Thursday, November 29, 2012

The Twitch !




What is happening at the moment. Not a lot, I seem to be suffering some sort of nervous twitch in my left thumb which makes painting and holding figures steadily almost impossible. I did try however, but I would go to paint an Ansar’s rifle, twitch just as brush bristles touched led and then end up painting brown on his clothes. I had to revert to basing  (for spraying) and  undercoating new figures and painting the base coat on completed bases but based figures suck up a lot more space than when they are new in a bag so I’ve actually run out of storage boxes. There has also been some grumbling in the camp by my civilian camp followers about the space I am taking up in the kitchen, and I have been warned that a mutiny may occur.

Before the dreaded twitch I was going all out to finish my 15mm Zulu and Dervish armies and I made some headway, but alas I am now laying low until I can’t paint twitch free again. The Dervishes are Peter Pig and they are such a nice figures, I  whinged to myself that one of the figures had flash on the front and back (I’ve never seen flash on a PP figure before) so got out the old knife and pruned away. I then decided to engage my brain and realised as this particular tribesman was nude, then perhaps the “flash” at the front was actually his crown jewels and so I only pruned the flash at the front. I guess I just assumed it was flash and didn’t really have my 15mm figure penis check mind set on.

So I am currently just reading blogs and doing paperwork for solo campaigns I intend to run. One of those campaigns is to redo my Jaxonia Ubongo campaign as the last time I did it I seemed to have tremendous luck. On rereading the rules I found I had made a few mistakes and left out jungle encounters completely, but as I now have a bag of Jungle animals from Irregular Miniatures it looks like gorillas, crocodiles and various others beasts will also pray on the poor soldiers.

Its pretty boring with a twitchy thumb !

Sunday, November 11, 2012

First ACW based and 15mm Altenguard Army.



So seeing as though have a tonne of stuff painted but not based properly I thought I'd spend the next session sorting some of this stuff out. First off I found the 28mm Russian 1812 Horse Artillery, filled my paint tray with dark brown and then proceeded to drop the first figure in head first - %&$^&!.

Then I did it again (%&$@! x 2) and gave up on the Napoleonic as I needed to clean two figures and it gave me the hump.

So I have based the first four bases of the 29th Pennsylvania. The standards are in the post at the moment, and when they arrive I will finish the pole as well as sort out Officer and NCO chevrons etc. I've gone for a plain old grass scheme with a few weeds and clumps of brush, typical sheep country !.

So I have another 20 figures to paint from the first box and the second box to go.

I then moved onto a 15mm Rally Round the King Army - Altenguard (basically based on 100YW English) - lots of bows, a few men at arms and a commander, I based the Brethren (Religious Paladin types) Knights as well as for some reason they were in the wrong box.


 I also noticed that the spears\spikey points all need fixing - yay. I also need to adorn the pike with a standard of some type.




Unfortunately I was a bit robotic now and accidentally based 3 Goblin Archer stands in the same grass theme so I called it a night there as I wanted to give them a rock\cave based theme. Looking at the RRTK boxes I have the following to finish.

Goblin (Bases to be flocked)
Border Kingdoms (Norman)
Elf
Dwarf
Imperium (Roman)

Sunday, November 4, 2012

If less is more, then more must be awesome.

So onwards and upwards. I have been quite busy on the painting table, but rather lazy taking photos.

I have started to paint the bases of my 20mm Japanese, and then realised I have never done jungle bases before so will need some different decor. This is quite good timing as I need some tufts and flowers etc to make the lads below look pretty on their bases. The figures (16) are only 60% done as I still have to add the final shade\highlight layer, blanket rolls, brass n boots and head wear to go. The faces will also get a slight wash in some places, especially elephant man on the far left hand side.  only 56 to go :). My blues are quite light, but I'm happy with it, I have spent some time in museums around the USA in my traveling days and that good old blue uniform did vary considerably. I spent a lot of time in Alabama too over the course of a few years but rue the day I didn't buy that kepi in that trinket store.


And you can never have a Napoleonic 15mm army without Italians ............

So hopefully I'll bash out the rest of these Unions lads over the next few weeks, and I need to finalize my Peter Pig order. I've often wondered why he never seemed to advertise specials, but now I seem to have been in on a lucky discount draw and have got a hefty discount for one order only - HUZZAH !