40k with the kid

My oldest got the mini-Warhammer 40k Starter "First Strike" from my mother-in-law for Christmas, and was pretty excited about it.  He ripped the package open, read all the books, and clipped out and assembled all the figures within a day.

After I helped him scrape off mold lines and glue the figure together, we waited for some good weather to spray undercoat the figures (where I was aggravated by the failure of two newer cans of spray paint.  Fortunately my 15 year old Citadel spray paint still works...)

He then painted all the figures himself, which naturally took quite a bit longer. 

Despite my protestations, he went Ultramarines

 Somehow he had the idea that you can not play the game without painting the figures, so he was pretty eager to get the first few needed for missions completed.

First game First Strike! 

After we played with the first few figures he painted, he rushed through the last few so that we could play a "real" game with all the figures at once.  Since the points are imbalanced, the boys in blue won every time!  Which is probably working as intended. 

Good guys losing to the blue servants of the Tyrant

Now that 9th edition is on the horizon, there has been some interest in getting more figures, so we shall see.  The cost of 40k is fortunately something he is acquainted with, as well as forced obsolescence, so he is relatively patient with getting more.  When the actual starter is announced, we may get figures from it on Ebay, as he is already leery of getting more figures for an army he is not interested in after the Death Guard from this box.

Happy Christmas/New Year

Happy Christmas and Happy New year to you all.

I hope Santa/Krampus/Your Paypal account brought you what you wanted this year.

I have been rather busy for the last month, with a conference in Chicago, being sick for a week, and then taking nearly two weeks off from work to be with the kids.

For Christmas this year, I, er Santa, got everyone in the household miniatures from Reaper for their stocking.  Reaper, as is usual for the season, was running a few promotions, so I got a few extra things too:

Reaper Christmas 2019

Specifically, in addition to free shipping, I got a free miniature of the month (Genie coming out of a lamp), a free pack of holiday figures (I selected the Christmas familiars because my wife loves polar bears), and a Christmas Sampler pack.

Candy and miniatures (plus paint and an ornament)

The sampler pack I, er, we got had a Santa miniature, an ornament, two paints, three bones figures, and some candy!

For Christmas, I did unexpectedly well, and got the D&D Essentials set from my sister, and some X-wing stuff from my Wife.  She also got me a subscription to White Dwarf, although that will not show up for a while.  Santa also got a number of Reaper figures to stuff into my stocking.

Somewhat unexpectedly, my son got First Strike, the miniature starter for 8th edition Warhammer 40k from his grandmother, so there has been a lot of talk about Warhammer in the house lately!  He has already read the books, and Christmas morning clipped the figures out and put them together.  Finishing the miniature assembly and playing through the starter missions are in our near future.

Pleased as punch

Boxing day I had a hour or so to work on the terrain mat with my daughter, and we got the roads done, the river bottom painted with its first couple coats, and some rocks added to the ford.

It is really coming along nicely now, and I anticipating it being done with a couple more sessions.  Mainly, I want to glaze some green on the river, and then layer in some clear caulk. Unfortunately the flock is not sticking to the canvas/caulk quite as much as I anticipated, so I am going to have to paint it with a coat of watered down PVA.  In the picture above the regular flock clumps you can see in the lower left are where I was adding another layer of caulk/flock to try and fill in some empty areas where the flock had rubbed off. 

We got away to my Wife's cousins' house for New Years, and in addition to playing a ton of Code Names and In the Bag, we managed another game of Risk Legacy. Unusually, I nearly won, and was back stabbed by those that encouraged me to make some board spanning moves.  Such is Risk!

Finally, at the cousins' house I finally got the chance to use the D&D miniatures that I gave the kids in 2017, and then had to contend with them begging me to play more D&D for the rest of the trip. (and they even were trying to figure out how to play together over facetime!)  First session they asked if they could fight each other, and then split the party after the first encounter...  The kids seemed to have a great time, and it was one of the only things that could drag them away from the Switch they got.

Terrain Mat part One

Earlier in November, my family was away for the weekend, and I got little done while they were gone, instead spending time with my sister and playing video games. (Classic XCOM).

When they got home late on that Sunday afternoon, my wife encouraged me to involve the kids in a project that I have been wanting to do for quite some time.

In the spring, a neighbor moved out, and for a few days had a bunch of random wall "art" out in front of their house to give away. My wife picked up the last piece with the idea that she would repaint it with the kids, as she has done with other canvases in the past. However, like many projects, no progress was made for a while, and the painting lived in the garage.

