In summer, we can taste, the rain…

It’s late, which is the only explanation I have for using an Alien Ant Farm lyrical reference that is only tangentially connected to what I’m writing about as a post title. Painting time has been sparse recently (mostly due to repeatedly falling asleep after putting my children to bed), but having a week off work to celebrate my daughter’s birthday means I’ve actually gotten to occasionally put brush to miniature and have finished the next member of the crew for this year’s Firefly Stargrave project:

It has rained all the time recently, so apologies for the slightly dark pictures.

My First Mate is a River Tam expy, a girl that has found herself on the crew in mysterious circumstances. She has clearly been experimented on by the Alliance, and vacillates between terrifyingly deadly in combat and down right nonsensical the rest of the time. She can kill you with her brain, though.

She’s a Hasslefree mini that I’ve had for years, potentially since I initially planned this project which I think was at least fifteen years ago. Looking at it blown up like this, there are a couple of rough spots - a little blister on the front of the dress and a crack on the back of her coat, but fixing them would involve stripping her to the bare metal again, so I’ll have to live with them if I want to get any games in this year. The paint scheme was inspired by River Tam rather than any one particular costume, although I have googled ‘Summer Glau Firefly Red Dress’ and other similar variations enough times in the last week that I probably appear on a list somewhere now…

Although it’s the months leading up to Salute, where I traditionally save my hobby funds for the big spend in April, but a couple of packages have arrived since my last post. First of all, I took advantage of Checkpoint Minis January Sale to grab some 15mm plant monsters to use as tiny 28mm plant monsters, and a frog for a planned conversion. They also threw in a freebie frog, because they are too nice and don’t know some of us work on a Tally system:

I’ve been prepping the plant monsters, and realised that I actually had far fewer 20mm bases than I thought, so I’m waiting for an order of those to turn up so that I can get these painted (and the family D&D game is currently on hold until I do).

I also received a package of Rezolution APAC figures from a kind gentleman over on the LAF, as I had fewer than I initially thought in my project drawers, and I feel like 10-12 is probably a goodly number of Ruffians to menace my crew in Stargrave. 

Plus, there were a couple of minis that I didn’t already have that could potentially make good NPCs or bounties, which is nice…

All in, the Tally now stands at:

6 vs 24 = -18

I’d hoped to keep the Tally in the black a little longer than usual this year, but that’s jus5 how it goes sometimes. Hopefully I can wrestle it down a bit before Salute though… 

Zomtober 2021 week 3!

 Another week, another post deadline successfully hit!

This week's offering is another Hasslefree survivor, another fine Kev White sculpt:

I have him stripes down his sleeves, as a bit of visual interest but also mostly so that I could make this joke on Instagram:

What is the fascination with chainsaws and zombies? Practically, it would be less than ideal as a zombie-fighting weapon: heavy, loud, needs refuelling. On the other hand:

I went to town weathering this mini, and I think he looks much better for it! Dusty, grubby, oily, this is someone that has had other things on his mind than laundry recently…

You can’t really see it in the other pictures, but I also gave him a five o’clock shadow, that also highlights that he’s shaved his head because he’s balding than for purely practical reasons:

Finishing him brings the Tally to:

24 vs 23 = +1

Next time - more zombies!

Zomtober 2021 week 2

 Another Sunday, another zombie themed submission!

This week I present for your delectation a Hasslefree survivor that I think was originally prepped as a backup mini for a previous Zomtober, and so has sat undercoated waiting for her time in the sun for far too long.

The details on the face are very fine, and I think I went too pale and lost some of the definition - there’s nothing like painting for a deadline to lower your standards though! When initially taking the pictures for this post, I noted how pale she was and went back to add some colour to her lips to try and make her look a little more lively, but I think all I’ve succeeded in doing is making her look like she’s enjoyed some beetroot at some point in the past…

I also wouldn’t have gone as light on the hair if I were to paint her again - up until that last application though, it looked very flat and dark, so I’m not sure that a do over would come out any better (as ever, I asked my wife to suggest a hair colour, as is usually the case whenever I’m painting near her). The acid wash jeans effect is a little hit or miss too, but again, done is done, so points on the Tally!

23 vs 23 = +0

Back to equilibrium!

A Wildling Princess...

