Oh if I only had some braaaaaaaaaainsss...

Playing catch-up a little this week, we have two finished miniatures for my week 2 and 3 Zomtober entries!

First is the next of the Studio Miniatures Wizard of Oz themed Survivors box, a pitchfork wielding vagrant with overtones of Scarecrow:

Good fun to paint, even if the detail on his face was a little squiff (although it might just be that I've been spoilt by having painted Hasslefree miniatures, that even my modest level of skill can make look quite nice), but judicious application of a five-o-clock shadow came out looking pretty good I think and distracts from that! His eyes are a mote wonky, mostly because my daughter chose the exact moment to grab my chair and yell boo that the micron pen was making contact with miniature...

He got straw blond hair to suit the Scarecrow theme, and his clothes were painted dirty and worn partly for theme, partly because there's just something satisfying about scrubbing on some weathering with a ragged old brush!

The other miniature offered up this week is this militaristic zombie:

Back when I got back into the hobby in my early twenties, I was inspired to start a zombie project after seeing all of the great stuff happening over on the Lead Adventure Forum (which I'd joined to ask a member a question about where they'd gotten some miniatures that I'd stumbled on while googling for AEWWII miniatures). To get started, I bought a bunch of Horrorclix zombies from a nice guy in Spain (username PredatorPT iirc), and this chap is one of the last pair of that bunch to get painted (the other of which is currently sat half finished on my desk). The Horrorclix zombies are a mixed bunch - variable sizes, wildly variable sculpting quality, but they got me started and over a hundred zombies later I still like them (I think the Zombie Ventriloquist is still one of my favourite members of the horde).

This particular zombie is one of the better sculpts though - fairly crisp detail, characterful, but straightforward enough that he looks great with three or four colours and some weathering! Painting was fairly straightforward: I basecoated everything, weathered the lot, and then washed and highlighted anything that wasn't black before coming back to do a pass to pick out a couple of small details like the handle of his holstered pistol, the buttons on his pouches, and his teeth! I was tempted to apply some blood effects (as it's been a while since I got to play with my pot of TCR) but figured that given how dark overall the model is, you wouldn't really notice the blood on him...

Here are the two miniatures squaring off - you'll see what I mean when I say that the Horrorclix zombies are a little big! Mixed into the crowd though the scale difference isn't quite as noticeable...

Tally 

32 vs 40 = -8

Coming next week:more of the same, hopefully!

Zomtober - you have my axe...

Zomtober is here again!

Doubly exciting this year, as my daughter has learned what Halloween is, so our house currently rings to repeated viewings of The Nightmare Before Christmas and Hallowen songs like these, so painting zombies feels festively apt!

So here for my first offering (a day later than originally planned) is the Tin Woodman themed survivor from Studio Miniatures' Wizard of Oz themed set:

Selected for my first week's submission mostly because time really got away with me and he was the one that I was able to get finished in the least number of steps on Saturday and Sunday night!

Ugh, my photography is doing me no favours with him is it? I used a variety of washes and shades (as well as various bits of weathering) to visually differentiate between the different parts of his makeshift armour; with his hair I was going for a 'hints of chestnut' rather than my usual 'bright ginger' that I seem to end up with when I get carried away from a Vermin Brown undercoat; the sculpt of the face is a little odd, but I did what I could.

Which brings the Tally to:

30 vs 40 = -10

In theory I might still hit the 1 miniature a week average by the end of the year, but who knows?

...

What do you mean where have I been?

[checks date on last post] wow, it has been three months hasn't it.

A number of factors contributed to this.

Shortly after my last post, I managed to slice through the end of my thumb with a meat cleaver, which made holding miniatures to model or paint very difficult:

I have also sunk a number of hours into the videogame The Witcher 3, which it turns out is super good, although I seem to be approaching the end of the game already, unlike Fallout 4 which took me actual years. This may have more to do with my daughter's bedtime being slightly earlier these days than the relative complexities of the two games though... I even got round to reading the advance copy of the first novel that I was sent nearly a decade ago, which is also very good. The multi million selling series of novels and videogames that came out in the interim are probably more of a testament to that than my much belated approval though...

I've not been completely out of the hobby though; I've built some scatter terrain (as was briefly alluded to in my last post) that is now sat undercoated in the basement:

(pre-undercoat sneak preview that those of you that follow me on Instagram will have seen months back)

as well as having half-painted several things that I won't name on the off chance that I manage to finish them once we're out of Zomtober, and having built about a billion (well, twenty odd, but it felt like a billion) wildlings whilst the latest series of Game of Thrones was on, until I realised that I was almost out of non-GW 25mm round bases for them (I'm oddly obsessive about what bases get used for what) and now they're sat forlornly on my desk waiting for their turn back in the spotlight. I also had a hankering to build some Gundam models (having been watching Gundam Build Fighters with my daughter of a weekend when we're up before Mummy), but rather than the logical response to that of ordering some Gundam models to build, I started writing the basis of a set of 1/144 scale giant robot combat rules, as you do. Maybe with a polish and a playtest I'll publish it, eventually. 

