Things with wings

You wouldn’t know it from everything else I’ve been posting about, but over the summer I decided that my next project was going to be Warriors of Athena, an obscure Frostgrave adjacent Greek Fantasy game originally released as a series of magazine articles - and then it got announced that it was getting a proper release from Osprey! The plan is to rope in some compatriots to watch Clash of the Titans while building warbands, but in the interim I’ve been painting some suitable enemies, some Foundry harpies:

You can tell at a glance how happy I was with each individual face based on how much Blood for the Blood God got splashed around. 

It’s been a while since I painted any miniature nipples, so I turned to my big book of painting for inspiration and advice:

Looking at their backs, I tried to make the upper feathers look different to the lower feathers - I think I could perhaps have gone a bit further, but I’m not mad at how they turned out:

I think I need to start varnishing my miniatures if I’m going to play games with them though, these ladies have done nothing but fall over since I got them.

Fun fact about the bases - they are decorated with bones from a Wargames Factory skeletons set that I bought years ago from a gamer that had given up on trying to get them to go together as they were so fiddly, which was fine for me as I wanted to use them for scenery. Having rejoined the Lead Adventure Forum again this year, I was looking through some of my old PMs, and realised that the gamer that I had bought them from was actually Joseph McCullough, who went on to write Frostgrave, and Warriors of Athena, the game that these miniatures have been painted for.

Speaking of wings, I’ve also painted this little chap, an excellent sculpt as ever from Crooked Dice:

I bought him at Salute just because he’s such a lovely little sculpt, it’s mostly serendipity that I actually have a use for him now.

Speaking of little sculpt, he’s tiny, that’s a 20mm base he’s on. I suspect it may be time to dig out the magnifier that I have somewhere, that got packed away back when I was young and vital and didn’t need such things.

It’s been a while since the last Tally post though, so I’ve also received some miniatures:

Last month’s GW free mini of the month was a Chaos Dwarf, which I quite fancied, but unfortunately came out the same week that I found out that if you work hard enough, you unlock extra time off on doctor’s orders (hence all of the solo games and blog posts recently), and it was a week and a half before I could bring myself to go into town, where I discovered that they had apparently run out that morning. So instead I treated myself to this pack of D&D miniatures from the games shop on the other side of town:

My daughter has made it very clear that she wants to play a Tabaxi Rogue at some point in the future because of the Dungeon Club graphic novels, so I figure I’ll probably end up letting her have one of these when the time comes.

The next month, I nipped in on day of release to grab the Deathwatch marine, because I figured there’s definite inq28 potential there:

I also took advantage of em4’s Black Friday deals - I ordered a kilo of random dice, planning to make my children dice advent calendars, although they took too long to come to be ready for Advent, so the backup plan is to do some sort of twelve days of Christmas deal instead. I had a voucher from when em4 used some pictures of minis I’d painted on their website, so bought a slightly discounted bridge (because slowly but surely, I’m working my way towards playing that next Rangers of Shadow Deep scenario), and then figured I may as well add on a mystery bag of five random minis for a fiver to qualify for free postage (although to be fair, out any mini in front of me for a pound and I’m likely to bite) and was furnished with these:

I’d admittedly assumed it was going to be some of the weirder ranges that em4 stock, but other than one prepainted dwarf that will likely get stripped so that I have a random minis for ready the next time my son wants to paint something I got 4 Grenadier sculpts, only one of which I already own (the chap on the far left). I was especially happy with the chap on the far right, as having recently finished Cyberpunk 2077 I was tempt3d to paint up a Rockerboy, and ummed and ahhed for a while over ordering the singer from the same range at the same time, but showed remarkable restraint and resisted the urge.

All things included, that brings the Tally to:

36 vs 255 = -219 

I’d need to paint ten minis a day, every day, for the rest of the year to get the Tally back into the black at this point! I’ll settle for trying to get my finished minis up to an average of one a week though.

What’s next? More Frostgrave, and more painted minis hopefully! I will admit, I did dig out some minis that can be painted with very simple paint schemes to try and game things in my favour, but on the other hand, inspiration may have struck for another new project for next year:

And then again, I rearranged my nerd bookcase earlier to try and get all my Really Useful Boxes of minis onto shelves rather than having some piled up on the floor next to it, and found myself unearthing things I hadn’t seen in a while and going ‘ooh I should probably dig out my Strange Aeons minis right?’