Death Korps armour crew

Hi folks! We've mostly got half measures today:

Yup, "top half only" to misquote Brassed Off. The models above are for the turrets of tanks sticking out of the cupola so there's no need for legs. This half of the commission was for tanks with a "Third Reich"-esque camo scheme so the client wanted a Panzer-feel tank uniform. Instead of pure black I went with grey with gloss black armour plates. Pure black is very much the colour of commissars in the Imperial Guard. The pinkish red piping on the cuffs and epaulettes is actually authentic colour for german tank crews back in the '40's. Pink being a girls colour is a fairly recent development - heck napoleonic Russia had whole regiments with pink and green banners - we'd initially dismissed the pink as it might have seemed silly. But during painting the crews needed a little something else and so the pink was lurking in the back of my mind. Tried it, and who knew? It works.

Then as an example of how much a different paint job changes a model we have the DKK infantry scheme on the same figures. These guys are destined for chimeras. I used the grenadier scheme to add the green ballistic plates to the steel helmets. Figured if your job includes sticking your head out of armoured vehicles you'd want the extra protection.

Just add a girder and a New York skyline right?

Finally today we have the centaur crews. These chaps are actually destined for Salamander troop compartments. As a result the "driver" models needed some converting:

I had a spare DKK lasgun and grenade launcher and was able to get reasonably convincing "at ease" poses with their weapons across their laps. But what to do with the third. I tried having him sitting there just weaponless but the fist in the air just looked weird. I sat there looking at it and trying to figure out what to do with him. Then the idea struck me. A brew. A section of plastic tube closed off at one end and smoothed off with a thin strip of plasticard for a handle and the classic squaddy enamel mug is formed. Add some chips and dings and he's all there. There is one important question about the model though and I wonder if anyone will ask it in the comments? ;) That's all for models today but I thought I would finish with a wargamer fitness report:

Nope, hadn't forgotten about this! Weight loss progress has slowed a little, but I've still lost another 6 pounds or so putting me down to 19st 7lb. More importantly, my fitness is increasing exponentially. I've been doing the NHS's couch to 5k program of running podcasts. They're designed to take you from sedentary to running 5k without rest. Over the past two months or so I've gone from being barely capable of jogging for a minute at a time to running 8 minutes - over a kilometer - at a time. (The program is interval training so the current run is two eight minute runs seperated by a recovery walk). I honestly feel better than I have in years and haven't been this weight since university 13 years ago. I'll keep you posted on progress and there'll be a before and after pic in the fullness of time (probably at the end of the year).

TTFN

On the Workbench - more Inq28 converting!

Greetings all, this post should have gone up while I am floating in a pool on holiday - assuming Mulder can be trusted to push a button in my absense that is. I thought I would share with you all the progress that is being made on the last few members of my Inquisitor's retinue for our Inq28 campaign.

We saw the early progress on the Ogryn in the last On the Workbench. Since then the leadbelcher arms arrived! I had to carve off the gnoblar from the shoulder (could not get a pair of the great cannon arms for love nor money) but after some smoothing with fine sanding sticks you really cannot tell it was there. With the arms in place I could finish off the vest by killing off some undercuts and adding a ridge to the edge where the fabric ends. Then it was time for the firepower. The multilaser I was using came from the sentinel kit but just wasn't quite hefty enough. So I sliced up a guard lascannon and added the multilaser barrel to the cut end. Some shaping and carving to merge the bracing strut at the bottom and it was there. I added a large battery pack by slicing the top off a meltabomb and gluing it where the cables normally go on the normal lascannon. The meltabomb handle made a nice carrying handle on top of the multilaser. I'm going to hold off on attaching the weapon until I've painted the torso. Mrs PVP noted that he looked more like a biker than anything else and so that is his new identity! A sort of Ogryn "Hell's Angel". A more interesting paint scheme than my "sort of a catachan" feel I was going for at first...

Remember the autogun from last time? Well, its got it's home now. This chap is made from Victoria Lamb Miniatures legs, torso and arms (can't recommend her highly enough, great models, free worldwide shipping for very cheap orders - $10 - and got here from Australia within a week). The converted autogun was carved to fit and an Empire head gave the right tone. This fella will be an Imperial Guard demolitions/engineer type, hence the underslung grenade launcher, and will mostly be working in the retinue as an "obstacle removal expert", no door is safe!

For the Interrogator I wanted to have a bit of the 40k madness creeping in. He's not ready for a rosette yet and I figured he could look a bit weirder than the hired members of Inquisitor Vandemar's retinue. I started from an Infinity model, used a Cadian bionic arm - cut and straightened - to replace the ultra high tech left arm. Replaced the power sword with a Tomb Kings Khopesh - a brilliant weapon designed to do lots of different things from parrying, tripping and focussing evil cutting power - and added a rolled sleeve to hide the join. Finally I carved away the metal head and replaced it with a haughty cadian command HQ head. I hated the hairstyle and knew I would be changing it, but to what? Then I remembered an old conversion that Jakob Nielson did with a dude with a huge gun, a top hat and a judge's wig. The legal wig thing seemed to work for the lunacy of the 40k universe so I thought, why not? I chose the more restrained barrister's wig rather than the full on judicial and it was only half way through the process of sculpting it that I realised it was basically just a powdered wig from the 17/1800s. Seems to work.