So, hopefully see you in a week rather than three months!

In the Emperor's name get back here so that I can show you the business end of this Eviscerator heretic!

So, there's a bit of a long-winded explanation for why this guy got painted. And why it took... 8 years maybe?

One of the guys at work has recently discovered Warhammer (40K to be precise), and knowing I am a big nerd wants to play some sort of game. Me being me, I've already bounced from the idea of playing Kill Team (which I'm assuming is what used to be 40k in 40 minutes), to Shadow War Armageddon (new! Also unavailable) to Inquisimunda (because it's basically Necromunda with waaay more options). I figure I probably know a couple of adults that I could probably also rope in to some skirmish scale wargaming...

Which brings me to this figure. Fired up with my current enthusiasm for Inq28/Inquisimunda, I thought I'd finish painting a conversion that was originally built for the Witch Hunters army that was last briefly mentioned on the blog 6 years ago:

A zealot with an Eviscerator - he was built so long ago that he was the last model in a blister of Empire Flagellants that I bought along with a Mordheim Witch Hunters boxed set. Off of the shelf in a Games Workshop. That long ago.

It's a fairly straightforward weapon swap - off came his flail, and on went the blade from a space marine chainsword (as it's big enough to look like an oversized Eviscerator on a normal human, and the handle of the flail is long enough to look like a two-handed grip). I figure his awkward stance is him swinging his chainsaw like Leatherface at the end of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in his enthusiastic religious fervor.

I mostly basecoated him, then many years passed until the events of the first paragraph of this post.

Fun painting facts:

• his ragged robe was my perhaps first experiment in painting using washes over a light basecoat. I haven't really used the technique since. Maybe I should give it another shot?
• I added some blood effects on his feet (as I'm assuming that the battlefields of the forty-first millennium are mostly broken glass) using Blood for the Blood God. I do love some glossy blood effect.
• I went with orange for his shoulderpad to try and make him look less fantasy - I'd originally planned to have it in the colour of the inquisitor he'd accompany, but as I haven't decided who that's going to be I went for an industrial orange and went to town on the weathering!

It's a fairly interesting little sculpt - I love the string of bells hanging from his waist, but I'm not sure where I stand on the book on his chest and parchment on his side - rather than being blank for you to add your own squiggles for writing, they come with sculpted indentation detail - with careful use of dark washes I was able to pick them out so that they looked passable, but it's fairly unusual (as if you look closely you can see the indents...)

Lastly, the blade. Oh hazard stripes, thou art a pain to do evenly. Thank goodness for a soft pencil and carefully marking out where you want the stripes to start and end rather than trying to freehand it!

Also, a goodly amount of weathering helps add to the whole effect. I briefly considered going hog wild with blood splatter, but I'm glad I held back as I think it would have been easy to go too far and ruin it...

He was actually painted about two and a half weeks ago, but a number of factors have combined to mean it's taken me this long to get him posted - I miss the Blogger app, it's a pain having to drag out my wife's laptop to edit posts; also I've been playing a lot of Fallout 4, as I ordered the Witcher 3 and want to finish Fallout of before starting another game that will take me multiple years to complete (and yes, I'm the sort of OCD nerd that is also reading the Witcher novels before playing the game); also, I've been working on a bunch of scatter terrain pieces in the hopes of being able to play some games at some point...

Tally:

29 vs 40 = -11

So what's next? Some more Inquisimunda models, hopefully - I've a few stock models built that I'll try and get based up when I'm basing the scenery (which you may have already seen progress pics of over on Instagram), and then hopefully I can then move onto finishing some conversions that I've had in various states of half-completion for the best part of a decade - weirdly, despite my prediliction for the more Radical aspects of the Inquisition, a number of figures that I have would probably suit a more Puritan band (this Zealot, for example...)

What do you get if you cross an owl with a bear? Banned from the zoo...

Ah, owlbears. Half owl, half bear, all twisted hate. Created just because they could be. The perfect pinnacle of 'a wizard did it'. I'm weirdly amused by them.

This delectable beast was originally a playing piece from an old Dungeons & Dragons board game that I rebased, and is a surprisingly nice sculpt for something that was originally monocoloured shiny plastic.

I think I basecoated him at least five years ago... but he ended up geting brought along for the ride when I took some miniatures to paint at work, with the finishing touches being added at home over the last couple of evenings. The feathers didn't come out quite as I'd envisioned, but I think other than that overall I'm fairly happy with him! You'll notice a lot more flock on the base than usual - this is due to my extensive research into the lush flora of the owlbear's natural habitat, and not to cover up some slightly dodgy basing with weird gaps left by past me, not at all.

And here he is terrorizing a hapless cleric - you can just about see his orange eyes from this angle. He'd have been completed and posted a day earlier if I hadn't decided that I needed to go back and add the tiny reflection spot of white on each eye...

