Living in the woods, hugging a tree…

Next in my desperate sprint through the painting queue before the year ends is the final entry in my Dungeons & Dragons Classes project, the Druid:

To recap, here is everything else so far:

Classes (as of 5e Player’s Handbook):

• Barbarian
• Bard
• Cleric
• Druid
• Fighter
• Monk
• Paladin
• Ranger
• Rogue (and also here)
• Sorcerer

• Warlock
• Wizard

Originally when I was looking for a Druid mini for the project I was considering using one of the sculpts from the old board game expansion Forbidden Forest:

(Especially fun is the fact that the antagonist Druid in this has a separate staff, cloak and headdress that you can dress him up with)

But then I remembered this chap, that I think was from Wargames Illustrated at Salute a few years back, and fell a bit in love with his look of absolute disdain (I imagine he’s looking at someone who just thoughtlessly stood on a flower). It’s a lovely little sculpt, with a bunch of little details that add visual interest (the various bones and whatnot hanging off him) without there being so many that it’s a pain to paint.

Speaking of painting, when it came to it I went for a faded leather duster look, even if the idea of a nature loving Druid wearing that much leather might not feel quite right (although I justify it to myself as him having honoured the animal to continue using it after its death, rather than having killed it for fast fashion). What in hindsight might be a bit of flash rather than an earring I painted silver, which just makes it look a bit like he’s got a chipped paint job… but that’s how it goes sometimes. I also wanted to give him a non-white skin tone, to add a little more variety to my miniature collection. Unfortunately, I base coated his face months before I came back and finished him, and could not for the life of me remember what colour I’d originally used, leading to an evening peering at various Foundry skin triads trying to work out which one was closest in order to highlight the flesh…

[edit - my copy of The Silver Bayonet turned up the day after I posted this, and I suspect this Druid might slot nicely into that…]

Finishing him brings the Tally to:

33 vs 23 = +10

And let’s me cross the Classes project off of this year’s Challenge:

• Finish something old
• Finish a piece of terrain
• Finish some scatter terrain (3/3)
• Prep all of the monkeys in the monkey box
• Paint all of the miniatures in a boxed game
• Play a game with fully painted miniatures
• Finish a complete skirmish force for a project (at least 16 miniatures, unless it's for a much smaller scale game like Frostgrave)
• Repaint something (either a miniature that I have previously painted, or one that was received painted

• Convert a miniature and show WIP pics

• Finish the last member of the Nextwave team
• Complete the classes project (and when I do that, start a project to have painted miniatures to represent all of the Races in the Players Handbook)
• Add at least 3 entries to the Monstrous Alphabet Project (1/3)
• Average at least a miniature a week by the end of the year (so, paint 52 miniatures)
• End the year with the Tally in the positive!

Looking at the Challenge, I’m probably on track to cross a few more off by the end of the year, which is nice! Also, at the start of the year I considered expanding the Classes project to include all of the races in the Player’s Handbook, which if I look back at things I’ve already finished would look like this so far:

• Dwarf
• Elf
• Halfling
• Human (there are plenty more, I won’t link them all here!)
• Dragonborn 
• Gnome
• Half-Elf
• Half-Orc
• Tiefling

(I’ve also done a Goblin adventurer, which appears in the Monster Manual iirc)

So only four miniatures to paint and I’ll complete that project too! Although I know I don’t own any Tiefling miniatures, and am fairly certain I’ve not got anything that could be pressed into service as a half-orc… that sounds like a problem for next year’s me though…

A litre of what?

(Is what my wife asked us when we replied ‘Alita’ when she asked us what we were going to the cinema to see)

So, cyberpunk is cool right? There’s a video game coming out imminently that I’m probably not going to get for a while, having too much in the backlog already, but here’s a mini that would be perfect for gaming that:

When we came out of the cinema after seeing Alita, I was all fired up for cyberpunk, and kept thinking to myself ‘I want to play a game where I buy arms’, having fond nostalgic feelings for games like Syndicate on the Amiga, and then found myself scrolling through the Crooked Dice store and stumbled across this beauty!

It’s a beautiful sculpt that takes paint exceptionally well, although as previously mentioned on the blog I did sand down her nipples, as in the bare metal they were ... really something else. The arm is great, the gun is great, even her shoes look delightfully futuristic! Special shout out to the hacking desk hanging from her belt, which I painted with colourful cables and then gave it a grubby cream body like it was a piece of 80s kit (because after all, cyberpunk is the past’s view of the future, no?). I dug out a Foundry Asian flesh triad as well, as the future is multicultural.

Here’s a picture of her knee deep in rubbish:

(In hindsight, I should have had this shot lit by the light of a flickering computer monitor for proper aesthetics)

Painting her brings my total of painted miniatures for the year to 45, but as we’re at the point in the year where it becomes obvious that there’s absolutely no chance that I’m going to get the Tally back into the positive before the end of the year the postman has been with some treats:

A couple of back issues of Wargames Illustrated with free sprues - American War of Independence Militia (because we watched Hamilton months ago and apparently I have a sickness whereby everything I see or hear translates into 28mm in my head) and Samurai (or at least they were advertised as samurai on the website, but what actually came was Ashigaru with bows, less useful for what I actually wanted them for, converting into zombies for a Japanese Fantasy project that I’ll hopefully write more about in the near future) and a Giants in Miniature... miniature, Lord Callan from the recent Never Mind the Billhooks release, who will probably find new life as a Redanian Sergeant;

A Citadel Sanity Claws, as I’d been fancying painting one of these as a festive treat for years and a nice seller on eBay was able to furnish me with one, as well as a freebie Witch Aelf from Games Workshop that I got on the same day - the 24 year difference between the two models really shows!

