Ratling Gun!

The next step in my plan to conquer the overworld (or at least the part of it the chum I’ve challenged to paint a Warhammer army is standing on) with a sea of ratty types is completed:

Gorgeous, and a joy to paint, even if grey-furred ratmen don’t show up particularly well against my usual display board background.

I was so happy with these that they even got their vanity shots done using actual sunlight, unlike 99% of what I paint which gets photographed at midnight in my basement or balanced on my dining room table. See also, tufts and flock, making them technically the only fully finished mini in the whole army!

So, why the Ratling Gun? The first benchmark is 500 points, against an opponent painting an equivalent amount of Bretonnians, so my options from the miniatures in my collection were:

Poisoned wind mortar - move AND fire, good at killing knights

Warp fire Thrower - absolutely archetypical, good at killing knights

Ratling Gun - most likely to misfire, bad at killing knights, punny name

Me, in this situation:

Eh, I made the right choice. We’ll see how it goes, I’m generally luckier with D6s than I am with D20s. Plus, at this low points level the Bretonnians have a general on foot, so you never know…

The Tally took a hit in the opposite direction too this week, as GW are offering a free Skaven to cut out and keep this month, so I made an excuse to nip in for a pot of paint (not pictured) and grab one of those:

I mean I’ve got dozens already, but I always need more right? I might see about getting a pack master arm from somewhere and converting him, as the old plastic pack masters look a bit chonky compared to the modern cleanest sculpts.

Tally:

49 vs 47 = +2

And to end the post, here’s a group shot of the army so far:

All 140 points of it so far - the Ratling Gun is only 7 points shy of that unit of Slaves it’s next to!

Dem bones dem bones…

 …dem surprisingly well armoured bones:

Way, way back in the shrouded mists of the past known as March 2022, my family all had COVID, which wasn’t ideal, but on the other hand having a week off work did give me the opportunity to start playing some solo Frostgrave. Having made my way through the three scenarios of Dark Alchemy, I decided that the next thing I wanted to do was hire a Captain, and the solo scenario ‘Alone in the Crypt’ from Spellcaster issue 1 seemed like the perfect way narratively to introduce a Captain to my warband.

Scanning down the encounter table for the scenario to see what monsters I didn’t already have in my collection, I saw that I’d need some armoured skeletons. Most conversions that I’ve seen tend to be in full plate, transplanting skeleton heads into Perry medieval knight bodies (which was my initial plan), but digging through my backlog of kits one day I came across a box of plastic Vikings that realistically I’m never going to use for anything, and figured I’d give them a go as a base for some chain mail wearing skeletons:

Each miniature is a mashup of Viking (from Gripping Beast) and leftover Mantic skeleton bits (that I’m fairly certain I was gifted years ago by Infovore.Tim). As the shield arms are generally single piece with the skeleton bodies, this often involves a lot of careful cutting, scraping and filing to get everything to fit together.

I thought I’d taken more WIP pics than this, but apparently not, so we’ll jump straight to this shot of my four converted boys:

I figured four was enough, as the most you’re likely to encounter per roll on the encounter table is 2, and anyway I’ll be smashing these to pieces so quick they’re unlikely to spend much time on the table (oh sweet hubris…). I gave them a variety of different weapons to make them look less like a uniform unit, but conversely made sure three of the four had matching helmets so that they would have that visual detail to link them. What can I say, I’m a walking contradiction.

Whilst painting them, I fancied giving them all a cheesy skeleton logo on their shields, so dug out an old Chaos Space Marine transfer sheet. I know, it’s a bit silly (did they have skull themed insignia when they were alive? Did they repaint it after they were reanimated?) but some things are just classic:

And here they are after the rest of the paint job was done, suitably weathered:

Top tip for anyone using the verdigris effect paint from GW: make sure the lid is firmly on when holding the pot directly above your finished models! There was an… incident, that involved frantically trying to dilute bright blue paint and mop it off of the models before it dried, and a few touch ups. I think they only place you might still be able to see it is on their bases, but I can always pretend that’s an intentional effect, representing the magic leaking from these walking corpses and leaching into the ground…

And just to complete the set of images, here’s the back of them:

Painting these brings the Tally to:

48 vs 46 = +2

Back in the positive, and also so close to hitting the ‘miniature a week’ yearly average of 52 miniatures painted with 5 months still to go on the year!

