Eight legs, how many watches?

Continuing on the theme of ‘my laser like focus to complete the miniatures I need to play a solo war game of Rangers of Shadow Deep’, I finished painting some giant spiders: 

Sculpted by Mark Copplestone, these gribbly little beauties are gross in the best possible way - I tried to give their abdomen that mottled, gross pattern you get on some spiders. Also: see their glinting, multitudinous eyes, which you wouldn’t believe there are four different colours on (not counting undercoat and grey dry brush) to look at these pictures. 

One thing I like about this sculpt is that you can get a variety of poses with a little careful bending:

(I even managed to only break a single leg being a bit heavy handed, which was carefully glued back on!)

One of the things that attracted me to Rangers of Shadow Deep was the fact that I could play the majority of the missions using my backlog of fantasy miniatures without having to buy anything new, but these spiders were the exception to that, an odd hole in my collection...

As well as menacing my Ranger (well, Paladin, as you’ll hopefully see soon in a future blog post), they can do double duty for Dungeons & Dragons, although again they only get an appendix entry in the Monster Manual so don’t qualify for my Monstrous Alphabet challenge!

To give you an idea of scale, here is one of them menacing an under coated Captain Scarlet:

Not so big that you couldn’t boo it with a stick, but big enough that it would be a terrible nuisance when you’re busily trying to loot their forest...

Finishing these 8 doubles my number of painted miniatures this year, and takes the Tally to:

16 vs 68 = -52

Next: one last miniature to complete my companions for Rangers of Shadow Deep, then some scatter scenery, some civilians, then to make some trees...

In other news, we showed our daughter Princess Mononoke last weekend (side note - I didn’t remember it being that violent until I showed it to a 5 year old), and before the movie had even finished I was already considering starting a Japanese Fantasy project reskinning Rangers of Shadow Deep to Ronin of...

Last minute edit: I forgot, I actually acquired another miniature! Uncle Johnny posted this through my letterbox:

As I saw (on Scruffy Crow’s YouTube channel) some conversions using this old school monopods Chaos Warrior as a base, and fancied giving it a try!

This does, however, leave the Tally at:

16 vs 69 = -53

The year of the plague (doctor)

Whilst it may have been a while since my last confession, do not think that I have been idle! Although admittedly the things that have taken up most of my time aren’t finished yet, so you won’t see the fruits of that this post...

My Salute order from Fenris arrived, and had a free miniature in, taking another point off of the Tally:

(I’ve also placed and received another order since that I apparently forgot to take any pictures of, but it was some walls and rubble, so no effect on the Tally)

The chum who waved Rangers of Shadow Deep under my nose was considering ordering a couple of Frostgrave sprues to try them out, so I offered to trade him one of my Soldier 1 sprues if he ordered a couple of Soldier 2, so I find myself in possession of this bunch of lovely ladies:

He also threw in Mad Donna, because my friends are generous to a fault. 

The box I delivered the week before:

I threw in a couple of interesting bits from the Barbarian sprues as well in case he fancied taking a barbarian companion for his own solo ROSD games...


At ten to midnight on the day that Partizan would have been, I found myself idly scrolling the Crooked Dice web store, and ordered myself a Captain Scarlet lookalike as it was on sale (which has led to me spending the last week or so of lockdown watching the original series while I do the washing up, and considering ordering a load more to do an entire Spectrum force, but I’ve managed to hold off thus far as I’ve only undercoated this first one so far!)

My order came with another freebie as well, tugging the Tally even further into the red (or should that be scarlet)...

Finally, I ordered a pack of Copplestone Giant Spiders that I’d need for the first couple of ROSD scenarios, seen here with Captain Scarlet for scale: 

They’re horrible, in a good way. I thoroughly enjoyed bending their little legs and mandibles around to get a variety of poses!


It hasn’t all just been me gingerly receiving packages at arms length from the postman though; having vowed to any gods that would listen that I would dedicate myself solely to finishing miniatures and terrain needed so that I could play the first couple of Rangers of a Shadow Deep of course the first thing that I’ve finished isn’t actually for that:

A plague doctor from CP Models, that I have no real need for but it caught my fancy, given the state of current affairs. Maybe I’ll claim it’s the first model in an Assassin’s Creed miniatures project that I haven’t started yet...

Lots of dry brushing to grubby him up as he stalks his way through the plague choked streets made this a relatively quick and satisfying paint job to complete, which brings the Tally to:

3 vs 68 = -65

What’s next? The miniatures needed for ROSD are half completed, so shouldn’t take much longer to get over the finish line. I’m about halfway through painting the buildings that I knocked up for the first scenario, but I find painting terrain much less entertaining than miniatures, so I’m jumping back and forth between the two currently...

