Time for some Blog Necromancy

 I´ve been neglecting this blog again... time to attempt to raise it from the dead again.

The lure of social media has been strong and so I´ve been posting a lot of stuff on platforms like Facebook and Instagram as that seems to be the place were most people are located these days.  

And yet I am not a friend of these platforms with their endless feeds of content, with little option to filter for special fields of interest.  So after some consideration, I´ll be trying to give this blog another chance. 

Don´t expect many updates or a regular schedule... 

Here are some new sculpts I have been working on:

These will supplement my Australians for Vietnam, which were released last year and are already available in the shop:

As well as the Vietcong Sets armed with a variety of different weapons:

And to not make this just an advertising show, here are some more Work-In-Progress Afghan Captives. 

These guys popped up as a side project as I worked on more Taliban (pics coming soon). I had some reference pics with captives / hostages in my collection and after looking at them for hours I felt they deserved their own miniatures. 

These minis are also different in that I am using polymer clay here. 1 or 2 years back I bought myself some BeesPutty and tried working with Oven-hardening clay. It´s a bit different from working with epoxy putties, can be challenging especially when modelling the arms - but it is very rewarding in its own way and perfect to sculpt minis that have their arms close to their bodies such as these captives... 

or this Tank commander that I was commissioned to sculpt: 

New Bush War Releases and Work in Progress

Hi all,

 

as promised, I´m starting with the updates on what I´ve been up to in the last few months.

I want to start by introducing some new models I sculpted not too long ago.

Brand New Sets

 

 

African Riflemen

 

 

 African Tribal Warriors

 

 

Released a while ago, but not presented here before: 

 

 African Insurgents with Support Weapons 

African Insurgenst with AK Skirmishing

You can get these new sets at my homepage here

 

Or click on the banner: 

 

 

Work in Progress for the next batch of Releases: 

 

 

Portuguese G3 Firing

 

 

 

African Army - MachineGunners

More is in the pipeline, but you´ll have to wait a little longer for more pictures ;)

On the Workbench - January 2018

This blog has gone silent again, hasn´t it?
Well, as usual when this happens, things have been going on behind the scenes but I didn´t feel much of an urge to take pictures, process them and put them online.

Still not feeling much like it, but at least I managed to take some shots of the various projects I have been or am working on right now.

Last week I finished these river pieces. I´ve long wanted to add some rivers to my terrain selection and finally pushed the project through after gathering some motivation and inspiration over the christmas holidays

I also worked quite a bit on Code Red (my Modern Warfare Ruleset) in the first two weeks of January. One addition to the Rules was stats for MRAPs for the Americans and Brits. 

During the work on the rules I felt the urge to add an MRAP to my collection.  There are some kits out there, and I might get one at some point, but I didn´t feel like spending money.  In the spur of the moment I remembered how other people achieve great results by scratchbuilding and started chipping away at some foam and plasticard.

  

After a few days, here we are with the scratchbuilt MRAP chassis. The CROWs is magnetized and can rotate. Right now I´m working on the wheels which are a bit of a challenge - too big, too small or too irregular and they start looking ugly.

 

On the sculpting front, I started another set of Special Forces -  these will be a Team in CQB-poses, one Pointman with a pistol (or out of ammo switching to his sidearm - you decide), a breacher with a Shotgun - and not yet started, an operator preparing a grenade or flashbang before the assault.

 

 Hope you enjoyed the small insight into my WIP stuff. 

I finished a lot more stuff in December that I did not take pictures of.  When my blogging motivation returns, I shall take some photos and put them up here. 

Until then, happy wargaming!

As they lay dead

Just a quickie today - finished three Insurgent Casualties today which will be part of the next batch of releases.

Your orders, Sir?

By Fire and Sword requires order markers to play -  three kinds, to be precise:

• Move
• Charge
• Defend

Lacking these markers turned some of my first games into an ugly mess, as we had to improvise using paper slips to display our orders.

Being a cheapo, I refuse buying expensive tin order markes when I can build them easily. After our latest game with paper markers I decided it was time to prepare some proper markers.

These are pretty simple if you know how they are made.
The base are my usual synthetic cork pieces cut into slices - you might as well use metal, plastic or coins, doesn´t matter.
The symbol on the marker is a slip of plasticard cut into triangles and rectangles, which I then used to build these simple symbols by gluing them onto my base.  Then they got a treatment of oxide paste and a bit of gravel on the symbol-side before they went into painting.

Done.



Of course orders aren´t the only thing I´ve been working on. I also completed the last base of Cavalry to add another 3 Boyar Son bases to my force for our game scheduled tomorrow.

As these troops are not exactly high performers, I also prepared some casualty markers for my Muscovites. These were a bit more work than the orders, as I sculpted these from scratch.

