Zomtober 2022 week 5

And here we find ourselves back to our more traditional posting slot of almost too late for the deadline, but still squeaking in with another completed zombie:

The freebie zombie from GW actually painted up really nicely - regardless of how you feel about them having a gravestone in their back and a stake through their heart, it’s a nicely sculpted mini that takes paint exceptionally well, plus it has enough details to add a bit of visual interest without being so busy that it’s a bear to paint.

But what’s that there’s more? Not much more, admittedly:

A quick raid of my bits box and I was able to make a zombie bursting forth from their grave. Whereas the rest of the zombies got plain grey ‘city rubble’ bases, this one got some grass and moss as I wanted to really make it look like it was breaking through the ground, upending some plantlife, rather than just being a hand with some sand stuck to it as it might have looked otherwise. 

One of the reasons I wanted a very short zombie like this was that I also dug out a dreg that I converted way back when I was probably eighteen, that has his spear levelled in suck a way that he’d never rank up with other miniatures. Unless he’s behind someone like this hand, that is…

However, the dreg didn’t get finished, as Friday night became ‘desperate last minute Halloween costume making’ rather than the usual ‘painting and a cup of tea’:

See also Saturday morning, painting something a little bigger than may usual scale so that my son could be Toad from Super Mario:

He was very happy with the costume, even if his toadstool hat with all of its stuffing made him overheat somewhat (also, my wife sewed a complete Starfire costume for our daughter, which is even more impressive than this that I made).

But I digress - not content to have just a hand as my additional submissions, I pressed on Sunday evening to get this handsome chap finished:

The Mordheim Necromancer! Apologies for the terrible photos of him, he’s come out looking fairly washed out, but that’s more to do with taking pictures in the dining room on a Sunday night than anything else. Although on that note I took all of the miniature photos in this post at the same time, so I’m not sure why the Cursed City zombie came out with good looking pictures while the rest didn’t!

In hindsight, maybe I should have weathered up the Necromancer’s robes too, but on the other hand I’m assuming as an actual living chap he probably takes better care of his robes than the shambling hordes he’s bent to his will.

Skull! It has a rune carved into it, so some Carroburg Crimson smeared in and around it gave it a suitably grim and gribbly appearance.

So, in total this Zomtober we have the start of a unit of zombies:

Which if you add to the skeletons that I painted way back when means I’m probably approaching having more points of Undead painted than Skaven, so I’d best get back to painting some ratty boys!

All this Mordheim painting had me browsing eBay, and so after painting the Cursed City zombie I treated myself to the Ogre from that game:

He’s a nice sculpt, who doesn’t look particularly like he’s from AOS, so will make an excellent Ogre Bodyguard as being me I’ve obviously started thinking about a challenge where I paint up all of the Hired Sword options from Mordheim just in case I ever play it…

All in, this brings the Tally to:

73 vs 65 = +8

Zomtober 2022 week 4

Shockingly, here we are for week four in a row with another on schedule blog post - slightly later than usual as my Sunday today involved a lot more tidying up and less spooky season movies than usual, but that’s just the way of the world sometimes isn’t it?

This week’s offering is the Witch Hunter themed zombie from Mordheim (picture taken during a rain storm, unfortunately, so the natural light wasn’t as bright as it could have been):

Not as brightly coloured as some of my previous zombies, but still a characterful little sculpt regardless. I went for a lot of greys and browns for him, as is my usual approach to almost any miniature.

I experimented with painting the flaming torch in his hand as some sort of wyrdstone-tainted warp flame, but it… didn’t quite turn out as I hoped. Initially I went too heavy on the green, and so had to go over it with very thinned white to try and lighten the whole thing, and then applying black to the flames left it too dark overall, so I had to go back in with more white, then redo some of the green… after a while, you hit a point where done is as good as perfect, and that’s what you see here.

