'He's a veritable one-man army! Half-man army. Whatever'.

Last year at Salute, I was able to track down the guy from Westfalia miniatures and acquire a freebie miniature - I was really quite taken with his halflings, and super happy to get one. 

(side-note: have a nose around the Steampunk sections of the Westfalia miniatures website. Look at the Clocktopus, and then try and tell me you're not in love!)

However, as is my way, I decided to save building and painting it for a special treat, which has resulted in it not getting painted for almost a year! Seeing that Salute was rapidly rolling around again, I decided that I was going to get it painted up before then!

Such was my excitement and haste, I was a little incautious in removing his accessories from the sprue they came on, leaving me a little bit of fine green stuff repair work to do:

(Brief side-note: I don't know what sort of resin they use for this range, but I think honestly it's the best I've ever worked with - it cuts and cleans up like a plastic, and is super light, but holds excellent detail).

A brief clean-up later, it was time to decide which of the optional accessories to use. Helmet or no helmet? Holding a weapon or holding a measuring cup? Halberd or crossbow? I quite liked the look of the halberd, although the figure has a quiver of bolts (is that the right term for it when it's bolts rather than arrows?) sculpted on the body piece, so in the end I decided to use absolutely everything:

A little filing on the head to attach the helmet and then everything else piled on in every free space gives us one heavily armed furry footed burrower:

'He's a veritable one-man army! Half-man army. Whatever'.

I'm starting to picture him as some sort of wandering mercenary now, a survivor of countless wars selling his services to the highest bidder (or the one with the most well-equipped kitchen).

Then came basing - only a basic sand blend job, as there isn't really space for anything fancier on his tiny base!

Painting was fairly straightforward, and an absolute delight - as mentioned earlier, the resin holds detail beautifully, and it's a lovely little miniature!

I wanted to give him a little extra detail, and so decided to give the haft of his halberd some stripes - marking out the guide lines with a soft pencil as per usual:

Striiiiiiipes

At this point is finished painting the rest of the miniature, and just needed to decide what colours to use. I briefly considered red and yellow, so that he'd match my Lannister pikemen, but thought that as he was a one-off miniature I'd give him something a bit more interesting, and settled on pink and green (as when we were younger, my wife's official colour scheme was pink green and grey, and so I took inspiration from that for my fantastic heraldry). And lo, here he is finished:

Bringing the Tally to:

18 vs 0 = +18

But that will soon change...

Catmandu! Or don't. It's your choice.

Another miniature from the depths of the project box, this is a thing that's largely been painted a layer here, a layer there between other projects:

Originally a Mage Knight Dungeons (or perhaps Pyramid) figure, he was rebased many, many moons ago for use in D&D and the seemingly long-forgotten Conan project. 

Several layers of drybrushed have picked out some nice detail on his fur, so now he's good to go and terrorise hapless adventurers!

I gave him blue eyes, because a four second google image search suggested that that was a thing that tigers might have:

(Presumably with the assistance of Photoshop, but I liked the idea regardless)

In hindsight, maybe I should have painted him in a snowy or arctic theme, to use him for Frostgrave, but either way, finishing him takes the Tally to:

19 vs 0 = +19

Did you see that thing move?

Last night I finished this batch of scarecrows that I've been scratching away at for a little while now:

Originally bought with the intention of using for Doctor Who games (based on The Family of Blood' episode), they will likely see more use in D&D (as the game I'm playing in was originally a Pathfinder game set in Ustalav that is currently being converted to 5th edition Ravenloft) or in Frostgrave (either as medium constructs or proxy henchmen in a necromancers warband).

Brief diversion - I saw the scarecrows at the Doctor Who Exhibition 5 years ago:

Chilling. Also very brown, but I mixed things up a little in my painting!

You might notice the final highlight on the miniatures bases are a little heavy; this is due to my tiny assistant being awake while I finished them up:

Playing her favourite games of 'how many of Daddy's paints can I hold at the same time' 'how many paints can I post into Daddy's shirt pocket' and 'wow, this cup is full of dirty water, I'm going to put a paintbrush in there too'.

The miniatures are a mix of Crooked Dice, Gripping Beast and Foundry:

The Crooked Dice scarecrows are the only multipart miniatures of the lot - the chap with the red jacket has had his right arm reattached more than once, despite my having pinned the limbs! They're a bit chunky, and there are only two sculpts, although I swapped the arms on the duplicates to give a little more variety. Looking back over old blogposts, I apparently got these in February. Of 2011.

The Gripping Beast sculpts are the closest to their on-screen look in the Doctor Who episode, with four pleasingly different sculpts. 

