From AlexK: Is it still fashionable to be late to a party? (14 points)

The answer to the question in the title is "Not really Mr Knott, if anything it shows a slight lack of readiness on your part or, as some may say, a complete lack of care and attention". Ahhh fond memories of high school are coming flooding back.

That all said I have actually been painting miniatures, specifically Marvel Crisis Protocol miniatures, namely Baron Strucker and Rhino. I may well of spent far too long on these but I think it was time well spent, enjoyable if nothing else. I suppose some pictures are in order, so

So points wise I think that's two 40mm models at 7 points, so 14 in total. Hopefully by the end of the competition I should have a few more Superheroes done.

Cheers,

AlexK

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Great to have you with us Alex, and this is a very fine start to your Challenge.

The brushwork on these two villains is superb (I have fond memories of seeing Rhino in my Saturday morning cartoons). I particularly like the flesh on Rhino and the flame effect on Baron Strucker. Lovely work.

14 points it is and welcome to the roster!

- Curt

From AlexK; I finished a whole thing! (15points)

 Sneaking in at the last minute for this years challenge are three more figures. Two are the final members of my new Blood Bowl team and the third is another Stargrave crew member to add to the ships roster. I suppose pictures would be useful wouldn't they?

photo evidence of said completed project

I've really enjoyed painting the Blood Bowl team and its really nice to get a whole project finished (admittedly a second team would be the whole project but we don't want to get bogged down in the minutia of small details do we?). For once I'm also happy with how the Stargrave crew are ticking along and I'm not too far off another completed project with that either.

Although I will end this challenge somewhat short of my target I've still found it to be very productive and a lot of grey plastic has been removed from the shelf of doom, which is always good. As always its been great fun to participate and I hope the next one will be just as good. It's lovely to see everyone's great work on display and it always blows me away with what people can achieve in three short months.

Cheers,

Alex

From DaveD - Thats a grand little end note alright . Good to hear you have enjoyed and completed a project too - so its all good - until next time!

From AlexK: Fantasy football and more superheros......and some traffic lights (91 points)

 I have been painting I promise, just not quick enough so it seems! Although it looks like I will fall short of my target this year it feels like it has been a very productive couple of months. My biggest problem has been painting very low points cost miniatures but taking quite a while to get them done (it's almost like I'm my own worst enemy sometimes), but with that said I've found real enjoyment with the figures I have painted and points total aside, this is just what I needed.

The biggest offenders in the low points time sink I find myself in are the Marvel Crisis Protocol miniatures. They are such nice figures it always seems a shame to rush them......so I haven't. For this post I give you some of the more recognisable characters from Marvel in Doctor Strange, Black Widow and Ultron. 

I also found time to do a spot of terrain painting, again for Marvel Crisis Protocol. Hopefully I will never have to paint anymore traffic lights ever again, for anything. Bright yellow can just get in the bin! Points wise I'd say it's a cube or there about.

Finally I have an attempt of mixing 2 of my hobbies, wargames and The NFL. This manifests itself in the form of Blood Bowl. So far I have the first 10 miniatures out of 12 painted. I'm hoping to have the rest done for the end of the challenge along with a few other pieces. These figures were really good fun to paint and it would seem rotten flesh is my ideal painting subject, which is slightly worrying.

So points wise I think I'm good for 10 x 28mm infantry, 3 x 40mm infantry and a couple of hand fulls of 40mm terrain, 71 points plus whatever the terrain is deemed to be worth? (I could do with it being worth about 305 points if that possible, hahaha).

Cheers,

AlexK

Wow! Two Black Widows in one day? And in opposing colour schemes! That's a great set of minis, Alex, and a great set of terrain. I'll go with a cube for the terrain, so that's 91 points for this submission!

Tamsin

From AlexK - More Superheros and space adventures (101 points)

The pull of Atomic Mass Games "Marvel Crisis Protocol" is still pulling strong and most of the last month has been spent painting more Marvel characters. Over the last weeks I have painted in no particular order, Ms. Marvel, Ms. Marvel Embiggened, Bob; Agent of Hydra, Clea, Sin, M.O.D.O.K, Killmonger and Baron Mordo. I still have 10 more characters left to paint and then I think I can call this project done.....for now. The bigger characters like M.O.D.O.K and Ms. Marvel are really good fun to paint and in Ms. Marvel's case quite a challenge. A model with only 3 bold primary colours should be simple on paper, but getting the colours to transition between light and shadow turned out to be a lot harder than I had first imagined. Points wise I think I'm good for 8 x 40mm figures, so 56 points. I also can't help think I'm missing a trick by not submitting these for the planets challenge, but that's a problem for future Alex who will be in no doubt scrabbling for points mid-march.

As a little side project I have also jumped into painting a crew up for Osprey games "Stargrave", a miniature agnostic sci-fi skirmish game were you write the backstory for your crew and do exactly as you please. This format is increasingly beginning to become much more appealing to me due to it's lack of limitations and I'm much happier letting my imagination run riot. So up next we have the first 5 members of the crew for the star ship "Enlightenment".

