Paint Table Saturday: Here's a howdah do!

A bit more of an action shot for Paint Table Saturday, as I get on with my Victrix Carthaginian war elephants.  I hope to finish the howdah's this weekend and in fact the main structures are done and varnished so they just need to be stuck on the elephants and the spear quivers adding.  I have also made a start on the crew.  There was a TV programme about Hannibal taking his elephants over the Alps this week. It was one of those ones billed as presenting 'exciting new evidence' which, as usual, had nothing of the kind, other than they found a valley that was full of horse poo from about the right period of time.  No actual proof of elephants, however.  It looks like his elephants didn't have howdahs but that would be boring (someone makes an undressed one I think).

The view from my study this week

Nice bright weather helps, today, and it is much warmer in my study,  We didn't get much snow, living in civilised Surrey, as all the exhaust fumes from the 4x4s keep the temperature up, compared with the more primitive parts of the country.  It was quite cold, though.  One morning the temperature in my study was just five degrees before I got the heaters on (my radiator packed up years ago and there is just too much stuff in front of it for a plumber to get access).  The roads were all clear ,although I did have to postpone my visit to the Charles I art exhibition at the Royal Academy yesterday evening.  Good job I did, as Waterloo station shut at 8.00pm. 

Helen of Troy versus the Styracosaurus - just what the BBC series needs to liven it up

On Thursday I had spent twelve hours editing a document for my father in law on mobile magnetic resonance scanners (some of it was a bit beyond me, I admit) so yesterday we went to the garden centre .  Now I hate garden centres, except my wife knows this one has an excellent selection of dinosaur models so she knew that if I went I would end up paying for her oasis.  Anyway, I got a nice Styracosaurus.  It's a bit bigger than it should be but not by much.  When I have finished the elephant and crew I am going to start on my Antediluvian miniatures retrosaurus, as the painting technique will be similar to an elephant.

I also got some more jungle type follidge in little pots so have been pulling it out of the polystyrene to go in my giant follidge box.  Three little pots and one big one of what looks like giant ferns, which will be ideal for The Lost World.  I even started to entertain thoughts of making it into a giant tree fern by attaching it to  a trunk. but then I had a mug of Lifeboat tea and came to my senses.  That would be far too close to actual modelling.

I did pick up another aquarium type rock and this one is full of little caves so it will be ideal as the habitat for the Lucid Eye simians for Savage Core.  I need to remove the plants and paint it to match my other rocks though.  I also ordered some more smaller rocks this week so will paint it when they arrive.

What is the appeal of watching winter sports for the Legatus?

I haven't managed much painting over the last few weeks because of the Winter Olympics (good job by the Koreans) and poor light.  I did spend far too much time watching ladies in skintight lycra skiing, sliding and skating (I didn't bother to watch most of the men's events, so as to save time).  I have more time to catch up on my TV backlog, now, although new series of Nashville and Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.LD start this week.  I haven't seen the second episode of Troy: Fall of a City (I wonder what happens in the end?) yet and the third is on tonight.  Tonight, the Old Bat will want to watch The Voice so I might finish assembling the Carthaginian crew for the elephants.

The reading girl (1886), Roussel

Today's wallpaper demonstrates one of the easiest things to get a model to do, while she endures the tedious process of being captured on paper or canvas, which is to let her read a book. The fact that she is concentrating on a book also distances her from the viewer. There is no opportunity to engage the viewer directly, as her gaze is elsewhere. It adds a voyeuristic quality to the picture. This painting, by French born, but London based, artist Théodore Roussel, is a marvellous composition. Irish painter William Orpen called it the finest nude painting of the time, although its realism shocked many due to its lack of classical justification for the nudity.  The art critic of The Specator wrote:."Our imagination fails to conceive any adequate reason for a picture of this sort. It is realism of the worst kind, the artist’s eye seeing only the vulgar outside of his model, and reproducing that callously and brutally. No human being, we should imagine, could take any pleasure in such a picture as this; it is a degradation of Art."  It's actually a wonderful painting with Hetty's pale body glowing against the almost black background. Only the kimono (a reflection of Roussel's interest in Japanese art) gives any colour to the painting.  Roussel's friend Whistler called it "an extraordinary picture" ,

