From Barks: Tommy Atkins's weird WW1 day (Limbo)(64 points)

I've been a little slow getting off the starting blocks for this Challenge, but I'm happy to be back.

My initial Limbo entry is this Martian scout tripod from Alien Dungeon, which I picked up from the good people at the War Library. I sprayed the whole thing silver and washed it black, and then hit a creative wall. Should I make it rusty and decrepit? What colour should the eye be? Should I make the details more defined? So it languished, until the Challenge inserted new life.

I decided to leave it un-rusty, and go for a red gem effect on the eye. I blended a deep red to black and orange, and then gave it a gloss coat. I'm not entirely happy, but it is done. The photos are with a previously painted PSC 15mm plastic soldier for scale. What else will poor Tommy Atkins encounter today?

I painted the tripod because I had been inspired by The Last War, a Forbidden Psalm/ Weird WW1 ruleset. My 15mm WW1 project had also been in a bit of limbo as well, and Last War has helped it approach completion. The tripod will be my 'Thing from the fog'. To add to my meagre Squirrel score, I've painted a few more gribblies.

First, I had a bag of transparent zombies from a board game. These made great ghosts, and also mud ghouls when liberally coated in mud effect.

Ghosts

Mud ghouls

I 3D printed some other figures at 50% size.

Trench maggots (Goonmaster)

Hounds of Annwn (Knucklebones)

Gas bugs (Goonmaster)

Trench rats (Duncan Shadow)

Some of these were barely painted (mud ghouls and ghosts) and others are small (15mm giant rats). So how about:

• 1 x 25mm vehicle: 20 points
• 24 x assorted 15mm gribblies: 24 points
• Limbo bonus: 20 points
• Squirrel (Last War) +1
• Can opener duel +8

From Millsy:

Great to have you join us again this year Barks! This is a great way to kick of your Challenge and I think you did the right thing sticking with the shiny finish on the walker. I've always thought part of the otherworldliness of tripods is they were made of unknown materials and wouldn't rust. I've scored it as a 28mm vehicle given the scale.

Nice work mate, a healthy 64 points to kick of your Challenge.

Cheers,

Millsy

From SeanS - 4 Ogres and a Rat (21points)

Hi All,

Not as productive as I need to be to get on track, but here is a small selection of figures I finished while watching the Cardinals get shellacked by the Panthers on Sunday.

These characterful little sculpts come from Splintered Light in their 20mm fantasy range here.

I decided to go with the Reaper golden skin triad, but used only the shadow and mid and then wased with the shadow again. I think some areas could have used a dark lining where the golden shadow hits a darker color, but only realized that in hindsight.

I thought I'd show  closeup of these faces as i liked them a lot. Perhaps I should have used a tripod, the picture isn't as clear as I'd like.

Here we have the Giant Rat from Reaper. I got him with the Basic Learn to Paint kit : Fur and Armor. The Drybrush highlight of the fur didn't really come across. In general I've taken to picking out fur with a small brush instead of drybrushing. Funny as that used to be my go to technique.

The flesh was just good ole Reaper tanned skin and the boils were Rosy skin, a wash of red and then a drybrush of rosy skin again. He is 28 mm scale on a 25 x 50mm base.

Here's a shot of the group so you can make a relative size comparison. The Ogres are pretty large, but I've only scored them at 4 points each as many of my 20mm offerings have been fairly small goblins and such. The rat I scored at 5 because he is essentially a riderless mount. So 21 for the lot.

Just wanted to show this weeks change in photo set up. Normally I use static lights, a tripod and a laptop to remotely control taking photos. This time I used some remote flashes. This set up evolved as I was messing around, it's not quite right. All of these photos were still under exposed, so I tweaked the levels in GIMP. But I did manually adjust the shutter and aperture and hand hold the camera for these. Thanks for looking.

Fine painting Sean, the facial detail is excellent and as you say they are very characterful, and rat is particularly nasty looking. Adjusting things in GIMP... hmm wont go there.. Nice work.