AHPC X Day 03 - Second Submission

My second submission is up now: link

I was meant to be heading down to Sussex today for Christmas, but I've been struck down with a D&V bug. Brilliant timing, thanks whoever passed it on to me. As a result, I will be staying in London on my lonesome, but it does mean that I will be able to do some painting. I got these chaps primed this morning, then added basing gunk:

They will be for my "Millsy's Millpond" entry.

And I have made a start on these chaps:

I hope to get these and two regiments of converged grenadiers finished before the 30th, so that they will be available for a big game at the club.

Saturday Update 14 October

Instead of leaping straight into painting the "red hat" cavlary, I decided to do something long overdue this afternoon - finishing assembly and painting of the Sarissa corner store and warehouse. The lower parts of the warehouse still look a bit too clean - I might have to go over them with another dirty wash at some point.

Sometime in the future I'll need to make up some signs for the businesses. I've got a couple of ideas for those.

This evening I've started work on the "red hat" cavalry. Well, their horses at any rate:

Once the brown wash has dried I'll do the white markings, eyes and the tack. And maybe touch up the riders with Sky Grey where the browns have slopped onto them. Tomorrow I'll carry on with the riders - with just the 9 of them, I might even manage to get the painting finished.

AHPC7 - Challenge Day 55 Pulp Seamen WIP 2

"..I'll work on them in small batches" my arse! Yup, I ended up working on the whole lot and none of them are quite finished. They're all pretty close though:

Just highlights on hair, boots and gun wood to do, plus the metals. And a little bit of tidying up on the bases. I should be able to finish them tonight, then tomorrow I can carry on with the rest of the Koreans.

Oh, and I seem to be over the worst of my cold.

AHPC7 - Challenge Day 54 Pulp Seamen WIP 1

Well, I made a decision. I'm going to submit all the Koreans as one entry next Monday. which meant a further decision - to paint something else to submit this Monday or just carry on working on the Koreans. As you can probably tell by the post title, I opted to paint something else.


This afternoon and evening I have been putting down the base colours for a bunch of merchant seamen (and seawomen!). Base/shade colours of the flesh and main clothing are all done:

I'll probably do the highlights on the flesh and the dark blue clothing later tonight. Tomorrow I'll work on them in small batches to get as many finished as possible.

These will be the crew of a merchant ship that smuggles alcohol from Canada across the great lake into Salutesville.

The Figures What I Prepped

Well, 'tis the season (for repeats of family favourite TV shows) and most of my UK readers should recognise my homage to the late Ernie Wise in this post's title. But enough blather, this post is to show off everything that has been prepped and primed so far in readiness for the Challenge.

Everything:

6mm ACW:

Mostly cavalry, some artillery and generals, plus casualties and gabions.

28mm stuff (and some 15mm):

Some WW2 Soviet women, some sheep, a whole bunch of gangs and civvies for Salutesville and some of the Raging Heroes "Jailbirds". Not to forget a trio of 15mm grav tanks and a trio of grav APCs.

15mm SYW Russian cavalry, generals and wagons:

15mm SYW Russian infantry and artillery, plus Three Musketeers, friends, enemies and collateral damage civvies:

Sorry for the blurry pic - red are Russians, black are Three Musketeers

15mm Nubians:

I'ms till waiting for another 48 bowmen to arrive.

15mm Choson Korean regular and irregular troops:

15mm Mongols:

This last pics is of a box containing the first of my 15mm sea Peoples to arrive (all prepped) and some figures received today from DaveD for our Curtgeld submission - I'll prep those tonight.

Phew! What a lot of stuff to paint! And what a variety! I haven't done a points count of them, but it should be over 3000 points worth with the Sea Peoples when they arrive, more if any get entered for bonus rounds. I don't expect to paint them all and at the end I will take pics to show what has been painted and what remains.

In terms of my personal priorities (but not necessarily painting order - the Bonus Theme rounds could mean stuff gets painted earlier):

1. Nubians or Sea Peoples
2. Sea Peoples or Nubians
3. 15mm SYW Russians
4. Mongols
5. Raging Heroes
6. Soviet women
7. 6mm ACW
8. 15mm SF armour
9. 28mm pulp
10. The Curtgeld group

If I excel my expectations by a huge margin and all this gets painted, I do have lots of other lead, plastic and resin in the pile that can be prepped, primed & painted.

Wish me luck!

Saturday Workbench

Yet again a few days pass without a post from me. That's the trouble with this period, the lull before the storm - nowt to post most of the time. I have been busy though, as you will see below!


Latex Rivers from Early War Miniatures

Well, "flowing streams" as the company call them...

I finally got round to painting them up this week and flocked the banks this afternoon. I think they've come out quite nicely.

I might add some tufts and clump foliage at some point but they'll do for now.