The "Enlightenment" is a prison transport ship that was transporting prisoners between local systems toward the prison satellite station "Infinity VI" when the galaxy was plunged into civil unrest and contact with the station was lost leaving the "Enlightenment" travelling star systems looking for a new home. The crew consist of a mixture of prison officer, detention droids and several members of cargo. As is usual, orange jump suits are reserved for the prisoners as tradition dictates. It has been good fun trying different skin tones, uniforms and kit bashing to create a cohesive team. That is another 4 x 28mm crew figures for 20 points and a scratch built detention droid that stands 40mm tall for 7 points.

Cheers,

Alex

 

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Hi Alex - well, I must confess, I just can't do superheroes...but that's OK, it is good that there is a ton of variety to the hobby and to subjects that motivate the participants in The Painting Challenge. Whatever my hopes for Marvel's executives to be placed in a rocket and launched directly into the sun while the rest of the company simply plunges into bankrupcty, I know great brushwork when I see it, and you have done a fine job here on these heroes - who other Challengers will surely recognize. The colours are brilliant, and each character is quite distinctive (even though Marvel writers will make all of them exactly the same in 15 seconds, but I digress). Well done.

 

And another Stargrave crew! It is fun to see this set of rules taking off amongst many Challengers, and it seems like a set of rules I should check out for myself. Once more, your brushwork is top shelf, and the back story sounds fun and engaging (so, the opposite of Marvel). I'm particularly blown away by that "Dentention Droid" - how cool is that thing?! I'm going to score that up as a 28mm vehicle, so you will get some bonus points for your excellent conversion work all around on that Stargrave crew - hopefully supporting Future Alex...

GregB

From AlexK - A New Challenge and A New Project (28 Points)

So as of late December another challenge rolls around and I look to my shelves full of planned projects, nearly complete armies, special one of figures that had to be bought, gifts that have yet to see the light of a starkly lit painting room never mind a wargames table. All ready and willing to be finished, finally able to fulfil their primary role, just waiting on me to do the right thing and use the next three months to just add paint and allow them to ascend to the gaming table......ohhh......is that a good idea???......Well hello Marvel Crisis Protocol, please allow me to swiftly move you to the VIP area of our painting queue. Don't worry about the others, if they've waited 5 years another 6 months will do them no harm......I suspect!?

That is how I've ended up in this painting scenario, ill prepared, many models unassembled and no real plan on how to go about painting this project. All that said, my level of enthusiasm for the task is through the roof and whilst it is, I need to get to some painting done before I end up with more models clinging on to hopes of challenge 13!

For this first entry I present a selection of Super Heroes (and some villains) from the Marvel Crisis Protocol game. These models are so different from my usual painting project they have unleashed a real sense of joy in painting that I haven't experienced for a long time. I love the way they require being painted with a really high level of contrast, deep shadows rolling in to highly charged highlights and if that wasn't enough someone added in extra special effects and glowing powers. The inner 11 year old me is super jazzed at this. So enough waffle and time for some pictures.

Drax and Gamora

Ronan

And finally Nebula

Now scoring these maybe a bit of a challenge as they are around the 40mm scale but swing wildly around that measurement, some much larger and some smaller. I'm suggesting 7 points each for a total of 28 but I'm not sure? If anyone doesn't enjoy super heroes and the like, you may wish to skip my challenge 12 posts as it's all very Sci-fi.

Cheers,

AlexK

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Hi Alex, welcome again to The Painting Challenge. While Super Heroes may not be my thing, I know you are not alone, and many of the Challengers will share your interest and enjoy your excellent brushwork. And whatever our interests, I know all of us can relate to that moment where we suddenly dive into a whole new project out of excitement, pushing other projects to the side for "a time". 

As I am painting some pretty large figures myself these days, I am sympathetic to these large Crisis Protocol sculpts scoring-wise. That will 28 points for you, and we all look forward to more!

Greg

From AlexK - Five more Turnips (25 points)

 So in my last post today I was rather pleased that I'd hit my target with 13 hours to spare, that's correct I was going to idle away a whole 13 hours!! After spending some down time with my girlfriend catching up on some TV, she asked "Have you not got something to be doing?". Initially I thought I'd forgot to do something that I'd promised to do, but no not this time, it was more a general "Go and find something to do whilst I watch something good that your not interested in" type question. So I took the gift horse and ran with it and decided to try knock out another 5 troops for my Turnip 28 project and these are the results.

2 more pictures with the rest of the unit

This is certainly my final submission for AHPCXI, although we have 5 hours and 34 minutes left I really need some sleep. I think that adds another 25 points to my total and makes my overall score look a bit healthier, rather than a shambling wreck squeezing over the line in the final seconds it really is.

From AlexK - When is Oldhammer not Oldhammer? (5 points)

 So this submission will be my last gasp effort for the finish line and should see me hit my target of 400 points. This didn't seem possible a month ago as I hadn't really started on anything for the challenge, barring a single ork. Once I'd pulled a plan together things began to fall in to place and this piece sees me hit my target with a 5 point haul and 13 hours left on the clock!

