Foundry goodies!

Arrived home from work today to find a pile of parcels outside my door, which opened into (amongst other things) this:

Yes, I couldn't help myself , I took advantage of Foundry's one day sale on the Kevin Dallimore books (oh the eye candy!) and used that as an excuse to pick up a couple of Flesh triads I'd had my eyes on for a while.

Also, I helped a nice man (Mr Marx) who was having a bit of a clearout, and took the bits in the middle off his hands. And yes, there's a miniature in there, which takes the tally to:

118 vs 294 = -176

Kung fu, discourse and lighting...

So, after claiming the end of radio silence... nothing for a while. 

I blame a multitude of factors: moving house, halo 2, and in some cases the fact that I've been staring at certain half-painted miniatures for long enough that I'm considering thowing them away and buying new, exciting, shinier ones (and yes, I realise that the sensible option would be to take them from half-painted to fully painted, but hey, sometimes your brain just wants to make excuses to buy new miniatures).

Despite all this, after a period of approximately eight hours of procrastination today (during which I watched several episodes of Adventure Time, drank several coffees, and went out for several cigarettes, so it's arguably not technically a wasted day) I managed to actually finish some miniatures:

A couple of dudes from Black Hat that will serve various roles - the sorceror type I see as being an ally for Conan (since I'm sure there should be at least one non-evil magic user in the universe), but can also slot into the generic fantasy project (like most anything else that gets the conan tag); whereas the martial artist is a monk for the 'paint a miniature for each dungeons and dragons class' that I shamelessly stole from EvilCartoonist and then didn't really do anything with, as well as being able to stand in as a martial artist for 7tv...

Onto the discourse part of the title: there are many miniatures I want, and many projects I want to start. I have a terrible problem with considering every movie I see and every game I play in terms of what 28mm miniatures I could buy to use for it, but never actually finish anything as I've lready started two more projects. I rewatched Sucker-punch and started planning conversions, I'm playing Halo 2 at the minute and planning on repainting some clix (after christmas though, let's hope Santa brings me a brick). I think I've found the secret though, the answer to my problem: 'give it a week'. After a week, I'll have either lost interest, or discovered another three things I want to do, or actually be considering starting something as a project. But even then, it's likely another week will pass before I actually start anything, as I'll have been distracted by something else shiny.

And so, onto the final part of the title: we need better lights in the Craft Room. That was it.

Which, as usual, brings us to:

118 vs 293 = -175

There are 23 days left of the year. If I painted 7.6 miniatures a day every day, I could end up with a score of -1. I've painted two miniatures in the last month, and truth be told they were already more than halfway done. I've said it before and I'll say it again, roll on the new year clock reset!

End of short period of radio silence

So, it's been all quiet for a while now, due mostly to moving house. The bulk of the back-breaking, soul-destroying part is over, but currently my desk looks like the picture (normally I'd put it next to the relevant piece of text, but I can't see a way to do that on my iPhone...)

Also worth noting is the sheer amount of stuff - a lot of stuff went into storage, but these boxes of games and whatnot are the ones I thought I'd need in the next six months, much to Nicole's consternation...

And, in the interest of full disclosure, of course more miniatures have arrived since the last post, 7 in fact, leaving the tally at:

116 vs 293 = -177

Rapidly running out of year, I think it's safe to say I won't be back in the positives until the clock resets with the new year...

Reaching my Threshold...

Scott Pilgrim references aside, I managed to paint my Threshold Team for Strange Aeons:

These badboys were bought at Salute, a mere six months ago (which is probably a record turnaround time from purchase to painted for me). I'll probably run the capped chap as an Agent with Lieutenant, and the two officers as Civilians with pistols and clubs (their truncheons!)  [and yes, I did remember to go back and paint in the capped chaps teeth after taking this picture...]

This chap however, whilst also being from Artizan, was actually bought a while before the others, and was originally intended to be the basis of a Captain Jack Harkness conversion. However, before I'd managed to make any progress, Crooked Dice released a rather spiffy not-Jack, so I based this chap on a lipped base and boom, a lick of paint later we have a Cthulhu-fighting Character that's also a bit of a lush (hey, it's thematic, I'll probably give him Morphine in-game...)

Which means (shock horror) I've actually got enough minis to play a game! As long as an opponent has enough minis to provide the other force... although I'm getting there on that front too:

It's not been all focused today though, as I also painted this:

An Operative type chap to chase down any naughty types in Firefly games. He'll probably be run using souped-up Swashbuckler stats, as reinforcements for the purple-bellies (just as soon as I get round to painting them...). He was originally a Star Wars miniature of some sort (a Genohadran assassin I think, but don't quote me on that) that had sat undercoated in one of the WIP drawers for god knows how long, and I thought it was high time he actually got some paint on.

