Quick Start

Another week of working hard looks like it is in the offing. Already I am getting static from all quarters and I need to find even more paperwork. Still, enough griping as I also have some painting to do.

So another mixed bag this week. Last year I was all about getting blocks of stuff done. This ended with big queues and feeling just a little demotivated. At the moment, this really is working for me. So four more Mantic Star Saga figures are on the table. I did a little bit on these last week. There is one Artizan Designs cowboy which has been hanging around as well. the biggest chunk will be the Star Wars Legion Rebels. These have been staring at me for a few weeks now so probably time to crack on with them. Lastly there are three Malifaux figures. I plan to spend some extra time on these and get them as perfect as I can. It's about time I did something with them. They cost enough when I got them and they have been gathering dust for ages. Maybe it will push me into doing something practical with them.

End Of The Week - Too Tired To Stand Up (25)

I have managed to make most of my goals this week and exceeded a few of them. So all in all I am quite happy with myself. This was going to be a simple week. I was expecting to be busy. I was. Tired now and ready for bed and it is not yet 9pm.

The week began with a plan to paint ten figures. At some point I added one on the quiet because I thought it was going to be easy. Most of what I planned to paint this week was from the Star Saga game by Mantic. From the first time I saw it I liked the idea of buying it. It was the right price, there were plenty of figures and a decent amount of usable terrain. There were many sci-fi games they would work for. I had some ideas for the X-Com game that has been on the gaming burner of a low heat for about two decades. Mostly at the time I thought they would be good for what I had planned for Titansgrave: The Ashes Of Valcana, a game I really like the idea of but doubt I would get too many players.

Anyway the first set of figures I decided to paint were the security guards. I played about with the fleshtones a bit and I think they came out ok. This is despite the detail on the faces being a little soft as they are plastic figures. In the end I was okay with them. Not my best work but acceptable for tabletop standard.

Then there were a couple of hero figures. Most of the heroes don't seem to work with many of my ideas but I think I will come round to doing them eventually.These models were, to my mind at least, nice to paint although the face on the female warrior could have used a but more details.

In my head there were three more dark age figures to do and I thought I planned to paint the three. I could only find the two though. I doubt the horn playing musician will get used a lot so I didn't put a huge amount of work into it. Some work went into both but not a huge amount. They came out alright though.

Another one of the big plans at one point was to run a superhero game. Whilst there is plenty of Heroclix stuff out there but the models, to be fair, a bit kack. Really what I wanted was to go for nice metal figures at around the right price. At about £5 this model from Reaper was not the cheapest figure I have ever brought. It did work out okay though and I am very happy with it.

By Wednesday, with eleven figures painted, it was all pretty much done. There was a few bits of detailing to do but not enough to keep me busy. So I had a rummage. Having enjoyed painting the guards I thought I would have a go at some of the others. So much for an easy week.

During the process of rummaging I some military types from Star Saga to do. These were an easy enough paint job. There were some mould lines that were hard to get out and so I ended up leaving them.  A simple paint job with mainly shades of green (I think five in total) and that was most of them done. These are pretty good for hard sci-fi and I can already see a number of uses for them.

Somehow I didn't stop there. What do you call these figures? Well I have no idea. Some sort of failed (or possibly successful) experiment. These are big hulking figures (with the faces looking not entirely unlike the big green wrecking machine).

 
So in the end there wa a total of twenty five figures done and dusted. This sounds like a lot but there majority are plastic figures with limited details so relatively easy to complete. Along the way I worked on some more terrain. For a while I have been wanting some standing stones. These are not yet finished. On top of that I have done a little bit of work on five of the fifteen figures I have planned for next week.

Supply Markers

The Walking Dead: All Out War by Mantic Games is my favourite apocalypse game at the moment. Nuclear war (especially Fallout) and other forms of zombies are pretty close. Does that sound a little insane? Maybe I am a little insane. I am comfortable with that :)

Anyway, I like the idea of skirmish gaming and post-apocalypse skirmish gaming is particularly appealing. TWD:AOW is still drawing me in although I have only played a few games of it. I keep looking at it and want to buy more of it.What has been on the list of things to do for a while is the supply counters.