The Foundry sculpts are the least like the Doctor Who scarecrows, because they're not meant to be! If I recall correctly, they're part of their undead range, and very characterful with it - there are chunks of wooden framework visible through tears in their clothes, and they look lashed together before being animated and armed!

Finishing this large batch of lads brings the Tally to:

17 vs 0 = +17

which is a nice place to be, although with Salute just round the corner who knows where we'll end up. As to what's next, who knows? There are some generic fantasy miniatures clogging not up the project box that I could finish off to free up some space; maybe a member or two of Nextwave or some more Barman villains; alternatively, I should probably paint the halfling from Westfalia miniatures that I got at last Salute before a whole year has passed! My mantra is going to be: ''I do not need any more Perry Plastics. I do NOT need any more Perry plastics'...

February recap

Fatherhood has left me with less time to actually complete projects, so I thought I'd experiment with recap posts to talk about what I'm working on rather than posting once a month when I actually finish something!

So, the recap. This month, I painted Deadpool. 

That was my one post.

We also went to see the film over the weekend, and was pleasantly surprised to find I enjoyed it all (and more surprisingly, so did my wife - although I suppose I shouldn't be that surprised, as she is the right sort of horrible person to enjoy this sort of humour!). We watched Ant Man the night after, and I think it suffered by comparison - for all that we love Paul Rudd and how great the train fight scene was, there were a lot of bum points and duff acting, as well as the fact that I found myself saying 'well this seems a little contrived, even for a superhero movie'...

But, back to Deadpool - as happens whenever I see almost anything, I want to paint something, in this case Collossus!

I'm fairly certain I've got a suitable Heroclix figure somewhere, but I'll have to wait until my daughter is napping as my Heroclix stash is somewhat buried in a pile of stuff on top of a bookcase:

(The unmarked boxes contain the scenery like fences and gravestones you will have previously seen if you've been reading the blog for a little while)

Since starting my 'project box pledge' (title not final) the main thing I've been painting has been this batch of scarecrows:

14 in total, finishing these will get me to the point where I've only actually got the miniatures in the project box out (AKA the ideal starting point for such a pledge, only a month or so after starting it). Progress has been somewhat stilted on these, as I mostly only get to paint them while my daughter naps, and having them put away rather than out means it takes longer to get to actually painting when I do get the chance! Painting them in in this size batch has also presented its own problems - if I'd been painting say four miniatures, I might have used only eight or nine different paints; with his size batch, to avoid them looking too uniform, the number of different paints has seemingly increased exponentially! I tried being super organised, with a list of what different coloured areas there were to paint, to allow me to most efficiently use my time (rather then my approach whilst painting zombies, which is more of an 'ooh I'll do this bit red, paint it from start to finish, then another area, then maybe another bit red on another miniature, meandering from choice to choice), but there are so many different bits and so many paints to pick through I'm not sure it helped!

The current list of bits left to paint looks like this:

Although I fully expect I'll find something I've missed once I do all these! Fingers crossed though, they should be done in the next week or two (as since I'd set myself the target of finishing these, I've been hankering after painting something else for a bit of variety!)

I've spent a lot of time over the last month browsing Pinterest for ideas for making cork ruins (although when I'll get round to making some generic cork ruins that work equally as well for Frostgrave as for modern zombie games is anyone's guess) and looking at people's Inquisimunda conversions (as I've got a batch of planned Inquisitorial miniatures in a Baggie somewhere), but this is mostly inspiration gathering rather than actual planning at this point (at least until I clear some space in the project box...)

I've started drawing up my Salute shopping list already - I'm planning on strict budgeting this year, rather than my usual wild spend (see, I am a mature and responsible adult) - I assume everyone has seen these beauties from Elladan:

I would like some of these very much, but at present it seems the German company selling these doesn't have anyone that's going to be at Salute:

But I live in hope that something will get sorted so that I can get a set to lead the medieval zombies I bought from Gripping Beast at Salute last year!

My GM has recently come into possession of a couple of Warhammer armies, and so has been bugging me to dig out my Night Goblin army (that I don't think I've done anything with since before starting this blog...)

And finally, on the way to my Mother-In-Law's for dinner last night, I saw this in the window of a charity shop:

Late 80's Oldhammer! Alas, it looks like someone's been looking at eBay Buy-It-Now prices for guidance, so alas no bargains to be had here...

Deadpool

Timely, given the release of the film, I've just finished painting the Knight Models Deadpool that my wife got me the Christmas before last:

Well, last night, so not technically 'just finished', as I tend to finish things at night and then take the next day to actually write the post about it...

