Moving right along...

I've been quiet for a while, but I'm still here! Just not getting any painting done at the moment, what with my new job and moving house!

We've moved 0.2 miles down the road, to a little house of our own, with one crucial feature - a sweet basement for me to turn into a gaming room!

Initially it looked like this:

And then in the midst of rearranging it looked like this:

But, having snuck back out all the things that my wife suggested we store in the basement and building some bookcases:

It looks like this:

(Painting desk starting to be visible amidst the piles of half-sorted oddments!)

Not done yet, but well on the way.

Several of my favourite features include handing ledges on the underside of the stairs on the way down, giving somewhere to display a number of nerdy collectables:

Built in shelving, that will hopefully one day be used to store and display trays of painted miniatures, for easy access whilst gaming:

And a sweet alcove for board games:

(Although I've since stripped out the family games to go live in the dining room, as I found another box of my games after taking this picture...)

Another benefit of moving house and buying lots of furniture (we own a dining table now, like real adults) is that I now have a metric ton of interestingly shaped bits of polystyrene and enough corrugated card to make several tiny model shanty towns:

As I unpack some more things, I'll probably have some more things to offer up for trade or sale, which I'll add to the previously used page to give first refusal to the good people of the circles of the internet that I frequent before I toss them to eBay...

Once I've finished the last few bits of unpacking down there, I'll need to sort out getting a gaming table. There were a couple of desks next to a skip over the road at the weekend (where one of the local universities seems to be clearing out one of their facilities) that I considered dragging home to see if I could lash them together to make the base of a table, but it had rained, and I'm probably going to need a table that can be folded own rather than several hefty chunks of pine, so I passed... Every YouTube video on the subject seems to involve carpentry to build a table from scratch - any advice, oh lovely people reading this?

May the power of Pelor or some other monotheistic belief system that resolves around an advanced form of solar worship compel you!

This miniature was I think originally produced by Spyglass as a limited edition freebie for a fantasy book club. A number of them made their way to discount seconds shop The Works, and a nice chap on the Lead Adventure Forum was nice enough to pick one up for me (as my local branch didn't get any, boo). So, I undercoated it, painted the flesh (using a Foundry triad) and then didn't touch it again for a few years.

Digging through my project box for a few things to paint before getting sorted and actually working on project related miniatures (I know, I know, the same old story), I came across her and thought she'd be a nice mini to get finished.

I think my original plan for her was to have her in gleaming silver armour, but decided instead she might look nice in gold (which would help her stand out amongst every other silver armoured miniature I own), and would likely look a lot better doing it now with the paints I have than if I'd have tried it when I first got the miniature and only had a pot of Shining Gold to my name! Extrapolating from this, I imagined her as some sort of Paladin for a sun god, her unusual (compared to the rest of my Cadian Flesh toned miniatures) complexion suggested maybe she's far from home, spreading the word of her God and taking its light into the darkened places of the world. This line of thinking also influenced the colour of her cloak, as I thought it might be thematically appropriate for a paladin serving a sun god to have a cloak the colour of a clear sky... 

The cloak was base coated Fenris grey, then layered up from Caledor Sky to Ice blue and out the other side with the addition of increasing amount of white...

(Looking at this picture, I've just seen a splash of blue on the rock, which I'll fix with an extreme Bleached Bone edge highlight before posting!)

That's as far as the considered symbolism goes though - for the colour of her hair and the gem on her shield, I just asked my wife to choose! I originally highlighted the hair much lighter, but it just looked... wrong, so I glazed it with the original colour to knock it back a bit. 

I even tried the Kev Dallimore tip of painting the bottom lip a shade of red on female miniatures, which in my mind I imagined would look a bit harlot-ish, but in reality looks quite nice!

Finishing this pious elf maiden takes the Tally to:

21 vs 333 = -312

(I sold 37 orks, hence the reduced total on the acquired side of the equation!)

This is probably the last miniature I'll paint and post before moving house in a fortnight, as everything will be getting packed up (one of these days) - this also includes everything on offer in my previous Trade Post, so if you want anything get in quick before they get packed up!

For Sale or Trade

Having a bit of a clear out before an upcoming house move, I thought I'd offer some things up here and on the Lead Adventure forum before listing them on eBay - trades or cold hard cash wanted!