Supply counters, or something like it, seem to be a facet of a lot of skirmish games. I was looking at doing something like this for Scavenge, Skirmish, Survive. This made me think I should put some effort into these thinking I might use them in other games as well. If nothing else they will do as scatter terrain. The bases are either basically painted green or sand. Over time I have developed a box of basically green and basically sandy terrain so I might as well make stuff that would fit for either.

Really Yesterday's Post

Having spent much of the day shivering and sleeping I thought it was time I posted what I did yesterday. Things planned for the week are now getting close to completion. So all in all I am feeling quite happy. Despite the shivering.

I am even getting close to finishing off the terrain. There are loads of bits to do, enough to do three linear feet, which has kind of put me off so far. Still it's there and and I want to get it done for a couple of game I have planned.

Now I thinking about next week. I have found eight figures that I think I purchased in 1992. This would be a nice thing to get out of the Lead Mountain. Not the oldest thing I own but probably the oldest thing I can find at the moment. They turned up a few years ago but there is one missing. I was hoping to find the missing one before I started but what the hell. If I do get round to painting them I have no idea what I will use them for. At the moment I just want to.

Modernish Barricades

The post apocalypse is never far from my mind, at least in a gaming sense. Despite Bethesda recently ruining my gaming experience, I do not feel that the world is about to end. I think my interest goes back to reading The Postman by David Brin after reading a review in White Dwarf of all places. A quick reading and rereading of Day of the Triffids and I am kind of a fan of the genre. Zombies and nuclear war seem to be my preferred way to end the world. The Walking Dead and Fallout out gave been my most recent influences in tabletop gaming but I have a lot of love for ideas from the old RPG Aftermath and almost anything done George Romero and a number of other books and computer games.

Finding players has been hard in the past so I haven't pushed it. In there here and now things are not so bad on that score.  So I am looking at this as a possibility again so I figured it might be time to do something about it. I don't have many figures left to paint and those that I do have I can't find. What I can find is some terrain.

In the end (so to speak) it's close enough to the modern era that the terrain at least should be able to do double duty. What is available is a bit of a mixed bag. I wanted them to all tie together and look relatively uniform and with a lot of the longer I wanted a bit more stability and I wanted it to match what I had done in the past. If I do get X-Com off the ground this year I will need some terrain for that. I have medium terms plans for a zombie and one based in post nuclear war London. Part of me wants to get into 28mm modern but I have a few reservations about that.

I wanted a range of sizes some of which, if not all could be used as barricades and general scatter. Large quantities of tire piles seem to figure highly in a lot of games so I purchased some from Crooked Dice. These first four are produced by them although there is a crate found in my bit's box (I have no idea who by) added to make up the length. Then is is also an oil drum which I think is Tamiya.

The crowd barriers are from Ainsty Casting. I love these guys for terrain. Hopefully these will hold up to the punishment but will need to be carefully look after.

Most of what I have to hand is from Mantic's The Walking Dead : All Out War. Nice details on the terrain as I am starting to expect from Mantic. Some have been added to with stuff that I have handing around to make up the length. Some of the barrels are from a Tamiya kit I got back in the 1980's and other bits have been around for well over a decade. It's nice to get some of things used rather than just hanging around.

In total there is just short of three feet/ninety centimetres of stuff. It's never enough but it's a distinct improvement. I have some Mantic supply tokens to be done. These are a lot smaller but have a bit more detail. Think these will be a project for next week as I expect the Stormtroopers are going to take a lot of work.

Happy New Year Or 2019 - The Plan

So the end of a another year. Time for the usual renewal and looking forward to the future kind of post. Right now it does feel like a time of renewal. The New Year appears to be a time when my life is about to change. Significantly so. In previous years this has been a fundamentally upbeat post. It is odd that it was this day last year that everything started to change. Today things seem very precarious still. My predictions for the year to come seem to be more vague ideas than they have been in years gone by. This year has seen me me lose my auntie, my home, my relationship, my beloved car and about seventy five percent of my income. I have recently quit my job and now have to find one. Where I am living may be untenable soon. Many of these problems may sort themselves out and I have a feeling they will. Sadly it looks like nothing is going to sort out Fallout 76.