Tally:

70 vs 64 = +6

Now a sensible person would continue building up a positive buffer on their Tally, but North Star just announced that there is going to be a money off code in their next newsletter, and I’ve got my eye on a few bits for Frostgrave / Rangers of Shadow Deep / Silver Bayonet, so who knows how long I’ll last before the Tally is in the red again…

Zomtober 2022 week 3

Another week, another Mordheim zombie finished and posted at a reasonable hour, posted while watching Hocus Pocus 2:

It’s a lovely sculpt, although the facial detail was a little soft for my meagre skills to make the most of. Everything looks good with a judicious application of blood though! The blue and yellow came out looking quite nice, so it was almost a shame to cover it up with dirt and grime, but he’d have looked out of place among his peers in pristine clothes…

Nipping into GW to grab a fresh pot of Rakarth Flesh as mine had completely dried out, I also grabbed the latest Mini of the Month:

Which is fairly handy, given that I have four Mordheim zombies and there are five Sundays in October (although there are a couple of backup minis in various states of preparation just in case). 

Side note on the Rakarth Flesh - being so used to my pretty much solid pot, what was supposed to be a light drybrush became an accidental overbrush, so that’s why the yellow sleeves on this week’s zombie look so pale. 

One in and one out brings the Tally to:

69 vs 64 = +5

Zomtober 2022 week 2

Another week, another zombie, this time the Sisters of Sigmar themed one from Mordheim:

Oof, I thought natural light was supposed to be the secret to taking better pictures? Then again, not rushing to take a picture before watching Hocus Pocus with your family probably ranks up there too.

I dug out an old pot of the GW Foundation range red (Mechrite Red) for her tabard, as I fancied something a little more muted than my usual method of painting red. It came out so nice that it was almost a shame to have to dirty it up with weathering, but grubby is as grubby does and so she got a layer of dirt and blood just like her companion from last week.

Her hair and skin got some green tones too to sell that unhealthy look, doubly thematic in that I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to hit this week’s deadline due to being sick enough to be off work. Luckily I recovered enough to put in the usual midnight Saturday finish in order to be able to post today.

Finishing her brings the Tally to:

68 vs 63 = +5

Next week: more of the same, hopefully! 

Side note - while Mordheim wasn’t high up on the project list for this year, painting these zombies has led to me watching an awful lot of Mordheim battle reports on YouTube…

Zomtober 2022 week 1 - Old World edition

As October rolls around again, it’s time for another month of Zomtober posts!

As ever, I planned and prepped for this month, but inevitably forgot that the first Sunday in October is only two days into the month, leading to some last minute painting as the deadline for the first post jumped forward - October’s always so far away until the week before!

We’re going back to Mordheim this year: 

Because Mordheim will always be awesome, and also since I have vague plans to do a small Undead Warhammer army once I’ve finished my Skaven army and played some games (looking at updating Circle of Blood because apparently I thrive on making rods for my own back).

Back in the days of the first lockdown, my planned project (until I got derailed by a buddy messaging saying ‘hey so have you heard of Rangers of Shadow Deep?’) was Mordheim, complete with planning out multiple warbands in a notebook. Having dug that back out, it turns out that there weren’t actually any zombies in my starting Undead warband, but given that I had this lovely metal sculpt (my wife bought me the boxed set back in the day) I figured I’d paint him up anyway! 

I went for a grubby paint scheme, even branching out away from my usual grey based scheme for zombie flesh. I especially appreciated painting grubby and dirty rather than trying for neatness when it hit one in the morning the night before post deadline day…

Before we hit the Tally, here’s a poses pic of my new shambling chum hanging out in an old graveyard:

Painting him brings the Tally to:

67 vs 63 = +4

The Tally may well go up again before next week’s post, as what I was painting before I realised how soon the deadline for this post was was on the final stretch before being bumped off of the painting handle…

…wheels…

 Next in my trio of posts comes this pair of carts:

When thinking what pieces of scatter terrain that I’d like to build that could see use in games like Rangers of Shadow Deep and Mordheim, an abandoned cart seemed like an easy win - plus, leaving it freestanding rather than based, it could always be flipped over and made part of a barricade.

