'Rage', 'The Flower Thrower' for the AHPC 'Resistance' Theme

Hi All!

My entry for our Resistance theme lifts shamelessly from the theme's poster, which is Banksy's 'Rage' or also known as 'The Flower Thrower'. The original can be found in Beit Sahour near the wall separating Israeli and Palestinian communities on the contested West Bank. It depicts a rioter in sharp black and white, throwing not a Molotov cocktail, but rather a bouquet of flowers, which are depicted in colour. 

It is one of Banksy's most iconic pieces and can be found on t-shirts, posters and geegaws everywhere (in fact, Sarah has it on her favourite coffee mug). I found a 3d design of the image on Cults and printed a 40mm copy to work on.

To echo Banksy's stark contrast of the figure to the flower, I pulled out my greyscale recipe and did the figure along the same lines. 

It's a powerful image of protest and non-violent resistance, and I thought it particularly apropos in our current climate as the people of Minneapolis have been recently nominated for the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize for their nonviolent resistance to the ICE activities in their city. I'm sure the President was thrilled to hear of this as well. :)

Thanks for dropping in!

- Curt

Mar-a-Lago Militia - The Boggs

Hey Y'all,

I return to my ACWII project with these colourful denizens from the dark, dank swamps of south Florida. I give you the Bogg family. 

In my wondrous, fictitious, fantastical and terrifying 'Merica they they are part of the local Mara-a-Lago Militia, fiercely loyal to Father Dagon and 'The King in Orange' (Yellow being so very passe these days). 

The Boggs (distant cousins to their Yankee Innsmouth relations, the Marsh family) are a spiteful, vain, and oily clan. They revel in their own stupidity, are selfish, hate outsiders and rarely listen to reason.

Yes, they very much have 'the Mar-a-Lago look'.

Cyrus

Cletus

Ruffus

Festus

Jo Lean

These figures are Deep One Hybrids, 3d prints from KLT Studio. I had fun working with their flesh tones, giving them a fishy look about them, but in the end they sort of have a Simpson vibe going on, which makes me smile as I can easily envision an episode where he Boggs cause chaos amongst the good folk of Springfield. :)

Next Up: A Low-Rent Security Force

- Curt 

'Baba Yaga' - John Wick @ 1:05:48

When I saw that Spectre Miniatures had issued a limited edition figure of John Wick I knew I had to snap one up. While I've not been especially enamoured with the overall trilogy (silly assassin meta and increasing bloat), I really enjoyed the first movie's brutal simplicity.

While I was cleaning up the figure, getting it ready for priming, I was trying to recall what Wick's shirt colour was when this scene was shot. I knew he wore a white collared shirt in the earlier bar scenes, but I though he may have changed to all-black later in the film. 

1:05:48

So, for a bit of fun, I decided to spin up Netflix and watch the movie again to see if I could both sort out the shirt colour and also spot the moment where the pose originates. Sure enough, at 1:05:48 he's seen swapping his assault rifle for a pistol wearing his iconic black suit.

For painting him I used thin layers of dark grey over a black base. It should have been easy, but it was actually fiddly as heck.

One more whine: trying to photograph black on black is pure evil. I must have blazed through a hundred shots to get something workable. Thank goodness for digital cameras!

On a related note, a few people have asked what process I use for working on clear acrylic bases. Well, you can definitely use normal superglue to mount a figure, just be sparing with the glue and keep the finished work away from any moisture while it's curing as it will frost the acrylic base. A more fire-and-forget approach is to use this GS E600 glue as it doesn't frost and gives good adhesion. I don't know what it's made of (I suspect ground unicorn horns and distilled pixie tears), but it works. I picked my tube up from GreenStuff World.

Thanks for dropping in!

Loo Roll HazMat Team

I'm still undecided if this post is in very poor taste or ingeniously apropos... No matter, I'll put my head down, brass it out and hope for the best. I present to you a quartet of  special forces operators in badly clashing hazmat gear. 