This year has been a bit of a let down on the gaming front at least so I am at a bit of a loss of what to write this year. After splitting up at the beginning of the year I haven’t had a proper paint station. So, whilst I have done a little bit of painting, I haven't finished a figure since March. I guess this is the real reason why I haven’t done much blogging this year.

I have been blogging for almost seven years now. This year has seen a bit of a bump. When I look at the blog numbers, the post count seems to support this. The post count plummets in April and there have even been three months with no posts at all. That said it has not been my worst year for posting. Somehow I have managed to put on about sixty five thousand hits. Not all of these have been from dodgy sites in Russia either so not bad when all considered.

It has also been a year where money has been tight. I have purchase very few figures. Again less than any other year. The grand total would be less than fifty. I have had about as many again brought for me. I am very grateful for that especially as I have had little free money.

There have been a couple of things I am proud off this year. Firstly, and mostly related to painting was the fact that I took the time to clear my bench of part painted stuff. This took a good chunk of time at the beginning of the year. Like many of you I have a significant lead mountain (and plastic and resin) but the part painted mountain was driving me up the wall. It felt good to get all the part painted stuff done. Then of course I realised that I have even more part painted stuff but that is by the by.

Perhaps the best for me was that I finished the rules for the Viking game. Now formally Northmen: A Time Of Sagas. I have been tinkering with them but they are playable. I have also done a lot of world building. Now I am happy to play the game and plan to start the ball rolling in February.

Figure painting wise this has been the worst year in a decade. My much maligned paint station is now sorely missed. Currently the shortage of space makes the prospect of getting another workstation unlikely in the short term.

Of those new figures Blood Bowl has featured highly. This has amounted to about a third of what has arrived across the year. I now have what I need to do Doom Lords, Skaven, and Dwarves with a few other bits and pieces. Last year the Skaven Team was the next one to be done. In terms of painting I have not painted a single figure for this game this year although I did finish the Orc team troll that had been sat around, 95% finished since the year before. All in all a bit of a wash out and I have not even started on what I had planned which was two full teams so in the region of thirty to thirty five figures.

At the beginning of the year Titansgrave, or rather the figures for it was catching my attention. Many of the figures could be used in other games. Some Sci-fi dwarves were finished. Obviously there were not enough of these. 

😏 

I have no specialists and no female characters and so may get some of these this year. One of my friends plays a lot of Shadowrun so I figured they they would also work out for that. I up-painted some Future Savages for this game. I really like these figures, which were designed by Mark Copplestone. These will do double duty for post-apocalypse. Also doing double duty for Titansgrave and post-apocalypse were the chaos cultists. I was quite pleased with how these turned out in the end. As part of the plan I would have liked to do some conversions of the plastic gnolls originally purchased for Frostgrave I planned, and would have liked to have brought some more figures for his game. That said I think I pretty much achieved my target for the year on this one. Like most other games, this will be a few years in the making I think.

The Viking game I run was expected to take up a big chunk of my painting time this year. It didn’t. I have plenty of stuff primed for the game from the year before last. If I totalled up all the fantasy figures I have done this year I might have painted about twenty, many of which are not really Viking in nature. I was expecting to paint fifty and maybe ninety. So again a definite undershoot. Frostgrave was also part of this years plan. Some of the figures might be useful for this but not many. I have more or less given up on this as a project but I suspect that most of them might get used for other things.

Zombies is another failure. I was going to take part in the annual Zomtober event. I even had figures purchased last year that I had planned to use. I did get six Mantic figures for Christmas which was nice. I had hoped to get about thirty figures done. I think I managed four as part of finishing off what I had on the bench. There is still a pile of older plastic stuff as well but I was expecting to get a fair chunk of the Mantic stuff I got last year done. I was hoping to paint at least a trays worth of figures so again a bit of a bust.

Kingdom Death Monster is something that I would really like. It is a game that I would throw a lot of effort at. Sadly I haven’t had the money and whilst I could be looking at it it as a present that is just too much money to spend. This project looks like it has died on the vine.

