Ghoulies everywhere...

 

A bevy of spooky chaps have made their way off my painting tile!

They’re Chainrasps from Age of Sigmar, that came on the front of a magazine ages ago.

I actually bought a second set when I realised that I could make a ‘chap in the stocks’ rather than a ‘ghost who had brought their own candles’ using the same body, and to feed my bits box the rest.

They were painted as part of the same ‘will it look too terrible if you paint dirty black robes by throwing a bit of drybrushing and a wash on it’ experiments as my previously posted Night Goblin Netter, and I can tell you it’s a success.

They would have been much faster to finish if not for me making up a large batch of diluted Vallejo Smoke (because I always make too little and end up having to make more mid-wash) that ended up being too dilute, so took several coats to get the coverage I wanted, and then had to spend some time cleaning up areas where it had dried weirdly...

Whilst I’m not likely to start playing Age of Sigmar any time soon (although with Cursed City on the horizon who knows), they’re stylistically appropriate to menace a Witcher or two, as well as standing in as wraiths for Frostgrave!

Tally:

17 vs 18 = -1

So close to being in the positive! And, truth be told, the next mini is pretty much finished already, so expect to see another post in the near future!

Wandavision

 Well guess what I’ve been enjoying on Friday nights?

I wasn’t initially particularly fussed about watching it, but my wife insisted we give it a shot (as she is always wiser than I) and I was hooked from the first episode - as soon as it finished, I hared off to the basement to dig out some minis from various boxes of Heroclix!

The Scarlet Witch I knew I had (I was always a fan of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, and so have figures of the majority of their classic members), but wasn’t sure about Vision.

After much rummaging, it turns out the only Vision figure I had was the female version (from the Ultimates?), so I found an online store with a sculpt I liked for pennies. 

Waiting for him to arrive, I started voraciously consuming back issues - definitely check out the Vision mini series if you enjoy Wandavision! I’ve since ploughed theough

Side note - when finding Scarlet Witch, I also stumbled on dozens of other figures I now want to repaint, and so was sidetracked into looking up Superhero ruleset, and also giving the X-Men movies a second chance...

Looking at the Vision figure next to Wanda, you can tell that they’re from opposite ends of the release schedule - Wanda is I think from the first set, so I’ve probably had her for somewhere between fifteen and twenty years (terrifyingly), and her proportions are somewhat more cartoony than the computer sculpted Vision from a more recent release, with his slender limbs and sensibly proportioned noggin!

Ugh, I went way too hard with a soft tone wash after basecoating Vision’s cape, and the following weeks were just an exercise in trying to undo that. Part of me thinks I should have just stripped it and started again, but after a certain point it feels like you’re in too deep!

And yes, these two fairly simple paint schemes took weeks to compete, mostly because I wanted to paint them whilst watching Wandavision (thematic!) but hampered by the fact that I was paying attention to the screen too much to do any actual painting when it was on...

Done now though, and taking the Tally to:

6 vs 18 = -12

With only one more episode to go, how do we think it is going to end? 

A Netter!

 Three posts in a week!

Another little chap marches off the painting tile, this time a Night Goblin Netter painted for Paula_she_creature’s Instagram contest - I had this miniature on my painting tile already when I saw the contest (as I was considering trying out a quick Drybrush to do black robes speedily) and thought I’d take part to make up the numbers!

Ah, that old school charm!

To my shame, this is the first fully, actually finished Night Goblin. Despite having a couple thousand points of them in various states of basecoat. It’s been so long since I’ve painted a Night Goblin at all, so had to try and figure out how to do the skin again - if I were to do it again, I’d probably go brighter, truth be told, but the deadline for the contest was creeping up so I thought it was better to just finish him off! The nose was a few coats of a crimson wash, which didn’t come out as red as I’d hoped, but I think reads like I was hoping at tabletop level. 

So, one gobbo finished every ten years, at this rate I’ll have a fully painted army in... oh, centuries time...

This one does take another dent out of the Tally though:

4 vs 18 = -14

Slowly but surely clawing my way back into the black!

