Elemental

Although my painting plans for the week are almost complete, I decided to finish off another project piece. I am pretty sure I got this large . elemental about three years ago. It's a Reaper Bones model. I am not sure I would pay for something like this in metal as it probably isn't going to get a lot of use but for a good chunk under £10/$10 I thought it was worth while.

It has been sat around, primed and on a textured for about two years so it is probably about time I got around to it. There is a fairly simple paint job. Primed light grey and painted a mid blue. You can't really tell the mid blue is there after heavy blue wash. If I was doing it again I probably would put the original base colour down and just use the wash. Lower down the model and in some of the crevices but mostly on the bas I put on a heavy green wash. You can just about tell if you look hard enough.  Then there is an old GW paint, Ice Blue for a highlight. It really needed something to bring out the details and finally a white high, highlight.

End Of The Week All Over Again

This week has all been about bench clean up. I have an unspoken rule that nothing new hits the bench until everything that is on it is complete. I have already managed about a dozen figures in the week and have finished off a few more over the weekend.

The Frostgrave soldiers are a bit of a let down. Aside from being tiny compared to everything else (including the metal Frostgrave stuff) they haven't turned out quite so well. The word I am thinking is abandoned rather than finished. There are a few nice details on them but in the main I am say "Meh" to myself over and over.

The Reaper giant demon is a much better proposition. I really like the figure and can see a few uses for it. In general, I like the Reaper Bones range. The detail is good (as good as the metal figures) and of course the price is right.

The remaining two human figures are also Frostgrave miniatures. All of these have been hanging around since I got the Nickstarter. The one on the middle bottom row has been on the bench is various states of incompletion for over two years now. I did not find either of these two figures especially interesting to paint. They have turned out alright though.

So in the round for the week that is eighteen figures down. In my way of thinking the demon is probably the painting equivalent of theee figures and the ogre/giant orc/goblin is about two. So call that twenty one figures for the week. The New Cruelty is very satisfied.

To be honest it's been a crap week for me. One element of my job has come to a head and that looks like it's about to resolve itself but not in a good way. This has meant I have been really busy and I suspect that I am now going to be skint for a while as well.  In general it has been a week full of arguments and upset and the fact today has been mother's day has really not helped me out. So all in all I am hoping for a better week next week but I am not extremely hopeful.

Back To Work

The stated goal of the week is to have a workbench clearout. Anything that is part painted is fair game. Let's face it, if it's on the bench it's also fair game. Hopefully the five dark age figures I am working on will be at the top of the list for completion. So starting as I mean to go on.

I got this Reaper Bones figure last year. Although it's kind of a demon, in my game it is a big fire giant. There are plenty of smaller demons and even a larger demon in the collection so I was tempted to do him as something else but he really does look demonic so I guess not. Although there is some paint on the details, the skin tone is mainly ink. I found a mix of red and orange gave a nice looking and solid colour. There is also a bit of purple in then for shading and more on the scaly back.

So the dark age figures have been tinkered with but they were not exactly the only thing I have looked at today. I have attended to a few details but they are not substantially closer to being finished than they were before.

River Troll

This uncommonly large beastie has been my main focus today. I am not really sure what he is meant to be in my games but According to Reaper he is a Marsh Troll. I don't have a clear purpose for him in the Viking game but I can see him as a Mutant in the Underground game. He is still work in progress. there is some highlighting left to do and some details to touch up (the teeth look pretty grim in the picture). I plan to do a water effect on the base but I am going o test this out on another base before trying it out for real.

I kept finding myself getting distracted again today. On top of painting this big guy, I think I have worked on another dozen miniatures. Nothing major, just tidying up. I have also moved into to doing some basing prep. I have gritted about twenty bases and attached another twenty to bases prior to gritting.

Spiders Are Done

Anyway I have finished off the Reaper Bones Spider Swarms for Savage Worlds and Dungeon and Dragons. It's good to have something else finished. All the time consuming drying has been done already so it was a fairly quick process.