Chaos Defiler:

A Chaos Defiler, still on sprue. I think this came in an army boxed set that I bought at a Games day many, many years ago.

Eldar heavy weapon grav platform:

An elder grav platform with crew and a selection of 3 weapons - the crew have been previously stripped, and still have a few remnants of paint on them. If I keep this, I'll end up making an Eldar warband to justify it (I'm sure I've a couple of guardians in my bits box, and that converted chap that came in the big box of warhammer I got last month dammit stop it brain!)

1/72 Valiant American GIs

A sprue of these, which just aren't the right scale for me! Unless I were to make a toy shop scenery piece, and used these as Action Men...

Malifaux dogs:

Canine Remains 1&2 blisters, bought back when Malifaux was new and shiny for use with my zombie project, but the scale difference is just too big!

Plastic gutter runners:

I'm not a fan of these plastic sculpts, so I bought some metal ones to replace them. If I get desperate for them for nostalgia purposes, I'm sure I've got a sprue of them in my Mordheim boxed set! 12 in total, one missing a base (although I'm sure I can find you one if you don't already have hundreds)

Plastic Wood Elves:

1 Lord

(He's quite nice - I'd be tempted to keep him just to paint, but figured that if someone wanted a bunch of Wood Elves or Wanderers or whatever they're called these days they would probably want a Lord to lead them too...)

1 wizard type?

 

(May be a conversion, at a guess?)

18 stag riding elves (some male, some female) - a quick google suggests that they're Wild Riders and Sisters of the Thorn

2 standard bearers

13 archers

9 elves with bow and hand weapon (these look like more modern sculpts than the archers)

Will require some TLC, as they lived in the bottom of a box for a year before finding their way to me (some antlers have taken a bashing - I'll include any and all broken pieces that I can find)

Wants:

Cash money - I'm moving house, and need to buy things like a kettle and a microwave.

Metal Skaven of the Jes Goodwin era:

A Poison wind globadier (as I'm currently one short of a legal unit)

Pack masters

Champions (pointing guys)

Guy with long rifle (champion with jezzail or warp musket I think he was called?)

Anything, really... Jez Goodwin goodness like these sorts of things:

Metal gutter runner(s) with shuriken

Engineer heads with gas mask from Doomwheel or warp lightning cannon for a conversion (or two!)

Star Wars dark times Zuckuss (as then I'll have all the bounty hunters in miniatures, and can finally get around to painting my lovely Knight Models Boba Fett that I was saving until last!)

Roron Corrob miniature (because I have vague designs on gaming Palpatine's abduction from the Clone Wars cartoon)

Lord of the rings ruffians (especially the chap with a club and noose) for a Brotherhood Without Banners warband for the ASOIAF project

Batman miniatures game cops, deadshot, to go into the box where I keep the rest of my sealed and unused Batman Miniatures Game blister packs...

Brother Vinni nuclear sandlot miniatures (Mr handy, brotherhood of steel etc)

Ezio auditore da firenze heroclix (the one in white robes with his arms crossed in front of him)

Ventriloquist heroclix (the batman villain)

Metal Lelith Hesperax (the Juan Diaz one rather than the original) for a Slaanesh champion conversion

A single Juan Diaz Daemonette, some Dark Eldar Wracks (the original release, not the plastic ones) and maybe a couple of plastic wyches for a Path to Glory warband to go with the aforementioned Slaanesh champion

Various dwarf slayers, mostly marauder era, but especially the one stood with his foot up on a dragon head...

A plastic Imperial Guard Commissar, because that is just a nice miniature

The tech-priest from the Castelan robot set, because he's the closest to a Delphan Gruss style miniature there is!

A command (?) sprue of mantic skeletons (the one with the skeletal dog) to make some emaciated wights for my white walkers to lead along with the Gripping Beast revenants I bought at Salute last year...

Some LOTR Rangers (Faramir's Rangers I think?) to induct into the Night's watch, potentially including Ranger Faramir himself to convert into a Ranger Captain (so I don't mind if he's battered and missing a limb or two!)

Perry miniatures agincourt French infantry plastic miniatures box set because I think my Baratheons are going to have a French flavour to them when I get round to making them...