First of all, I started thinking about wheels:

I grabbed a variety of circles to eyeball to see what felt right - in an ideal world I’d probably have just used the Warhammer cart wheel, but I only have two of them in my bits box and might need them if I ever get round to building the chariot they came from! After some deliberation, the Warhammer wheel won out as being the size to use, so I set about making some wheels out of balsa:

Lots of careful cuts later, I had vaguely round wheels:

I then sanded them in pairs, to ensure that they’d both be matching in their near roundness:

Using balsa, I was able to scribe some wood detail into my wheels using a pencil:

I went a little too deep on one of the grooves and accidentally snapped the wheel, but was thankfully able to glue it back together in such a way that you wouldn’t notice!

Next came… cladding? Shoeing? Whatever the technical term is for adding the metal rim:

I cut a thin strip of plasticard the width of my wheel, and then curled it like it was a ribbon:

I glued it on with superglue for a speedy hold, and then carefully trimmed it to the right length so as not to have an unsightly bump.

Wheels done, I needed to make a body for the cart, so I turned to my trusty distressed sticks

Matchsticks provided a crossbar for strength and some arms to pull it (if anything this post is revealing to the world that I do not know any of the correct terms for talking about carts)

Whilst working on this, I had made up a balsa rectangle that I was considering using as a template or base for my wooden stirrers, and suddenly realised that it wouldn’t actually be that much effort to just make a whole second cart…

A cocktail stick made an ideal axle, so I drilled through the wheels with my pin vice and set about glueing everything together:

And lo, we have the finished carts!

Seen here with a mini for scale:

Then it was really just a case of drybrush, drybrush, and drybrush some more, and thus we have the finished product that you see here, displaying that they are also the right size to carry some of the food supplies from Bad Squiddo and Zealot Miniatures that are currently on my painting tile:

• Mystery additional structure
• Trees
• Cart
• Well
• Woodpile
• Crates and barrels
• a playing surface!
• Treasure tokens

Next time - mystery third post!

2020 in review

Happy New Year, and welcome to ten years of Dead Lead Project! I'd like to say that so much has changed since that very first post, but alas I'm still flitting from project to project painting what I fancy and then badly photographing them to show you all!

So, as is tradition, we analyse the year that was:

Tally:

47 vs 147 = -100

Looking on the bright side - that's one more painted than the previous year!

I had such hopes that I'd be able to pull my usual last minute eleventh hour hail mary to push that painted total up to 52 to hit that Challenge target, but having been burning the candle at both ends since being furloughed the week before Christmas, my 'evening painting time' often turned into 'falling asleep putting the toddler to bed and then blearily stumbling downstairs to make a cup of tea and try to dab paint at miniatures for twenty minutes'. But honestly, of all years this one is the one where we shouldn't be beating ourselves up for what we have achieved.

So, ten years of stats!

2020: -100 (47 painted)

2019: +3 (46 painted)

2018: +52 (52 painted)

2017: -14 (47 painted)

2016: -287 (56 painted)

2015: -96 (59 painted)

2014: 0 (80 painted)

2013: -416 (25 painted)

2012: -103 (68 painted)

2011: -173 (122 painted)

Here’s a graph of that, added the day after this post went live:

I've no idea how 24 year old me managed to paint 122 miniatures in a year. He had fewer hobbies and no children vying for his attention, which might have something to do with it!

Posts:

25 this year, unusually quite evenly spread throughout the months rather than the usual summer drought (although lockdown might have had something to do with that, as my making terrain for Rangers of Shadow Deep kept posts going even when painting was sparse!). Nowhere near the dizzying heights of 2014 where I managed 69 posts, but the secret to that was that I got a lot of painting done while my heavily pregnant wife napped!