Figure Prep - Salutesville

I've also been working on the basing of the mass of figures I've prepped for Salutesville. A few weeks back I added Milliput to some figures' bases and some coarse pumice gel to a few others (the ones which will be on rough ground). I got round to carving the Milliput this week to give a coarse woodgrain effect as well as filing down the excess at the edges. Whilst doing that I found that the Milliput hadn't fully mixed in some places - I think it had gone off, so I ditched it and bought some new (standard rather than terracotta). I've used that to build up the bases of a decent bunch of figures last night and this afternoon.

There was a little bit of Milliput left over this afternoon, so I decided to make some sandbags for Ray, just in case he runs out (as if!) during the Challenge.

I've got 24 more figures to add Milliput to. I'll probably do those tomorrow.


Jailbirds

I also prepped and assembled the Raging Heroes "Jailbirds" character figures I bought recently. I decided that I wanted these to be a bit special, so I had decided to put them on the resin bases I bought last week. That meant pinning them in place. And then doing the fiddly assembly.

Blondie

Mad Nurse Bernadette (or is that Docherty?)

Punky

Harry the Hippo

The fifth member of the group was almost a disaster - her right arm disappeared at some point. Luckily I had a spare arm from Punky which I was able to use, but it did mean having to do some other conversion work - cutting the hand and foregrip off the flamer and adding a strap made from slivers of 0.25mm plasticard. I think it came out OK in the end:

(Oh No! it's...) Yoko

This crew should be a fun test of my painting skills. Quite a bit of work to do though with all the different bits on the bases.


Tomorrow is going to see me doing a lot of priming with the airbrush.

New Table and A Courthouse Confrontation

My new table and chairs were delivered just before 9am this morning and two hours later they were unpacked and assembled. I'd acquired quite a bit of white polystyrene packaging from the various packs of flat-pack furniture I've bought over the last few months. So, I sorted through it to find anything which might be suitable for making hill shapes, then dug out my little hot-wire cutter and set about shaping them. These will be for going underneath a cloth, so no need to painting, gritting and flocking.

I know what you're thinking - cream/ivory coloured seats, how long until they get dirty. Yes, well...

Various hill, ridge and undulation pieces

And under a cloth

I do have two more pieces that need shaping. Unfortunately I managed to snap all five cutting wires I had - a mixture of flimsy wire and me trying to go too fast/hard with the cutting. I'll have to take a trip to 4D Model Shop at some point to either get more wires or a new cutter.

Just after I'd taken the photos above, I thought it might be nice to see how much space all the buildings I've painted up for Salutesville cover so I put down my grey slate floor tiles and arranged the buildings. Of course, it would have been a shame to waste the opportunity to get out some of the vehicles and all the figures for a photo session, so that's exactly what I did.


A Courthouse Confrontation

The feds have caught up with Il Postino Diablo and he's been arrested and taken to the Supreme Court for arraignment. Anticipating trouble, Salutesville's Finest have mounted a heavy guard to prevent any rescue attempts...

Unaware of what is about to go down, Salutesville's citizens go about their daily business...

As Evil Postie is the only one who knows where all their ill-gotten gains are stashed, his mob react to liberate him. Ray "The Badger" Rousell's gang are first on the scene:

One of Big Lee's Bad Boys has managed to sneak behind some of the coppers:

And Fran's mob are starting to arrive in dribs and drabs:

Will they manage to break him out of custody? Read all about it in the late edition:

And the band played on...

So, the buildings I've painted so far do cover a 3' x 4' table quite nicely. I've got another seven to assemble and paint at some point which are all reasonably large, so I could potentially fill a 4' x 6' table. Time to acquire some street features I think.

Oh, and then there's the docks, the rail freight yard, Chinatown, the rural retreat...

Saturday Workbench

Gosh! Three weeks without posting. Sorry for leaving you bereft of my inane verbiosity for so long. The fact is that until today I didn't have anything to post about. Well, that's not strictly true - if I'd downloaded pics from my camera, I could have done an AAR of a game of Full Thrust. But I haven't actually done any painting over the past few weeks as I first of all got a bug to watch the whole of Babylon 5 again (including the films and "Crusade") and this past week I've been a bit wiped out in the evenings.

Anyhoos, I'm back in the swing of things now and have started work on the scatter terrain pieces that I primed a few weeks ago. At the moment I'm doing the stacks of sacks - they've had basecoats and a shading wash so far; the next step is to paint the integral bases that some of them have. I'll do that tomorrow and then switch to some of the other pieces, probably the crates and tea-chests.

WIP pics:

I used 3 different basecoats - Ivory, Pale Sand and White Grey - before a thin sepia wash

During the week I have been prepping the GZG figures I bought at Colours. I'll be sticking them on bases during the week while paint dries on the terrain. I expect that I'll just prime them for now, ready for painting during this year's Challenge.