Lucid Eye cro-magnons (especially the chief!) and assorted Frostgrave miniatures to convert into wildlings...

Frostgrave miniatures - the witch and apprentice, the pack with the knight and Templar, or the cult barbarian and thief pack mostly (for wildlings and hedge knight conversions)

Pretty much any of the metal Star Wars miniatures released by Wizards of the Coast: see here: http://www.miniatures-workshop.com/lostminiswiki/index.php?title=Star_Wars_(WotC) as they're all rather nice and I've somehow never seen them until recently!

Maybe some metal 2nd/3rd edition Eldar if I end up keeping the weapon platform mentioned earlier...

Or any other things that interest me or are of use to my multitude of unfinished projects...

I'll probably leave this page up and update it with new things as the clearout continues, so watch this space!

Leave a comment or email me at my username at gmail dot com if you want to talk business (or ask for less awful pictures of anything in particular!)

Acquisitions part 2: Winter has come!

Shortly after posting my last post, the aforementioned parcel from Germany arrived!

That's incredibly speedy service - I ordered these at 11 at night on Tuesday, they were despatched Wednesday and then arrived Saturday! That's quicker than the Skaven in my last post took to get to me from one county away, let alone another country!

I got the set of three, and they really are gorgeous:

They come with washers and magnets, and even a length of absolutely tiny modelling chain for the reins for the mounted figure - I'm absolutely blown away by this, as most miniatures don't even come with spears, let alone this amount of stuff!

I originally got in touch with Elmar at Elladan on Facebook to enquiry whether anyone would be stocking these at Salute, as these days money is a bit tighter than the halcyon days of I frugal youth, so to save on postage I tend to do most of my miniature spending once a year at Salute. Alas, no one was, so I popped an order on Elladan's new web store - the set, including postage from Germany came to around twenty pounds, which is eminently reasonable considering their quality! Elmar also threw in a few samples of some of their resin bits as well, to take the sting off of paying postage!

So overall, fantastic miniatures, fantastic service, and ridiculously fast delivery - go and order some from here (and no, I'm not on commission, I'm genuinely impressed!)

These arriving takes the Tally to:

20 vs 370 = -350

These will get based and painted along with the Gripping Beast Revanents that I picked up at last year's Salute, which might get supplemented with some more damaged wights if I can find someone with a spare command sprue of Mantic skeletons that they're willing to trade...

Acquisitions

Finding myself with a little spending money left after Salute, I did something I hadn't done in quite some time:

I ordered some miniatures.

Whilst not everything has arrived yet (as there's a package making its way to me from Germany) I did receive these:

Some lovely metal Skaven Gutter Runners, as there were none to be found at Salute. These metal figures are just so much nicer than the frankly showing their age multipart plastics, and so these are now having a bath in the stripping pot (which it turns out had some bits in that I'd forgotten completely about, which I may well write a post about in the near future). I feel a bit bad about stripping them, as they're quite nicely painted, but hey, I don't want them showing up the rest of my paint jobs! I'd quite like to replace one or more of them with miniatures holding a throwing star, as unfortunately there weren't any in this lot of miniatures, but that's something for another day...

I also received a promo halfling from the nice man at Westfalia miniatures, who took pity on my failed hunt for him at Salute. Having previously pledged to get this miniature finished quicker than last year's one (which took me almost a full year after Salute) he is already built and undercoated, although he has not been safe from tiny hands:

The arrival of these two packages takes the Tally to:

20 vs 367 = -347

I know the Tally isn't going to end the year in the black, but I think I might set myself the target of trying to make sure that I paint an average of one miniature a week - we're I think eighteen weeks into the year at this point, so I'm already ahead of the curve! Plus, I've been getting some stuff built to refill the gaps in my project box...

Anarky in the UK

I like Anarky, the anarchist sometime foe sometime ally of Batman that wears his influences very clearly on his crimson sleeve (I seem to recall that in his first or second appearance he is pictured having a copy of V for Vendetta in his room). I enjoyed the structure of his first appearance, where it is only revealed at the end of the story that it is actually the teenage Lonnie Machin under the costume rather than his father as you had otherwise assumed from the story (which Batman realises based on how he takes a punch, I seem to recall). So I decided to paint myself a model of him! As I've occasionally mentioned, I'm mostly reading 90's Batman comics these days, which introduced me to the character, and having a rummage round some old boxes of heroclix, it turned out I already owned a miniature of him!