And then today, a freebie Plague Marine from GW, when I popped in to pick up a pot of paint suitable for painting Temerian blue;

Which brings the final Tally for this post to:

45 vs 133 = -88

Post-Salute 2018 post

Only a week after the actual event - did I mention that I'm not a fan of the Blogger app being killed off?

The night before Salute, I made a meme after seeing that Troll Trader were running their usual 'first 50 people spending over a certain amount get a goody bag':

My first stop at the show was their stand, where I bought the Collector's Edition of The Walking Dead game from Mantic, so I guess Dark Side Kermit won there...

Ah, early morning starts, everyone's favourite, but a pilgrimage requires sacrifice:

(I think at this point I'd already been ignoring my alarm for twenty minutes)

The usual Salute outfit of Jayne hat - this year was unseasonably warm though, so it spent most of the day in my bag, leading to complaints from my companions that they then couldn't find me.

My phone is alas on the way out, and doesn't hold charge as well as it used to, so less photos than usual, presented in almost no order:

[Obligatory queueing shot]

Modiphius Fallout miniatures: 

I like them, but at a larger scale than my existing stuff, I'm not sure if I'll get any (he says, setting up for future 'well, although last year I said...' posts. Wait, didn't I say last year that I wasn't going to get The Walking Dead?)

One of the thing's I was most excited to see was Mantic's upcoming Hellboy kickstarter - alas, there was only a handful of preview miniatures, and no game content, but look how pretty they are!

Particularlyexciting is that it looks like there's a mechanic for the frog monsters to evolve from little swarms up to big gribblies...

There was a rather large and nice Star Wars Legion table:

(read again my comments about the Fallout game re: larger scale, me not investing)

Mantic were running a paint and take table, so I tried my hand at knocking out a Star Saga Scientist:

Not bad for half hour with a large brush!

I'm not going to count him as painted for the Tally just yet, as I think I'll repaint his face (as it took a couple of goes with the brush I had to get it to this state of acceptability, but could definitely be improved), as well as potentially changing the colours of some things like his kneepads, maybe adding a Vault number to the back of his suit so that I can use him for Fallout, as well as rebasing him!

I managed to snap some pictures of Fireforge Games' upcoming Fantasy Northern troops, and they're rather lovely:

I wasn't sure how they'd look in the flesh, as pre-production renders seen online can hide a multitude of sins (Wargame Factory zombies being one of the most well-known examples of this) but they look like they take paint pretty well:

I think with some custom shields they'll make ideal House Bolton troops for my Game of Thrones / A Song of Ice and Fire project, as well as providing some additional bits for House Stark kitbashes...

I took this photo of a Bad Squiddo table to use as an inspirational image for future scatter terrain building, as I think that those rubble and broken pipe pieces look great!

This is an awful picture of a lovely Crooked Dice Post-Apocalyptic table - I think they were running two games on the same table, one with plant zombies and one with dune buggies?

Got to see Angel Giraldez painting again - insert the now traditional 'so handsome, so talented, it just isn't fair' comment!

Joe, our DM, is a feeder. This is fine with me. Picnic lunch with some old friends that I hadn't seen in a while, including Ciarron, who long-time followers may remember from a Salute post a few years back where we both got super excited about the Batman Miniatures game, bought a bunch of stuff and vowed to play. We still haven't.

Someone had painted up their Westfalia Northern Mercenaries kickstarter and entered it in the painting competition! I really should paint mine...

Now, the real meat of any Salute post - the loot!

• Rogue Stars Psions (because one looks like farmboy Luke with a lightsaber, and the other is a froggy looking alien)
• Frostgrave Barbarian Tracker (to fill out the kitbashed Wildlings that have been sat on my hobby desk since last summer)
• Rumbleslam goblin & Kromlech orc pilot from my Troll Trader goody bag
• Assorted dice and badges
• Heresy Ebric the Doomed (as I try to always buy something from Heresy - support the companies you love or they might not still be around next year!)
• 2 Crooked Dice Wasteland Warriors (to add some greater female representation to my Survivors collection)
• '!' tokens from Fenris, to use with the set of zombie rules I'm working on
• Some Hasslefree Survivors
• An assortment of Wargames Illustrated Giants in Miniature models, to get the show-exclusive Druid
• [heavily inspired by] Fallout / Mass Effect / Star Wars miniatures from Brother Vinni 
• This year's show mini

Also, the Mantic Walking Dead game, plus a selection of bits from my goody bag, like a couple of rulebooks, a cardboard building that is the perfect size for 1/144 Gundam models, a stencil, some weathering powder, a bunch of beer mats and a handful of sweets!

Fun fact - after Salute, I went for dinner at my Mother-in-Law's, where I showed my daughter the miniature that I had painted that day, which then vanished without a trace. Several days later, he turned up in grandma's bag...

Adding everything up (and factoring in the things that sold on eBay just before the show) brings the Tally to:

9 vs -36 = +27

I'm thinking that I might have to reconsider my 'board game pieces don't count towards the Tally for acquisition' when some of the games come with what are clearly miniatures, as they Tally would look a lot less robust after buying The Walking Dead game! I'm selling some more bits on eBay in preparation for the aforementioned Hellboy Kickstarter, so expect to see the Tally distort even further...

In other news, the sun briefly came out in the UK, and the sound of rattle cans resounded across the land as we had that perfect combination, a warm day with no wind. Not me though, as by the time everything was sorted and my daughter was settled in bed it was ten at night, but I'm not one to let something like that stop me so I set about getting a bunch more odds and ends into the painting queue:

Top Tip: though you might think you've been very careful with your spraying box, in the cold light of day it usually turns out you've sprayed a black line onto the paving slabs in the garden.