Last Year's Challenge:

• Finish something  old
• Finish a piece of terrain
• Prep all of the monkeys in the monkey box
• Paint all of the miniatures in a boxed game
• Play a board 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 Batman)
• Repaint something (either a miniature that I have previously painted, or one that was received painted

• Convert a miniature and show WIP pic

• Finish the last member of the Nextwave team
• Complete the classes project (potentially adding the races from the Players Handbook to the mix)
• Add at least 4 entries to the Monstrous Alphabet Project
• 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!

The less said about this this year the better I think! A few things were half done (there's an unfinished conversion I was hoping to polish off and post, for example), but as previously stated, this isn't the year for anyone to beat themselves up over what they did and didn't achieve... Even if not for the ongoing global pandemic, the Challenge has always been something to hopefully guide me if I'm looking for some direction, rather than a stick to beat myself with!

Projects (according to the last end of year post):

Warhammer Quest Blackstone Fortress

Nothing painted in 2020, as so many other things took my focus! In hindsight, this could also work perfectly well as a solo project, so here's to hoping 2021 sees more BSF love!

D&D

I saw myself painting a lot more D&D miniatures this year than I actually did, truth be told! With the pandemic and various lockdowns though, solo war gaming was my main focus (not that any actually has happened yet) instead. Having not played D&D since March though, I’ve got a bit of a craving for it, enough that I’ve worked out the basis of a campaign to run at some point when the world rights itself. Who knows when I’ll find the time to actually play it though, but that’s a problem for future Olly...

ASOIAF 

Nothing added this year. Got some character miniatures for Christmas though, so who knows what next year will bring...

Hellboy

Nothing painted, nothing played. I think the thing stopping me getting started on this is that absolutely everything is unpainted, which is a bit daunting when you aim to do it all, and there are other projects on the go that use existing painted miniatures that you can add a little to, or a small project that you can paint a handful of miniatures for and call it good...

Star Wars

May the Fourth completed, but nothing else. I’ll always love Star Wars though, so it’s likely to continue on as a main project even if nothing major gets added to it for long stretches of time!

Zombies

Zomtober successfully completed again this year, and added more to the positive Tally than anything else, truth be told! With Salute’s cancellation (well, technically delay I guess) there were no Walking Dead bargains to be had, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing given my existing backlog of unpainted miniatures...

The Thing

I still need to find a suitable dog head, as converting the dog thing is the mental roadblock between me and polishing off the rest of this project.

Reality's Edge

I painted a Cyberpunk! I have a couple of other bits in the painting queue, but they haven’t made their way to finished yet. Probably not helped by the troubling launch of Cyberpunk 2077, which I’ve held off on getting until they have a chance to fix it a bit (which was a bit of an awkward conversation with my wife, having to ask if she’d bought it for me and telling her not to if not!)

Backburner:

40K - I was sure I'd painted a Howling Banshee in the last year, but apparently that was in 2019!

Necromunda - nada

Fallout - nada

ROTPOTA - At this point it’s almost a joke keeping this on the project list, but one day, one day I’ll come back to you my sweet monkeys...

This year was mostly zombies, peasants to play RoSD, and very random odds and ends that caught my fancy!

Before we set the projects list for 2021, let's have a look back at the projects list from my very fist post and see how much progress has been made over the course of a decade?

Primary Projects:

Zombies



Not necessarily my main project these days, but every year I strive to complete Zomtober and add some more miniatures to the collection! Rules are half done, but whenever I work on them I tend to end up having new ideas that involve redoing whole chunks of what has already been written, and I start to wonder if it's the best choice or just me being excited at thinking of a new mechanic, and I walk away for a bit...

Three Kingdoms

I have finished exactly one miniature for this in the last ten years. There is a unit of 24 half painted chaps sat on my desk (and has been for around seven years), but it turns out I'm not the hugest fan of large batch painting!

Firefly/Serenity

The odd miniature painted here and there. 

Strange Aeons

Apparently I haven't finished anything for this project in the last 8 years, which feels wrong but is alas backed up by hard data! 