After several months, we pulled out the painting, and put it in the backyard where kid painting occurs. The paint was basically falling off, and we began to peel it off as we were doing other things.

After a few weeks of it sitting around, I got serious about peeling off the paint, and realized that it was sticky on one side... was it glued?  A quick soak with the garden hose proved that it was, and everything came off much more quickly after that.

So now we have a 91x119 cm blank canvas, and my idea was to make it into a play mat.

The kids were enthusiastic once they got into the idea, and they wanted to make a design with a road and a river (the maps of the battle of five armies and the battle of the Hornburg I had showed them may have influenced this a bit).

With a pen, they sketched out a plan on the canvas, and then I had my son measure the road segments so that they would be approximately 40mm wide (suitable for a 15mm dirt road or a Warmaster base)

After that we gloved up, and started mixing caulk and paint and smearing it on.  After slapping on a section of caulk, we then sprinkled a relatively heavy coat of the primary flock, followed by dustings of other flocks, static grass etc.  I then crudely rolled it in with an empty caulk tube, although this was not very successful due to the canvas still being on the frame.  Unfortunately no pictures of this phase, my hands were too dirty, and my wife was busy.

After less an an hour (and one change of clothes for the kids), we got to this stage:

You can see here that there are quite a number of colors, and some texture imparted by the caulk.  The roads and river are currently unfinished. After this dried for a few hours, I carefully dumped it off onto newspaper, and put it in the garage to await the next step. The flock and such dumped off was recovered, and equaled about 60% of what went on in the first place, more because of all the other flocks added than because it all fell off!

Tools used:
Paint stirring sticks
plastic tub from the recycling bin

Supplies used:
Two cans of paint, matched to GW Scorched Brown, and Vallejo Earth
Two tubes of flexible paintable caulk
One bag of flock
Various other flocks, static grasses, and herbs

Next step: have enough time to do the road and river sections.

Basing Basics

Yesterday I was home from work with the kids, due to a change in my wife's work schedule.  While child #2 slept, #1 and I had a quick lesson in basing.  The 20 handgunners acquired in my Ebay score last year were quickly claimed, and I made a couple of conversions to them as requested (added a banner bearer, and mounted one on a horse to be a "leader".

As shown here, figures had diluted glue applied to their base with a brush, and were then dipped in sand. [although I believe technically it is decomposed granite]

As I said, pretty basic! There was some discussion of getting the figures primed in preparation for painting, but we shifted focus to LEGO and that took up the remainder of the "free" time.  At this rate, we will be able to have a game in a few years...

Rebel Blockade Runner

Ignore the contents of my counter... the light was good there. 

The "real" CR90 should be about 150 m long, so this works out to ~1/360 scale

For a fifth birthday gift, I got #1 child got the pictured Electronic Rebel Blockade Runner, which was new in box from 1996!  Bought on ebay for not very much at all, particularly considering how long it had been moldering away in a box.  The batteries were still good, and the lights and sound work as well as they did back when it was released.

This will eventually pull double duty as a X-wing piece, although I have to figure out or acquire the rules for the official piece, and make a base.  It probably could stand to be detailed a little more, and would benefit from some weathering... this is after all for Star Wars, and grubby is the goal!

At 16 inches long this works out to about ~1/360 scale, and is too small as compared to the 1/270 scale of the official X-wing miniatures, but it is still quite a bit larger than the "official" figure.  (plus it has lights and sounds!)  It will be pretty dominating on the table top, since it is about 44% of a total table length!

The important part is that the kid liked it, and was zooming it around the room after opening it, and really, that makes it worth while.

Painting again, at last!

The other day, I decided that I should just paint a figure that I had sitting around in my desk, from start to finish. I chose the beggar figure from the Reaper Townsfolk II set, sculpted by Bobby Jackson. These are great figures, full of character and easy to paint; however, they are very very large, too large to work well with many other figures out there. I plan to use these figures as scenery for Warhammer games, and as NPCs in WHFRP, so the size should be ok.

A nice feature of painting a fantasy figure, and particularly a one off, is that there is no uniform consideration, and if I want to paint the pants one color and the shirt another, only aesthetics dictates what I should do. So I was able to zip along, and got a fair amount finished.

As you can see from this picture though, I had a bit of a handicap while painting though...

Since then, I have painted up another figure (the farmer with the withered arm from Reaper Townsfolk V), and plan to do a few more soon. Maybe this will get me back on track.