End Of The Week - And I Am Kind Of Glad

The painting of the Grenadier / Mirliton trooper miniatures has continued and whether they are used for Shadow, Cyberpunk, Fallout, Titansgrave or some other post-apocalypse, near-future or sci-fi background remains to be seen. I am enjoying painting them and I do like the Copplestone vibe about the figures but they are not done yet.

If you look carefully you will see that there actually are some differences between this picture and the last one

Sadly The New Cruelty will not be satisfied this week as I have only finished of the two Mimic figures this week. They are fairly close to being finished with almost all the blocking out and inking done and the highlights to go. If all I do next week is finish these off then I will still be well ahead of my goal. Until tonight I don't think I have done any work on them since Thursday. This is a shame as I was hopeful that they would be all finished by now. It's been a kack kind of week towards the end with the only highlight being getting out on Friday. This has not been helped by being ill for the last couple of days. I did manage to get to FabLab once although I didn't do anything. When I was there I did find out that it was going to be open more often so that might make things easier for me. I have a few plans for this but not so sure what I can do at the moment.

Maybe it has been watching The Vikings TV series but I have a feel for my Northmen, norse esque game at the moment. I have had another play about with adding some background again.

Health wise I am doing okay. I was thinking I feel fitter this week although I don't seem to have lost any weight. My fitbit is telling me that despite missing my calorie goal a few times it was not actually a bad week (not the best but doable especially as I have been feeling ill and a bit peed off). A while back I realised that I was lactose intolerant and just of late I have come to think I am gluten intolerant as well. As an experiment this week I have tried to stay of anything with gluten in it. It seems that when I have had gluten I have paid a fairly high price.

Gaming Tiles

Over the last couple of weeks I have been playing about with the idea of  doing some gaming tiles for roleplaying and board games. This stems from playing Star Wars: Imperial Assault and Descent as well as looking some of the home made 2.5d dungeon terrain. I like the idea of making the terrain easy-to-use, easy-to-build and interlocking.

Whilst I like the tiles and the figures and even the game of Imperial Assault, I am not going to go out and buy them because I know two people who I game with that have it already and I wouldn't be running it any way. However, I want them to play other games and I really want something I can customise so the commercial stuff doesn't do quite what I want. I did think about cutting stuff to the same shape and size as the FF game but that sounds like more hard work that it's worth.

So I came up with the idea of  creating my own. The first one is a try out of the 2.5d terrain. The original idea was a bit of a stretch but it was an easy fix to make something that works. I am stuff not sure I like the form. The Imperial Assault tile idea works much better and the absence of walls specifically means that the tiles can be closer together.

The prospect of the creation and painting of the dungeon tiles is fun and I like the idea but the printing out of images created elsewhere makes the process a lot quicker and more visually appealing.

Woefully Busy Day & Some Fun & Zombies

Whilst I still have a bad back that is causing me a lot of pain and a cold that just won't go away, the world isn't going away either. My other half is ill with the same thing I had although this seems to be the second time she has had it. She was that bad last night that she asked me where her glasses were and she was wearing them, on her face, at the time.

This picture demonstrates why most good painters (or do I mean sensible ones) don't show their work until it's finished.

Zomtober continues. I took this picture yesterday to remind me to keep on track or else The New Cruelty will catch up with me. When I look at it I feel a slightly unpleasant feeling in my stomach. Still, very early days. They are very blocky and pretty hideous. It was for this reason that I wasn't going to post the picture. That said, I have worked on them a bit this evening after going out for a birthday meal, and I am happy to say that they now look a lot better. I realise that the blood looks pretty bright at the moment but when I get down to washing them and painting the clothing, the blood splatter will narrow down a bit and darken down a lot.

So getting a bit better but still don't look bad enough to be zombies

Still pretty far from perfect but they are getting there. There is a fair bit of detailing to do on them and lots and lots of highlighting and what I call "grebbing them up" to make them a little more zombie. This will include a significant amount of Tamiya Clear Red, which is the best blood substitute I have found so far (although I wouldn't recommend it for a transfusion).

There has been a bit of time for playing around with CorelDraw as well. I am working on some terrain ideas. I have had an idea for some roads for ages. For a while now I have been thinking about doing them in laser cut MDF. This might take a while but it is doable. It will take a long time because of the scope of the amount of stuff I am actually wanting.

Road To Woodbury

The Real Evil

The Road To Woodbury arrived this morning. I am really starting to look forward to painting all of this stuff. What I am doing right now is nice, but the prospect of painting these and maybe even running an RPG game with them (despite having over a hundred zombie already) is keeping me going.

Group Shot

FabLab was a bit of a mixed blessing. My work from last week was done but the stuff I did today did not turn out so well. I'll be able to get something out of it but maybe not so much. Still, it gives me something to do. When I got back I was knackered so I haven't actually done much. This cold is still killing me and now the other half is coming down with it so time is going to be tight over the next few days. So I am going to have to make the most of the next few days.

Bases, Washes And A Need to Clean Up The Workbench

This is going to be a quick post. I am coming down with a bug the kids have given me. Yey.

The FabLab went okay. I was bounced out a little early so I didn't get all that I was hoping to do. Hopefully the staff will finish off my stuff for me and I will be able to pick it up on Thursday. I still managed to get fifteen plus bases cut and all have been glued, most have been flocked and some have been painted. I should have just about enough to run a game when these are done and there will be enough for multiple options when the rest get finished.