As far as background projects go nothing has really advanced. 6mm Napoleonics hasn’t gone anywhere. Weird War II/VBCW has seen some figures being primed but nothing more. In my head the 15mm mecha game has become a 28mm mecha game. I have done some work on the idea and have updated the rules but nothing more. Earlier on in the year I did some work on my ideas for a Savage World game set in the Underground of a post-apocalypse London. Some of the figures I painted at the beginning of the year will count as progress on this front. I quote “The English Civil Figures I have seem destined to stay in their box and the super hero figures are probably going to stay unpainted.” about sums it up.

X-Com is a game I talk about almost every year (going back for twenty years) and this year I haven’t really done much of that I haven’t painted or brought any figures although it has been on my mind. The new computer game left me a little uninspired. Having talked about it with a few people there seems to be some interest in the game so maybe things will progress. I would be happy to get a game on the table. At the moment it’s on the back burner but maybe I could get some stuff done later in the year.

In total I have painted just under one hundred and twenty figures this year. This is about half of what I had hoped. This only really happened because I had a good start to the year. Even with this limited amount of figures done the lead mountain has officially gone down this year. The New Cruelty is very unhappy.

This is the point where I start making predictions for 2019. This seems like a fools game at the moment. There are some things I would like to do but I think I am going to be a little less ambitious this year.

So for the new year Blood Bowl is something I would like to work on. I have planned to get some Forgeworld pieces for the Skaven team but haven’t had the money. So I would like to get this done in 2019. I would like to get another team, probably he Dwarves, done as well and maybe buy some more figures and paint another team as well. I have the Doom Lords in boxes and it would be nice to get them done as well. As I put a lot of effort into these figures they tend to take up a lot of time so this might be more ambitious (already being ambitious within a paragraph of me saying that I wasn’t going to do that) than I can manage. Some more Nurgle and the Champions of Death would be nice. Two teams of about eighteen to twenty figures would be a reasonable objective.

Having played in a Star Wars RPG this year I have been taken with the idea of running that game although probably as a Savage Worlds game rather than one of the published rules. Solo was a great film no matter what the critics say and I have watched Rogue One several times. All this keeps giving me ideas. About half the figures that have come my way this year have been for the Star Wars Legion game. I thought about the Imperial Assault game but like the figures for Legion better even if they are massively too big. These are ripe for conversion. I suspect that I will be buying some more and maybe some conversion stuff. I would like to see sixty figure/two foam trays full of figures completed.

As I am going to be running the Viking Game and I am feeling the fantasy vibe, I suspect that I will be painting figures for this came at some point during the year. If I throw in some more mainstream fantasy stuff in this section I can see me doing quite a lot of work. I have a load of small lizardmen primed and based and ready to go, just like last year oddly. The same can be said for some GW LOTR rangers which is fancy more as thieves or bandits. There are gnolls and cultists too. Celtic dwarves and some gnomes (not for the Viking game) from CP Models are still on the wish list. The latter will probably get ordered in bulk and converted for Titansgrave. There are some halfling figures due out that might catch my attention (some of which may end up being converted for Titansgrave). I would be surprised if I painted less than fifty this year although a few more would be nice.

Zombies are bound to play a part if I get my painting mojo going. There is plenty of Mantic stuff still to do including the Made To Suffer expansion that I got for Christmas. A couple of boxes of prone figures might get purchased and Here’s Negan might come my way this year. Whilst I guess I have sixty plus figures to paint I would be happy if I managed a foam tray full/about thirty figures.

As far as background projects go there is stuff I would like to work on. The apocalypse is never far from my mind. It would be nice to do some work on this he post-apocalypse in the London Underground seems like it might see some work and some of these may morph into Fallout. I have been playing Red Dead Redemption II a bit and I might think about doing some more cowboys but this seems less likely (it should have been Fallout 76 but I really don't want to talk about that right now). Having seen a few things about strange happening in Arizona (an area that I am drawn to for gaming for some reason) I might try and do some Conspiracy X like.

