Doctor Aphra, I presume?

This year’s May the Fourth miniature is this Doctor Aphra expy:

Originally released for Rogue Stars, I thought she’d make a delightful stand-in for Chelli Aphra (it’s the goggles, more than anything else!), everyone’s favourite Archaelogist/downright awful human being.

I was tempted to try and add a flying cap too, but thought it would be a shame to lose the nicely sculpted hair - hey, people take hats off sometimes you know!

I read the entire run of comics she appeared in earlier this year, highly recommended for anyone that’s a fan of shenanigans, murder droids, and further shenanigans. There’s also a run drawn by Kev Walker, which is always a win in my book! As previously mentioned, she’s a terrible human being, and I love her.

The miniature isn’t an exact match for Aphra’s comic outfit, so I went for something evocative rather than an exact match. I’d originally intended to paint the jacket a reddish brown, with an orange collar to more closely match her comic appearances, but after putting on a base coat of Mephiston Red I was so enamoured with it I just carried on! I gave the collar a bit of orange detail though as a nod:

Also, she was painted over a grey undercoat, and between that and the delightful Mark Copplestone sculpt was an absolute pleasure. From this experience, I think I’m now sold on grey under coats over black, although even with the light box my pictures don’t quite show the colours properly, so here’s a wonky picture of me holding her a bit closer to the lights in the hopes of showing that I do in fact apply the occasional highlight to my miniatures:

Ah, you’ll just have to take my word for it!

If I see the murder droids that are her sometimes companions, sometimes foes in a bargain bin at a show, I'll grab them to keep her company, but for now she's flying solo, and finishing her brings the Tally to:

2 vs 56 = -54

Next: who knows? There are a variety of odds and ends on my paint palette, but on the other hand, I'm just about to start the Witcher series again, so I may get sidetracked making miniatures from that universe...

May the Fourth, Revenge of the Absent blogger

So, it's been quite a while since my last post - with the impending birth of second child, I've not had much time for painting little men, but didn't want to miss out on the tradition of a Star Wars post for May the Fourth so managed to knock out this on a few tea breaks at work:

A psionic from Osprey Games' Rogue  Stars, that with the right paint job and the addition of a length of coloured acrylic rod makes a nice gender swapped Luke Skywalker type.

Apologies for the awful lighting, it's the night before and so I'm crouched over the Dining Room table trying to get something half decent.

Apologies for the awful painting, it's been a few months! As you can see in the next picture, there was a little mould line (but one of the annoying ones, an indent rather than flash) across her face that it turned out I hadn't fixed at all when prepping the miniature, which I'd hoped I'd be able to disguise with paint, but in the end had to settle for painting as a rad scar:

Originally I'd planed to paint her the same as Tatooine Luke, but as I was working on her ended up inverting the scheme of the trousers and top and quite liked it, so left it as it was!

Also pictured, an objective marker that is essentially a Stomrtrooper's bum:

Made yonks ago out of scrap parts from a WoTC bendy miniature, it can represent some intel that the Rebellion need to acquire, or maybe explosives that they need to capture in order to sabotage some Imperial project...


Whilst I may not have been getting much painting done these last few months, that doesn't mean I haven't added anything to the Lead Mountain:

Four Nurgle terminators for £7.99 was too hard to resist...

As was a Rhino! Admittedly, it's missing the turret hatches, but I'm sure that I've got at least one (and parts to kitbash another) in my bits box...

Finally got hold of a Jokaero for the Ordo Xenos warband I've had kicking around my head for a little while now...

Picked up some Poison Wind Globadiers from a friend of a friend, so now I have enough to make a legal unit of them (well, legal for a game that is no longer current), as well as a dinky Night Goblin because look at his little face.

A friend mentioned that he had some old Warhammer and D&D miniatures back in the day, and after having a clearout gifted me this little treat, an old Warhammer Fighter!

I wasn't able to make it to Salute this year for the first time in a while, as baby could potentially have come (spoilers: he didn't, and is nine days late as I sit typing this the night before it publishes), but luckily Adam (lostinthewoods79 on Instagram, look him up, he's an embarrassingly good painter) was able to grab me the show mini and this promo of some sort of space necromance that looks like it would be ideal for Starfinder.

I finally managed to pick up some of these pipe straws from Flying Tiger, which will be adorning some Necromunda / 40k terrain at some point in the future...

Jimchenko (previously lauded buddy) gifted me this old Necromunda box, filled with all sorts of lovely plastic bulkeads! Now, I need to get hold of some mould-making silicon so that I can make duplicates to fancy up some boxes...

Also, this beautiful GM Canon kit that was a Christmas present from my wife came, and was then immediately stored until the day when I will have bountiful hobby time again!

The Mantic Hellboy game that I backed on Kickstarter came too! Frustratingly, it was delayed, and so came a week before baby's due date, so I haven't been able to dig into it as much as I'd like! Just look at this though:

Very much looking forward to getting some paint on these!


So, factoring in everything, that brings the 2019 Tally to:

2 vs 12 = -10

Not honestly as bad as I thought it would be when I started going back through my photos to see what I'd acquired since the start of the year! And also, it would be a very different story if I counted the board game pieces in the Hellboy game...

Whilst I haven't gotten much painting done so far this year, that doesn't mean that there has been no hobby:

My Blackstone Fortress miniatures are now all ready for undercoating. Well, they would be if it weren't for the fact that I was determined to make the 7 man renegade guard squads into proper 10 man squads so that I can use them outside of BSF too:

Going has been slow though, and I'm still not sure what to do for their heads...

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.