Tally:

28 vs 40 = -12

Next - who knows? I'm tempted to build some more scenery, or maybe did out the bag of bits for Inq28 conversions (as I've been poring over the Inquisimunda pdfs recently)... But then again, minus twelve on the Tally is tantalisingly close to being back in the black isn't it

4-Lom & Zuckuss

We got the bug eyes / it doesn't bug us:

Yes, that is why I painted these bounty hunters as a pair!

 

 

For the longest time, Zuckuss was the only bounty hunter of those seen in Empire that I was missing a miniature of, but after umming and ahhing all this time, I got one for Valentine's Day this year!

 

Both are originally prepainted bendies from the Wizards of the Coast range - weirdly, unlike the rest, Zuckuss wasn't included in the original release (which is probably why I didn't already have one - I bought a lot of boosters when the game first came out, but ended up buying less and less as time went on...). They're fairly nice sculpts considering where they're from - detail was generally clear and pleasant to paint, with exceptions like an annoying mould line over 4-Lom's eye (which are always a pain to fix on models like this, as you can't just scrape them off and have to try to creatively cut them) and slightly soft detail on Zuckuss head, but with careful paint application I think they've both come up looking alright!



 

 

4-Lom was especially interesting to paint, given how scruffy and worn he looks - another difficulty with trying to paint Star Wars miniatures is that you'll often find contradictory information when you're trying to check colour choices! Handily, I have a copy of the old Action Figure archive (so that I can look at both stills from the films and the colours chosen for the action figure releases) and try and make an educated guess from there (with the occasional bout of Google Image searching trying to find a reference image that I like!).

In the end, I washed him with a highly diluted orangey-flesh colour, to try and recreate the tarnished finish on his shell (before giving him a once-over with some sponge weathering), which I'm fairly happy with! Zuckuss' robes were also quite nice to layer...



And for those of you wondering, that thing under 4-Lom's foot is a Rebel Pilot helmet, with an orange band with gold chevrons along it!

Finishing these two brings the Tally to:

27 vs 40 = -13

Who knows where we'll go next...

The Hammer is my Penis

Totally worth the expense and effort just to have a blog post with that title.

You've all watched Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, right?

If not, go do it now.

I'll wait.

Seriously, it's three parts, will take forty minutes of your life, and is highly recommended if you like things that are good.

Done? Good. Pow, that ending!

But on a more cheery note, having re-watched it this year (as it turned out that my wife had somehow never seen it) I had a hankering to pick up the 'Sergeant Spanner' figure from Hasslefree that bears a passable resemblance to a certain Hammertastic hero, and so picked one up at Salute (even better, he was one of the freebie figures on offer for pre-ordering, so double score!).

He was painted mostly on lunchtimes at work, under terrible lighting conditions. The shirt was one of those cases of painting until I decided I couldn't tinker with it any more, and so took the plunge to freehand on the tiny hammer logo - I started by carefully painting on a black circle to outline the whole thing, then a couple of gentle layers of yellow, breath held and fingers crossed! A dash of brown and a curve of silver later and voila, we have a tiny hammer!

The thing that took the longest to paint was probably his right eye - I don't think that micron pen that I use for dotting in pupils travels particularly well, and seemed to splurt ink out somewhat, so his right eye was probably repainted three or four times in the end until I managed to get a satisfactory result!

I have no idea what project he is for - I could probably shoehorn him into the Zombies project as a random event, and he's probably underpowered to go toe-to-toe with any Marvel superheroes... Ah well, sometimes you need to paint something just because you want to!

Tally:

25 vs 40 = -15

It's a good bet the Empire knows we're here...

Painted up the pack of Probe Droids from Star Wars Imperial Assault. They were painted vaguely following the tutorial Sorastro put up on Youtube - vaguely in that I watched it a couple of months before starting painting, and then watched it again once I was too far into the painting process to change anything.

I went for a fairly dark scheme, with some bright nicks of weathering. The bases took some more doing than usual, as since the models are so flimsy there was a lot of careful glueing involved to get them to bond to their new bases, which seemed to disagree with the sand staying where I wanted it. Two were glued using tiny contact points, whereas the third I managed to trim down the base without the legs all snapping off and so smoothed the edges down with filler before applying grit and sand.

To make the Elite figure stand out, I decided to give it red lenses and some markings - cue some frantic digging through every Star Wars reference book in my house looking for a reference chart of Aurebesh (the Star Wars alphabet) only to discover that it's in the Star Wars Miniature Battles rulebook, which is Uncle Johnny's, so I googled it:

If you peer at it, you can just about make out AB172 on the side of the Elite probe droid (chosen for the same reason my Fallout survivor is from Vault 172), as well as very carefully painting an Aurek on top of the droid. I then looked at it at arm's length and figured that the small red symbol wasn't obvious enough to differentiate between the different droids, so I repainted the entire panel red and repainted the Aurek in white. Then, as per the Sorastro video, I gave all of the lenses a coat of GW 'Ardcoat to give them a glossy, reflective finish.

Tally:

24 vs 40 = -16

In other news, I spent part of my afternoon sieving bits of shell out of Wilkos £1 bird sand. After explaining to our local Labour MP that that was what one of the two tea strainers my daughter was holding was for when she asked. As you do.