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.

Review: Tania Tanker from Raging Heroes

I'm going to start by apologising to Raging Heroes for having taken so long to get round to painting this figure and writing this review post - sorry guys! I hope that the wait was worth it.

So, where to start with this review? I guess a bit about the company. Raging Heroes are a "boutique" miniatures company based in France, specialising in (mainly) female character figures for fantasy and SciFi gaming. The figures are digitally sculpted and the masters are 3D printed. I believe that all of the figures are available in resin, with some available in metal as well. Prices aren't cheap (character figures cost 13.95-24.95 Euros/£11.89-£21.26; "grunts" cost 19.95 Euros/£17.00 for 3-5 figures), but you aren't likely to buy many of them so maybe that's not an issue. You can buy direct from the company or through some distributors/retailers (there is a listing o their website).

There are three main factions in their "Toughest Girls of the Galaxy" range - the Iron Empire, the Kurganovas and the Jailbirds - Tania is from the last.


This is what came in my package:

Blister contents

The figure sprue

Let's open up the baggie and get a closer look at the sprue:

Cutting the pieces from the sprue was quite easy, although do take care as some of the parts are quite brittle (such as the pistol grip on the smaller weapon). Clean-up of the flash was also quite quick. I did encounter some mould-line flash on the figure after I'd primed it. There wasn't much and it was quickly removed with some light filing (then washed off and re-primed).

Assembly was simple using superglue, although I did find that the straps were a little bit short - that might have been me slinging the weapon a little lower than intended. The gaps were easily corrected using some small slivers of venting flash.

It seems that I forgot to take a pic of the primed figure before I started painting (or I did but it's not in the folder with the rest of the pics...). You'll just have to take my word that I primed black with the airbrush.

I did a lot of umming and aahing whilst trying to decide how to paint her up. I could have followed the scheme on the packing. Or I could have gone for a more military look (like the ones Kyle painted up in "Catachan" style during the last Challenge). Or, given the pose, I could have gone for a "Rosie the Riveter" scheme - I went with that, but with some little touches that I thought would look good, like the red boots and the dark pink dungaree straps. I also painted on a bracelet just for that little extra touch.

Anyway, here are the pics of the finished figure:

Finally to round off this post, my opinions. The sculpting is excellent - the right combination of smoothness and sharpness, which made painting fairly easy although some of the recessed detail on the metal arm was a bit soft. This figure was resin, which I'm not a fan of, but it is also available in metal, as are most of the character figures.

Would I buy other figures from their ranges? Possibly, but only for the challenge of painting them as I don't have any gaming use for them. There are a couple I have my eyes on.

Would I recommend them to other painters/gamers? Yes, if you are after some excellent character figures to add some variety to a gaming force for a certain system from a certain Nottingham-based company who shall not be named here, or simply for the challenge of painting something a little different. Price-wise, the character figures are comparable to that certain company, but the "grunts" work out about double the price.

A Somewhat Productive Week

Despite being somewhat tired every evening this week and spending much of yesterday trying to catch up a bit on sleep, I've actually been reasonably productive. During the week I was painting up some artillery for my SYW Russians. I'd pretty much finished them on Thursday night so I did the final details on Friday evening and varnished them. A bit later on I stuck them in a container with water in it to help loosen the PVA glue holding them onto the painting sticks. A couple of hours later I took them out and as I was plucking the figures off I noticed something frightful - everything seemed to have white splotches in random places. I then realised what it must have been - the varnish wasn't fully dry and the water must have been warm, causing the varnish to go cloudy. I decided to try something a little drastic, but it seemed to do the trick - a  mix of satin and matt varnishes with some of my ink washes.

Yesterday I got the figures stuck onto their bases and added basing gunk. This morning I added flock and glued the limbers into place behind the horses.

And without further ado, here are the pics:

4 pounder, 2 x 8 pounder, howitzer

As before, the guns are loose so that I can choose what gun to use depending on my army list and also to turn them round to show limbered/unlimbered.


This afternoon I've been having some fun with the airbrush. You may recall that toward the end of the Challenge I assembled a bunch of extra vehicles (mostly hover tanks) for my 15mm NSL force. Well, as they'd been sitting in the drawer ever since and I didn't have anything else primed and ready to go (OK, nothing else that I wanted to paint today) I set up the spray booth, sorted out the paints I'd need, found my little scraps of mesh for the camo patterns and got myself ready to go. And then I spotted that I hadn't added radio antennae to the vehicles. A couple of minutes with a cheap plastic brush, a hobby knife and some superglue and the antennae were in place.

I did my best to replicate the paint scheme of the original vehicles. The colours were easy as I'd made a note of them in a blog post at the time. It was more the technical side - I'd forgotten how much of a pig it was using the meshes for the camo.

Anyway, some pics of the various stages of WIP:

Dunkelgelb primer

Hull Red stripes

Dark Blue Grey diamond pattern

Diamond pattern close up

Camo Light Green dot pattern

Dot pattern close up

A few weeks ago, I was contacted by a small miniatures company in France, asking me if I'd be willing to review some of their figures. I had seen some of their figures during the Challenge and really liked the look of them, so I agreed. They then asked if there were any in particular that I would like to review. The list was very long, even after I knocked it back to a few examples of the singles and groups, so I just said "surprise me".

Anyhoos, earlier this week the package arrived:

On opening the package I was surprised - the figure they'd sent wasn't one of the ones which had made it to my pared down list, but was a very suitable one for me:

"Tania the Tanker" from Raging Heroes, whose pose and look is clearly inspired by "Rosie the Riveter" from the WW2 posters. The pic shows everything (except the delivery slip) that came in the package. I have opened the blister pack to take a look at the figure, but no pics for now - I'll be saving those for the review post. Let's just say it looks great and I look forward to painting her.