I had found this model on eBay a couple of months ago for a very reasonable price, the sort of price that would suggest that it was a very old edition of the model and was 15 - 20 years out of date. After a bit of google work it turns out that this is the same current edition that GW still produces now, some 27 years after I last saw this model in a White Dwarf magazine!

I would also like to declare this as my Curtgeld entry for this challenge, I thought I had declared my initial entry as such, but that idea seems to be lost to the internet ether somewhere. So to whoever deals with such prize giving admin, it is entirely your choice which model gets sent out, this or the ork.

Cheers,

Alex

From AlexK - How not to play AHPC and blogger!! (390 points)

 So first off an apology (reoccurring theme), the last three months have been a bit different from normal and so my paint production for the first two months was abysmal.....very abysmal. Not only did I not have a chance to paint, I also lost track of other peoples posts and didn't really look at the great submissions as they were posted. This puts me in the category of "Bad" AHPC 11 participant and to further my place in this category, I'm about to unload my last months painting in one big (crude term coming up!) "Money shot" post, with little regard for theme, consistency or quality! I can only imagine the almighty Snowlord is sat somewhere in Canada thinking,

"We really should vet these participants more closely, maybe a Star Trek style fight to the death challenge to separate the cream from whatever you separate cream from, may well be in order?"

But as it stands I'm in and I don't think I can be removed (please don't kick me out to prove a point). So with that out of the way I suppose I should offer up some miniature content.

First up we have the final parts of my British Peninsular Wars miniatures. These have spanned three challenges in all and I'm in no rush to start painting red and white anytime soon. So this batch contains 24 line infantry, 6 Light infantry, 6 rifles and a Sergeant. Barring the officer which comes from Front Rank, all the figures are Perry's and very nice they are to.

My initial post for this years challenge was a Orc boy for Warhammer 40'000 - Kill Team and with that I detailed my plan to maybe paint up a Kill Team to play the game with my young nephews who are just starting to take an interest in the hobby. Well that plan, for once, has worked out well....huzzah!! The team consists of 17 boys from Games Workshop and as much as I hate to admit it, they are super fun to paint. I think I suffer from the engrained mentality that everything GW does must be evil and I'm slowly coming to the conclusion I may have been very wrong about this. Sure they're on the expensive side, but with an eagle eye and an eBay account I think that the cost can be curbed slightly and staying away from vehicles seems to also help. The figures themselves are really nicely detailed, go together well and are easy to convert which is always a bonus.

But as we all know, if you paint a force up it will inevitably need an opposing force, a counter balance if you will. This is in fact how I described this to my better half when ordering more figures when she asked "Do you really need more figures?!", she walked away muttering about me being an idiot or something similar. After not listening to my partners wise words, I went ahead and ordered some big space marines and here we have 7 of these Genocidal Super Humans for your pleasure.

At this point dear readers you'd imagine that no one would then be stupid enough to make the exact same mistake again.....ummm well....

So we have 12 Hormagaunts next, these figures, which aren't blatant rip offs of a very popular movie franchise from my childhood, are very nice models. Full of character and super easy to paint at just two evenings of work. Out of everything I painted these are probably the ones I like most.

At this point I was feeling rather pleased with myself. That was until I worked out my points  total, which was still some 30 points short of my target. After I'd pulled my bottom lip in and wiped the tears from my eyes I went to find a solution to my 30 point deficit and it was answered by turnips! Well it will be by the end of the challenge. I'd heard rumours of a aspect of this hobby called turnip28 (if you haven't heard of it, may I suggest a quick google session to get you up to speed), a re-writing of European history between the 17th and 19th century following some type of apocalyptic event which seems to have promoted root vegetables to some type of god like status and has altered the way in which humans grow. Reading this back it seems as clear as mud, but the basic facts are this - kitbash medieval and Napoleonic plastic kits together with great joy and where the kits don't fit correctly bang some mud, grass or vegetable matter there to fill the gap. Then paint them however you want, make up a back story and your done. I'm not sure how far I'll go with this project, but as a bit of light relief it has been nice not to be confined by set rules and ideas.

These were some Warlord Games Hanoverian line infantry I'd picked up in a sale they occasionally have. I had plans of representing the forces present at Waterloo with these, but the idea of painting all that red makes me feel a tad unwell. The ideas presented in Turnip28 seemed a much more fitting use of the figures and overall I pretty pleased with them. The eagle eyed among you may well notice this leaves me 5 points short of my target, but fear not, in between writing this up 5 more of these fine fellows are being painted to add to the ranks.

A final photo now of everything assembled together. Quite the mix isn't it?

So in conclusion I can whole heartedly say this is not how to do a painting challenge and apologies to everyone for the all in one post of randomness . If I haven't miss counted my fingers this should be 78 x 28mm models for 390 points I believe. 

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