2013-05-07: Demands

The beginning of May has come and gone and my swordsmen have not yet been completed. The demands of "getting the crops in" (I have a veggie garden and the Frozen North thawed in the span of 2 minutes and I found myself needing to build raised beds, fill said raised beds with soil, recover from the shoveling of cart loads of said soil, and then planting planting planting), a demanding 2 year old, and now the demands of overtime at work have conspired to deplete my painting time.

The swordsmen are still not done.  Here is how they stand now:

They are very very fiddly and I am getting sick of running down the line of models with one color on my brush and seeing all the little missed bits that need a different color.  And of course when I next have that color I am seeing all the bits that needed that first color.  And what the heck is this thing hanging from his belt next to the always useful on the battlefield hour glass?:

I will keep chipping away at them over the course of this month.  And for May I will pledge to do an entire WIZARD! 

 

Ohhhh… ahhh…. Yeah its a cop out but in addition to needing to finish the swordsmen, I also need to finish building the June pledge, which will either be knights of Morr, a metal steam tank, or bear cavalry. 

2013-04-19: Teddy Bears on Parade

I worked in the garden last night instead of painting, but I was able to take a few pictures of the Swordsmen and the Musician+Bear.

  

I have said earlier, the base coating is taking a while to finish as their are many colors and many fiddly bits.  My hope is to get the base coating done soonish, then put in some simple highlights and some quick and dirty washes for shading.  Most the shields I hot glued to a piece of wood to allow me to paint them separately.  I usually don’t have that foresight or opportunity.

 

Looking forward I have three options as to what to paint next month.

A)  Another Steam Tank!

B)  Knights!  I want to give most of them cool hoods and scythes in order for them to be Knights of Moor/Knights of the Black Rose.

C)  Bears!  I have not fallen in love with the new Empire Demigrifs.  So I had looked around for an alternative.  The Thunderwolf models were a possibility, but they are pricey.  I came across these bear toys which I ordered and was very pleased with the size.  I like the fact that they are pretty realistic and have a solid pose.  The only thing I could wish was for more poses, but oh well.

   

 

So readers (reader?), which of the three options should I do?

2013-04-16: A Little Behind with Pictures

For April I decided to paint up a unit of swordsmen and a musician with a bear (the later two are part of the same miniature).  I did a few head swaps since I like the furry hats of the newish Empire archers.

This picture is from a few weeks ago and is the models primed with Armybuilder ‘Skeleton Bone’.  I had used black primers in teh past (often spraying white from above to pop the highlights) but this time I decided that I want to start with a brighter base since I have gotten tired of all the work it takes to get a good yellow over black primer.  The bone color seemed a nice way to have that lighter base without risking having super bright white spots showing where the paint didn’t reach.

The musician and bear miniature was primed a month or so ago and is in some picture from that time.

At this time I am still grinding through the base coating.  The primer has proved to be less aggravating to paint over and works well with my subdued scheme.  All the little pieces of equipment (including skulls and hourglasses, its an Empire thing) is taking a long time as its fiddly painting and I also am not sure what some things are and thus dither as to what color to paint them  My life would have also been easier if I had painted them all an identical pattern, but Stirland is supposed to be rustic and its army hodge-podge so I think they look better when each soldier has a different set of clothes.

I will try to get pictures of the work in progress soon.

2013-04-01: Better Late Than Never

Travel and childcare kept me from posting earlier.  The War Altar/Steam Tank is done except for adding some magnets to make the swappable components.

    

2013-03-15: The Ides of Hobby

No pictures tonight, but I wanted to update what has been on my painting desk this week.

I continued painting the Directorate Firestorm Armada models needed for the next round of the campaign I am participating.  Since Directorate frigates have served me well I am adding 9 of them along with 1 heavy cruiser and several escorts.  The bronze color is almost done, so I maybe able to get the dip shading done this weekend if I don’t get to fussy with detailing.

I dug out the ogres for the Garagehammer challenge and started assembling some ogres.  I realized that I don’t have enough parts for as many ironguts as I had wanted to do.  Oh well, I will just do more bulls and ironblasters and perhaps do a few converted ironguts.

I have green paint on the War Steam Shrine Tank and have started doing the bronze/gold trim.  I need to give it some more love as I will be out of town the last week of the month.  Tick Tock Tick Tock.

Tonight I cut out 5 halberdiers from the sprue and added archer heads (furry hats are important since they will be a snow based army).  I also added blades to the arms taking care to use the X-acto blade to cross score the contact surfaces before adding the glue, and then letting the glue melt the plastic for 30 seconds or so before making the join.  I have found that in halberdier and spearmen models I have bought in the past that that joint is very vulnerable to breaking so I wanted it to be as secure as possible.  I can not say enough about taking the time and care with scoring and letting the glue melt the plastic when assembling plastic miniatures as the plastic really makes a weld instead of a joint that consists of two pieces of plastic stuck together with dried model cement.

I placed the artillery and the death wizard into the display cabinet tonight.  Its really nice to see them on display there… and really nice not to have them taking up space on my painting desk!

2013-03-08: Now with more Snow!

I had Tuesday off since it was Town Meeting Day in The Frozen North.  It was a rare day off in which my daughter’s daycare was actually open, so it was Happy Hobby Day for DaDa!!!

I had great plans of assembling a horde of ogres and base coating some Empire swords men.  But in the end I spent most of the day doing snow bases on my artillery and crew, fiddling with my War Steam Shrine Tank (which I talked about earlier), and deciding how to convert up some knights of Moor.

Here are some pictures of the artillery and crew. Ohh… ahhh…

 

 

 

I have decided that the WSST will be my painting challenge for the month.  Now I just have to find that engineer for it.

2013-03-07: Transform and Steam Out!

During the last few days I have been busy throwing together an idea I have been musing about for a while.  Many moons ago I bought one of the very old small steam tanks to use as the heart of a skaven rat tank.  That didn’t happen and later I bought a plastic steam tank hull to for the same project and I never got around to doing a rat tank again.  The parts lingered in the basement until the new war altar kit came out and it looked great except that the griffin on top made it look very top heavy.  So I struck on the idea of sticking it on the back of a steam tank.

So I through together the engine and cannon from the old metal mini-stank, added that to the plastic hull, and placed the podium over the hatch (which I will magnetize later.  I added magnets to the bottom of the griffin and put a piece of steel inside the steam tank ceiling so it latches on well.  The magnets will allow me to swap them out to place the steam tank turret on instead in order to use it as a steam tank.  I have to dig up the old engineer from the mini tank to place inside the turret and then I will prime it all up for my painting project for the month.

Oh, the shields on the side (since I didn’t buy them when I got the hull) are from the knight kit and from the banner things in the war altar kit.