The New Cruelty has called for about five figures per week. Obviously this hasn’t happened this year and I don’t think it is going to happen this year. I am not expecting to start painting in the next month or so. When I do I am not expecting to have as much time on my hands. Setting a target of an average of ten figures a month rather than five per week seems more appropriate. The New Cruelty will be a little less cruel this year.

The future of the blog, well it is still pretty secure. I would like to think I am going to do better than I expect at the moment. I would like to get back into it a bit more so would hope to do at least two posts per week. If I can manage a little more I may even get to a thousand posts. This means that I need to do something to blog about. This year is another birthday milestone for me. This seems to be a year for a change.

So here we are. It’s a watch and wait kind of year in the offing.

Thanks for reading the blog this year. I really do do it for me but it is nice to know that somebody else is out there and reading what I have to write. A happy new year to you all. Hope it’s a good one and brings you everything you want.

End Of The Week (That Was) - Good News/Bad News

This has not been a bad week all round on the painting front. Along the way I have managed to get  ten sci-fi dwarf figures painted to a reasonably good tabletop standard. To my amazement this only took about three days.

The plan after that had been to finish off the chaos cultists I have for Titansgrave and any number of post-apocalyptic projects which might become a Scrappers game. The figures had already been put together but the bases needed flocking and the figures themselves needed priming. So with this done they were ready to paint. Then the real world got in the way in the form of my other half developing a bad back and the cat being ill. This has delayed me for a bit. Although I have managed to get some painting done today the cat has again taken my seat.

So with the week that comes I have the chaos cultists to finish. I have made a good start on these already so I am confident that this will be done by mid week (assuming the cat does not get in the way). If things go my way there are another half dozen space dwarves to finish off. Next weekend I am away at funeral so I doubt much will get finished if I have to leave it until then so I won't aim to over achieve.

After that I have the miniatures for Star Saga to do. These arrived the other day and I guess I will get round to posting some pictures of them in due time. All the Star Saga stuff will form part of the X-Com and Titansgrave projects so are probably going to get pushed to the top of the list. There are also some old Grenadier (now Mirliton) troopers which I have been tinkering with, Basically another background project to be painted any time I have some paint I don't want to go to waste.

Next week I am going to start do some RPGing again on Monday night. It's Rogue Trader, not my prefered game (well I have never played it so I am open minded about it). At least it will get me back into the swing of things. I am hoping to get back to FabLab at least on Thursday.

So the New Cruelty is satisfied. I have hit my painting target. I have hit all my exercise goals every day and a bit more besides. I have even managed a game this week. Well done me.

Some Progress On Zomtomber

I can't believe that I have got this far into the week and not picked up a paintbrush. Concussion and a birthday seem to have kept me away from the bench. Today I have managed to get back to it and things have gone pretty well. there has been a bit of quiet time away from the distractions which has allowed me to get on with things.

Figuring out where to start has been the hardest bit. The figures I showed the other day are not the only ones in the queue, when I went looking I found all these minis and the cars as well. It is still Zomtober but I am already thinking about what to do after the end of the month. There are plenty more to do but maybe some civilians are needed. One of the figures types I like a lot in the TWD: AOW range are the frightened unarmed civilians. I can see a few uses for these coming up.

Still a bit more work to do yet.

Happy Birthday To Me AND The Start of Zomtober Week 5

The day hasn't been too bad to me so far. The best gift was a copy of Terraforming Mars which is a game I have been dying to play for ages. A load of The Walking Dead: All Out War Stuff that I am going to have to send back. Amazingly a load of the minis were missing. I can't imagine what happened to them. Strangely I have a load of primed zombies and survivors on the workbench.

Anyway, this is the start of Week 5, the final week, of Zomtober. I haven't made up my mind about what I am going to do this week but I think pretty much everything is now primed and ready to go. There are a few specials, not on the picture, that I might end up painting. They have been on the bench for ages and are probably in the background of some of the earlier shots.

Zomtober Week 4

Again, not quite finished. The weather here has been way too bad to spray varnish the figures. It has been one storm after another here. But once  they are varnished I can play about with the bases and all should be good.

 The end of Week 4 already. Where did the time go?