In other news, after killing the blogger app, it seems they’ve now updated it so that it’s almost unusable in Chrome on my iPad. This post was brought to you by emailing the post to blogger as suggested by a quick google, that not working at all, and so flip flopping between various applications and drafts copying and pasting chunks, then doing it all again when none of the pictures worked. How is everyone posting? And if you’re also having to jump through these hoops, how do you deal with that frustration?

Regdar, punching bag extraordinaire...

So, Christmas looms ever larger, and life has been getting in the way of my attempts to finish 52 miniatures this year - at this point, we’ve gone from me needing to complete a miniature every other day to hit that target to needing to finish three every other day...

Regardless of whether I hit that target or not, here’s another finished miniature:

(still getting to grips with using my wife’s photo booth, but I think this is better than the usual late night miniature photography!)

A miniature of Regdar from an old D&D board game - if you’re not familiar with Regdar (although you’ve probably seen him getting murdered numerous times in various pieces of art) I’d recommend giving this a read: The Many Deaths of Regdar

I like that he’s actually equipped with a bundle of stuff, he looks like he’s prepared to go delving! Less fun was the weird blending of some details from the casting process - his helmet stretched across to meet his sword, which I carefully cut away but might have taken a smidge too much material...

Finishing him brings the Tally to:

37 vs 27 =

Wait, the postman has been...

Northstar’s Black Friday sale brought 6 miniatures, and eBay brought a classic Harlequin Solitaire (as I’d been enjoying painting the Howling Banshee in my previous post and thought that all else failing I could use it for Blackstone Fortress after rules were published in White Dwarf)

Which actually brings the Tally to:

37 vs 34 = +3

Painting Regdar reminded me of an old plan (in the 4e days) to paint a miniature for every Dungeons and Dragons character class, and I thought I’d look back and see whether I could do the same for 5e, and was pleasantly surprised at how far done I was:


Classes (as of 5e Player’s Handbook):

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

• Warlock
• Wizard

I think I’ll add adding to this list to next year’s Challenge, and also may well add races to the mix... which also gives me another idea for an addition to the Challenge... 

I Spy with my little Eye...

Another mini plucked from the painting queue because it took my fancy, this time a Copplestone spy-fi type for 7tv:

Not a lot to say other than that really... Nice sculpt, Dark Reaper basecoat for the usual reasons...

Not my finest facial paintjob, and unusually I painted his pupils using an actual brush rather than a micron pen:

This is the first set of posted pictures taken using my wife's new lightbox. Better images mean you can see my painting better, which isn't necessarily a good thing...

Despite the closeness of Salute, I also bought a miniature this week. A nice chap on one of the Facebook groups had listed a bunch of out of production Doctor Who miniatures for sale, so I grabbed the 'not-Rory' that Crooked Dice used to make that I missed out on the first time round:

Also as it's Salute soon, my eBay auctions finished and some miniatures have gone off to their new homes, which leaves the Tally looking positively wacky:

9 vs -54 = +45

Not to worry though, just think of it as pre-Salute buffer...

Not-Sterling Archer...

Having recently started watching Archer on Netflix, I found myself with the urge to paint a dapper looking gentleman in a grey suit:

He's a little older looking, but passable I think:

Handily, I had the miniature (a Copplestone sculpt) already based and undercoated (and had done for... I don't know, a couple of years probably), with a basecoat on his flesh, which meant I was able to paint him in a single afternoon (rather than the 'a little here, a little there over days/weeks/months/years' approach I usually end up taking). To that end, he was painted almost entirely using a Citadel Large Brush, with the exception of the whites, which used a much sharper tool:

I forget where I read 'use the largest brush you can get away with', but it seems to be good advice - the miniature was a lot quicker to paint than usual, and hasn't suffered much quality wise (although my usual standard doesn't set the bar unreachably high, I'll admit) - it was quite nice having a brush that held paint, rather than my usual time-consuming approach where I spend as much time reloading the brush as i do actually applying paint to the miniature... Something to think about in future sessions, I think...

In the time since my last post though, I've received a couple of goodies - a halfling from Uncle Johnny that's currently an experiment in using very thin layers over a white undercoat with a black wash (that I was sure I'd already posted about and included in the tally, but apparently not), and the pair of slayers that I needed to complete my set of Marauder sculpts:

These two likely lads are currently taking a long soak in the stripping pot, and take the current tally to:

14 vs 19 = -5

Back on the horse! (Redux)

Back in the swing of things, and actually painting miniatures, who knows how long it will last?