The White Wizard

 

I painted up this Saruman mini in the hopes of cajoling my wife into playing a game of the wizard battle mini game that was in White Dwarf a couple of months back at some point. 

He was painted almost entirely following an old Duncan Rhodes YouTube tutorial, which was pretty straightforward and came up with a fairly nice result! 

Trivia for this mini - due to the finely sculpted eyebrows, this is the first mini in the long time that I painted the pupils of using a paintbrush rather than a micron pen!

For the wizard duel game I also need a palantir, so I got this lovely little piece from Zealot miniatures:

I painted the plinth to match his staff rather than just being grey (as I thought it might blend in with the board too much otherwise), and the same goes for the red cloth (as well as the ongoing truth that Mephiston red is a lovely shade of red). It will also do double duty as a treasure token for Frostgrave. 

Tally:

3 vs 18 = -15

(I’m not counting the treasure token as a mini for the purposes of the Tally)

In other news, I’ve had a sudden urge to revisit Dark Age, the old miniature game inspired by the art of Brom, but it seems like it’s died and everything got sold off on clearance a year ago... if anyone has any Forsaken bits and bobs in their trade pile let me know!

...although it’s entirely possible that my attention span will have wandered already, truth be told

Wooden miscellaneous

 

I’ve finished a few bits and bobs, thematically connected by all being made of wood.

A while back, I alluded to a mystery structure that I wanted to build for the first Rangers of Shadow Deep scenario, which is this outhouse, as when I was racking my brain thinking what would be an interesting building that it would be funny for a zombie to stumble out of this is what came to mind!

I knocked up a quick base structure out of cereal box card, using a miniature to eyeball the size:

In hindsight I think I made it a little too large, as tends to be the case when I eyeball it, but it’s not so big an issue that I’m not giving to use it!

To help my structure remain vaguely square, a small square of balsa wood halved diagonally makes a super pair of internal supports to keep those right angles... well, right!

Then, like the wooden shack I previously made, it was clad with distressed coffee stirrers and split tongue depressors (top tip - prep a load while you’re watching a movie rather than doing them individually as and when you need them so that when it comes to cladding you can just crack on rather than having to stop and start)

Here it is with the walls done and a door added:

I did consider putting on some tiny hinges and a handle for added realism, but after some quick experimentation abandoned the idea as not being worth it!

More planks were added to add a roof with a little overhang, and voila, a queue is forming already:

Then it was undercoated black and drybrushed with a series of browns and tans until it was ready to grace a tiny battlefield, modelled here with some miniatures painted by my daughter:

She then went on to invent a board game:

 

The two large crates were made in much the same way; they started life as a pair of Nerds packets that came in a secret Santa gift at the last work Christmas party I went to (so, 2019?) 

Then they were clad using the usual method using distressed coffee stirrers

Rather than trying to measure the planks, I just stuck on the whole stick and trimmed off the overhang with my clippers, which made for much quicker and easier construction.

The sides were built overlapping the ends, to avoid any awkward looking gaps. I was originally going to apply some of the same planks diagonally across the outsides, but figured that they would stand out too much and look a bit odd, when I remembered that many moons back someone on the Lead Adventure Forum had sent me some card sheets that had been embossed to look riveted (so many moons ago, according to the postmark on the envelope they came in they had been posted exactly 11 years to the day before I pulled them out for this project) which when cut into strips was applied to look like metal banding:

Trade secret - one of the four strips doesn’t quite meet on the underside, but I can hide that with careful placement on the table!

And lo, some boxes that are large enough that when stacked on top of each other or placed on their side block line of sight rather than just being set dressing:

And last but not least, the single crate. It’s a plastic piece from a Heroclix scenery set that I found whilst digging through my Heroclix stuff for... something that will hopefully appear repainted on the blog in the near future (and for a heavy handed clue, this search happened about three minutes after I finished watching the first episode of Wandavision).

Honestly, it probably would have been fine to use as-is, but I repainted it anyway (part of me thinks I do this because my painting doesn’t look ‘realistic’, so it would look weird having my scenery and whatnot also looking like that rather than painted). 

