Miniature or more a Day 14

Well I managed to get one done today. I was pretty tired from work and I wasn't sure if I'd be able to finish one. This is from Copplestone Castings again. One of the Babes with Guns from the Future Wars line.

Miniature or more in a day 13

Yes I skipped ahead. I didn't like the way I was numbering them so now I'll just use the date when I post.

Well it's the 13th of the month and I've just finished the 13th miniature. It's the last of my Alliance Militia which is cool. I was starting to get tired of them. I was going to try and finish up my fed squad but they have very similar colors so I'm just going to do up some PCs and random NPCs over the next week. I need a break from using the same six pots of paint over and over again.

I may be able to get more done today and if so I'll post them later but my studio is trashed and I need to mow the lawn so I'm not making any promises.

Miniature or More in a Day update.

Well I didn't finish a miniature tonight. I got about half done with one but I didn't finish it. So I've got 12 minis done in 10 days and it does seem like a shame just to drop the project so I'm not going to count the last strike unless my number of finished minis is less than the number of days that have passed. For instance if on Day 16 I have only 15 minis done then I'm counting myself out. I hate to change the rules but this doesn't let me off the hook compleatly.

Miniature or More a Day 8

Ok the varnish dried enough he didn't look to shiny to photograph. I only have one more milita guy to do after this one. I'm pretty happy with the way these guys turned out but I'll also be happy to work on some other minis for a while.

Miniature a day short update.

I finished another militia tonight but his varnish is still drying so I can't post pics until after midnight. I'll have him up soon.

Miniature a Day Strike Two

Ummm strike two. Just ran out of time. Had to do the laundry. Things ain't lookin good.

Miniature a Day 7

Just barely got this guy done today. I really didn't feel like painting tonight but I decided to sit down and get one done. This is another militia trooper. I only have two more and I'm going to get them done in the next two days.

Miniatuer a Day 6

Got a couple more militia done today. Just three more militia to go and I'll be done with them.

Miniature a day Strike One....

Strike one.Well this was more of a foul ball that looked like a home run but went just the wrong side of the pole. I got about 90% done with two more of my militia figs but I just couldn't wrap them up. We had a party to go to late in the afternoon and so I only had about 4-5 hours to paint. I would still have probably finished but I spent at least two of those hours playing WoW. It was for a good cause though. We had our game groups 4th of July party on the 5th. Actually it was more than just our game group. About 30 or so people were there. One of the GMs in our group has a really nice house out in the country about 15 miles from town. We had great food and drink and all the Dads had fun shooting various firearms on the property owners firing range. The AK-47 was my favorite. One of the guys in the group worked at a fireworks stand so he came with about $1,000 in fireworks. Best show I've ever seen at a private party.Anyway I should be able to finish what I started today quite easily tomorrow but I'm afraid I may end up getting another strike on Tuesday because I have to be out of town that day.

Miniatuer a Day 4

Well I got three done today since I had a day off. These three are also Alliance militia for my Serenity game. I've got five more militia then I will be done with that group. These turned out ok I guess. They are just troops after all.

Miniature a Day 3

Well I finished up the two I started yesterday. Might get another done by midnight but I need to do some assembly and stuff so I might put the brushes down for tonight.

This guy turned out alright but I rushed his eyes a bit and you can tell.

Both of these are from Copplestone Castings Future Wars line. They are civilian militia and I intend to use them as Alliance Militia for my Serenity RPG game.

Miniature a Day 2

Well I got cocky. Got home a bit early from work, went to the store and picked up a few things and still got to sit down at my table much earlier than normal. So I decided to paint three minis tonight instead of just one. Unfortunately I only finished one and he's a bit dodgy even for a speed paint. Oh well I think he's still tabletop and the other guys are 85% done so I sort of have a good start on tomorrow. Front and back pics this time because his back is more interesting than his front.

Most of these mini a day figures will be for my Serenity game. This is a GW Van Saar fig but he'll be an Alliance sniper in my Serenity RPG.

Miniature a day 1.5

Well today turned out to be one of those "or more" days. This guy is about a 3.5 hour job and he's an NPC for my Serenity game. Guess which side he fought on during the Unification War.

