workshop knows how criminally bad the Citadel paint pots are. They don't close properly, fall over, get completely gunked up with dried on paint and often cause you to waste more of the product in them than you get to use. It's almost like they're designed to cause you to waste the paint in them so you'll have to buy more sooner.

I've been amassing a nearly complete set of GW Contrast paints recently. At over $7.00 a pot, that's an investment I don't want to keep in the crappy GW paint pots. 

Per the advice of several on-line and YouTube 'experts', I picked up some generic dropper bottles and small funnels off of Amazon. Fifty of each totaled about $15. If I save two pots worth of paint with this project I'm at break even. Also the convenience of dropper bottles will save me time at the painting table as well and will make using these paints in my airbrush a LOT easier. 

To re-cant the collection of bottles shown above took me about two hours. Not an insignificant amount of time. I had to be careful to fully mix each pot before re-canting. I also added agitators to every dropper bottle while I was at it. Here you can see the contrast paints in their new dropper bottles. My washes are also re-canted, but not shown.

One saving grace is that the labels on the GW pots are put on with a glue that does enable re-using of the labels. By carefully peeling them off they're easily re-applied to the new dropper bottles. Time will tell, but my initial impression is that the labels seem like they'll stick permanently to their new containers. If they don't, a quick wrap with clear tape will solve that problem.

I think the only thing left to do is for me to make up a good sample chart of the colors. The names, aren't very recognizable to a historical miniatures painter, so I'll need a chart.

Game Room Update - Figure Storage, Tables and Laser set-up!

Short video of my wargaming room including my new wargaming tables, figure storage and engraving laser.

 

Wargaming Room - ALMOST DONE!

This past weekend my girlfriend and I installed the flooring in the game room. We're ALMOST DONE! Next steps are to get the gas heat professionally installed. This is scheduled for tomorrow. Once that's done I can have final inspection from the building inspector and I can move in, set up the laser and get back to gaming and painting miniatures. The whole project has taken 2 1/2 months, mostly because I did a lot of the work myself nights and weekends. The sweat equity savings was significant. Doing it myself also means some things were able to be done 'exactly' as I wanted. 

I'm looking forward to moving in and getting back to my hobbies. Thanks to everyone for your support.

 

Overview of Room

Finished Floor

Wargaming Room Update - Baseboards Installed

 More progress. Flooring arrives so I could finally start working on the baseboard trim.

Wargaming Room Update

Wargaming room video update by request.

 Some photos as well...

Hobby Room Construction - Part 4

Construction continues! Drywall is up and ready for 'mud' and tape next week. It's pretty amazing how just getting the flat white drywall up on the walls makes the room look bigger, and much closer to how it will eventually look. I still have a lot of work left to do after the carpenters finish the drywall, but once they're done a lot of that work consists of things I'll be doing myself.

Video tour below.

Game room lighting plan

Sorry for the fuzzy screen-shot but here is the lighting plan for the game room and painting/laser studio. All lighting will be daylight spectrum LED flat panels, with dimmer capability should I have selected 'too much' light. I'm not sure there is such thing at my age, but just in case.

The game table will obviously be put under the eight (8) 2'x4' lights and the painting table under the pair of lights on the far left. The green area is a low area of the ceiling where a beam is. It's still high enough to walk under comfortably unless you play center for the NBA, but it does segment the space as far as lighting is concerned. 

I've always struggled with getting enough light on my gaming table. Starting over fresh has let me attack the problem with a good portion of overkill. If it's worth doing, it's worth OVER-doing!

 

Hobby Room Construction - Part 3

This update - a video update for those of you that do not follow my YouTube channel. I've finished all of the "rough-in" work, and have passed the building inspector's inspections. I'm ready and waiting for my drywall contractor to start putting up the walls! I'll still have plenty of work to do after that doing the trim work, painting and flooring. The final step will be having a hung ceiling professionally installed. I think I'm on pace to have the room completed before enough of my friends have their vaccine and are ready to come over for a game!