Hetty Pettigrew (1889) by Sambourne

The model in this painting is nineteen year old Hetty (also variously known as Bessie, Harriet or Nettie) Pettigrew (1867-1953) who. with her sisters Lily (b. 1870 and Rose (b. 1872), modelled for Whistler, Millais, Godward, Poynter. Leighton, Holman Hunt, Burne-Jones and others. Hetty was born in Portsmouth but the family were originally from the West Country. Millais said that the sisters were gypsies (although they themselves claimed aristocratic antecedents) and her sister Rose described Hetty as having a "cruel wit". They were generally considered, by those who painted them, as a bit of a handful. The  penniless Pettigrew sisters came to London in 1884 and their artist brother suggested they could make a living as models. He was right and they became the most sought after models in London, with painters offering them bribes to pose for them instead of other artists. The Pettigrew sisters commanded fees for modelling of no less than half a guinea a day, about twice what a housemaid would earn in a week.  Hetty became Roussel's mistress and bore him a child in 1900.  When Roussel's wife died in 1914, Hetty was shattered when Roussel married another woman and she never posed for him again.  Hetty was photographed, at the age of 23, by Punch illustrator and amateur photographer, Edward Linley Sambourne (1844-1910)  (Lord Snowdon's great-grandfather and furniture designer Viscount Linley's great-great-grandfather) and the photograph shows how well Roussel caught her features.

Today's music is another purchase this week and adds to my pulp playlist.  It is the soundtrack to The Phantom (1996) which I rather enjoyed but, like The Shadow (1994) and The Rocketeer (1991), it failed to kick start the pulp genre in Hollywood.  Composed by David Newman (son of Hollywood golden age composer Alfred Newman) it hits all the requisite adventure buttons and will become a pulp figure painting favourite, no doubt.

Paint Table Saturday: Olympics, Dark Ages Kickstarter, Elephants, Wargods of Olympus and Zulus

Having finished my elephants last week, the next parts of the Victrix models to complete are the howdahs.  These will also need quivers for the javelins attaching and shields.  I haven't tried using Little Big Men transfers on domed shields before.  It is not going to be easy, I suspect!

I have started the base coat on the Zulus and put together another two to make a unit of 12 for The Men Who Would be King rules. I assembled these in front of the TV and looking at them, as I paint them, I should have done them in good light at my desk, as some of the arms don't look right.  Hopefully, this will not be too apparent when the shields are on.  Although it is a lovely, bright morning I'm not going to get much done today as it is my father-in-law's 90th birthday party.

Let's hope they don't all say 'Hoo! Hah!" before they charge into unrealistic man to man combat with swords.  The lady needs a few kebabs, I think

I have started some of the Wargods of Olympus figures and have found a Foundry Argonaut I am going to try to finish at the same time.  I am looking forward to the new BBC Troy drama, although political correctness has struck again, with a black Achilles. The costumes, as ever, have seen a costume designer go mad, once more, and ignore any historical evidence..  We know what Bronze Age (no iron spears either!) Mediterranean people wore; there  are plenty of paintings and pictures on pottery.  Stop making it look like an episode of Xena: Warrior Princess.