To my way of thinking, in a perfect world, these would be the guys we'd call in to 'have a chat' with the loo roll hoarders and those tw@ts who refuse to take 20 seconds to wash their hands.

Some may think those backpack canisters hold oxygen, but I think they are just clever toilet paper holders...

These are Ebob sculpts offered through Hasslefree Miniatures. Great minis to paint, with lots of foldy relief and neat details to have fun with. I thought I'd save time using yellow contrast paint, but it all just ended up with me layering them similar to my normal method. This being said, I still enjoy the funky colours you can achieve with these paints, depending on how you mix them and on how you prepare the surface (i.e. use of various shades of grays and whites as an underlay to skew the colour saturation).

I was originally planning to put them on clear bases like my other modern skirmish stuff, but I thought that I had run out of stocks, so I muddled along without them. As it turns out I had scads of them in another drawer (facepalm), but being lazy I just dashed ahead as is. Sigh. I think they look okay.

Thanks for dropping in for a peek!

Curt

Entry #4 to AHPCX: Cartel Gangers and their Hideout

Happy New Year Everybody! 

This is a book-end entry to my SAS post from last week. Here we have a nasty band of cartel members, in the midst of a shoot-out next to their seedy caravan hideout.

Similar to my previous post, these figures are all from Spectre Miniatures. I find them to be  very characterful sculpts and a lot of fun to paint. 

As with most of my skirmishy collection, I sawed off the original metal bases on all the figures and replaced them with acrylic bases supplied by my good friend Byron over at Northern Lights Terrain (as we all know, Byron's both a participant and a long-time Challenge sponsor, bless him). It's a bit of a pain to do, but I like the effect of being able to see the table surface though the bases.

The caravan/housetrailer is from Sarissa Precision. I really like their kits as they are seemingly specifically designed for muppets like me. I managed to put this thing together in under 30 minutes AND without completely screwing it up. Bonus.

I wanted to this to be a really dodgy place, definitely not an AirBnB Superhost location, so I went pretty hard on the weathering. For the siding I wanted an effect of faded, peeling paint which I attempted to convey with various shades of simple craft paints. It's pretty rough, but I think it works at arms length.

I kept the interior fairly basic. As opposed to the exterior these guys must be minimalist neat freaks...

I wanted the skylights to be just as nasty as the exterior so I smeared superglue on the surface and misted it with water to get a frosted, scaled effect. I then drybrushed them both light khaki to convey they being filthy and cracked.

Now for a little tabletop scatter. These trash piles, cardboard boxes and stacks of concrete bricks are also from Spectre. 

I find the piled trash bags to be especially neat additions to the terrain collection. 

The largest pile of bags is cast flat along the rear so it can be placed flush along a building. I think they all help give the tabletop that lived-in, urban-decay look.

The Ford F-150 Raptor was a very late addition and has a little story behind it. It was Sarah's birthday this past Monday and a few days prior I was at a ladies gift shop picking something out for her. After I made my purchase I spied in the children's section a group of diecast vehicles. This truck caught my eye and I plunked down for it thinking that, with a little weathering, it will serve nicely as a ride for my cartel boss. 

Thanks for checking in. Now, I put on my pith helmet and head back to Challenge Island. 

Entrry #3 to AHPCX: SAS Jungle Operators and a Huey

Hi All!

Today Sarah's Balloon drops me onto Bromley's Butte to challenge its mysteries. 

Dave asks us for: 'An individual figure or squad of tactical stealth troopers.' With this in mind, I present a team of SAS operators (or perhaps private military contractors), kitted out for jungle ops, deploying from an unmarked Huey chopper.

The models are from Spectre Miniatures' SAS range. I'm a big fan of Spectre's stuff and have found myself snapping up almost everything they have to offer. It's a bit silly as, really, how many figures do you need for a modern skirmish-based game? Well, apparently loads if you look at my lead pile! It's a little out of control. 