After doing that I finished off a few more details on the figures.The Gripping Beast Romano-British are coming along nicely but I am struggling to bring out some of the details of the Northstar Frostgrave figure. Then I moved onto doing the washes. There are still a few details that need to be attended to as well as the highlighting. Hopefully I should get this done for close of play tomorrow.

Zomtober is on the Horizon. Although I have missed out for a couple of years, I have a plan that means that I should be taking part, I got a few minis today just for the purpose of running the game. These are perhaps the most expensive minis (in 28mm anyway) I have purchased in a while.I have primed them today but they should be being started in earnest in the next week or so.

Graft

I've said a number of times that I am not a big fan of basing. For me it's pretty much the worst element of figure painting. I should probably put a bit more effort in and then I would probably get better results. Even so, it has become the kind of thing that I do when I can't focus on the details of figure painting.

So today I started something that has been really hard work.  Having glued some bits together for the wargame sabot bases yesterday I have put some texture on them and given them a green base coat. I wanted to get ahead on this because tomorrow I am hoping to come away with a whole load more bases, maybe double the number I already have. My thinking was that if I don't do some of them now, the pile of bases will put me off completely. Now I have enough bases for about one army with a few spares and options. There are fifteen bases done. Mostly they are standard infantry bases but there are a couple for regular cavalry, and one each for heavy cavalry, irregular infantry and smaller monsters.

Hopefully I'll have a duplicate of this set so I can run two armies. With a bit of luck I will also have an odds and sods set with some different base layouts, irregular infantry, larger monsters and even some light artillery.

If the plan goes better than expected I might even have some more regular bases and some larger irregular bases that will do for terrain areas like swamps and woods.

At the end of the day I did get a chance to work on the week's figures. They don't really fit with anything on the horizon but the Arthurian age (Romano British) types are nice minis and the other figure which I think is a Frostgrave captain looks pretty good. I am worried that I have slacked off a bit on these to do the stuff for FabLab. For the most part they now have a base colour and tomorrow I am planning to ink them up and make a start on the highlighting, assuming the extra bases don't get in the way.

FabLab, Wargames And Bases

Much to my surprise I got to FabLab just about on time. This proved to be a bad thing. Having booked the machine, someone else was using it when I got there and I was told that the time I had wasn't going to happen because they were going to close early. With a bit of targeted complaining I got them to extend the hours but still didn't get what I want done because it took over forty minutes to get the other guy of the machine.

For a while now I have been working on the idea and basics for a Savage Worlds driven wargame. There are a couple of wargame systems available already. The mass battle system in the rules is extremely basic and the Showdown rules won't handle mass battles. So I thought I could find a third way.

The plan calls for about ten to twelve units per side with units ranging from about five to thirty men. In a world where two hundred men might be called an army, this is about right. What I have wanted to do is give the rules a serious play test. I have played them through with digital paper counters and they seemed to work okay. Over the summer I have been thinking about doing it as a miniatures games, I just needed some sabot bases.

As a game it is really an extension of a RPG campaign but like most of my games, I like a mass battle element to them. So I want  a mass battle feel but still have the scope for using individual heroic characters. There are plenty of dark age figures in my collection but they are all based individually as I am primarily a roleplay at the moment. So whatever the rules were going to be would have to take this into account. I also wanted a system that would allow characters to be right up in the action but a bit more, well, wargaming light. The most obvious solution was sabot basing.

Take somewhere between two and six infantry or two or three cavalry figures per base. Make sure that there is some scope for bigger monsters and even light artillery (okay I have two dwarf ballistas and I might get one for a Romano-British early saxon army).

I had hoped to walk away with about enough bases for two armies. Time got a bit short but I have still walked away with enough stuff for eighteen bases, admittedly some are not needed at the moment and I could do with a few more leg infantry bases. However, I should have enough of the stuff cut by the close of play on Saturday to make that happen.

A bit of sand, some time, some paint, some wash (maybe make some of my own wash as I am now going to need a lot of it) and a bit of highlighting and that should do me.Time is getting a bit tight to have all this done and finish my figures but I live in hope.

Back To FabLab

With the kids being back in school FabLab is back on. I went down there yesterday with little expectations of even getting access to the machine let alone the thing working properly. So I was surprised when there was no one there wanting to use it and the machine working properly. Apparently I had done a better job at diagnosing the problems with the machine that the staff had.

The trouble was that I didn't have much of an idea what to do. Over the last week or so I had an idea for a stick to paint figures on. Something I could slot in bases so that I could secure the figures with whilst priming and varnishing. As I have done a lot of that lately, I thought it might come in useful. Seems like it worked out well, hopefully not too well. This is a product I think I am going to produce.

This wasn't going to take too long so I thought i would cut up some bases. For years I have been using two 2p coins glued together as cavalry bases. This works well but us time consuming and messy. So I cut a few appropriately sized bases. I don't do too much cavalry (I have a thing about hating painting horses) but there are plenty of monster minis (I am thinking about the dozen or so dire wolves I did a few years ago). Then onto a few larger monster sized bases. My stocks of 30mm, 40mm and 50mm were running low so I thought I'd top these up.

There was a little bit of space left on the board so I thought I'd do some template sized circles for Savage Worlds. Sadly the Medium Burst Template didn't come out how I would of liked it.

For a while I have been working on a Savage Worlds wargame. I think I might give the sabot bases for that atrial during the week.