What’s next? Back to the main project of Skaven, of course, but for the next non-Skaven miniatures I still need some ghouls and a vampire before I’m able to play that Frostgrave scenario…

Clutter makes a house a home

And I’m assuming the same is true for dungeons.

Looking at Frostgrave, Rangers of Shadow Deep and Dungeons & Dragons, one thing I realised was I needed more oddments of scatter terrain to give rooms some personality. So, with that in mind, as a little palette cleanser between Skaven regiments I finished off this:

Even gnolls need somewhere to eat their tea, right? The table looks a bit 3d printed in this picture (new phone, new camera, new clarity apparently) but I can assure you it’s not, it’s from the same Frontline Miniatures set I used to build my Fallout scavenger camp way back when.

No change to the Tally, as they’re not actual miniatures, but rest assured, they’re not the only palette cleanser on my painting tile right now…

Happy Father’s Day...

 ...to (from?) some scrawny ratty boys:

And here they are again, in actual natural light:

The downside to which being every flaw on these secondhand miniatures that I stripped is more visible in this picture, but for 2 points a model I don’t think I’ll lose any sleep over that. Pretend that lump on the bell is a specifically modelled clapper, wouldn’t you?

When you add the singular model for this unit I’d previously painted (last year!), we get my second complete unit for the Road to the Old World challenge:

Being that they’re only Skavenslaves, this isn’t a huge amount of points out of what I need to paint - between this and my rat dart, the running total of painted Skaven is now 85 points. Still quite a way to get to 500… on the other hand, in painting this unit I’ve now painted more models than my opponent will have to for his whole army, so who’s the real winner here?

Painting these brings the Tally to:

44 vs 46 = -2

(and also brings me a huge leap closer to my annual challenge of painting at least 52 miniatures each year to average one a week)

Now having a proper unit to shove around, I thought I’d see about making a movement tray. I dug out some materials from the basement:

And, suitably fortified with coffee, after sketching out what I wanted (a square base, with a lip around the edge that I could hopefully fold up) I tested it using the actual unit, as my ability to produce squares is not always perfect):

Then I cut it out, and removed the corners to allow the excess ‘lip’ I’d allowed for to be folded up.

Now, in my planning I’d assumed I’d be able to gently score the plasticard, fold it up, then superglue the corners in place. In theory maybe, but in practice it was much less accommodating. A quick Google suggested that heat was the best way to bend plasticard, so off to the kettle I ran, much to my wife’s bemusement.

This however was also a non-starter, and I was largely just mangling this poor piece of plasticard. so I set about drying and flattening it back into shape (additional weights courtesy of my son):

Plan B: cut out some strips of plasticard that I can glue down to form the lip. Lesson learned from initial attempts at that though is you should cut the thin strips off of a whole sheet rather than trying to trim them out of a pre-cut piece, as tiny pieces of plasticard bend and slide under your metal ruler like there’s no tomorrow when you try and cut them. I’m tempted to use matchsticks instead, but worry that they will look even more shonky than my initial plans.

I could order some from Warbases, or crack open the single pack of Warhammer modular movement trays that I have stashed, but the thing holding me back from pulling the trigger on either of those is that I’m still undecided on whether I’m going to expand the units at a higher point value, and being that my modular movement trays are a finite resource I might end up using them up to make smaller bases than I end up needing…

What’s next? Probably more Skaven, although there might be a little palette cleanser or two in there as well. The next unit might get painted in smaller batches rather than all at once - I’d probably have done more detail and highlights on this unit if they weren’t such a big blob, where it got to the point where I was just glad to see the back of them on my painting tile. Maybe five at a time for the Clanrats? But then again, that’s pretty much what the plan was for these guys, before I got carried away…

The Protector of travelers in the night

 Moon Knight! He’s been prepped to paint for ages (I think since the Disney series was initially announced), but finally got finished this week, as the final episode of the aforementioned series is now out…

Which is surprising, given that he’s basically one colour. 

I’m not a huge fan of painting white, but have discovered the secret to this - paint it a very light grey and then use grey to shade it, before adding white to the mix to highlight, and it comes out looking not terrible!

Well, don’t look too closely at that cape as I describe it as not terrible, but you get what I mean.