I actually tried the Tony Barton tile technique (read more about it here) using oven-baking clay for some of them. For casualties that worked quite well - which prompted me to take the experiment one step further and try a full figure.

Read more about how that went soon ;)

Russifying Cossacks - Making more Boyar Sons

One of the things that are starting to annoy me somewhat is the ungodly amount of crappy Boyar Sons that I need to produce and paint only to see them flee from the battlefield at first opportunity.

After making most of the Boyar Sons for the first units from scratch, I´ve started to take some shortcuts for the next batch of Boyar Sons. There will be fully sculpted figures, but I´m starting to mix in converted Totentanz figures  (Tartars and Cossacks).  With a little bit of conversion, they can easily be russified - and much quicker than building an entire rider from scratch.

Below are two Totentanz Cossacks, one with minor conversion (just added a full beard), another one up-armored with a thick brigantine.

And here is the latest scratch-built cavalryman.

 

I was also able to finish my Reiter unit of two bases, but haven´t taken any pictures yet. This is something I´ll fix after my holiday.  Until then - happy wargaming to all readers! 

 

Cacadores - AR10 Portugese

They´ve been requested for a long time and I finally got around to sculpt them:  Portugese AR-10 Riflemen for the Bush Wars in Angola and Mozambique.

Wonder Women - New Women Militia Preview

New miniatures coming up - the next batch of masters is ready and getting packed up for casting.

Among them:  New Women Militia  / Militiawomen  / whatever they are called ;)

I still find that I struggle a bit more with female faces, but there is a small and steady improvement - my personal favorite is the kneeling figure with the beret.

You think you´re Special...

After a lot of Fantasy and painting in 28mm, it´s time to turn back to Sculpting and Modern in 20mm. Progress has been slow on the latest set of miniatures, but I´m finally coming close to sending a new batch into production.

Here´s the first pack of the Summer 2017 releases coming up in the next weeks I hope:

With this set I want to provide an addition to the already existing set of Special Operatives in Light Gear.

The Golova - Russian Skirmish Force Command

Time for another update on my ongoing project.  Next week I´ll have to be ready to field at least the most basic skirmish force for our wargaming day. To work towards that goal, I´ve greated my Commander and russified the Musician and Bannerman from the Totentanz Mounted Cossacks Command set.

Together, thes should make a nice command stand to represent my Golova, the commander of my Muscotive Skirmish Force.

With all the work done so far, I´ll have to finish the Command Stand and the last two Boyar Son cavalrymen to get a basic playable skirmish force on the table.  I´ll probably have to lend a unit of cavalry to represent a skirmish sotnia if need be - but we´ll see.

Then I can focus my attention on adding the Reiters and paint mounted Cossacks to represent my Servant Cossacks when mounted and moving on horseback.

So far, my Scratch-Build Boyar Sons unit looks like this:

Two more to paint.

Recruitment Rapport - Mustering the Tzarist Forces

The buildup of my Muscovite Skirmish Force is progressing.
Since my last entry, more Miniatures have been sculpted, painted and purchased.

Dismounted Servant Cossacks -  left and middle base with my own designs, right base with Totentanz Foot Cossacks - lovely figures :)

 First member of my Reiter unit who are supposedly better-performing than any of the other cavalry options in my intended build....

 

...such as the Boyar Sons, one of which can be seen below.  These are the Muscovite Levy of the Nobility and are said to perform poorly.

 

My intended build for the first skirmish games: 

Basic Skirmish Force with 2 Boyar Son Sotnias replaced by 2 Servant Cossacks of equal strength (4 FSP) 

• Servant Cossacks (3 Bases)
• Servant Cossacks (3 Bases)
• Boyar Son Sotnia (2 Bases)
• Boyar Son Sotnia (2 Bases)
• Boyar Son Sotnia (2 Bases)
• Additional Skirmish Sotnia (3 Bases) - for the Miestnichestvo  Special Rule 

•  Reiter Sotnia  (2 Bases)  (+1 FSP):  + 2 bases by the "Ludiej Unas Mnoga" Special Rule
• +4 Boyar Son Bases (+1 FSP)   - to bring the base force up to strength 
• Skirmish Sotnia (+1 FSP)

This will be the guiding template to build my force. Most of the Base Force is complete, the most annoying part is the Additional Skirmish Sotnia as I don´t know if I´ll actually use it in my first engagement.

Raising the Levy - Muscovite Army in the Works

It´s time for a little update!  Since last I posted about my plans to raise my Muscotive Army, a lot of progress has been made.

My lovely little horses have indeed arrived a while ago and I instantly started raising the Boyar Son Cavalry unit. Obviously stratch-building them with only the horses, putty, some metal dollies and plastic strips is taking some time, hence the long intervall since the last update. But I´m finally able to show you the first results both painted and the next batch as Work in Progress:

Here is the first base of Boyar Sons, sculpted on AB horses:

And another base finished as sculpts, but yet to be painted:

Humble Beginnings - The Muscotives are gathering forces!