 

Hobby Room Construction - Part 2

Update #2 for the hobby room construction. The framing has been completed, including two storage closets and the wall to separate the finished space from the mechanical/utility room. Next up is the wiring, which I'll be doing myself.

#progress

New Hobby Room - Construction Begins

I've recently relocated to a new home now that I'm single again. When picking the home I prioritized getting something with an area I could dedicated to a painting studio and wargaming room. My old place had a finished basement family room and a 'bonus' room that I converted for this purpose. I wanted something similar. What I found was a nice home with a completely unfinished basement, but one with high ceilings and full-sized windows. This first photo is where the game table will be.

These are photos of the project after two days of work by the carpenters. The walls are lined with rigid foam insulation as a heat and vapor barrier. This is a necessary step here in New Hampshire where that concrete is below freezing part of the year. The room will eventually have a hung ceiling to allow for access to mechanical functions. 

The space will feature a generous area for a 6'x12' table, with a side area for my painting studio and display cases. I'm hoping to have it all finished in time for the flurry of gaming we all hope to do as vaccinations become the norm. This final photo looks into the painting studio area.

2020 Year in Review

This post is criminally late. I apologize for that. What can I say about 2020 that hasn't been said thousands of times before? For me 2020 included, in addition to the pandemic, some personal challenges. I got divorced, had to buy a new home, move and start many parts of my life over. Through it all, my wargaming hobby, family and friends (many of them are wargamers) helped me get through the dark times. Here's hoping 2021 is as much as an improvement for all of you that I hope it will be for me.

Now on to the hobby content. My favorite unit of the year, pictured top left, was my Macedonian Hypaspists. Honorable mention go to my Finnish WWII Ski Patrol squad. A majority of the projects this year were 28mm Macedonians, with a smattering of Finnish WWII and even one science fiction project, some Fallout Wasteland Warfare miniatures that I painted for my friend Gordon. Due to being held up in isolation from the global pandemic, painting totals were up significantly over 2019, but games were way down. Much of what I painted is yet to be based, as I still haven't finished setting up the infrastructure for my laser cutter, so I am without means to cut bases. Hopefully that will be resolved soon.

This year's totals:

• Painted 25/28mm Figures:235
• Painted 28mm Vehicles: 2
  
• Terrain/Misc Created: 8
• Stands Re-based: 0
• Puchased Painted 28mm Figures:133
• Purchased Painted 28mm Vehicles:0
• X-wing Mods & Re-paints: 4
• Games Hosted: 1
• Games Played: 8

 

Games played this year were primarily virtual games. The majority of these were one on one games of Chain of Command played via Zoom generously hosted by my friend Greg. The one game I hosted was an outdoor game open air in my garage.  

 

I paused painting completely for about four months while I was in transition between homes. Once my new home was purchased I set up a temporary studio in a spare bedroom in order to resume painting and streaming on my Twitch.tv channel. My new home has an unfinished basement that I've already begun finishing. This new space will hopefully be just as nice or maybe a little better than my previous game room and painting studio. Being single does have some advantages. When buying houses I looked more intently at the basements than any married man would have the luxury of doing. 

Here's hoping 2021 brings all of you a vaccine, and a return to face-to-face gaming. I know we all could use more of THAT.

Laser Infrastructure - Part 1

This past summer I got a divorce and bought a new home to live in. One of the unfortunate consequences of this is I have to re-build all of the support infrastructure that is required to operate my laser engraver. Although the laser is an amazing tool for both my wargaming and radio-control aircraft hobbies, it does require a large amount of infrastructure to operate safely. This is part one of what I hope will only be two installments on this subject. This does include efforts that spanned several months, but for brevity I am including them all here in one update.

To the left two switches and an outlet. The outlet is an always-on 110 volt AC outlet to power the laser. Not shown are the two receptacles that the switches operate, both are elsewhere. Eventually this wall will be covered in drywall. On the opposite side of the wall will be an airbrush compressor run by the left-most switch. This blows compressed 30 PSI (2 bar for you non-Imperial types) air in the path of the laser to clear smoke which would impede the laser's ability to cut.   