The miniature itself is an old bendy Heroclix figure picked out of a bargain bin at Salute many years ago, mostly because of having seen the character in someone’s avatar many times over the years over on the LAF (you’ll know who I mean if you ever frequent that particular forum). In the years between buying the figure and actually painting it, I got round to reading a bunch of the Moon Knight comics (the Ellis and Lemire runs, and even the Max Bemis run) and found myself enjoying them. Now, on to paint one of his iconic enemies like… I don’t know, another Moon Knight? Some sort of mercenary? Some generic dudes? Maybe I’ll shelve that plan then…

The Tally:

15 vs 46 = -31

Next, back to that unit of Skaven I’ve been working on all this time, but still haven’t got ready to show…

Something something Tosche Station something something power converters

As is tradition, I have painted my annual Star Wars miniature for May the Fourth:

Luke Skywalker from Imperial Assault, as I didn’t have a painted version of him yet. Don’t look too closely, when adding the finishing touches I managed to dip my paintbrush in my cup of tea, and while reeling from that he ended up incredibly cross-eyed. Perfect is the enemy of done though, as they say!

He’s a little chunky compared to some of the other miniatures in my Star Wars collection, but not so much as to be unusable I don’t think:

While I’d only planned to paint a single Star Wars mini this year, as is my way I find my plans expanding - I could do with painting R2D2 and C3P0 to round out the core gang from the original trilogy, and of course after watching a couple of actual plays on YouTube I’m now thinking about painting the rest of my Imperial Assault core set, but one thing at a time…

I’ve had a couple of mail drops since my last post too. First of all, a couple of eBay wins - some Hobbit goblins to use as ghouls in Frostgrave and Rangers of Shadow Deep, as my gnolls are goblins so it fits thematically having ghouls be messed up looking versions of those, and some old plastic dwarfs, as the lot included the Warhammer Quest Dwarf and a plastic Slayer that was missing from my collection:

They’ve since had a bath and are awaiting being prepped:

Also, I received a parcel from Joe of Zabadak’s Zombie World that requires some backstory. A few years back, one of the pillars of the blogging community was Vampifan, whose prodigious output was only matched by his enthusiasm for miniatures. Check out Vampifan’s world of the undead if you haven’t before, and marvel at the blog that was long an inspiration for many of us.

After years of multiple posts a week, Bryan/Vampifan suddenly stopped posting midway through December 2019. After a month, it turned out he’s been in hospital but was looking to be on the road to recovery, but unfortunately his next and final post revealed that he was unfortunately critically ill in a hospice, and said goodbye to us all.

I don’t know the full story of what happened, but Joe/Zabadak posted earlier this year that he’d saved a fraction of Bryan’s collection, and started a series of blog posts showing it off, including a number of things that I don’t remember ever having seen on the blog originally, as well as offering it up to anyone that could give them a good home. I expressed my interest in a  couple of items, and here’s what came:

As well as some Mordheim scenery, a selection of miniatures:

There’s also a zombie in there, that I want to get or make a small display for to keep as a memorial/memento, as it was Bryan’s (huge!) zombie collection that originally brought me to his blog.

Also, this graveyard piece, that will be perfect for fighting over once I’ve finished my current Skaven painting project:

Adding everything up, the new total for the Tally is:

14 vs 46 = -32

Next time: there’s a single figure that’s almost finished, then it’s back to batch painting a regiment of Skaven! They’re all base coated now, so it’s time to crack out the washes and dirty them up…

Oh rats

I’ve completed the first proper unit for my ‘Road to the Old World’ challenge (for those of you that haven’t heard about it, it’s a slow grow escalation challenge to paint and play some classic tank and flank Warhammer ahead of the release of The Old World - there’s a Facebook group and a Reddit, if you want to join in!), a Skaven rat dart:

Excuse the lack of natural light which is making the pictures look more terrible than they do in real life. Look at that lovely classic pack master sculpt though, beautiful.

Considering that I need to paint close to a hundred models to fill out my 500 point starter list, I probably shouldn’t have done 3-4 layers on the fur and 4-6 on the skin, but I guess a speed painter I am not.

I may come back and add some vegetation to their bases at a later date, I’m still undecided. But for now they’re done, and take me up to a mighty 25 points painted, only 475 to go!

Finishing these also takes the Tally to:

13 vs -4 = +17

Next? Some slightly more involved sculpts, in greater quantities is the plan. I intend to break up painting the units with single figures to try and keep motivation up between batch painting, as well as having some off-project figures for when my attention span wanders towards something else. Batch painting is slow going currently though, as post-covid my energy isn’t what it previously was, so I’m generally able to base coat one part of three or four figures an evening, if I don’t fall asleep putting the children to bed…