The Start Of Zomtober Week 4

The good work continues but this is going to be another hard week.

More Mantic The Walking Dead: All Out War stuff. Zombies from a variety of sets.

Zomtober Week 3

Really the title of this post should be Zomtober Week 3 - as far as I got.

There is still a few bits to do on the paint work. Across all the figures, there is plenty I am not happy with. There are also a few bits that are just not done. The basing still needs to be dealt with to. This is probably going to be put off for a bit.

The New Cruelty is not happy. I am not happy.

Well except I am. I have had a bloody good day, a nice evening meal in a restaurant and I have managed to put as smile on one of the lads faces on his birthday.

Next week...Zombies.

Progress, In A Lot Of Different Directions

Well I have had a blip for a few days but I seem to be over it now. Somewhere along the line I have managed to get a solid three hours of painting in today. Whilst I am not speeding through the work, I am at least making progress.

A little bit of everything here

What I am lacking is a bit of focus. For a while now I have been wandering off part way through projects. Tonight for instance, I have worked on all of these miniatures. I think I've worked it out. Maybe. The carrion crawlers (without the beards) have been on the bench the longest. Well they were cheap. The troll and the female mage have been around for about a year. I'm not sure where the mage came from, might be Northstar and the troll is from Midlam. The Blood Bowl figures of the last of the human team I started earlier in the year and The Walking Dead stuff I've had for a couple of weeks now.

A while back I made a decision to improve my painting skills. Feel free to comment here. Part of this involved using thinned down paints and a wet palette. It seemed logical at the time to switch to dropper bottles. This seems to have saved a lot of paint, whilst there is more waste on the day it means that the paint doesn't end up drying up which usually happens to most GW paints because of their either stupidly designed or cleverly designed (depending on your point of view) bottles.

In practice, occasionally, if not frequently, I put more paint on the wet palette that I need. Having been brought up to waste not want not, I figure that I should be using the extra paint. If there isn't something I can use it for, then I find something I can use it for. Or something on the back of the bench that gets one step closer to being finished. I have always had what I call Background Projects. These are something that doesn't take over (that's why they are background) but I can work on them when glue or wash is drying.

The background is becoming a lot more foreground. During Zomtober I have had more zombie figures on the bench. This has helped me keep on track. This week however I have run out of stuff  that is prepped and primed.

So now I am thinking I need to do some more prepping and priming. I was reading a blog post somewhere that somebody was doing just that in readiness for winter. They live in Canada where there is a chance that there might be one foot of snow. Here in the UK we might get one inch of rain but the problem remains the same.

The Start Of Zomtober Week 3

The new week begins. More Walking Dead minis and a long way to go.

The Walking Alive

There is not so many zombies of the bench this week, mostly survivors. Whilst one of the zombies is waiting for just a few more details the other needed a bit more work. The real work is on the four survivors. There is a good coat of paint for them ready to be highlighted. I did play about with the shirt of one of them. It's a bit more effort than I would normally put in but it is kind of what it looks like on the in house model. My reason for not doing more is that if it goes badly, it goes very badly and means a restart and repaint, which never ends well.

The colours seem quite bright at the minute. Part of that is down to me trying to emulate what's already on the web and part is I know they are going to get darker pretty quickly. Yellow is definitely not a colour I normally use for hair, but the one on the mantic site seemed to work out okay.

Zomtober - Week 1

The plan for the week was to finish off all the minis from The Prelude To Woodbury set.

The Governor, Brian Blake, was a fairly easy paint job. Whilst the mini is crisp enough for a good amount of detail, there is actually a limited amount of actual details. This is down to the simplicity of the images from the comics being easy to draw rather than a flaw in the figures.

It's difficult to put extra detail into some of the figures. When all you have to work with is a shirt and pants it is difficult to make the figure really shine. These are actually pretty nice figures and they have painted up pretty well.  The zombie having a snack was a bit more fun. When I first looked at the figure I thought the"snack" was actually handcuffs.

The three female figures look like they have come straight out of an office. Although this is quite normal clothing, it's difficult to make normal shine. A grey business suit is not going to stand out from the crowd. I always think the female miniatures need to be better colour coordinated than male ones.