Quick bit of dry brushing, and I’ve produced the best thing I’ve painted all year:

So, what’s left on my RoSD scenario 1 checklist?

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

Trees, woodpile, crates and barrels and treasure tokens are all in various stages of completion (everything is at least undercoated), and I’ve got all the bits for my planned playing surface (although it remains to be seen whether the idea actually works...)

Speaking of checklists, this post lets me amend a couple of things on the Challenge:

Challenge:

• Finish something old
• Finish a piece of terrain
• Finish some scatter terrain (2/3)
• 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!

In other news, the Tally has changed, due to me gifting a vulture mini to the pal that turned me on to Rangers in the first place (don’t worry, it was safely posted through a letterbox in order to maintain social distancing) which leaves the current total at:

2 vs 18 = -16

There are at least a dozen miniatures on the painting tile currently at that annoying stage where you think they’re just one little push away from finishing, but somehow are still there the night after, but hopefully I can knock a few out and drag that number back into the positive!

I’m the baby...

 ...gotta love me (brief side note - how disappointing is it that Dinosaurs isn’t on U.K. Disney Plus after them advertising it for a month?)

Finished this little chap:

That had been sat almost finished on my painting tile since the end of last year when I frantically tried (and failed) to get my painted total up to 52 for the year to tick that off the Challenge. Speaking of which, this is definitely something old, as I’m fairly certain it’s been waiting a lick of paint longer than this blog has been around, and that’s been ten years...

I wanted the skin to look plasticky, like one of those terrifying baby dolls that my daughter is so fond of, and I think it reads as that rather than just looking like I chose the wrong base colour and didn’t highlight it enough! 

Doing the text on the dragging scroll was also stressful fun, squiring away with a micron pen after scruffily trying to make it look like I could freehand an illuminated letter!

Now, before we get to discussing the Tally, I need to confess that despite my plans to keep the Tally in the black this year, I have in fact not managed to paint enough miniatures to offset the number that I have received.

I got a box of lovely scenic bits from Zealot miniatures that you’ll be seeing soon (and may have seen some of IG you follow me on Instagram and squint a bit at some of my WIP pics, as well as a box from Northstar where I took advantage of their subscriber only offer last month. They warned that’s it would take a few weeks before orders got despatched, to which I thought ‘well that’s fine, better in fact, as it gives me time to paint up a buffer to protect the Tally’. Then January sort of flashed past and this box of 10 miniatures arrived (although in my defence unthought it was only going to be 7 minis - the pack of vultures that had three birds in its picture actually came as a blister of six, although one of them will have a new home as soon as I can safely drop it off to the pal that tempted me with Rangers of a shade Deep in the first place).

Then my wife picked me up the latest copy of Wargames Illustrated. With its accompanying sprue of Hoplites:

Which I’d added to the shipping list mostly for the solo Frostgrave Ghost Archipelago scenario, but between that sprue and the 2013 Salute mini of Jason of Argonaut fame I could probably knock together a little Greek mythology warband of some sort, a temptation I’m currently resisting (although that hasn’t stopped me idly browsing the Foundry website!)

Tally:

2 vs 19 = -17

Hmm, not where is planned to be, but not irredeemable!

So what’s next? As my wife has been working on a print, I’ve been sat with her at the table and took the opportunity to get some drybrushing done on a couple of scenery bits I’ve made, which may or may not be the subject of the next blog post...

Challenge:

• Finish something old
• Finish a piece of terrain
• Finish some scatter terrain (1/3)
• 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!

Which witch is which?

It’s taken a while to get done, but here’s my first painted miniature of the year:

A repainted Mage Knight figure of Scholar Magus Bessa that I have apparently been entirely unable to photograph well today. Being bendy plastic, despite my attempts to fix her bendy staff using the hot water trick it seems to have curled back down, but I’m not mad enough about it to try and fix it again...