Surprisingly quick to paint (if you ignore the 10 month break between two layers) due to the limited colour palette, as with all Knight Models miniatures it's a lovely sculpt, although there are a couple of oddities - the crossed scabbards on his back are a little weedy for my tastes, and the faceplate of his mask seemed a little asymmetrical (on side seemed to peak less above the eye than the other).

Inevitably, the first Knight Models miniature I've finished isn't one of the dozens of Batman figures I've bought,  but if you've been following this blog for any length of time that probably shouldn't come as any surprise!

Anyway, I got this because I (like so many others) love Deadpool. I'm not going to say I liked Deadpool before he was cool (I didn't - the original Liefeld era Deadpool comics are a bit generic superhero for my tastes from what I remember, if by 'a bit generic' you mean 'a rip off of DC's Deathstroke the Terminator' - I mean, Slade Wilson and Wade Wilson?), but I really got into them round about the Daniel Way run a few years back (just after the Skrull invasion, when Marvel realised that they could do fun things with Deadpool, but before he reached the saturation point of being in pretty much every book released each month - Wikipedia tells me this was 2008, further back than I'd thought!) - it was whacky, then it looked like the run was running out of steam, then it just got awesome. However, as alluded to earlier, by the time I stopped getting monthly comics (due to impending fatherhood) Deadpool was in most monthly releases, and had gone a bit silly (here he is fighting reanimated US Presidents teehee). Now don't get me wrong, I like silly, but what I really want is Nextwave silly rather than 'oh look at me I'm trying to be whacky' - give me meta-aware over 'kerazy' any day...

Now, to break up that wall of text here's a splash page of Deadpool catching fire from an issue of Thunderbolts (another comic that I enjoyed during the Warren Ellis run, but gave up on when they folded it into another series, and then started getting again when they rebooted it with Deadpool):

Indeed.

Painting Wade Wilson brings the Tally to:

3 vs 0 = +3

And I've got a batch of multiple miniatures that I've been working on as well as this, which (if finished) should skyrocket the Tally into double digits (because as we know, it's only a couple of months until Salute...)

A handy tip for removing prepaints from their bases!

Digging through some older photos on my phone, I came across one that I meant to include with a previous post but must have overlooked:

A handy tip I picked up from a random YouTube video (I forget who from, but it may have been bensrpgpile) for removing plastic prepainted figures from their bases without the usual bloodshed - hold the figure in a towel, so if the knife does inevitably slip, it hits the towel rather than sinking straight into the delicate flesh of your fingers! I can't believe I've just been mangling myself doing this for the last decade or so...

A prize and a project pledge

First of all, this came in the post the other day:

A prize from the draw over on the lovely Ray's blog (who I'm sure you're all following already) - I almost missed out on this, as when the battery in my old phone started mysteriously swelling, as well as losing all my photos I lost my blogroll (and can't seem to get it back, despite several pleas to Bloglovin, the app I use for reading blogs on mobile devices) so I haven't been able to see anyone's posts for about s month now :/ luckily, Ray tracked me down and let me know I'd won though, so hoorah!

And now, a pledge.

I have a lot of half-painted miniatures.

A lot.

When I was much younger, and just getting back into this wargaming lark (painting miniatures from Darkson Designs for AE:WWII), I had a system - three small trays, each of which was probably large enough to hold 3 based miniatures. I didn't let myself start anything new until I'd cleared a space on a tray by finishing a miniature, and so would often force myself to finish something because I was desperate to paint something else that had caught my eye! Over time, my adherence to this system lapsed, and now I have several drawers full of half-painted (or in some cases just undercoated) miniatures.

So, I'm going to try and reinstate the project box in place of the three tray system:

It's currently full of various half-painted miniatures (all of which got popped in here at one point or another 'just to tidy them out of the way until I finish them' - as a brief aside, I thought my long-ago built but never finished Path To Glory war band was in this box, but looking at the picture whilst writing this post I can clearly see that they're not, and am wondering where I've put them...) and I plan to only work on miniatures that are currently in progress in the box, and will not build or undercoat any new models until there is a suitable space in the box for them (although before I embark on this I might swap some miniatures out from the project box for something from the drawers - maybe I'll give myself an out of 'I can only take something out of the box if I swap it for an equivalent volume of half-painted miniatures').

That doesn't sound so bad, I hear you say?

I'm also including the rest of the miniatures in the cupboard where this box lives in that:

So only once that volume of miniatures is reduced to the point that I have space in the project box can I start something new.

My, that's a lot of scarecrows.