Another mini finished as the end of the year looms closer, this time a lovely Hasslefree sculpt that I’ve painted as a ‘Wildling princess’ for the A Song of Ice and Fire / Game of Thrones project. Having a nicely sculpted face helps with the painting, although the flesh tones on this miniature were actually painted ages ago before she was relegated to the ‘Work In Progress’ drawer for who knows how long, so may have been before my current face painting slump began! It’s hard to tell in this picture, but she does actually have pupils, although I went over them again with the Micron pen after taking this picture to make sure they were more visible, as you can see in this blurry close-up:

Just to head off the inevitable criticism at the pass - yes, as she’s a Hasslefree mini, there’s more underboob on show than would be practical for a barbarian lass from snowy climes (the gloss varnish on which is actually still wet in these pictures) I know. The rest of the Wildlings in the queue are practically dressed I promise.

One thing that was especially fun about painting a Wildling was the fact that they tend not to have much in the way of iron weapons and armour, so painting her bracers and other metal details in a variety of shades was an interesting challenge, and Indecided to paint her twin blades to look slightly rusty and worn, as if they were long ago scavenged and not particularly well maintained. She got a head of red hair as I figured that being ‘kissed by fire’ would only add to the Wildling princess feel!

Tally:

30 vs 27 = +3

Zomtober week 4: the circle is complete

If by circle you mean the challenge, that is.

Week four is another survivor, from Hasslefree this time:

As always with a hasslefree miniature, she’s a lovely sculpt, even though my attempts at fixing her pupil have left her with an entirely black eye looking somewhat like the mother from Coraline... Which admittedly I don’t completely hate, so am leaving as is. I might go back and see if I can get some definition back into her shoelaces though...

She was originally bought one Salute for the The Last of Us project, as I like that she has a torch, but she can pull double duty fighting her way through zombie hordes if needs be.

Painting her brings the Tally to:

15 vs 27 = -12

and also draws this Zomtober to a close - not my biggest year, being four ladies and a cameraman, but expect something related to appear in the next couple of weeks (as unfortunately I just couldn’t get them finished in time for this post! Unless I save them for next year...)

In other news, I had thought that the blogosphere was dying out, but having dug deeper it seems that my followed blogs weren’t showing up properly in Bloglovin (the reader app I use), so I’d been missing out on a ton of people’s blog posts! I’ve been taking steps to manually rectify this, so hopefully I won’t miss anything else!

Post-Salute 2018 post

Only a week after the actual event - did I mention that I'm not a fan of the Blogger app being killed off?

The night before Salute, I made a meme after seeing that Troll Trader were running their usual 'first 50 people spending over a certain amount get a goody bag':

My first stop at the show was their stand, where I bought the Collector's Edition of The Walking Dead game from Mantic, so I guess Dark Side Kermit won there...

Ah, early morning starts, everyone's favourite, but a pilgrimage requires sacrifice:

(I think at this point I'd already been ignoring my alarm for twenty minutes)

The usual Salute outfit of Jayne hat - this year was unseasonably warm though, so it spent most of the day in my bag, leading to complaints from my companions that they then couldn't find me.

My phone is alas on the way out, and doesn't hold charge as well as it used to, so less photos than usual, presented in almost no order:

[Obligatory queueing shot]

Modiphius Fallout miniatures: 

I like them, but at a larger scale than my existing stuff, I'm not sure if I'll get any (he says, setting up for future 'well, although last year I said...' posts. Wait, didn't I say last year that I wasn't going to get The Walking Dead?)

One of the thing's I was most excited to see was Mantic's upcoming Hellboy kickstarter - alas, there was only a handful of preview miniatures, and no game content, but look how pretty they are!

Particularlyexciting is that it looks like there's a mechanic for the frog monsters to evolve from little swarms up to big gribblies...

There was a rather large and nice Star Wars Legion table:

(read again my comments about the Fallout game re: larger scale, me not investing)

Mantic were running a paint and take table, so I tried my hand at knocking out a Star Saga Scientist:

Not bad for half hour with a large brush!

I'm not going to count him as painted for the Tally just yet, as I think I'll repaint his face (as it took a couple of goes with the brush I had to get it to this state of acceptability, but could definitely be improved), as well as potentially changing the colours of some things like his kneepads, maybe adding a Vault number to the back of his suit so that I can use him for Fallout, as well as rebasing him!

I managed to snap some pictures of Fireforge Games' upcoming Fantasy Northern troops, and they're rather lovely:

I wasn't sure how they'd look in the flesh, as pre-production renders seen online can hide a multitude of sins (Wargame Factory zombies being one of the most well-known examples of this) but they look like they take paint pretty well:

I think with some custom shields they'll make ideal House Bolton troops for my Game of Thrones / A Song of Ice and Fire project, as well as providing some additional bits for House Stark kitbashes...

