Posts, articles and links mostly concerning the painting of miniatures. Lead Painters League posts, links to resources and inspiration elsewhere, and such.
No, not the (very tasty!) drink, but White Russian Rifles from sometime in the Russian Civil War; the figures are 28mm from Brigade Games and very nice.
My Whites will, by the time you read this, have been fairly comprehensively beaten by an Irish medieval/Dark Ages warband with very, very nicely painted freehand shield designs, and Round Seven will be underway!
Week Five of the LAF’s Lead Painters League having just ended, here’s my entry. This was one of the bonus theme weeks; the bonus theme this time was “Africa”, with extra bonus points for producing an opposing team as well as your basic 5-figure entry.
I completely forgot about the extra bonus points for an opposing team, but that wouldn’t have mattered as I’ve no suitable figures anyway. I did manage to shoehorn the tropical British I’ve been painting in, as British and British Empire troops spent the entire length of the Great War chasing Paul von Lettow-Vorbek around various East African territories. They never caught him, he surrended shortly after the November 11 Armistice undefeated in the field.
Unfortunately my British riflemen got done for by a group of zombie nomads on zombie camels, but I’m still pleased with the paintjob on them and the photograph.
The larger base they’re on, incidentially, is a CD covered in sand and fine gravel, then painted to mostly match the bases of the British and some of the other figures I’ve been doing lately.
LPL5 Round 6 launched Sunday, go check out all the great entries!
With getting ready for Trumpeter Salute taking up almost all of my gaming time the week before the convention, I didn’t manage to get a new entry finished for Round 4 of the Lead Painters League.
I re-ran Lord M Hosts A Weekend instead, and watched my fancy toffs perish under relentless Imperial bombardment – they got paired up with a rather nice (and new!) entry featuring Star Wars Imperial spaceships, including the Death Star itself, and a great disturbance in the Force was felt.
I’ve got a new entry in Round 5, live this week, though, and Rounds 6 & 7 already finished, photographed & submitted, so I have a bit of breathing room for the last three rounds, including the blowout Round 10 Movie scene bonus round!
My Round Three entry for LAF’s Lead Painters League, more Pulp Figures sculpts. This time it’s the upper classes, with the PGJ-14 Upper Crust Swells pack providing five of the figures, and the PHP-18 Rugged Sons of Empire pack providing the Scotsman with shotgun and bald officer in mess uniform.
Yes, that’s tartan on the Scotsman’s kilt. Yes, I’m mad.
As a bonus, they’ve won their round, against a rather nice flotilla of Ground Zero Games’s FSE starships! As I’ve said before, I don’t take part in LPL with any serious expection of winning, just to get stuff painted and photographed and to force me to push myself as a painter. Winning is just gravy. Tasty, tasty gravy, though.
More goodness from the Lead Painters League, this time my Week Two entry, titled Command On The Frontier. The frontier in this case being the interwar Northwest Frontier, nominally. British officers and sargents attempting to control the volatile, dangerous border between what was then British India & Afganistan.
Unlike my winning Round One entry, Command got soundly and deservedly thrashed by a spectacular field hospital entry from Hammers. Entertainingly, both cover the same ground — British interwar army — and even the same theatre (!) so the random match generation had a bit of a sense of humour about the whole thing.
Once again, the figures were all from Pulp Figures, a mix of PTB-1 British Army Tropical Command and a few from PHP-18 Rugged Sons of the Empire.
Anyway, onto Round Three, in which I have a much better set of photos, more colourful figures and (Dog willing…) perhaps a less overachieving opponent!
LPL5 Round 1 is over and Round 2 begun by the time you read this. The LPL format, for those of you not familiar, is ten week-long rounds, with entries paired up so with 70-odd participants there’s 30-some one-on-one entries per round. The league format means no elimination, and every round you’ll be paired up with a different contestant.
The Round 1 bonus theme was “Civilians”; my entry was five Pulp Figures’ Surly Servants, with a RAFM Investigator’s Roadster‘s back corner on the left. All sculpted by Bob Murch, in fact!
As a bonus, I quite handily won my Round One matchup, against some quite nice modern bystanders. (I don’t enter LPL with any particular expectation of winning; there’s too many far better painters active on LAF for that!) On to Round Two and more!
As discussed in my last post on entering LAF‘s LPL5, here’s all ten of the images from my 2009 LPL3 entries. I finished somewhere in the bottom third of the pack, but certainly didn’t enter with any expectation of doing much better — I entered to give me incentive to work on my painting and photography, which worked out just fine!
LPL3’s bonus rounds were “Germans” for Round One, which I botched; the German WW1 stormtroopers I did for Round 7 were supposed to be my Round 1 bonus entry, but I ordered them too late. Round 5 was “Cavalry”, which I managed with my first 15mm fantasy unit painted in years. Round 10 was “Lost Worlds”, bonus points for an exploration team, a “native” team and “monster” or similar — pegged max bonus points there, and a photo I’m still proud of!
The entirety of LPL3 is still archived over on LAF.
