Well I started working on my 2nd squad for my German Freikorps army. I'm pretty happy with the way it's turning out. I'm about 89% done with the base colors and I should have the wash on by the end of the day. I think they will look good next to my finished unit. After this I have a light assault unit and a Maxim machine gun unit to finish. I'd like to have one more regular squad and one or two more machine gun squads then I'd like to get some armored cars and tanks together for them as well as some trucks and light artilery. I think I'm going to go with mostly captured Mark IVs and Whippits for tanks and some captured armored cars as well. 
Here's the Cannoness. She's nearly done. I'm going for a character leve table top look on this fig. Nothing special. In fact I'm trying to paint my army too a "good" standard and intentionally trying not to spend too much time on them. I need to scale back on the quality for bigger projects. 
Here's my old Mark I Immolater. I decided to use the green that I'm using on the inside of the sister's tabbards as my main tank color. I think it looks snazzy. This tank will get a umber wash and highlights and details of course.
Squad Alpha is tabletop ready. I think I did an ok job matching the armor though it's not perfect. The new models are what most of my army will look like anyway. They are the ones with the static grass. Eventually I'll re-work the bases on the older models and give them a bit more highlighting but for now that's going to have to wait.
Squad Beta is comming along. I've only got a few hours in them so far. When painting squads I try to start with the big areas then work to the smaller areas that way the steps get shorter and shorter.
Oops! Well I didn't expect an exact match but these are a full shade brighter. I use to make medieval armour with a guy who would say that the difference between a master and everyone else was that the master could fix his fuck ups. Now I wonder if I can fix this fuck up. I'm pretty sure I'm going to go with a wash. Hopefully that will get them close enough.
Well I went down to my local FLGS today and picked up a Pegasus Hobbies Gothic City Buildings small set #2 or the Gothic Church as I like to call it. The retail price was $30.00 which is very good for a building of this size. As you can see Gordon got the box open right away and there are several parts. 
Straight out of the box the most disappointing thing is the lack of instructions. In fact the instructions were a one side one sheet affair. Gordon can't understand it either.
The first thing we did was put together the parts that did have instructions. The flying buttresses, rose window, and roof arches. These went together easily. There are some chunky flash areas and some other bits that need to be trimmed up a bit but a big exacto is the only tool I used in the basic assembly.
Oddly enough the hardest bit to assemble were the doors although they were not all that hard. You want to set them up to swing out like this.
Here are the doors and walls. They go together fairly easily I wouldn't personally recommend gluing these parts until you at least dry fit the entire structure together first.
It's actually a bit tricky to put all the parts together and I strongly suggest you dry fit everything before you use any glue. Make sure everything is snug and take your time putting the thing together. The walls fit together via a tab and slot system which is really quite ingenious and there is some play in the whole structure which makes it easier to assemble. The tabs that show on the outside can be filled with the decorative elements that come with the kit or filled with putty or something. The only loose parts I had at this point were the flying buttresses. I'm going to be gluing mine together on the final assembly. 
Here is the left side wall from the door. I managed to get two five tier shelves up. I still need to rearrange my shelves to get the most important projects in each room. There is quite a bit of finished terrain on these two shelves. Eventually I want to have only WIPs on these shelves but I don't have enough nice shelving in the living room to display it. 
Here's my painting desk in the right wall. I've got a smaller five tier shelf in the corner because that's all that would fit there. My paint desk is still not in order but it is in place.
Here's a shot of the left hand corner behind the door. I have some more short shelves and as you can see there is a small closet in this room as well.
Ah yes and here's Gordon the studio gorilla reading my copy of Savage Worlds a game I haven't played yet but am dying to try. Gordon seems to like it anyway.
I've shown you what is and now you get to see what could be. This is the garage. The last people who rented this place apparently stole the garage door. They also stole the refrigerator and stove. I'm not sure why. Anyway we're trying to get the door replaced and I hope to get the garage re-wired since the old wiring has been cut. Pretty soon I hope to turn this into the uber terrain studio.
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.
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.
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. 
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.
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.