Anyway, this is week one done. The New Cruelty is more than satisfied. Next week is going to see me paint the Days Gone Bye. More survivors and fewer zombies.

The Walking Dead & The Irony Of The Industry

I think I said yesterday that I had gotten hold of a copy of the Kickstarter box set. I have been after this for a while mainly because it has a few miniatures in it that are difficult to get hold of without Mantic points. The TV show and the comics are stuff I just love and to my mind are amongst the best in their respective genres.

At the time it came out I wasn't so sure that I was going to be interested in it so I didn't back it. Too much rigmarole I thought at the time. Whilst I am very happy with my purchase and the others I have made lately, especially as they were cheap, Mantic's latest releases have taken the edge off.

As you can see I was so happy to get this that I had
removed some figures for priming before I took some pictures

The kickstarter boxes are back on sale on their store. Admittedly seconds and more money than I paid for it. I suspect the guy who has a boxed set on eBay for £330 will be disappointed. What is naffing me off is there is a collectors edition set. This has three exclusive figures and three more that it says that are also exclusives (which I already have and have paid through the teeth for).  If I sat down what I have already paid for the bits in it, I would have been much better off buying this set and I would have got the three exclusive miniatures (really not available anywhere else unlike the kickstarter exclusives). As I really don't need all the duplicates (a third copy of the starter set might be too much and there is only one Governor and how many Lee and Clementine figures can I actually use (and the zombie with these two is great but is a bit distinctive)) I am not going to spend the money. I will wait to see if the exclusive come up on the web as all the other "exclusives" have done eventually.

To be honest, I shouldn't really complain, it makes me sound like a bit of a fan boy (and that hurts :) ). I keep buying the figures purely for the love of them.

Moving Swiftly Along

Despite having a week where I seem to have slept more than being awake, the figure painting is moving ahead briskly. The initial plan was to finish the horses I started at the beginning of the week and make a start on the the riders and their dismounted versions. Other than a few bits of detailing, the horses are now pretty much done. The riders and dismounted characters are pretty close to having a base coat done and even had some detailing.

If all goes to plan, the weekend might see me finish everything off. I have FabLab tomorrow. This is probably not going to get in the way too much as I don't normally start painting till late in the afternoon. So...The plan had been to finish off what I had started before moving on to the next project, which was going to be a figure for Zomtober. I am starting to think that I might just be able to get five or more figures done for the October the First.

If I can manage six figures a week, that would make thirty done by the end of the month. There are about fifteen in the house at the moment but I have a big delivery on the way. There are going to be some that are the same a what I already have. I'm not sure that duplicates of Ric and Carl  (not to mention Patrick, Liam Dennis and Sandra) are not going to stand out like a sore thumb but I might get round to selling them. I might keep hold of the zombie but I suspect they will get painted. It's easy to give one zombie a different paint job to another.

Road To Woodbury

The Real Evil

The Road To Woodbury arrived this morning. I am really starting to look forward to painting all of this stuff. What I am doing right now is nice, but the prospect of painting these and maybe even running an RPG game with them (despite having over a hundred zombie already) is keeping me going.

Group Shot

FabLab was a bit of a mixed blessing. My work from last week was done but the stuff I did today did not turn out so well. I'll be able to get something out of it but maybe not so much. Still, it gives me something to do. When I got back I was knackered so I haven't actually done much. This cold is still killing me and now the other half is coming down with it so time is going to be tight over the next few days. So I am going to have to make the most of the next few days.

Birthday Money All Spent

Although I have managed to do a bit of painting I had to stop early. Recovery from a bug isn't easy and I have been extremely fatigued which has lead to me having the shakes. Too much blood in my caffeine stream I guess.

Whilst I haven't been too successful on the painting front, I did much better on the eBay front. I got an original The Walking Dead :  All Out War kickstart box and the Miles Behind Us  everything in one box set. For months now I have been trying to get this and it's gone for less than any of the others I have seen.  I think that brings me to around eighty to ninety figures to paint. This should make Zomtober harder work than I thought.

Still FabLab tomorrow. I have a few things prepped and ready.