Today I´m going to show you my first results in building my Muscovite Forces, as promised in my last post.

The core of the force so far is formed by a pike and shot infantry unit. The miniatures were made all by me - my first attempts to do 15mm models - in one of my earlier attempts to start a force. Unfortunately I soon realised that this kind of formation is not suitable to field a quickly playable skirmish force, as these are either cavalry or dragoons, not pike and shot units.

Later, I laid my hands on some cheap cavalrymen that I found suitable to represent Russian Traditional Noble Cavalry - even if not historically accurate, these riders at least give the right feeling and impression.  Here they are, painted up, representing some Boyar Sons Cavalry bases:

Some interesting features that you might not discover on first glance:

Christmas Break is over!

Hey all,

I took a few weeks off of wargaming, painting and sculpting during christmas and new year to spend some time with my family. But fear not, I´m back now and have already commenced work.

I´m not so much into painting right now, but I made good progress with sculpting a few new minis.
So today I want to show you another part of the new Portugese Support Weapons:

This LMG-Gunner carries a HK21 into battle and was requested by several supporters at the Guild, who helpted to bring the range into being in the first place.

 

I´ve also prepared another MG3/MG42-Gunner to provide an additional. more combat oriented pose and supply more options for gamers who already have a lot of riflemen, but few support weapons. 

New French and Portugese Support Weapons

Okay, time for a small break on the painted miniature streak  - we´ll continue with that tomorrow.
I wanted to show you some progress on the sculpting part as well. 

It´s already been a long time since the release of my Portugese Colonial War infantry, and though it´s long been requested and I always wanted to add another Set of support weapon, I never got to it because of higher priority work (commissions, replacing old sets, fleshing out other important ranges).

Now I´ve finally started to create another set of Portugese for Colonial conflicts, carrying a few heavy weapons including a light Mortart a light Machine Gun and this guy:

The other figures are still top secret, but I´m sure there´ll be more pictures at some point ;)
I´m also planning to add more Support to the French, including this Marksman as well as an AT4 Antitank-Soldier among others.

 

 

That´s it with our short sneak peek on the new minis, tomorrow I´ll have more pictures of painted minis for you!

Quick Shots of new Masters

Hey folks,

time to show some more masters for the impending new releases. These were very quick shots taken before I packed everything for shipment to the foundry.

This is the third figure on the new YPJ-Leadership set, which also contains these two girls.

 

 Then, we have the remaining three SADF-troopers with R4 rifles, who are part of a remodeled SADF-02 set that has been phased out this summer.  These SADF-guys will make a reappearance in November in a new set of 8 troopers.

And another view of the same minis.

African Rebels & Women Militia

After a long time without an update here, I´ve got another set of pictures for soon to be released models.

As part of a commission, I´m currently working on another set of three Women Militia fighters. The first batch of two sets with 7 figures will be released when these are produced. The entire commission is planned to be around 20 figures strong, but the buildup will be very slow as the customer wants to pay them bit by bit and I need space in the production moulds for other figures,  The sets will be publicly available when released, which keeps the cost down for the commissioner and still makes it worthwhile for me.

 The third model is almost ready, I´m sure a photo will appear in very short time :)

Furterhmore, I have prepared a replacement for the very old  African Insurgents with Kalashnikovs.
The old set was among the very first that I produced - I´m hoping that more people use them as Opfor now that they have proper models with a nicer look.

Both sets are probably coming Late October or Early November!

Private Protection Detail - Military Contractor Preview

As announced, the resculpting of old sets continues. After almost finishing the new Africans with Battle Rifles (photo turned out crappy so I didn´t upload it) I have reworked the Set containing the African Dictator / General and his protection detail.

Actually, the name is not really that fitting - you might call it VIP with Personal Protection as well.
So, here is the first foreign mercenary hired to protect my VIP:

As you can see, he is also suitable for other theatres and might even be doubling for a CIA operator or SpecOp Operator in light gear.

Very versatile figure, and I hope the set will be more sought after when the rework is done.

Old and New - Replacing Old Minis

Hey folks,

small update in between to show off some new sculpts.
These two are built to replace two very old and dissatisfactory models in one of my Insurgent sets:

I tried to keep the poses very similar to the originals, but I changed the arm on the RPG-gunner, hoping to improve castability without having his arm cut off.

Going into the remoulded set of INS-04, which has to be moved to a new mold anyway.
These include the original figures.
If you can find the models that are being replaced, you win nothing but will feel great ;P

"Gotcha!" - Russian Marksman (SVD)

Russian Marksman number two, zeroing in on his foes.

He is going into a set with the other marksman (presented yesterday) and the PKM gunners (here)

Tomorrow, more painted stuff...