Maybe I am getting work done because I am naffed off that I am finding the urge to do something. The house is generally never cleaner that when I am naffed off and it is pretty clean today not to mention getting a load of jobs done around the house. The truth is probably that I am a bit naffed off with myself because of what I am doing or not doing. Decisions to be made I think.

I went with brown as the main colour with a little bit of a wash and a highlight. Perhaps it's not as menacing as black but I have just done the beetle swarm in black, blue wash and grey and I didn't want the two  bases turning out like carbon copies of each other (I am not sure that I like the phrase carbon copy any more, it makes me sound older than I feel). When I think back this model this is actually quite a pricey model. £7 of figures and a £1 of bases plus a few bits and pieces. It's certainly the biggest base I have ever used. Now I just need to figure out a way to transport them.

I have also done a bit more written work on some post apocalyptic stuff I have been working on. I have been working on it for a good long time now, you would hope it would be finished by now.

Still, I am tired now.

Spider Swarms And Making Progress

I have come very close to missing the post tonight. Having posted at least daily for three months now I really didn't want to miss the deadline. My other half tells me the clocks are going forward as well which really would have cut into me time to post. So I just made the deadline which still counts.

Time is never on my side and I haven't had much time today. My other half has been hit by another illness which has meant she has been out of commission most of the day. Worse still she has needed a huge amount of attention along with family commitments. I did manage to find the time to sleep through two films. No great shakes as I have seen both of them already. This is after another night of sleep broken by outside forces. My current plan is to put the dog on tranquilisers and lock the cat in the kitchen.

Despite all that I have done a bit of work. The spider swarm base and it's two sub bases is just about finished. The texture I have used on the base is now curing and when that is done, I will get it painted. I am still not feeling the love for this model but it has been sat around, in kit form at least, for a while now.

Once I have finished that I have done a bit of policing up of stuff on the desk. I have done some trimming on another one of the X-Com Cyberdiscs and played around with a couple of the cars. Small steps but definitely progress. The blog is helping me focus.

End Of The Swarm

I think this is just about finished. Add some more highlighting, a little more texturing and a bit of flock later and this is about it. It looks okay to me.

Looking back at the process I think I got things pretty much right. Maybe I could have built the lip up around the smaller bases a bit more. If I had a laser cutter I would probably cut out to layers of thinner MDF. If I was more into playing D+D I would probably made a couple of 25mm/1" bases in the gaps. This would allow the D+D bases to be made up of 1" bases so that it could morph shape.

With a 28mm X-Com trooper for scale

The next task is probably going to be making the next swarm base which is spiders. I have said a couple of times that I am not so struck by the models. This is kind of putting me off the idea but I have already half started the base. I am still looking for some Reaper Bones rats but I am guessing that I will have moved on to something else.

Insomnia , In Your Face And Some Work In Progress

Insomnia no, miniatures and stuff yes. Swarm bases are going to be the next project.  I got to spend last night in an actual bed and a bed big enough for me to fit in. I had a great nights sleep and have been full of beans all day. I have hardly spent any time sat down. The House is much tidier and a load of jobs have been done.

I got some reaper bones swarms a while back. Nice and cheap but I still wanted more. After I got these I needed some bases for them. The aim is to do them for savage worlds. This means that they start as a medium burst template of 100mm/4" and can divde into two small burst templates 50mm/2". 50mm is also the same size as a basic d+d swarms, well kind of so I might need to make some smaller bases as well.

So what you can see here is a couple of test layouts. The plan is to have two small template with two bases in each. The main base would have a couple of single bases to fill in the gaps. My original plan was to have just one cut out withe no extra bases on the, but now I have some cheap bases so what the hell. The plan calls for some moulds to be made with some green stuff impressions. These are to be cut up and spread around the base. So far I have beetles and spiders. I am not sure I like the spiders.

If the concept works out I will get rats next. There are a few possibilities for these models and I can use them in just about every genre. I would like to do bats but I have had a lot of problems finding them. Birds, like ravens, would also be nice for a horror post apocalypse game. The same go for bats.