To be honest I have sort of a love-hate relationship with the modern gaming genre in general. I find that while I really enjoy the figures, gear and kit, I find that to 'do' the period justice, the settings and scenarios need to go beyond the typical 'lets go flatten another Middle Eastern compound' mindset. So when I'm thinking of modern-era gaming I'm often more interested in scenarios that are more nuanced, really gritty and more often than not, morally opaque. 

As an example: The SAS had a presence in Columbia beginning in the late 80s and extending to around 2010, ostensibly to train government forces in fighting the local drug cartels. Nonetheless, there are many analysts who would argue that their deployment was more to protect and project British corporate interests than anything else. In fact it's probably no coincidence that a significant portion of the private security detail at British Petroleum's site in Casanare were ex-SAS members. These personnel were also involved in training Columbian police units - the same units often associated with death squads targeting Columbian civilian leaders, academics and government protestors.  As I say, morally opaque and perhaps an interesting way to turn the accepted roles of Good Guys / Bad Guys on its head. 

Anyway, enough on the civics lesson and back to the minis. I painted these guys using the handy-dandy digital camo tutorial on the Spectre website - a great resource for those like me who have little experience with painting this kind of stuff. To simulate the spooky facepaint you often see these guys sporting, I painted most of their faces in camo as well.

The Huey began as a diecast model that I picked up on ebay a while ago. I remember it being quite inexpensive, probably due to it being in the cherry red livery of the Texaco Company (perhaps a fitting provenance considering how it's being featured in this post). 

The 'red-goes-faster' paintjob was easily fixed with a quick blast of primer and sprayed olive green and dirtied up a bit. It's a little rough around the edges, but I think it's quite serviceable for the tabletop. 

My lame attempt at a rotor wash using a coffee can glued over with spraypainted pillow ticking. Oh well, you get the idea... 

Thanks for dropping in. I hope everyone is recovering from the hustle and bustle of the 25th and is preparing for the upcoming New Years celebrations!

-Curt

Syrian White Helmet Rescue Workers

This was my closing post for the ninth annual Painting Challenge. I wanted to return to our overarching theme of 'Fellowship' and decided to do a small vignette honouring a group of people whose selfless efforts I've admired for several years now: the Syrian White Helmets.

As many of you know the White Helmets are a group of Syrian volunteers whose mandate is to provide medical assistance, urban search and rescue, civilian evacuation, and essential service delivery to areas caught within their nation's civil war. It is reported that since they were formed more than 5 years ago the White Helmets have saved over 100,000 lives, while losing over 200 of their own people in the process. In 2016 the group was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and have subsequently been awarded numerous international accolades for their humanitarian work.

Sadly, in this politically charged region of the world, there is an active smear campaign levelled at the White Helmets, trying to besmirch and belittle what they have done for their people. Personally I think this is reprehensible, but these are the times we live in and we all have to do our bit to rise above it and fight these injustices when and where we can. 

I'm proud to say that this past summer the Canadian government was instrumental in organising the evacuation of over 400 White Helmets and their families from Syria before forces loyal to the present regime could arrest them for supposed crimes against the state. Many of those evacuated have been resettled here in Canada, along with other participating countries. For many of them it has been a heart-wrenching experience, having to flee their homeland and loved ones to live in a far away, alien place. I am happy to have them here in a safe haven, but I hope there comes a day when these brave people can freely and safely choose to either return to Syria, or remain with us as new Canadians.

As you can imagine, there are no White Helmet figures on the market, so I took a shot of bodging my own. 

As they wear a distinctive cropped helmet, which looks vaguely similar to a German fallshirmjaeger helmet, I used that as a basis to work from. 

With this in mind, I found a trio of 20mm German paratrooper command figures tucked away in my collection, repositioned their arms and heads and carefully cut and filed away their equipment to look more like the rescue garb the White Helmets wore. 

I then carved a disc of high density blue insulation, affixed it to a base, added rubble and wreckage, and then arranged the figures to depict them having just found some survivors buried in the rubble. Admittedly, it's not perfect, but the overall silhouette seems to work to my eyes. I hope it does to yours as well.

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Thanks for dropping in for a visit. I hope you all have a great upcoming week!

Curt