Oops!

Well I've decided to try and get back into 40K and since I already had a lot of Sisters of Battle I decided to start painting them up. My sisters are the army I collected but never painted up during 2nd edition so I still had a lot of them left over. I did have a convent name "Order of the Iron Rose" and I had painted a five sister squad and had half painted a squad of Seraphim. Now back in the day I used a lot of craft paints and these days I use mostly miniature paints. Anyway now the minimum squad size for battle sisters is 10 figs and not 5 so I needed to finish up this squad and paint another battle sister squad to get my army started. Problem is I decided to paint the spares while the five I had painted were sitting on the shelf in the other room. Well of course with no refference I got the armour way too bright.


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.

Pegasus Hobbies Gothic Church

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.

Anyway that's basic assemble of this kit. I'm really happy with it so far. I think I have fewer than three hours on the assemble and I was bumbling around a bit. I would say that this kit could go together in less than an hour if someone was really in a rush or they had some experiences with the other kits like it. I'll follow this up with final assembly and painting. With any luck I'll have a new building for my table by the end of the week!

Another New Studio

Well our last landlords here in Warrensburg apparently fell off the face of the planet so we had to move house unexpectedly. We managed to find a much larger rental property for only about $150.00 more than we were paying a month and we were paying very low rent there. It's a three bedroom house with a separate garage and a really big yard. Still moving cuts into painting and terrain making time not to mention game time. The studio is about 50% larger than the old studio but I couldn't get as much shelving into it as I could the last one due to the layout so I put a lot of my model kits and long term WIPs on my other two shelves out in the laundry room. I think it's going to work out pretty well and I don't feel so crowded in this room.

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.

Longest "Speed Paint" project ever.

So I've decided to do a Warhammer 40K army and the only I still have enough figures for is my Sister's of Battle army. I started collecting this army several years ago. I'm thinking at least nine years ago and perhaps longer. I painted up a five sister battle squad straight away because in their first incarnation the minimum squad size was five then I started painting these seraphim. I got everything done on them other than their hair, weapons, and other small details then let them sit on my shelf collecting dust because I decided I hated 3rd edition. So Wednesday night I pulled them out dusted them off and finished them up. My painting style has changed over the years but I think these gals came out as a good table top squad. They arn't very heavily highlighted or tightly detailed but they they do have enough contrast for army figs. For instance their armor is just one layer of drybrushing over black but it gave me the exact look I wanted for them. They are from the Order of the Iron Rose my own order and I wanted their armor to look like brushed iron. Now I need to try to keep the rest of the troops painted to this level and try not to over work them. Of course I plan to paint the characters to a higher level but I'm pretty happy with this level as a squad.

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.

Well I've been eyeballing the plastic Minotaur of the Maze since I first saw him at a game shop. I must admit my first reaction to Reaper's Legendary Encounters was highly negative and I still don't care for a lot of the first round releases. I really don't care for the Orcs and Skeletons that were chosen for the first batch. They aren't bad minis in pewter at all but I don't think they translate well and I think reaper has some better sculpts for those particular creatures. Seems to me the somewhat bolder and chunkier sculpts with more robust details look better in this format. The second batch minis do look like better choices all around and i am looking forward to picking some of them up. The big monsters however are great all around. Their paint jobs look ok. Much better than a lot of other pre paints and they look like they could be easily over painted or spruced up. Also they paint didn't look as thick in person as it did in some of the photographs.

About the Minotaur specifically. I'm pretty pleased with him. He's definitely a great sculpt. Much better than other pre-paints that I have seen. His pose and attitude and the heft of his weapons lend very well to the material he was cast in. The paint job is not bad either. Somewhat above average and a good foundation for over painting which is what I plan to do with mine. I'm just going to clean him up and add some highlights and shadows using his existing paint job as my base cote. I'm also going to base him on a round metal washer which will add some weight to him so he won't tip over easily. Of course I'll finish up his base a bit more. The paint is thin enough I could even prime him lightly and start with an entirely new paint scheme but I think I'll try that on the ogre chief instead because I don't like his yellowish skin anyway.
There are a couple big advantages to this model over the metal version. He's much cheaper. $5.99 for the plastic version or $13.99 for the metal version. That $8.00 I saved can be used to buy a couple regular humanoid minis. The other advantage is that he's already put together so no difficult pinning work on a large mini and because he's plastic he probably won't break apart in a fall from the table. Big minis are hard to assemble and it can take quite a while to pin several heavy joints. That's going to save me time and get this guy on the table faster.
The one disadvantage to this guy is that he's already assembled. Yup that was also an advantage. Basically it's a problem but not a major one. Of course because these guys are mass produced they are not going to come assembled with carefully puttied joints and all the mold lines removed. There are gaps in the assembly you can clearly see in these photos.