So, with that little lot finished the tally looks like this:

116 vs 286 = -170

Creeping back in the right direction, but I don't for a second think that I'm going to end the year in the positive  (short of selling a ton of minis or taking time off from work to paint morning noon and night), I think a more realistic goal would be aiming to finish better than -150...

Blood Bowl Human Team Coach conversion

 So, there I was the other day, so eager to start painting my Mighty Zug that I couldn't even wait for it to be spraying conditions. So I decided to brush undercoat him. Now, I don't know when the last time you brush undercoated a miniature was, but it's got to be a couple of years for me. And it takes ages. And ages. And then you have to go back and re-undercoat the bits that didn't get hit properly the first two or three times round. He's had a couple of passes with the brush, but there are still bits that need another looking at, which somewhat killed my enthusiasm.

Determined to try and keep at least some sort of forward momentum thought, tonight I thought I'd have a crack at a simple conversion I'd been thinking about for a little while: a coach for the team.

Taking an Empire Engineer as my base model:

I carefully cut away his gun (which goes straight in the bits box, waste not want not and all that):

I then sanded down any remnants of the gun in the hand, paying special attention to the pistol grip, and making sure I left a nice flat surface either side of his hand for the next step, attaching a scroll from the Mordheim accessories sprue:

A little liquid Green Stuff was applied to smooth the pistol grip into the scroll: (apologies for the terrible picture, my iPhone doesn't seem to like extreme closeups...)

And, we're done! Wait, why stop there? Thinking he needed to look a little bit more like a Blood Bowl coach rather than just 'weaponless engineer holding scroll', I sanded off the engineer symbol from the medallion round his neck and painted on a football using liquid Green Stuff. I literally painted on the rough shape, building up a couple of layers to give it more depth, before smoothing it down with a damp brush and then tidying the edges with my knife:

And anyway, every good Blood Bowl coach needs to be smoking a fat cigar, right? I drilled a tiny hole between two of his fingers, glued in a teensy bit of paperclip, and then gave it a once-over with some more liquid Green Stuff to fatten it up, which brings us to the finished mini:

Well, I say finished, I'll probably give him a once over with a file once the Green Stuff has dried just to sharpen it up a little bit, especially on the Green Stuff I used to tidy up the ends of the scroll, but other than that he's ready to join the basing queue...

As a slight diversion, here's a quick picture of what I have to look at whilst I'm working at my desk:

Yup, right in my face is drawers full of unpainted models, taunting me. I usually aim to empty a WIP drawer completely before adding anything new to it, but it usually ends up with me emptying just enough space for the next thing (and even then it's usually a close call...)

Olly's final thought: don't download Dungeon Raid on your iPhone. It eats time. You'll never accomplish anything else ever again.

Plasma Gun Cyberman conversion

Having once again decided to be easily distracted, I decided now was the right time to crack on with work on some Cybermen for Doctor Who. Flipping through my copy of 'The Battle for Canary Wharf', I saw that I'd need at least 8 cybermen, 1 cyber-leader, and a cyberman with a plasma gun. Well, that just won't do, I'll want a couple of cyber-leaders, a cyber controller, and enough bits left over to convert Lumic in his chair, the damaged cyberman under stonehenge, and a cybershade (but more on those in later posts). I set to cutting various rubbery Micro Universe cybermen off of their chunky bases and scraping at mouldlines, pondering all the while what I should do about the cyberman with the plasma gun.

Should it be built into his arm? Should it be separate? This is where research comes in handy folks, rather than just racking your brain (which is my usual approach) - cue a quick rewatch of the relevant episodes:

In the episode Doomsday, we see them wielding what basically looks to be Mickey's blaster:

Cheap as chips prop recycling it may be, but it's handy for me as that means I have the perfect donor, the Micro Universe Mickey figure - a few careful cuts and a bit of shaving and we have one plasma gun, with the hand left in place (we'll be attaching it to it's new owner later - and don't worry, Mickey's body won't go to waste, he'll eventually become zombie terrain):