I have always enjoyed watching the Winter Olympics more than the summer games, although I was disappointed in the choice of (stops typing to look up how to spell it) PyeongChang as host city.  Deep down, part of me thinks that the winter Olympics should be held in Europe (or North America at a pinch) not some weird place in Asia. It looks wrong and feels wrong.  However, having said that, the scenery in Korea (apart from a tragic lack of snow) is, in fact, not too bad. The drone Olympic rings at the opening ceremony were the second most impressive thing I have seen on TV this year after the  Falcon Heavy synchronised booster landing.   Beijing, where the 2022 games will be held is just wrong. I have been to Beijing and it just doesn't have that authentic alpine/nordic feel about it, just as there wasn't in Sochi.  Also, when are we going to have a winter Olympics in somewhere that doesn't need artificial snow?  It's a shame Oslo withdrew their bid, as that would have been perfect.

Being involved in infrastructure finance I occasionally get called in to provide some advice on Olympics: Beijing, and Vancouver spring to mind.  A few years ago, the Norwegians asked me in to help on a Winter Olympics bid for Tromso for 2014.  It never went anywhere but at least I did go up there for a bit, saw the Northern lights,  had a beer from the world's most northerly brewery, ate some whale (not by choice - we went to a wine bar and everything on the menus seemed to be unavailable except whale.  Suspicious that.  I also did not buy a sealskin tie)  and got given a 'games that never was' badge!  It's like my Toronto 2008 Olympic mountain biking venue tee shirt!

The BBC coverage in the first week unfortunately, seemed to be fixated on the tedious freestyle skiing and snowboarding events, which were introduced into the Winter Olympics to give Americans something to win.  They really are dull (apart from the pinball-like cross racing, where they knock each other over all the time), despite all the ghastly American style whooping and hollering, yet the BBC (they have ruined Ski Sunday by including all this millennial rubbish too). is showing hours of it.  This is  all because the Olympic authorities are desperate to try to get Americans to be even vaguely interested in the Winter Olympics, as they need their TV revenue.  I can't help think, too, that sports which require judges marks fly in the face of the citius, altius, fortius motto of the games.  Its not faster, higher, stronger and more twiddly.  Sorry, Torvill and Dean.  I enjoy watching ski-jumping but it should just be about how far you go not how elegant you look in flight. 

The other thing the coverage is stuffed with is curling, as we (or, rather, the Scots) have done quite well at this in the recent past but to say the pace is glacial is an understatement.  It was only worth watching when the luminous Anastasia Bryzgalova was on.  Anastasia competes under the Olympic flag, in this games, for the 'Russian athletes who haven't yet been caught taking drugs' team. Everyone is still calling them the Russian team though.  I see a Japanese has been caught taking a banned substance which is embarrassing for the hosts of the next summer Olympics,  No doubt someone will provide him with a tantō sword so that he does the right thing.  If not the Koreans will happily do it for him, I am sure.  I have been to Korea a number of times and they just hate the Japanese.  Maybe they spiked his drink.

I always stayed in the Westin Chosun in Seoul, as it had an Irish pub in the basement where you could get a Guinness for £10 and a pizza for £30.  It was worth it so that you didn't have to eat Korean food,which is quite the most disgusting cuisine I have ever encountered in 70 countries.  I once went to the food hall of the department store next door to the hotel and everything there looked and smelled like it had died at sea and been washed ashore three weeks later.  You couldn't even tell if it was animal, vegetable or fish.  Rancid, is the word for most Korean food, Don't even get me on Bosintang (dog soup), which you can really smell on those Koreans who eat it.

I need to unwrap it this weekend!

I had a big box from Grand Manner this week, as I ordered some African buildings to beat their annoying deadline (since passed) after which they will only sell ready painted items at twice the price of what they sold the bare resin for.  The shop is closed for everything at present.  I do like their stuff but I enjoy painting it, so, price apart, I don't want it painted by someone else in weird acrylic paint.  This is because I am a painter not a gamer! 

After banging on about how I can't paint 18mm any more, I bought into the War and Empire Dark Ages Kickstarter.  Has my new magic optivisor thingy given me ideas above my paint station?  It's all about the Battle of Hastings,of course. Although they have ludicrously big weapons they are lovely figures.  We shall see (literally) whether I can actually paint them!