Doctor Who

We've gone off Doctor Who a bit, the last episode we watched being I think the first Capaldi episode, and so not many miniatures painted for this! I'd like to go back and start watching from the beginning again, as I hear god things about the current Doctor, but it's the sort of thing I'd like to watch with my daughter, but I don't think at five she's ready for some of the mild peril yet...

Secondary projects:

VSF

A couple of miniatures painted - any day now Northstar will release their VSF ruleset and I'll be galvanized to convert some more martians and paint the ones I've already made! I bought a pot of special GW Mars basing paint this year so that I could try it out on a test miniature at some point, so who knows where the future will take us...

AEWWII

The game that got me back into miniatures after some teenage time away, but alas, it's dead on the project radar. 

Warmachine

I finally got around to painting Alexia and the Risen! There are also some Cygnar bits having a nice soak in my stripping pot after I rediscovered Warmachine largely for the fluff...

Anima Tactics

Despite only needing a couple of miniatures painted to call it finished, I never did! 

Evil Genius/7TV

One day I'll get around to painting up a horde of hard hat wearing minions! In other news, I believe they're releasing a sequel to the videogame Evil Genius, which would be exciting news if not for the fact that my laptop is dead as a dodo! 

Marvel Superheroes

One of the projects that has actually had things added to it multiple times over the last ten years - in fact, one of the miniatures that was part of my desperate push to get the Tally up between Christmas and New Year's was a Heroclix repaint!



GW:

Fantasy

• Night Goblins - with Warhammer dead, I've not had much motivation to paint for it! 
• Skaven - same. We could still play an old edition, I know, but there are so many other games vying for our attention these days!
• Dwarves - I managed to paint Gotrek and Felix, but again, with Warhammer dead I've not been particularly motivated to paint any Slayers, which is a shame because I'm still inordinately fond of the little orange haired psychopaths!
• Mordheim - during the first Lockdown, I was struck with a sudden urge to dig out my old Mordheim stuff, so I started working out some warbands to build and paint, but then a chum pointed me towards Rangers of Shadow Deep as a solo game, which then took all of my attention...

40k

• Witch hunters - I'm so far out of the loop these days that I don't even know what the rules are for these any more. I still have vague plans to convert the occasional Inq28 figure, but no sweeping plans for adding to the army...
• Chaos - have I really had Huron Blackheart undercoated for ten years? I've been building and undercoating stuff, but that's mostly as far as they get!
• Space Marines - I made some nerdmarines!
• Orks - My claims that 'I'll probably come back to them one day though' didn't come to fruition. 
• Blood Pact - that squad and a half of converted guardsmen with grotesques made from cut down goblin faces are still sat unpainted in a drawer. Looking back, the conversions are a bit clunky, but I'd like to get some paint on them one day regardless..

Discussing this with my wife, she suggested that so many of my old projects making no real headway suggests that we should stop buying my miniatures, but I disagree, it's just that I've started new projects since then! To whit, the projects list of ten years ago looks very different to this one:

2021 Projects

Rangers of Shadow Deep

I want to get my 2020 Lockdown project to the point where I can play some solo games! Last time I checked (back at the end of August), this would mean making:

• Mystery additional structure
• Trees
• Cart
• Well
• Woodpile
• Crates and barrels
• a playing surface!
• Treasure tokens 

The trees are underway, as is the woodpile. I’ve got some food supplies undercoated, but I think I want some more general crates and barrels too (2021: the year of scatter terrain?). The mystery structure, cart and well would all be self contained mini projects, and treasure tokens shouldn’t be too much hassle to knock up...

Frostgrave

Again, solo play is the target, although I’m not nearly as close to being ready to go with this as I am Rangers. In order to play through Dark Alchemy and Perilous Dark, I’d need some generic fantasy ruins, scatter terrain, wandering monsters, and although I could probably scrounge up a serviceable warband from my already painted miniatures, I'd probably want to paint up a few fresh bits for the occasion!

