La Confrérie de La Mort Rouge

Well I actually did a project in the last few days pretty much start to finish. I painted up 10 Cultist from Bob Murch's Pulp Figures line as La Confrérie de La Mort Rouge (The Brotherhood of the Red Death) for my B.M.A.P. pulp game. These are pretty rushed paint jobs but I like the way they came out.

No Battle Reports?

Well there has been a distinct lack of battle reports on my blog of late. In fact the last actual battle report I wrote was way back in March. This is mostly due to the fact that I've not been playing a lot of miniature games. I've been playing quite a few role playing games and using miniatures for them but I haven't been playing many miniature games. It's harder to write rpg reports than miniature game reports because there is usually much more information and not as much miniature use. I tend to use miniatures for combat in RPGs but I don't always have combat in my game sessions and also we sometimes use battle maps or dry erase maps instead of terrain and while that's ok for gameing it hardly seems worth taking pictures and posting them.

Hopefully that will change soon. I'm going to start running some Pulp miniature adventure games using the Savage Worlds rules and nice terrain. I'm pretty well adjusted to my new home and I have most of my miniature and terrain stuff unpacked and sorted out so hopefully I'll be able to get back into the swing of making terrain for nice battle reports.

With any luck I'll have some kind of game report up in the next week.

Freikorps Squad 2

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.

Sister Sisters.

Well I'm trying to get my Sisters of Battle.... er.... um..... Witch Hunters army done to play 40k at the local shops and such because that's pretty much all anyone plays. I've had most of these models for years but I've added a few recently. These Sisters are from the Order of the Iron Rose my own custom convent. So far they are comming along. At the rate I'm going I'll have about 1000 points done in a couple weeks. Now if I could only get that motivated on my other projects. Sadly it's a lot easier to stay motivated when you know you can actually find people to play the game with than when your trying to get people interested in something new or different.

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'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.