Finally, after major Shed refurbishments, I am hoping I can get over to Eric the Shed's for an actual wargame next month.  I haven't played a game since our epic Zulu war games last January.  I always feel slightly embarrassed turning up with real wargamers as I can never remember the rules but that is largely because my limited brain capacity is full of other rubbish, like the workings of Export Credit Agencies at present and the El Salvador national infrastructure plan..  There is a trip to Nigeria lurking about at work at the moment but it has been postponed twice so I hope it goes away!

Les Filles d'Atlas

Today's wallpaper is this splendid painting by the French painter Paul Alexandre Alfred Le Roy (1860-1942).  Brought up in Russia, Le Roy moved to Paris when he was seventeen.  Like many orientalist painters of the time, he travelled to North Africa and Turkey and collected items for use in his paintings.  The title of the painting has two meanings, in that these huntresses are depicted in the Atlas mountains, which Le Roy painted on many occasions but they are also supposed to represent some of the Pleiades, the seven daughters of the titan Atlas, who were eventually transformed into stars by Zeus, to keep their father company as he supported the heavens on his shoulders.  He has depicted them in locally inspired North African tribal cloth rather than the more usual classical approach.

Today's music also has a North African aspect to it, in that it is Michael Nyman's The Upside Down Violin which features musicians from the Moroccan group Orquesta Andaluzi de Tetouan.  This appeared on his CD Michael Nyman Live in 1992.  I have over 12 hours worth of Nyman on my iTunes and my favourites include The Draughtsman's Contract, Water Dances and, especially, the propulsive MGV.

I am back blogging!

For various reasons which I will go into at inordinate length on another occasion, I have had no hobby time over the last three months and, therefore, it seemed pointless to do any posts.  I did do a review of Dan Mersey's new Wargmes Guide to the Anglo-Zulu War and now you have an exciting Vuelta a España themed Spanish recipe to enjoy today too, on my food blog.

Follidge!

I had one hobby triumph in that I bought a hot glue gun (thanks for all the encouragement, tips and warning from my Facebook friends) and stuck an aquarium plant to a base. I felt very clever and now have more bases painted and ready to be covered in 'follidge', as the Terrain Tutor calls it.  This has really caught on in our house and even the Old Bat is referring to the 'follidge' in the garden.  I went to Staines at the weekend and bought some lichen and clump follidge in Hobby Craft.  I haven't bought any lichen since about 1972 and was very excited by the chance to buy actual  clump follidge (which sounds like a character in an English Civil War novel) as recommended by the Terrain Tutor (yeah?)

Very good at golf!

I hope I might actually get some time to do some more follidge on Saturday, although I have to take my daughter to and from Kingston to meet her friends for lunch (unlike Guy, she has not learned to drive yet).  The Old Bat ran into the mother of one of Charlotte's friends from junior school at the weekend.  I was asked to conduct a drawing class for them once at the school when they were all about  ten and remember this girl from that.

Then they emigrated to Florida where the girl took up golf and became State champion.  They have now moved back to the UK.  "You can look her up on the internet, her mother told the Old Bat, proudly.  "search her name and then add 'golf'.

"Goodness me, she has grown up!" said the Old Bat.  I thought of that song from Gigi and felt very old.  I wonder whether she would like another drawing lesson?

Paint Table Sunday: Wargames websites, Cycling and Ugly People

Well, it's Paint Table Sunday again (although I missed last week's) rather than Saturday.  I had a bit of an epiphany Saturday morning in that, as I hadn't even started my PTS post (I usually start it on Friday), I thought, why not actually do some painting rather than sit and write rubbish?  

This I did and, as a result, I only have a few stages left to do on my next six Artizan North West Frontier infantry.  The figures are even varnished now (I let the paint dry while I did my post on Molly Peters so I just have to shade the base, varnish that, do the metal work and the static grass. I also painted the faces on my Sikh gunner for the mountain gun, which will complete my TMWWBK force. Then it's back to some more Confederate infantry. 