Stargrave

It’s not out yet, so who knows what I’d need! However, some more generic sci-fi terrain will surely be needed, and once the book is out I can start painting up a crew! I'm dissolving the old Firefly/Serenity project, half of the miniatures will work neatly for Stargrave, whilst the rest will go towards the Cyberpunk project.

Blackstone Fortress

Paint and play, same as ever. While I missed out on the majority of the smaller expansions, even the base game (plus the White Dwarf content) is a decent amount to be getting on with! I've got a copy of Escalation of backorder, which will make a dent in the Tally when it finally arrives...

Current progress on having the base game painted:

Explorers: 0/9

Enemies: 8/35

Mordheim

This should really be a back burner project, but here we are - I’ve got enough miniatures to make a couple of warbands, and I’d like to do that. I kinda want the Sartosan pirate vampire miniature for my Undead warband, but he’s pretty expensive on eBay...

A Song of Ice and Fire

I’d like to expand my Lannisters up to the point where I could fill some War of the Ring bases, so up to 8s of each troop type at the very least (mostly because I love the look of ranks of pikemen that I keep seeing on the Never Mind the Billhooks Facebook group). 

Japanese Fantasy

We showed our daughter Princess Mononoke (brief aside - I did not remember it being that violent until I showed it to a five year old) while I was reading the Rangers of Shadow Deep rulebook, and the wheels in my head started turning... No definite plans per se, beyond the temptation to call it Ronin of Shadow Deep, and take inspiration from everything from the aforementioned Princess Mononoke to Ninja Scroll! I’ve had a dig through my drawers of unpainted miniatures and come up with a few suitable minis to get this project started, time and attention span willing... In doing so, I'm dissolving the old Afro Samurai project that I'd been stashing miniatures for - half fit neatly into this project, whilst the other half will get folded into the cyberpunk project.

The Witcher

Yet another Rangers of Shadow Deep based project (because low model count projects seem to be the way my attention falls more often than not), I have some nice Brother Vinni miniatures that cover the named characters, with the potential to then expand the project out to include scrappy mobs of Redanians, Temerians and so on...

Zombies

I’ll do Zomtober at the very least!

Star Wars

I’ll do May the Fourth, anything beyond that is a bonus! Some minis may get painted that have cross project appeal between Star Wars and Stargrave...

Dungeons & Dragons

I still want to paint some more generic fantasy beasties, especially as not being able to play for the better part of a year has left me with such a craving for it that I've plotted out my own campaign to run at some point in the future...

Back burner:

40k - odds and ends for Inquisitorial warbands, as and when they catch my fancy. There are also some Black Legion miniatures undercoated in the basement, in case my attention swings towards the pointier end of the scale...

Cyberpunk - not a main project, as I have no particular plans for it, but I may well add a mini here and there to it. As previously mentioned, some older projects have been dissolved and their miniatures offered up to this project instead, so it's entirely possible that I'll get distracted and accidentally paint for this like it's a main project!

Zona Alfa - my enthusiasm for this project waned a little when a deal to get hold of the gas mask heads I needed for a couple of conversions fell through, but I've got both scenery and miniatures prepped for this, so may well add to it in the year to come. 

Mass Effect - there’s a remaster of the original trilogy of games as well as a new one coming, so maybe I’ll finally find some heads I like to convert some Cerberus troops? I think I bought minis I planned to use for those conversions when my daughter was born, and she turns six soon...

Rise of the Planet of the Apes: because it just wouldn’t be a year in review post without including this!

Next Year’s Challenge:

• Finish something old
• Finish a piece of terrain
• Finish some scatter terrain (0/3)
• 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
• 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!

I also have a sort of secret challenge, to try to keep the Tally in the positive by not buying new miniatures until I've painted existing ones (this is why I'm digging out old miniatures for the Japanese fantasy project rather than going on a spree and ordering myself some lovely new miniatures), but sod's law is my backordered copy of Blackstone Fortress Escalation will turn up before I manage to finish anything and sink that straight away!