Miniature or more a day project!

Ok well my last couple months production have been kinda lackluster so I decided to try and see how many days I can manage to complete at least one miniature. I'm shooting for a month and I'm going to give myself three strikes which will be day's I don't finish a miniature before I count myself out. At the end of the month if I'm feeling burnt out I'm going to go back to just painting at my leasure. These will be speed paints of course 2-4 hours maximum. I'm working full time again so I won't have a whole lot time to go for a longer paintjob. Right now I have pleanty of models primed for this type of thing so it's a good time to try it. Please feel free to join me if you like. Don't count any strikes until you get your first mini posted.

Here's my day one entry. July 1st 2008

Serenity: a WIP shot and a new vehical.

Still doing work on Serenity stuff. My campaign will be called "Midnight Rider". I have a blog set up for it. You can find it in my profile. I'll probably only show mostly finished projects there though. The meaty WIPs will remain here.

The blond with the gun is a player character for the game named Kate. The green John Deer thing will get re painted and converted into a pretty battered looking utility truck.

More Serenity Miniature Work

Got some more work done on my Serenity project. Unfortunately I thought I would have until at least the end of the month to work on projects but due to a really botched Shadow Run job our group decided to take a break from Shadowrun and run Serenity now so I will be working on things as the game is in progress.
Got a little further on the Fed Squad. All 10 of the troopers have highlighted jumpsuits and I started on the webbing gear and purple markings. So far I've just got these two at that stage but I don't think it will take long to finish up from here.

I also started working on the PC minis. This is a miniature from Urban Mamoths Urban War line. The character's name is Ben and he's the groups pilot and face man.

The player who is going to be playing Ben sent me this render of his character. The thing about minis is that you can't always match your mini to exactly what the character looks like. I think I made a pretty good match for this character. The hair is different and the render doesn't have facial hair but the basic elements of the character are the same and I tried to make my paintjob match his concept as best I could.
This is Toni the crew's mechanic. It's my wife's character and she did the paintjob on this one. I think it turned out real nice.

I expect to do a lot more Serenity projects in the next few months. Watch this spot.

Alliance Fedrals for Serenity

An update a real update. Well we've almost finished the move and we now have our phone and Internet service up at our new place. As I said in the reorganization post my new game group wants me to run the Serenity RPG in July. I already had a box of Starship Troopers Light Armoured Troopers from Mongoose Publishings Starship Trooper game that I picked up for the last Serenity campaign I ran. I never got the point where I needed them last time so I never painted any of them up. The costume designers for the Firefly TV show used the armor and helmets from the Starship Troopers movies for the Alliance federals in "The Train Job", "Bushwhacked", and "Safe" episodes. The miniatures were not the best sculpts and definitely not the best cast and they are on the large side for the 28-30mm scale of miniatures but they are the best match to the troops from the show available.

I decided to speed paint these guys in the same fashion I've been doing my speed paints recently. First I blocked in the colors on the whole squad and even the base on these troops. The box set came with 20 troopers but my experience with the Serenity rules left me feeling the rules didn't support really large combat encounters very well so I decided to pick only 10 troopers to paint. I decided on pretty much just troops with regular weapons though I did pick the sniper and communications officer as well.

After I block in the colors I washed the whole squad with a wash mixed from burnt umber, dark blue, and a drop or future floor wash diluted with water until I got the consistency I liked. I then start my highlighting with the color I used as a base and two additional layers of lighter highlights. As you can see I'm highlighting pretty loosely. These are definitely table top paint jobs and I'm trying to keep the time down on these. I hope they will end up looking nice but they are in no way display models.

So far I've been able to get the jumpsuits highlighted on five of the troops. I've only got about 3-4 hours painting this squad so that's not bad. I usually work from large area to small when doing this stage of highlights. It makes each stage go faster than the previous stage which is a great help when doing larger squads.

Moving Day!

Well today is the day we move from Warsaw Missouri to Warrensburg Missouri. I'm pretty excited though we still don't have jobs. There are two game stores in Warrensburg and we already have a game group there to play in. Our miniature studio space is much smaller but I think that is a good thing. In the old studio we had too much room to spread out so we had a lot of unfinished projects laying around. Hopefully this smaller space will keep us focused on projects until we finish them.