I took this photo of a Bad Squiddo table to use as an inspirational image for future scatter terrain building, as I think that those rubble and broken pipe pieces look great!

This is an awful picture of a lovely Crooked Dice Post-Apocalyptic table - I think they were running two games on the same table, one with plant zombies and one with dune buggies?

Got to see Angel Giraldez painting again - insert the now traditional 'so handsome, so talented, it just isn't fair' comment!

Joe, our DM, is a feeder. This is fine with me. Picnic lunch with some old friends that I hadn't seen in a while, including Ciarron, who long-time followers may remember from a Salute post a few years back where we both got super excited about the Batman Miniatures game, bought a bunch of stuff and vowed to play. We still haven't.

Someone had painted up their Westfalia Northern Mercenaries kickstarter and entered it in the painting competition! I really should paint mine...

Now, the real meat of any Salute post - the loot!

• Rogue Stars Psions (because one looks like farmboy Luke with a lightsaber, and the other is a froggy looking alien)
• Frostgrave Barbarian Tracker (to fill out the kitbashed Wildlings that have been sat on my hobby desk since last summer)
• Rumbleslam goblin & Kromlech orc pilot from my Troll Trader goody bag
• Assorted dice and badges
• Heresy Ebric the Doomed (as I try to always buy something from Heresy - support the companies you love or they might not still be around next year!)
• 2 Crooked Dice Wasteland Warriors (to add some greater female representation to my Survivors collection)
• '!' tokens from Fenris, to use with the set of zombie rules I'm working on
• Some Hasslefree Survivors
• An assortment of Wargames Illustrated Giants in Miniature models, to get the show-exclusive Druid
• [heavily inspired by] Fallout / Mass Effect / Star Wars miniatures from Brother Vinni 
• This year's show mini

Also, the Mantic Walking Dead game, plus a selection of bits from my goody bag, like a couple of rulebooks, a cardboard building that is the perfect size for 1/144 Gundam models, a stencil, some weathering powder, a bunch of beer mats and a handful of sweets!

Fun fact - after Salute, I went for dinner at my Mother-in-Law's, where I showed my daughter the miniature that I had painted that day, which then vanished without a trace. Several days later, he turned up in grandma's bag...

Adding everything up (and factoring in the things that sold on eBay just before the show) brings the Tally to:

9 vs -36 = +27

I'm thinking that I might have to reconsider my 'board game pieces don't count towards the Tally for acquisition' when some of the games come with what are clearly miniatures, as they Tally would look a lot less robust after buying The Walking Dead game! I'm selling some more bits on eBay in preparation for the aforementioned Hellboy Kickstarter, so expect to see the Tally distort even further...

In other news, the sun briefly came out in the UK, and the sound of rattle cans resounded across the land as we had that perfect combination, a warm day with no wind. Not me though, as by the time everything was sorted and my daughter was settled in bed it was ten at night, but I'm not one to let something like that stop me so I set about getting a bunch more odds and ends into the painting queue:

Top Tip: though you might think you've been very careful with your spraying box, in the cold light of day it usually turns out you've sprayed a black line onto the paving slabs in the garden.

Lurking in the shadows...

...to suck out your brains - finished painting my converted Illithid rogue (that I finished converting from a Hasslefree figure way back in December of 2014):

Lord knows when I'll meed a Mind Flayer in studded armour, but when that day does come I will be ready.

His flesh was one of those times when you finish painting happy with what you've done, then come back to it the next time and decide it needs more done to it over and over, hence quite a stark difference between the darkest shade in the deepest recesses and the lightest areas. His weaponry was painted in non-standard colours after being inspired by a flick through the 4th Edition Monster Manual (hence the aqua/teal hilt to the purple-sheened blade, and grey rather than colourful gems on the scabbard of his secondary weapon).

