Paint Table Saturday 214 - Finished, prep and a crack

Hi All,

A fair amount of progress this week, but probably not as much as I should have gotten. Such is life. I decided to do a bunch more prep so that I can focus on painting for the rest of the Old World Army challenge.

So I finished adding the flock and static grass to the Brigands and Chaos Warriors. I also brushed on some primer to some of the Wargames Foundry bowmen in the back there and I put everyone on bottle caps to try and cut down on the amount I handle the figures. I still touch them way too much.

Just below are the rest of the retainers with their basing done. I just need to seal the grit on and then I can prime these.

On the auxiliary table, I have the foot knights, Crossbowmen, Ordonnance and one Knight (totally unassembled. The Foot knight standard bearer needs to have his banner pole cut and some green stuff to fix his hand. Somebody had modified him in the past and his hand is messed up. I had a few voids in random figures that I filled with squadron putty. It's not the greatest but it works in a pinch. One of the gunners has some major flash/ mold seam that I'm going to have to be extra careful on, so I may do the cannon next month instead of my original plan to do it this month.

Finally, I noticed a large crack all the way around the waist of the leader of my retainer unit. Boo! I must have dropped him in all the back and forth handling I've been doing. There is a definite wobble in his upper half now, but it hasn't completely separated. I've waffled about how best to fix him. Clean break and pin, or force glue and or green stuff into the crack and hope for the best. Today I'm thinking glue, yesterday was break and pin.

I'm also getting a tad bogged down in planning. I'm not sure I have enough shields for all these guys and plain shields seem to be something of a rarity these days. I think I've found some on Magister Militum, but it seems stupid to have to order them from overseas. I also found that not only is one of the plastic knights horses miscast, but one of the knights is as well. It's his shield arm so it can be hidden easily, it's just annoying.

Thanks for looking.

Oh and check out Early Blazon, a great resource for 13th century heraldry.

Paint Table Saturday 213 - Brigands and Chaos Warriors

Hi All,

A lot of stuff finished this week. It was hard to get stuff done with all the memorial things for Master Xiao and trying not to have a pity party for myself. But, as we know, life goes on.

So I stayed up late Thursday night and finished my submission to the Old World Army Challenge. My submission specifically can be seen, here. I encourage you to look at other entries, as there are some truly masterful painters in this group.

The Normans, as I said, were finished Thursday night but both they and the Chaos Warriors were varnished yesterday. I plan to flock and static grass the bases sometime this weekend.

When All is said and done I'm not really crazy about these figures. Multipart plastics rarely go together seamlessly and ranking up units can be a little difficult. There were some odd gaps and things that I appear to have forgotten about in the push to get these done. If I had had infinite time I might have used a little greenstuff to take care of those.

This was also my first full use of the Winsor & Newton Galeria matt varnish. It appears to let the metallics still shine a little. The vallejo was so matt it killed any shine from metallic paint, so I'm glad that the Galeria has removed an extra step from my work flow.

I think I'm going to do the foot knights and Cannon next, but I'm not totally sure. I still have a ton of prep to do. I would do the mounted knights but I need to do some sculpting/ mold making for some missing and miscast parts.

Thanks for looking.

Paint Table Saturday 211 - Bretonnian Brigands

Hi All,

I know it's Monday, but I was busy with a roleplaying session and kind of in shock from some bad news I woke up to.

First the minis.

Did the base flesh while watching tv the other night and some base metal the other day on about half. I need to clean up my work space as I'm having trouble doing simple things because of all the clutter.

The bad news I woke up to was that Dr. Xiao Puquan, Master Xiao, had died. I used to train Taichi with him and a group in the local park and had been to his Traditional Chinese Medicine clinic a few times. He had been an honest to goodness Shaolin Monk and had come to the states, married and started his own business. I'm still fuzzy on the details, but he was apparently admitted to the hospital for pain and died 10 hours later. It didn't really hit me until some of our mutual friends started posting pictures of him on facebook. The one with his wife and kids devastated me. He was only about a year older than me.

Anyway. I'm had already been thinking about how I'd let my Taichi practice slip. I'm going to return to it and get back to what he taught me, as well as what I learned from my other teachers. I stopped because I got frustrated with my practice, I rationalized that I made no difference to the world if I practiced or not. But I want to honor the people that gave me their time and not throw that away. So I will do it for them and for me and not worry about anything else.

I'd also like to welcome Mr Papafakis to the blog. Sorry to welcome you after the bummer part of this post. I know you have a blog, but I can't recall what it is right now.

Thanks for looking.