I thought about progressing with my 1864 Danes as North Star have released some more Danish infantry variants.  I got out the ones I have started and then looked up some more uniform details and realised that I had painted them wrongly, again.  Initially I painted them dark blue and then realised that it needed to be a darker blue so repainted them again (base coat only, thank goodness). Now I have discovered that they are not wearing their (very dark blue) tunics (officers excepted) but greatcoats which were very, very, dark grey (almost black) so I will have to repaint them again.  This is down to paucity of uniform information but I found some on the Lead Adventures Forum. 

Since my little spat with The Miniatures Page I have been looking at the LAF more.  The problem is I find it quite dense.  One of the (few) things I liked about TMP was the news section on the front page and the fact that all new posts in the different sections appeared in chronological order there too.  This is not the case for the LAF so if you have a very wide selection of interests, as I do, you would have to look at every sub-section individually.  I don't have time for this.  The Wargames Website is better in that it does have new products on the front page but because each item has a picture you only get nine at a time.  I don't look at it often enough to keep clicking back pages to find things.  Yet again, the people on Frothers Unite (who wear their pig ignorance like a badge of honour) are joyfully predicting (as they have been for several years) the downfall of The Miniatures Page and, yet again, those on TMP are saying the same about Frothers Unite.  Somebody is wrong!  Fundamentally, the friction between the two is down to differences between US and British cultural attitudes, generally (or a less savoury sub-culture of parts of the two countries) and is irreconcilable, really.  Still, I'm not going to renew my TMP membership in January.

I actually bought some more figures this week. in that North Star announced that as their final stock of Muskets and Tomahawks rules were sold (imminently - they seemed to indicate that they haven't sold well - although obviously well enough to sell out) they would be withdrawing the corresponding figures from their range.  This is odd as you can use the figures in with other rules.  I bought a box of Highlanders (no doubt it was all a cunning marketing plan) as not many manufacturers have modern style ones for the French Indian Wars and one day...  I have to say that firms that withdraw ranges annoy me (I know that they have to make way for new ranges etc.)  North Star, for example sell a fraction of the range of 1866 Prussians that were originally in the Helion range. I also know (because I bought some) that they used to sell Spanish to go with their 1672 range (by a different manufacturer, but completely compatible) but these have now disappeared.  Grand Manner have been withdrawing lots of their resin buildings too and Copplestone's Arctic adventures range have largely gone too.  Trying to explain to the Old Bat that you sometime have to buy in case they disappear is not easy.  "More soldiers!  I need a garden umbrella!" she says before spending £120 on a dress. 

A rare smile from Qintana and a lovely display by the lady on the right

The Giro d'Italia finished last week and saw a great win by Tom Dumoulin, holding off a less than 100% Qintana and Nibali ("are your men on the right pills, perhaps you should execute their trainer").  I should have supported Qintana, really, as he is Colombian but he spends suspiciously long periods not racing on the circuit, holed up in the highlands of Colombia (he is from Boyaca, site of a famous battle in the Latin American Wars of Liberation between Simon Bolivar's Anglo-Colombian army and the Spanish) and also he looks weird.  He looks like a pre-Columbian statue and is about as expressive.

Our man in Ankara

My friend A says I am overly critical of really ugly people, which is true.  Now, people who know me may thinks this is rather indefensible (pot kettle etc.) but at least I used to be nice looking (decades ago, admittedly).  I just don't trust really ugly people in the same way I don't trust very short people.  'It's not their fault!', say my politically correct friends (well, I don't really have any politically correct friends, as if they were politically correct they wouldn't be my friends - I've been deleting more Facebook 'friends' for political nonsense again this last few weeks).  No, it's not their fault but it must effect their personality.  It's like the man from College (I have mentioned before) who thought I stole his girlfriend the summer after we graduated.  When I met him for work purposes decades later (he was a a senior figure in the FCO by then) he was still bitter about it. But then he looked like Plug from the Bash Street Kids, so of course he wasn't going to hang on to a lovely redhead for long.  He married a girl who looked like a tapir, which was still better than he deserved.  I am reminded of the old ITV comedy Brass, where mill owner Timothy West complains that he has to look out from his windows at the hovels of his workers while they get to look at his splendid stately home. 

