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.