The right-most switch is a three-way switch that operates this 600 CFM (0.3 m^3/s) exhaust 'blower' that evacuates the combustion byproducts from the laser. This keeps the air in the laser cabinet clear of power-sapping smoke as well as prevents it from asphyxiating the operator. Very important that this works properly! The other partner to the three-way switch is located where my spray booth will be, allowing me to use the exhaust system for both purposes by adding in some 'blast gates' for the vent pipes. 

Finally, an all-metal vent added to the exterior of my new home. This was by FAR the most nerve-wracking part of the operation. I needed to buy a proper mounting plate and line up everything so that it fit properly over the vinyl siding. As far as I'm concerned, it looks pretty good to me!

Part two of this will be running all of the interior piping for the exhaust system, including the blast gates and junctions for the spray booth and laser. Some of this is going to require me to order some specialty parts not offered at the local home center. Luckily, now that I have the external work done, I can do the exhaust piping even during the winter months - possibly during Christmas break since I won't be doing a lot of visiting with family due to the ongoing pandemic. 

Saga Thorsday - Eastern Princes Faction Review

It was my great pleasure to be invited by Rodge to co-host the Saga Thorsday Eastern Princes 2nd Edition faction review. Rodge was a pleasure to work with and his faction reviews are some of my favorite videos. Check it out above, or over at YouTube using this link: https://youtu.be/id39XOfXyY4

If you're into Saga, be sure to Subscribe to the Saga Thorsday YouTube channel.

2019 Year in Review

Another great year of Wargaming has come to a close and a new one begins. This is the time of year I look back and see how the year went, and remember how much fun this hobby is. The unit of the year this year is my group of Napoleonic French Marshals shown to the left. It was a close fight between these and some crusades heavy cavalry, but in the end the extra work on the Marshals sets them ahead. They may be some of the best figures I've ever painted.

For painting, the year started off slow with my hobby time in January, February and March mostly spent elsewhere. Towards the end of the year painting volume picked up a lot, but more on that later. Here are the totals for this year:

• Painted 25/28mm Figures: 138
• Terrain/Misc Created: 2
• Stands Re-based: 73
• Puchased Painted 28mm Figures: 80
• Purchased Painted 28mm Vehicles: 2
• X-wing Mods & Re-paints: 4
• Games Hosted: 9
• Games Played: 24

28mm Figures were primarily Saga crusades era figures. I finished up the last units for my Eastern Princes army and also completed a Crusader army. In addition to this I did paint up the French Marshals above, a smattering of World War II infantry and several livestock for Saga objectives. For me 2019 was the 'Year of Painting Saga' mostly. I also sneaked in a few cheeky X-wing miniature re-paints and conversions. Something of a guilty pleasure.

Thanks to my Friend Ed, I purchased 80 beautiful French Napoleonic figures. These were re-based as were another 100+ Austrian Napoleonic figures that I purchased last year. My Napoleonic collection is now approaching critical mass for me to start hosting Napoleonic games using my Electronic Brigadier rules. I hope to be putting significant time towards that project in 2020.

Terrain this year was a bit light. After doing the massive Salerno Tobacco Factory project last year I took a step back. Mainly I painted up the Warlord Games stone bridge I got for Christmas in 2018. It's a nice piece and got used in several games already.

For games, again an embarrassment of riches. I hosted nine games at my home or at the club with an additional 24 games played that others hosted. To be gaming more than two times a month is a luxury for sure. Great games. We played a lot of Saga, Iron Cross and locally-written rules this year.  I think my favorite was hosting and playing in some of the Saga mini game days my friend Mike organized (shown to the left holding the QRS). Thanks Mike!