On the wish list but I have no idea how to make it happen are: flying and none flying cockroaches; I would like a mixed base of creepy crawlies (something along the lines of of Indiana Jones and The Temple Of Doom); piranhas; and ants.  I guess when you have the figures you make sure that they can fit in with the genre of games you play.

So before I did anything, I tidied the workbench as well. It's the cleanest it's been all year. Around the edges of this I tied up and sorted out stuff. I may have just made more space to fill it up again but that's progress?

Another Busy Day

Although I feel that I haven't had that much time today, it seems that I have done a fair amount of work. Having had a terrible nights sleep it was really late when I got up. I woke up in the middle of the night and had a dizzy spell and almost fell out of bed. Then my uncle brought some books back and I took my mum out. On the plus side I got some cheap gloss spray paint which I used to spray some more of the cars. Now I have stripped all the labels off the cars I now have. I still think I need some more of those plastic cars. This may become a habit. I can see another three or four boxes of the cars arriving before the week is out.

Then I got round to filling some holes in the roof of the cars. Then I found out I had some left over greenstuff so I ended up using that on some Lizardmen for Titansgrave and an Reaper bones frost giant. I really thought I was going off target so I got back to the scatter terrain which, for the most part, is now finished. I found some more pipe sections when I was cleaning up the bench so I had better get them done soon.

Now I am working on some more scatter terrain. I am doing some tree trunks, probably better that I show them when they are done. It will look better when you see the final concept. I did a bt of painting of some of the scatter terrain that is already in the queue. Then I thought about some model brick piles I saw so I thought I'd have a go at them. These are still to wet to handle so I will take a picture of them when they are closer to being finished. It's just a foamcore topper scores to look like bricks with some more layers of foamcore to give it the look of having layers. then I got on to the idea of having some packaged items that are covered with tarpaulin. For both I used kitchen roll. I am hoping that the texture of the paper will be noticeable when they paint dries. These will do for a variety of game environments and even genres.

So all in all, not a bad day. I am driven to do the blog at the moment which is driving me to do the work. I have posted every day for almost two months now. If I keep that up, I will have posted as many times this year already as I did in the whole of last year. I would like to make this the big year for the blog so I want to post as many times as I can and hopefully beat my posting record. That would take at least another two months of posting at this frequency. I am about to hit five hundred posts which seems like a good milestone to be hitting and my hits seem to be healthy too.

Spirit Of The Forest and Jabberwock

I like painting figures. Not much of a surprise I guess judging by what else is on the blog. I don't much like painting anything much bigger than regular sized figures. I especially  hate painting horses. I have got better at horses over the years, more by looking at pictures than anything else. I rarely play about with anything bigger than a horse. Yet I find myself with a few bigger things on the go at the moment.

The biggest I have started so far and by far the most complicated is the Spirit of the Forest. This is a Reaper Bones mini. The figure wasn't too  bad but the legs were slightly curved inward making it a little entertaining to put it on the base. This wasn't a huge problem but it does seem to be a common theme the bones minis. I love metal minis and they definitely win on the quality front but the bones figures win on price every time. Some days you want fish and chips not a double starred Michelin Restaurant. There is still a long long way to go here.
 
I wasn't sure about posting the pictures because currently I think I am making a bit of a hash of it.  I am sure I will bring it around eventually. There is a huge amount of detail on this figure  so it may take a while to get it finished. Given what it is, I was hoping to go to town on it a bit. I was thinking that it would make a great monster for Shadowrun.

Even with the coin as ballast, the base is still a little misshapen.

I have got a few of the larger Reaper Bones monsters and some odds and sods. Most of them, especially the bigger ones seem a little warped. Just to show you what I mean this is the jabberwock. The base is bent and the figure itself has a bit of a list. Currently I am feeling a little Monty Python. A cross between Jabberwocky and the Ministry of Silly Walks.  I am currently debating what to do with it but I doubt it will end up as a mini but maybe some scenery instead?

There is also a dragon which looks pretty good even if it needed to be clamped to the base when it was glued down to get a flat surface. I'll post a picture of this on a another day.  All the smaller stuff turned out to be fine however.