I had dinner with my old girlfriend from College, K, last Friday week.  I hadn't seen her for twenty years but, basically she hadn't changed and looked very, very fit indeed (in every way).  She still looked great in jeans (the ones she wore at College looked sprayed on and my then girlfriend C had a thing about K's bottom - it all got a bit lipstick lesbian) and her arms were impossibly toned.  She was politely critical of the way I had gone to seed, so with that ringing in my ears ("so you'll listen to K and not me!" moaned the Old Bat) and the example of the Giro I have been going out on my bike most days. I even bought some new cycling gloves to replace my disintegrated ones from the nineties.  Of course three weeks of Italian food and wine while watching the Giro didn't help, really, and I have just bought some Beaujolais to go with the Critérium du Dauphiné, which is on at the moment. 

I have spent the last week catching up on all the TV I have missed while watching the cycling.  Versailles, actually featured a battle last week, although all the French were in blue and all the Dutch in red, which even with my limited knowledge of the period I know isn't right. There were no pikes, either.  However, in the same episode they also had Allegri's Miserere being sung in Louis XIV's chapel, despite it not being performed outside of the Sistine Chapel until a hundred years later, when Mozart transcribed it from memory.  Dodgy history, again. Still, this Friday we had Anna Brewster emerging naked from the bath, so the show is forgiven.

I have bought a lot of music this last week or so (The Rocketeer complete 2 CD soundtrack, The Man Who Would be King soundtrack, The Right Stuff soundtrack,  several CDs by Canadian/Russan jazz singer Sophie Milman and Marvel's Agent Carter soundtrack) but today I am listening to electro string quartet Bond, one of my guilty pleasures, even though they do  sound a bit like that dreadful K-tel Hooked on Classics LP from the early eighties.  When Bond appeared in 2000 they got into a spat with the people running the classical charts who removed their LP from the top as it was too poppy.  This engendered lots of comments from them about the snooty classical establishment stopping wider appreciation of classical music.  This would have been a good argument if they had actually listed the original composers of the works in their CD liner.  But they didn't, so it was hard to argue that you were spreading appreciation of classical music.  At their same time their record company banned them from using this shot of them on their album cover.  Really?  Their own record company banned them?  The picture, did however, appear on the cover of their single so the record company weren't that annoyed but by then the press around the so called banning had seen their sales jump.

Anyway, I was rather surprised to see them appear on quiz show, celebrity Eggheads this week, all looking, well, a bit middle aged.  So far the 'celebrities' on the twenty or so specials have been so unknown they make the cast of celebrity Big Brother look like the Hollywood Walk of Fame.  Basically, they have just been random people from BBC daytime shows no-one watches.  To make up the five the team requires they had bought along David Arnold, the James Bond, Independence Day, Sherlock and Stargate composer.  Good grief, people I have actually heard of, I thought.  Then they went and did what no other celebrity team had done in this run and won the show.  The people appearing on celebrity Eggheads have been, on the whole dismally ignorant,  It makes me despair for the next generation, it really does.  Unfortunately knowledge of popular 'culture' seems to have replaced real knowledge.  One of the contestants this week said he hadn't read a book since he was sixteen.

The Wave and the Pearl (1862)

Today's wallpaper is by French painter Paul-Jacques-Aimé Baudry (1828-1886) who is largely forgotten today but at the time this picture was regarded as one of the greatest nudes of the nineteenth century.  Most of his best known works were murals in Paris but he did a number of reclining nudes like this.