There are also mold lines including a kinda bad one on his face. If I'm going to the trouble to spend additional time painting on this guy that's something I'm going to have to fix. Then I'm going to have to match colors although since I'm only using the existing paint job for the base cote it doesn't have to be perfect. It would be nice however to know what Reaper colors were used to paint each mini so people could color match perfectly is they wanted to.
All and all I'm pretty happy with my purchase. I saved a chunk of money and a bit of time and i think these figures could easily be touched up and enhanced by a skilled painter quicker than painting up a figure from scratch. So I save time and money and I don't have to cringe when a big model falls off the table. I think I'm a convert. I'll be looking forward to future releases especially the larger monsters!

Sky Pirates Teaser

I got a shipment of planes in from Internet Hobbies today. Four SPAD 13 C.1s, Four Albatros D IIIs, and a Curtiss Jenny all in 1/48th scale which is the closest common scale for 28mm minis. I intend to use these planes for a pulp campaign I've been working on called Sky Pirates which will run from WWI through WWII and perhaps a bit beyond. It took the models about a week to arrive after I placed the order which is a pretty good turn around.

The SPAD 13 C.1s are Testors models. They cost only $6.37 each and they are very simple kits. Both of the factors make them excellent options for wargame models. Complicated models are harder to put together and tend to be more fragile due to many small parts. Since these are going to be handled a lot their simple construction should be a major asset. Also the SPADs will be player character planes and I hope my various players will try their hand at building and painting their own aircraft. I purchased four of these planes to serve as models for ground action or low flying action during my games. I will be using 1/144 scale planes for higher altitude combat.

One odd thing about the SPADs is the size of the pilot model. The planes are suppose to be 1/48th scale and they do seem to be but the pilot figure is very under scale. I'd say closer to 1/72 scale. 1/48th figures are usually taller than 28mm figures and as you can see here these ones are not. I will likely be using some head a shoulder pilot minis from Copplestone Casting instead of the kits stock pilot figure.

The Albatros DIIIs are from Glencoe Models. They cost $8.68 and the kits are somewhat more complicated than the Testors SPADs. I got four of these kits and I may get more if they go together well. These planes will be used by Graf Manfred Orlok and his squadron who have an uncanny ability as night fliers.

The Curtiss Jenny is a Lindberg kit. It cost $10.20 and it's definitely the most complicated of all the kits. This kit will be part of the Sky Pirates squadron and it will be used as a trainer and observation plane. I'm not looking forward to doing all the rigging but I don't think the plane will look quite the same without it. This plane in particular will be used mostly as a scenic piece so hopefully it won't get handled quite as roughly as the other planes.

The Jenny model crew and pilots seem to also be a bit on the small side for 1/48th scale but not nearly so much as the SPAD pilots. I think I may use these crew and pilot figures.

Well hopefully I'll get started on these models soon. Ideally I would like to start my Sky Pirates campaign right at the start of WWI. These planes of course are not suitable for that. They are more mid war planes but the campaign will be broke down into several mini campaigns with different aircraft and theaters of operation. I'm not having an easy time finding early war plastic plane kits so I may resort to trying to find paper models instead. If I can't I'll be starting the campaign mid war using these models instead. Either way these models will get used either in the first of second phase of the campaign.

Scouring Pad Conifer Trees.

Whilst perusing the projects of TerraGenesis, my favorite terrain site, I came across a project where the artist had made some nice looking conifers using scouring pads and bamboo skewers. They looked pretty good but I didn't like the fact that all the trees were so straight up and down. Later while thinking about the project I decided that the trunks would look much nicer if they were made from whittled down twigs. This way the trees would have odd twist and bends in the trunks and not be so uniformly straight. I sat on the idea for a while then I decided to work on it during my move time because it wasn't a big material intensive project. Most of my materials are packed and already at my other house but I still had enough stuff to work on these at night.

Here are the twigs whittled down and stained with some very warm brown paint. I made 20 trunks but then decided to work on them 10 at a time.

I then created the foliage just as the article instructs by cutting disk of scouring pads then splitting them in half and roughing them up into irregular shapes. A couple tips: Use old scissors. The pads are impregnated with abrasives which will wreck a good pair of scissors. That leads to tip number two. Wear a mask or respirator. Tearing the pads apart releases a lot of abrasive dust. I woke up this morning with a sore throat because I didn't bother. The abrasives can be quite bad for you and you might consider doing this projects outside because the dust can linger in the air.
Here is my first finished tree. Another thing I did differently than the article was that I used Aleene's Tacky Glue instead of super glue to glue my foliage in place. Aleene's is my favorite glue for terrain. It sets more quickly than white glue but also dries clear and flexible and it's thick enough to stay where you put it unless you really glop it on which can also be useful in some situations. You can see that some of the glue hasn't quite set in this pic especially at the top but it does dry completely clear.

Here's my first group of ten trees. You can see here how the irregular stick shape adds character to each tree and makes them look more natural. Now I just need to drybrush the foliage with some lighter green and base them and I'll have a nice small wooded area.