I like the little details all over the figure, like the potion bottles and assorted feathers. I tried to go for a swirling smoke effect on the orb in her hand, but I’m not sure if it quite reads as that (my daughter asked if she was holding the earth, which I’m not sure is a compliment or not). It got a coat of gloss varnish to finish it off, so it looks glassy at least!

The colour scheme was inspired by another witch:

Except for the yellow ribbon on her hat, which was the result of asking my wife to choose. 

Although I’ve described her as a witch, she was actually painted to fill the role of Sorcerer in the Classes Project, with the running total currently looking like this:

Classes (as of 5e Player’s Handbook):

• Barbarian
• Bard
• Cleric
• Druid
• Fighter
• Monk
• Paladin
• Ranger
• Rogue (and also here)
• Sorcerer

• Warlock
• Wizard

Which leaves me just a Druid to go to complete the challenge! 

As an aside, picking what to paint for my Sorcerer was an interesting exercise: when it comes to the magical classes, what are the tropes and visual cues that set them each apart? Admittedly, I could have chosen any old magic user and called them what I liked, but I wanted something more archetypical than that! 

In my mind, the Wizard is the easiest to define - robes, beard, staff, big nerd. Not all wizards are like this I know, but that’s the wizardiest wizard, the one that pops to mind when someone says wizard. Warlock and Sorcerer are a bit trickier though - a Warlock forged a pact, which doesn’t really affect their look, but ritual knives, maybe some spooky tattoos sell the theme (and the mini I chose for my Challenge Warlock was pretty much the only Warlock mini I had). Sorcerers though, what defines them? The Charisma magician, so sexy wizards?

(Pathfinder has taken this theory to heart)

The other way to go is raw power, so a magic user with their hair whipping around, robes flapping in the arcane typhoon... but I didn’t have a miniature like that, so went with a cute witch instead!

Brief diversion into the semiology of magicians aside, what else have I been up to in the month since my last post? Plenty, just nothing was finished until now to post! A lot of my much reduced by homeschool hobby time has been spent prepping miniatures:

Just a few odds and ends to paint as it takes my fancy! Also an entire Frostgrave warband, as apparently I can’t just use already painted miniatures to play solo...

I’ve also got a few odds and ends half finished to check off some things from the various lists in my previous post, but I’ll save them for future posts when they’re finished!

The Tally also took a swing in the opposite direction with the arrival of this:

Out of Print 12th Doctor mini made by Crooked Dice before the range got pulled, sent by the guy that runs Tangent Miniatures because he was feeling like he was in a surplus of awesomeness! 

So between painting one and receiving one, the Tally stands at:

1 vs 1 = 0

For now... I placed a little Northstar order when they had a subscriber order earlier this month which has now been despatched...

I also finished these walls made by Fenris Games:

They’re gorgeous, and painted mostly with drybrushes of Wilko tester pots, with a dirty wash and a spotty green glaze thrown into the mix too! They were intended for use in Rangers of Shadow Deep, but will also see service in Frostgrave, Mordheim, and potentially more modern games too, as walls are walls regardless of era!

Finishing this scatter terrain gets me a third of the way towards crossing an entry off on the Challenge:

• Finish something old
• Finish a piece of terrain
• Finish some scatter terrain (1/3)
• 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 could probably claim painting the Sorcerer as ‘something old’, as she’s been undercoated in the painting queue for an indeterminate amount of time, but I’m sure I’ll have older stuff in the coming months too!

So, what next? Probably not Blackstone Fortress, as my back ordered copy of Escalation (that I need to use the copy of Ascension that my wife got me for my birthday last year) was cancelled, as it has apparently now gone Out of Print and copies are selling for silly money on eBay, which has soured me towards GW somewhat (although if someone has a spare copy of Escalation, with for without minis, that they want to send my way, let me know!). As previously mentioned, I’ve started a couple of bits from the checklist of things I need to finish to play Rangers of Shadow Deep, so that and painting a Frostgrave warband are my current priorities, including something using these supplies:

(Mysterious mysteries - I might not end up using the tape in the end though...)

So, singular focus on getting to the point where I can play a solo game. Well, singular except for the fact that my wife and I started watching Wandavision...