I also had a play posing him with some of my wife's plants (more and more of which seem to appear in the house each week):

As well as playing with the settings and applying filters to make moody pictures like this:

Tally:

7 vs 0 = +7


In other news, a family emergency last week led to us heading down to Portsmouth a week earlier then originally planned - horrible times, but one upside to spending four hours each way on trains was that I cracked on and managed to mostly get the set of zombie rules that I've had knocking around half-formed in my head longer than I've had this blog that have been previously alluded to on paper:

Don't worry about trying to decipher my scrawl about rules for fighting across barricades, the picture is just illustrative to break up blocks of text ;)

It's in no particular order currently, fairly free-form as I remembered / thought of things, but I think I've got a fairly workable framework once I rearrange it and chisel out the heart. I have a vague thought to run a zombie game at halloween, which would need some scenery building and cards making (well, as well as actually playtesting these rules to see whether they actually work at all!)

Otherwise, I'm still wanting to get on with Necromunda, although I'm in a bit of a quandary - I'm reticent to start building models until I've built a gang roster, but don't want to build a gang roster without knowing what's good or that I like to play with... I could just build the models in their stock poses (which are lovely, don't get me wrong), but shouldn't I choose their loadouts myself? Argh, such conflict...

I also starting playing the Game of Thrones: Conquest game whilst waiting for the laptop to fire up tonight, which I'd assumed would give me a hankering for that project, but the game is so buggy (oh how it crashes) that hasn't kicked in at all...

What is best in life?

Yeah, it's everyone's favourite brooding Cimmerian, Conan:

Mood music:

I love Conan, and have had vague plans to game in Hyperborea for several years now. Small scale, run using the Song of Blades and Heroes ruleset, borrowing models liberally from the other fantasy projects, it's yet another one of those ideas I had where I thought 'this is small enough that I'll be able to finish it and actually get a game in' that then ended up getting mothballed until my attention swung back round again...

Admittedly part of the reason for the delay was finding a miniature that I was happy with for the main man, but in the end I went with this lovely lad from Hasslefree. 

You might notice a slight bit of shininess and or discolouration around his axe arm, which is a result of repairs and some minor cosmetic surgery after an escape attempt:

I have vague plans for a 'tree' style campaign (the kind where if Player A wins a game, you play one scenario next, but if player B, you take a different branch, potentially unlocking additional reinforcements or other boons in a final climatic battle along the way), which I'm sure I started sketching out on a scrap of paper that I should probably try and track down...

But wait, there's more!

Conan doesn't want to take on the cult of various snake gods on his lonesome, though, so I've also finished one of the chums I have for him in the painting queue:

Nice, classic Grenadier/em4 barbarian. Chosen almost entirely because I love the idea of a near-nude berserker taking the precaution of wearing a full helm (I assume his mother made him promise to never go out without wearing his helmet, and so he always has). He was also painted to a lighter skintone than Conan, to make the big guy seem all the more bronzed by comparison.

I feel like I might have missed a trick by not giving him a comedic beauty mark or heart tattoo on his backside though...

And here's the pair of them together:

The Grenadier barbarian looks a little bigger and chunkier than Conan, but that's fine, he's in a more dynamic pose, and was always described as being athletic as well as beefy, so I'm still happy with my choice!

Tally

41 vs 40 = +1

Back in the black!

Necromunda pre-orders went up today though. I've been good so far.

The Hammer is my Penis

Totally worth the expense and effort just to have a blog post with that title.

You've all watched Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, right?

If not, go do it now.

I'll wait.

Seriously, it's three parts, will take forty minutes of your life, and is highly recommended if you like things that are good.

Done? Good. Pow, that ending!

But on a more cheery note, having re-watched it this year (as it turned out that my wife had somehow never seen it) I had a hankering to pick up the 'Sergeant Spanner' figure from Hasslefree that bears a passable resemblance to a certain Hammertastic hero, and so picked one up at Salute (even better, he was one of the freebie figures on offer for pre-ordering, so double score!).

He was painted mostly on lunchtimes at work, under terrible lighting conditions. The shirt was one of those cases of painting until I decided I couldn't tinker with it any more, and so took the plunge to freehand on the tiny hammer logo - I started by carefully painting on a black circle to outline the whole thing, then a couple of gentle layers of yellow, breath held and fingers crossed! A dash of brown and a curve of silver later and voila, we have a tiny hammer!

The thing that took the longest to paint was probably his right eye - I don't think that micron pen that I use for dotting in pupils travels particularly well, and seemed to splurt ink out somewhat, so his right eye was probably repainted three or four times in the end until I managed to get a satisfactory result!

I have no idea what project he is for - I could probably shoehorn him into the Zombies project as a random event, and he's probably underpowered to go toe-to-toe with any Marvel superheroes... Ah well, sometimes you need to paint something just because you want to!

Tally:

25 vs 40 = -15