Here are a few shots of our new workspace.

The Best Laid Plans......

Well moving has thrown off all my projects for the year. I didn't think it would cause this much of a problem but it has. There is just no way I'll be able to finish up everything I have planned. I'm cutting all my sci-fi projects, Bretheren of the Belt, The M.S.S.R., and The TLA from this years list. I'm also dropping The Tethys my tramp steamer contest. The rest of my pulp projects I'm going to continue to work on but with some adjustments. Also I have already found a regular game group in Warrensburg Missouri where I am moving but part of being in that group is that I have to run a game for the group and they would like me to run the Serenity RPG so I'm adding Serenity to my project list. There are only six months left in the year so I'm going to have to change how I was origionally going to handle my projects. For one thing I had too many so I'm instead going to make two projects my priority while the rest I will work on but not put any particular deadline or specific goal on. They are all Pulp projects.


Primary Projects:


Adversaries for my Pulp games. These will be creatures like mummies and dinosaurs and the like and perhaps a few villians as well. Right now i have about 6 generic savages, 9 mummies, 9 wolves, 5 wearwolves, 8-10 cultist, 10 frog men, 10-20 lost world skinks, and about 10 other beast and creatures. I'd also like to add a few dinos but I'm not sure yet which ones. I'm not setting a date on this other than the end of the year.

Since I'm running the Serenity RPG for my new game group I need to get some minis painted up for it. I've already got some Sci-Fi humans from Star Wars but I could use a few more. The good thing about the serenity setting is that humans are pretty much all you have to deal with. My plans are to do about 10-20 more human types. 10 or so Alliance Fedrals using some Starship Trooper minis I have which is perfect since the troopers from the Firefly TV show wore Starship Trooper armor. I will also be doing 10-20 Reavers using mostly the Scared from Dark Age games since they are a close match. I hope to be ready to start running this game in a couple months so this is really a summer project althout I'm sure I'll be adding things as the campaign runs along.

Secondary Projects:

These are all pulp projects. They have no specific timeline or goal I'll just be working on them as i can.

Two Bit Pulp Hero

I was visiting my friendly local game store yesterday when I spyed these two Lobster Johnson figures from Heroclicks on the singles shelf. I asked the guy who runs the shop how much they were and I was a bit supprised to get them so cheaply. I got the pair for $0.75. One was $0.50 because it was rarer and the other was just $0.25. Just twentyfive cents and a real nice pulpy looking sculpt. I snatched them both up. I decided to do a conversion on the cheaper one so I carved off his symbol and swapped his head with a head from Games Workshop's Bretonian Knights boxed set. I had the carve down the neck area to make it fit the figure but it wasn't too hard. I also cut the little disk under the feat off and mounted the figure on a Games Workshop small round base. The conversion took like an half hour at best and all I used was an exacto knife and super glue.
Here you can see the converted fig between two 28mm figures. The one on the left is from Copplestone Casting and the one on the right is from Pulp Figures. I think he makes a pretty good match height and size wise.

I puttied and textured the base then I primed the figure with a light coat of Duplicolor Sandable Primer. I tried not to get too heavy here because the company paint was still on most of the figure and I didn't want to obsure any more detail than i had too.

The figure painted up fairly well. I did a bit of a rush job on him because I wanted to see how he would look. I spent about two hours on the paint job. It was pretty straight forward. It's not a very complicated sculpt and I didn't want to get very fussy because I wanted to have a project that was both cheap and fast. I'd say the entire project has less than 4 hours of bench time on him and I think he turned out alright. Now I have a totally unique pulp adventure that cost me less than a dollar and only a few hours time.

I think he looks pretty reasonable on my pulp shelf. He's not going to win me any painting contest but I'm very happy with this project as it expanded my pulp figure colletion at a very low cost in terms of both time and money. I plan to do more conversions based on Heroclicks and other cheap plastic miniatures. They are just so cheap you can't pass them up and the sculpts look a lot nicer painted up to even moderate gamer standards compaired to the poor quality paint jobs they come with.