By far the biggest change for me in the hobby this year was me jumping both feet straight into the deep end of the pool and starting to stream painting miniatures on the streaming service Twitch.tv. There aren't many historical miniature painters on Twitch, but there is a very vibrant and healthy community of excellent artists painting other genres of miniatures: Warhammer, Infinity, Malifaux, D&D, etc. The community there has been supportive and welcoming and after a full month of streaming I've started to find some viewers that are interested in historical miniatures. Stream chat during my painting sessions often revolves around historical topics. As of late a lot of people interested in Bolt Action have stopped by as I am currently working on some additional British figures for my WWII British army. If you haven't ever looked at Twitch, it's completely web based and free, come visit me at https://www.twitch.tv/ajswargaming. My current schedule is Tuesday and Thursday early evenings 5-8pm EST, and Sunday late morning, 11am-1pm. I also stream other times when I'm at the painting table. I'd love to see you stop by. Also you can view figures that I've painted on stream by using the Twitch tag here in my blog.

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas everyone! For those of you with different holidays may yours also be wonderful. 

AJ

Twitch Stream Replay - Basing 28mm French Napoleonics #2

This is a replay of today's stream where I finish basing up the figures from yesterday's stream by adding grass tufts and other scenic items. I also base up another three units of young guard French infantry.

For those wishing to get a notification on Twitch the next time I attempt to stream, you can follow my channel there. My channel link is https://www.twitch.tv/pease1
 

Twitch Stream Replay - Basing 28mm French Napoleonics

Lately I've been using my tablet at my painting table to watch miniature painters who stream on Twitch.tv. About 80% of these painters are painting Warhammer figures with the balance painting fantasy or science fiction figures. Rarely do I see anyone painting historical figures. Still, these are very skilled painters and there's plenty to learn from them regardless of subject matter.

I always wondered if this would be fun to do so I gave it a try. Below is a YouTube video replay of my first stream. The video quality is fair to sometimes poor and the audio volume is a bit low. All of this was done straight from my phone, clamped to my painting light. Clearly not a proper streaming set-up. Still if there's interest I may set up a proper streaming rig with multiple cameras and proper video. Give the stream a watch and give me your honest, even if brutal, feedback.

For those wishing to get a notification on Twitch the next time I attempt to stream, you can follow my channel there. My channel link is https://www.twitch.tv/pease1

These are some of the other painting streams I follow and enjoy:

• Ade Cook - https://www.twitch.tv/ade_cook/ 
• Samson Arts - https://www.twitch.tv/samsonarts/
• Gold Squadron Paintcast (Monday and Wednesday nights) - https://www.twitch.tv/goldsquadronpodcast/
• Amp Services - https://www.twitch.tv/ampservices/
• Hounds Tooth Minis - https://www.twitch.tv/houndstoothminis/

2018 Year In Review

2018 was a better year for gaming for me than 2017. I was able to return to my normal allotment of hobby time and enjoyed the hobby immensely this year. The title picture for this post is my massive terrain project, the Salerno Tobacco Factory - part of our club's Operation Avalanche game day this year. the complex includes seven scratch-built factory buildings, five ruined buildings, customized Pegasus Hobbies craters, and a scratch-built road. Other terrain items created this year were another scratch-built WWII bunker and another European Town House for WWII.

Painting totals were also up over last year's effort and back closer to my usual annual averages. 28mm Figures were mostly Saga Crusades figures for my Eastern Princes force, but also included a significant amount of Luftwaffe Field Division troops (43) and various support teams for my British and German WWII armies (62). Finally I also painted up some Napoleonic figures for my Austrian army, four more artillery pieces and some Grenzer command stands.  28mm armor completed this year consisted of three British and six German armor pieces. The latter all but finishes up my German WWII army.

Purchased painted figures and vehicles both totaled much less than I painted. Figures were primarily Napoleonics and vehicles were a mix of German and British armor.

Totals for this year are as follows:

• Painted 28mm figures: 183
• Painted 28mm vehicles: 9
• Terrain/Misc created: 59
• Purchased painted 28mm figures: 60
• Purchased painted 28mm vehicles: 3
• Games Hosted: 6
• Games Played: 15

Goals for 2019 are to paint the remaining single motorcycle to complete my German WWII army, finish up my Eastern Princes Saga army and start a Militates Christie force. I would also very much like to start working on expanding my French Napoleonic infantry so I can host some Napoleonic Electronic Brigadier games this year.

Here's hoping that each of you have a happy 2019. May your dice always roll well....