Like most heroclix, he was a little flimsy though, so after removing him from his large base I started out by removing his bendy staff:

And took a donor pole from a Perry Miniatures sprue (from either a pike or a standard from the WOTR European mercenaries kit), rebuilding his electrified shock staff with the original knob on the end:

And then came base fun! At last year's Salute, I bought a number of resin bases to experiment with using with my official Knight Models Batman miniatures, but most of my rebased and repainted heroclix have been getting cork bases - not as fancy as the resin, but still a shade fancier than my usual sand and grit basing method.

Fun discovery: rather than trying to trace the inside area of the top of a lipped base, a pound coin turns out to be the right size to use as a template!

I cut the piece of cork in a jagged fashion (entirely ignoring my sketched guide line it seems) and then cut away some material from the bottom of one piece to make them different heights to add a little visual interest and make it look more like wrecked asphalt (as there seems to be something cataclysmic going on in Gotham every other month or so) - I'll add some road markings at the end of painting to drive this idea home (pun intended). This was all done several months ago, before Christmas I think...

Time passed, and I tended to carry Anarky around in my portable painting kit as something of a backup - he was base coated whilst waiting for other miniatures to dry, generally, until a week or so ago when I decided to get him finished!

Being mostly red, he was fairly straightforward to paint, although I did try to have several shades of red appear on different areas of the model by varying my highlights mix - his body is overall a darker red than his cape, for example.

I did briefly consider some of the alternate colour schemes for Anarky, when I was almost finished with him: like most comic characters, he's been drawn differently in various different appearances - in some his belt is yellow, others his holster is too; but at this point I was quite happy with how the different shades of red had come out so I decided to stick to my guns!

And after my comments on painting coats and capes in my earlier Elsa post, this cape was a delight to paint - if I were to do it again though, I'd probably try and make the application of the brighter tones broader, to make the whole cape look brighter overall, but I'm generally happy with how it turned out after adding a couple of brighter glazes to make it look more like I had envisioned!

Finishing Anarky takes the Tally to:

20 vs 360 = -340

But what to paint next? Elsa and Anarky were my two 'on-the-go' figures, so what should take their place? Clear some figures out of the project box, or give in to my post-Salute craving to convert some more miniatures for the Game of Thrones / A Song of Ice and Fire project?

Elsa!

Is gonna speak with an accent! (As per last time, see the theme tune for the reference). I was half-tempted to throw in a Frozen reference, but managed to reign in my impulse...

So yeah, four and a half years after the first one, I've finished another member of the Nextwave squad!

Elsa, British sass monster and general all-around badass.

This miniature is another good example of the variability of the quality of heroclix sculpts - while she has some nice touches, her face is a little flat, and her coat, oh her coat! Painting coats and capes and drapery are a funny thing for me - sometimes, I get super into the layering, and it just seems to flow, and I really enjoy it (case in point: the Hellboy heroclix I repainted some years ago); this coat was not one of them:

The layers just felt wrong, so I'd glaze the whole thing with the base colour to try and knock it all back and start layering highlights again, and it would feel wrong again, and I just kept working on it until I felt I couldn't do anymore...

Maybe this is why it's taking me so long to paint the Nextwave squad, they're all wearing trench coats!

Finishing her brings the Tally to:

19 vs 360 = -341

If I continue at this blistering pace I'll have the rest of the squad finished by 2030...

(Which will give me plenty of time to sort out some Doombot heads to pop on generic suited miniatures to make broccoli men!)

[side note: I was lying in bed, finishing off this blog post and almost ready to publish, when I suddenly realised that I'd forgotten to paint the Bloodstone choker, the things that gives Elsa her powers and her name, as I'd planned to save it for last... Dammit, it's nearly one in the morning, hopefully I get the chance to finish her off tomorrow after work and then sneakily go back and replace the first picture in this post! So this should have been posted on Saturday rather than Sunday in the end, and that's why - fun fact: the post-choker picture looks almost identical to the original picture, you pretty much couldn't tell the difference. Ah well]