But before we get into all that, a slight diversion - I got taken to the Doctor Who Experience by my lovely young lady for my birthday! It was awesome, but can really be summed up in two pictures:

Olly loves Cybermen, but fears the scarecrow. There were many more pictures taken (although Nicole was less than impressed when I asked for front side and isometric views of every costume for painting reference...), but I think these two say it best...

Anyways, onto the miniatures (and apologies in advance for the worse than usual pictures, it's a new camera and a new light that needs a daylight bulb hampered by my measly skills):

An exotic bodyguard for 7tv to guard my evil genius whilst lazing around in a skimpy bikini -

She's from Copplestone iirc, and was my first time experimenting with a Foundry triad (Oriental Flesh). I quite liked using the triad, as it made painting flesh a lot more straightforward, and might pick up some more in future (curse Foundry's long-lamented postal charges, I may have to wait until next Salute to pick up the next batch...)

The Vulture! He's been sat in his base colours for... I don't know, a couple of years, but I finally got round to finishing him off. He's a repainted heroclix fig, with all the blurry facial detail and wacky scale that entails, but he was one of the first heroclix figs I ever got, so still holds a certain charm. With him done, I'm 66.66% of the way to having my own non-canon Sinister Six! (Although if I were to go canon, I'd probably go for the second line-up, consisting of:

• Doctor Octopus
• Mysterio
• Electro
• Sandman
• Vulture
• Hobgoblin

as that's who I'd most fancy painting).

And last but not least, some goons from Heresy, for use as technician types for 7tv (yeah, they had ipads then, what of it?) and SF goons for Doctor Who. I don't know why, but I do love to see a wedding ring on a miniature.

And thus, to the tally:

97 vs 270 = -173

Still not great, but getting better (and hey, we've almost hit a hundred finished minis!) - fingers crossed I can hold back from restarting Mass Effect (after all my xbox saves got wiped, I couldn't bring myself to start the big games again, but I'm getting a hankering...). Then again, it's only the fact that I can't seem to find my copy of Zombieslayer to re-read that's stopping me from building an old-school Undead Warhammer army (well, old-school to me at least, I'm only young); Kemmler leading blocks of zombies with zombie Wyverns, with none of this Vampire Lord malarky... Eh, it could go either way really...

And lo, there was wire!

After a long search for the missing camera wire, it appears our house has eaten it. Amazon has furnished us with a replacement, allowing me to post pics of stuff I received and painted a week ago...

Commander Vyper, being a rather nice chap, sent me some Mantic zombies when I bought some old copies of Harbinger magazine from him. Huzzah for zombies, -3 points to the tally...

...and yes, I am easily swayed by the motion of crowds. A whole bunch of chaps over on the LAF have recently started Star Wars projects, which reminded me of the number of plastic WOTC SW minis I own, and the fact that I'd borrowed the old SWMB rules from an old friend... Now, I love Boba Fett. But I do not own a prepaint Boba Fett, and they go for silly money on ebay, hence me now owning this dinky little 25mm WEG Boba instead. I haven't been able to bring myself to strip him yet (partially because I know how much I struggle to match colours when painting), but eventually he'll get repainted as Feskitt Bobb, Boba's slightly shorter cousin...

However, it's not just been minuses on the tally:

Strange Aeons



Rat King! A combination of Terry Pratchett's 'The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents' and the first Penny Arcade dnd podcast has left me with a bizarre fondness for ratkings... mini is from black cat bases, - I considered cutting him off of the sculpted base so that he'd fit in with the rest of my minis, but that was a lot of work that would have ended up with me throwing away 80% of the mini, so I didn't bother. He'll be a 'queen swarm' for Strange Aeons (from 'Shocking Tales of Madness and Mayhem'), which means I'll need another swarm for him to direct around - I'm torn between getting another swarm from black cat bases, and having two identical minis, or perhaps getting a dnd prepaint and rebasing it to give a bit of variety...

Zombies

5 Zombies from Copplestone and 2 ghouls from black cat bases (painted last monday, a full week ago, to my shame) take my total of painted zombies up to 65, I think (still never enough...).A couple of them have accesories from the Urban Litter kit from black cat, which I love (the zombie in the workout shorts looks sad that he's dropped his drink...)

Also, have a needless group shot:



Which brings us to a total of:

23 vs 13 = +10

Still in the green (and afaik, there's only four miniatures currently on their way to me in the post)! Not my most productive month though, as nosing through some old folders on the laptop I see that last august I painted 28 miniatures in a single month, which will be the new benchmark to aim for...