Recently work has been irregular, unpredictable and generally taking up far too much time that could be spent on more valuable things like painting minis. Between working online, meetings and other such time consuming things, actually being able to sit down and paint for any length of time has become a bit of a novelty. Similarly, since I have been spending too much time in front of my PC for work, I haven't really felt like sitting down and typing out comments for every post on the challenge recently. My apologies to everyone. I do try to look at everyone's work, there have been some great entries in the past few weeks. So if I didn't comment on your submission, I apologise.
Which brings me to this post. Rather than submit several entries over a couple of days, I have put them all together into one submission to save some time and effort.
First of all, here are some Weird World War II US Rocket Infantry.
The models are from the Dust Tactics game. I bought into the game heavily when Fantasy Flight was running it, as it was available from Amazon here in Japan at a reasonable price. Sadly, FF decided to drop the game, and then there were a series of debacles with Battlefront and the designer of the game running a kickstarter. The models are that soft kind of plastic that a lot of board game makers favour, but they look pretty good when given a lick of paint.
For five 28mm minis, these should add 25 Points to my total. And, as WWW2 is a new genre from me for this challenge, they add a Squirrel point to my tally too.
Earlier in the challenge, I painted up 5 old GW Lizardmen Skinks. Since then I dug out a bunch more of them from the hobby stash and painted them up too.
Here we have 42 of the old minis, still on their square bases. On the minis posted earlier, I had used a green wash on the skin, but on this batch I went with brown. After comparing the two, I find that the brown gives a much nicer shading to the figures and makes them look more natural. (As far as fictional sentient lizard folk go). I'll probably revisit the first batch at some point with a brown wash.
For 42x 28mm minis, these add 210 Points to my total and to my GW side duel as well.
When visiting my local dollar (100 yen actually, but it's roughly the same) store a week or so ago, I found some bags of plastic palm trees that looked like they were a reasonable size. I picked up five bags and brought them home to see how they would look as terrain.
They are a still a little on the small side perhaps and a bit rough around the edges, but good enough for the gaming table. The pirate figure in the picture is just there to give a sense of scale. I have since gone back to the shop and bought up the rest of their stock, so I should have enough of these to make a reasonable amount of scatter terrain.
The trees fill a roughly 3" by 3" by 4" area of the table, or roughly 1/6th of a terrain cube, so should score me 3 Points.
Finally, the part of my entry related to the Graveyard Beach section of the Chambers of Challenge. Some Pirate Ghosts.
These five spooky scoundrels are from Reaper's Bones line of minis and are cast in a translucent green plastic. I quite liked the look of it as it was, so I painted up the scenic bases and weaponry on the figures, but left the bodies and clothing more or less untouched.
To try to give them a bit more definition, I added a thin coat of Vallejo Transparent Green to the 'skin' areas of the figure. It doesn't show up in the pictures very well, but I think it helps.
Each of these undead pirates has a skull on their base (their own perhaps?) as well as a mix of flotsam and wreckage.
As for points, I am not sure how to score these. As 28mm minis, they should come in at 25 points, but large parts of them are deliberately unpainted. So perhaps scoring them at half the usual rate? That should get me 13 Points, rounded up. If one of the minions disagrees, they can alter my score as necessary. I believe there was some mention of bonus points for the chamber if the undead had a nautical theme? There are also 5 Skullz for my side duel.
So, in total this submission should get me 251 Points, which I believe puts me over my target for the challenge with three weeks remaining.
My running Duels totals:
GW Points - 1016
Skullz - 456
Squirrels - 18