The last figure for today is the bike mounted version of the crusader conversion. I've chopped most of the extraneous bits from a scout bike to make a slightly more civilian version. I hacked off the legs at the hips and the boots. Built leg armatures out of wire to allow future sculpting to replace the legs. I need to thin the handlebars a bit, Charlie from the Beard Bunker pointed out they were as thick as her arms at the moment... The same head replacement with an Elysian helmet finished her off for now. I still need to sculpt the legs and I may well replace the left hand as the original sculpt is really not intended for gripping.

There we go! What I've been doing on my lunch breaks! I think I've finally used the putty I've been sculpting with long enough to do a review on it so expect on later this week. But one last thing before I go:

See, haven't forgotten or quit. Last time we talked about this I was 21st 8lb (302lb) and 44% fat. So far I have only managed to change my diet, the weather/finances have meant that going out for a run or similar has been a non-starter and I can't really afford a gym. However, even with that I am now...

19st 13lb (279lb) and 38.3% fat

There will be happy 12st people out there who do not realise why being 19st will make me really, really happy. The fact is that I do not think I have been this weight in more than a decade. At my worst I was 24 stone and a whale. Being in the "under 20st" catagory, even by one pound is a cause for much merriment! With winter finally deciding to leave the UK alone I will be able to exercise more and this rate of progress should increase. For now, huzzah!

TTFN

Bushido, for charity!

Welcome one and all to this, the very first post of 2013 from Pirate Viking Painting! Huzzah! And I am delighted to report that it is a terribly ethical one as I have finished yet more stuff for charity. The Paint the City Pink campaign had several prizes donated back to the auction and I volunteered to paint them for free to add some value. I did the Pulp City gang a little while back and now the first of two Bushido sets from GCT Studios, the Prefecture of Ryu.

These are very pretty figures, and the closest I have seen in sculpting to getting Samurai armour right. Of course, this is a fantasy Japan so it doesn't matter all that much! Painting anything Japanese is something of a nightmare, there are lots of twiddly bits and the colour pallete is unfamiliar to our western eyes.

Look at some pictures of real samurai armour, they are a riot of colours. I thus resolved to use a rare colour combination for me, a tetrach. Four colours in two contrasting pairs, in this case red and green along with orange and blue. Note that in a tetrach the colours are also complementary to another colour, orange and red, green and blue and so on.

At some point in the painting I realised that the blue I was using (Kantor highlighted with Hoeth) was far too blue, too cold for the scheme and was making it a jarring clash. I warmed it up to a delightful indigo by glazing with violet wash. Wound up a gorgeous colour and created the harmonious tones I was going for.

For the skin tone I added Ungor Flesh to the Cadian Fleshtone but otherwise treated it as normal! Selecting the placement of the colours was what was important in this scheme, not necessarily the techniques used to apply them, as in the end it was mostly careful build up of various washes to achieve the effects.

The end result is exactly what I wanted, a general feeling of a red and indigo colour scheme with enough interferance from the green and orange elements to give that riot-of-colours oriental feel without compromising western aesthetics.

The final model in contrast was simplicity itself, ninjas usually are! Just pick a different black highlight colour for each area of the model and then use a couple of black washes to drab it all down. Lovely.

I am going to do a full on review of all of the Busido models that I have my hands on when they are all finished, but for now, just feast your eyes and enjoy!

TTFN

I've decided that I will do the Wargaming fitness spots like this, beneath the main posts, after the TTFN so that anyone who simply doesn't care can just ignore them! For the first one, I thought I would lay out the problem. I am 33, 6 foot tall and weigh 137.1 kg, that's 21st 8lb or 302 lb for our colonial cousins. Yikes, better news is that the weight is only 44.4% fat. I am actually a big guy even without the fat. This means that BMI is meaningless (it usually is btw) and so I will be using Body Fat % to "fix" me. Healthy range for guys my age is 9-19%, overweight is 19-25%. I think a realistic first goal is just to shift from the obese range to overweight. That means shifting my body fat from 44% to 25%. That means loosing 26.5 kg. Or 4 stone 2 lb (58 lbs) of fat. I don't care what my weight is, as it will probably go up on reengaging muscle groups. I care about the fat. Also, focusing on this well help with my truly scary stat. A visceral fat count of 21. This is a fairly abstract measure from my machine but the safe range is 1-12. Eep. This is the really dangerous stuff and needs to change. Some people can be overweight but not have this, my wife is an 8 on that scale. Seems that my body just loves to clag fat around my internal organs. This will not stand! I declare war on claggy fat.

Well, that is all for now, I'll let you know in a month or so how I am doing.

Peace out.