[apologies for the iPhone photos, it was to hand and I didn't want to lose momentum getting out the proper camera]
Two quick jabs with a pin and the gun has a barrel. Now, for the cyberman itself, I used a cyber-controller, as I seem to have more of those than basic cybermen - a few quick snips and some light filing gets rid of the ports on his chest and shoulders and voila, he's been downgraded to a normal cyberman.
As things stand, he'd look a bit silly holding a rifle with his arm outstretched, so boom, off comes his arm:

The newly separated arm gets chopped at the elbow so that we can reposition it, and since we've already got a hand moulded onto the gun, we don't need that any more either. In order to get the arm to fit onto the gun better, a little bit of material is shaved off the inside forearm, and it is then glued into place:

Once that hand's painted silver it'll fit right in.
Unfortunately there aren't any pictures of the next few steps, as most of my time was taken up with holding bits together, having a look, then moving something and trying again. But basically, what I did was this:

Remove some material from the gun wielding arm at the elbow (from both pieces potentially) so that it can be positioned against the body (cue lots of fiddling and general having a play). Only remove a little bit at a time - you can always go back and shave off a little more, but it's a lot harder to stick back on if you cut off too much!

After a lot of fiddling and swearing at pots of superglue that kept falling over, I had this:

Huzzah, he's holding a plasma gun like in the episode! Anything more than a fleeting glance though, and you realise he looks a bit silly, and thus cut off his head so that it can be repositioned to look in the direction his gun is pointing...

At this point I was on a bit of a roll, and as you can see I cut a V-shaped wedge out of the inner elbow of his other arm, so that I could bring it up to look less like it's just hanging there...

And with that, we have one cyberman with a plasma gun. Just the rest to do now... and Lumic in his control chair (I'm envisioning lots of guitar string)... and the cybershade...

Also, the tally has changed since the last post:

111 vs 286 = -175 - I finally got me a Mighty Zug, who's currently having a nice bath in the stripping pot...

11th Doctor, companion, and some more D&D...

Painting, I have been (apologies for the more crap than usual pictures):

The 11th Doctor, ready to join his two predecessors that I'd previously painted. Nicole (my previously alluded to young lady) had a look at all three together:

and judged them somewhat harshly: 'the ninth one's rubbish, it looks nothing like Christopher Eccleston. But it might just be your painting...'. She's lucky I love her so much. She also complained that the 11th Doctor looked like a zombie, but in my defence I hadn't finished painting him at that point (and yes, that second anecdote was added when she leant over and complained that her complaints had not been properly noted).

But what's the Doctor without a companion? (other than more interesting, if the tail-end of the tenth Doctor's run is anything to go by)

The Heresy Amy Pond. I love Karen Gillan, but I really hated painting this mini's face (and yes, as soon as this post is up I'm going to go back and fix the smudge under her eye). But with the pair of them painted up, it means I can do things like this:

On the non-Who front, I've finished a trio of miniatures:

A gaoler type from Heresy. Don't ask why he's based on a square base, or exactly what I was trying to achieve with his basing, as I think I originally started this particular miniature somewhere in the region of three years ago, before there even was a dnd project, when I bought the miniature because I fondly remembered the intro adventure to my generation's 'Red Box', the 'Black Box With A Big Red Dragon On The Front', where your character wakes up in Zanzer Tem's dungeon under the baleful glare of a fat gaoler...

The other two finished miniatures are an unlikely pair of bedfellows:

A Dwarf Fighter, originially a Heroquest mini, that was a bit of a nightmare to paint as some of the detail was a bit stretched (apparently back in the old days all plastic miniatures suffered from this, due to the limitations of technology at the time - sometimes we forget how spoiled for quality we are these days...)

And a Goblin Sneak (well, I guess he can be a Rogue for now, until I sort out a proper Rogue mini...), that was originally a character figure from Mage Knight Dungeons. Odds on if I ever play Keep on the Shadowfell he'll make a funny little Splug stand-in...

Well, that little lot brings the tally to:

111 vs 285 = -174. All I need to do is sell 175 miniatures and I'll be back in the positive! Or, more realistically, wait until the New Year for the count to reset to zero...

Plans for the near future include cybermen. Lots of cybermen. However, if I can't get the last couple I need for conversions, or if said conversions are less fun than I envision, it's entirely likely that plans for the near future will include Judge Dredd (because Dirty Frank in 2000AD at the minute is the best it's ever been), my Blood Bowl Team (Humans if I can finally get a Mighty Zug, or maybe Orcs, since I just saw an awesome Orc Coach conversion over on another blog using a Games Day miniature that I'm sure I own), or maybe even something like some of the Firefly project miniatures I keep getting out of boxes, looking at lovingly, and then carefully putting back away...