Posts, articles and links mostly concerning the painting of miniatures. Lead Painters League posts, links to resources and inspiration elsewhere, and such.
Quiet month here on the Warbard, I’ve been busy in real life (terrible when that happens…) but getting some gaming and painting time in when I can.
We had an Infinity event in mid-October, eight of us at Everything Games for a full day of Infinity. Three rounds with four tables; I provided scenery for two of the tables. I’ll get those photos up sometimes soon, but first I want to share October’s big (really big!) painting project!
Haqqislam’s Maghariba Guard TAG is the largest model in the game, so big it has a whole new Silhouette class (S8) all to itself. I finally splurged on the monster when EG put together an order direct to Corvus Belli and gave us a generous discount on anything we ordered through them.
The order arrived right at the end of September, so I decided that the Maghariba would be my October pledge for the Painting Support Club over on the Infinity forums!
I got her assembled (mostly) on the 1st of October and finally, on the 30th, declared her done! Here’s a gallery of the entire build process, from bare metal to fully finished.
1st of October: Maghariba in bare metal, with the upper gun turret and lower cheek guns just balanced in place.
1st of October: primed, basecoat under way, and test camo on the central part of the gun turret.
9th October: Basecoat all done, camo stripes and some dots in progress.
9th October: camo in progress.
October 30th: All done, front view.
October 30th: All done, front left quarter view.
Oct 30th: Rear view.
Oct 30th: Rear right quarter view.
Oct 30th: Right side full profile.
Oct 30th: Right front quarter view.
Oct 30th: Back to the left front quarter for one last look!
I’ve been back to painting Infinity figures recently, after being distracted by somescenery for a bit.
Over on the Official Infinity Forums there’s been a Painting Pledge/Support Group thread every month for a while now. I tend to be a bit of a scattershot distracted painter, so pledging a few figures to get properly finished in a month is a good way to keep me a bit more focused.
This month I pledged a pair of Kameel Remote combat robots and a Hassassin Barid Hacker figure to get done. I’ve also been trying to finish a few more of the other random figures around the place, and have been doing fairly well on that front too.
Left to right: Two Daylami and three Ghulam Light Infantry, a female Authorized Bounty Hunter, Hassassin Barid Hacker, Hunzakut infiltrator with Rifle+Light Grenade Launcher, and the pair of Kameel REMs. Click for larger.Primered for my September “paint pledge” over on the Inf forums. TR Kameel, Barid Hacker, EVO Hacker Kameel. Click for larger.Top view of the completed (except for the bases) Kameels and Barid. Click for larger.Front view of the September paint pledge figures. Click for larger.
I’ve been spending some more time on YouTube recently, rummaging around the wargaming-related channels. I don’t have the time or the patience for the long rambling unedited vlog-format stuff, but there’s some good, properly edited, to-the-point stuff out there.
Two channels I particularly like are Kujo Painting, who did the great “How To Paint Tartan” video embedded below. The rest of his collection is well worth looking through.
Miniwargamer Jay also has a good Miniature Painting 101 series of vids with lots of good tips. Again, most of them are fairly short (5 to 20 minutes), cover a single topic, and are well edited.
On non-YouTube notes, a couple more links!
Genet Models, formerly Ebbles Miniatures have been around since the early 2000s turning out really good papercraft science fiction models. The creator of them has more or less retired from the papercraft business (I think he works on computer games now) but he’s put his entire portfolio up for free download. I’ll be adding some of these to our Infinity tables soon, especially some of the shuttles and dropships!
I linked to this awesome tutorial in an earlier post about Infinity ads, but it’s worth linking to again. Want pseudo-holograms on your science fiction scenery? H-Archive does ads and holos is well worth a read. He uses printed transparencies and 1mm clear acrylic sheet to awesome effect; I’m going to have to hit up our local plastic supplier for some 1mm clear acrylic sometime soon!
Spent the weekend off on what might be our last camping trip of the season and I’ve been busy doing lots of other non-wargaming things, as one tends to when the weather is good, but I’m still getting some painting done.
I’ve just finished a couple of figures for my Haqqislam forces for Infinity, but the one I really want to show off is this female Hunzakut infiltrator. This is a relatively recent sculpt from Corvus Belli, and it’s fantastically detailed and nicely posed, one of my favourite figures in my collection. She’s crouching while placing a mine or repeater, rifle balanced on her hip.
Hunz 1, face-on.
Hunz 2, side view.
Hunz 3, back quarter view.
Hunz 4, back view.
More soon, I’ve gotten some progress on the hill and shuttle scenery seen here recently!
Awfully quiet around here for far too long, for which I apologize!
I’ve actually been doing quite a bit of painting and a little bit of terrain work. My personal goal is to get my entire current collection of Infinity miniatures painted, based, and completed before Labour Day, the first week of September. That’s about 65 miniatures total, of which maybe 25 or so are actually fully finished.
A couple of shots of recent work – see the photo captions in the gallery for more details!
Haqqislam Azra’il, a big Heavy Infantry (superheavy, really) that I just did some edging on to make him “pop” more!
Bikes in progress. These are the old (2006 or so!) and out of production Haqq “unicycles”. I like them, a lot of people don’t. Building new bases so they fit the current standard base for motorbike units, which has changed since these were produced.
Lasiqs for Hassassin Bahram. Centre is a sniper, left and right are rifles.
Sekban for my Qapu Khalqi Haqqislam force. A mix of rifles, boarding shotgun, and a rocket launcher.
My girlfriend is out of town with friends so I’ve had a bachelor/wargamer weekend and gotten a lot done on my Infinity figures.
The workbench – planters in the foreground, various Haqqislam figures behind, and the usual clutter around the edges! Click for larger.
The planters are foamed PVC sheet and mat board offcuts, and the trees are from Games Workshop — at one point they produced a rather nice set of modular plastic “tropical trees” that vaguely resemble palm trees and are a lot of fun to put together. Like pretty much everything that GW ever does that’s actually interesting, these seem to have vanished from their website, which is a shame. I picked up most of a set a while ago when I bought a whole mixed batch of wargaming stuff off someone locally who was having to downsize.
Closeup of the planters – done with the old GW palm trees – and CB Haqq figures in progress. Click for larger, as usual.
Closeup of the figures and planters. The dark blue figures in the background are various Hassassin Bahram soldiers including three of the infamous Fiday assassins. The figures closer to the camera include a pair of Remotes on the left, an al’Hawwa sniper and al’Hawwa hacker, a pair of Hafza infantry in lower left, and a quintet of Djanzaban medium infantry on the right – two rifles, a sniper, an HMG, and a hacker, all stalwarts of the Qapu Khalqi sectorial force in Haqq.
A vast pile of bare pewter Haqqislam figures for Infinity, and a few in progress… Click for larger, as usual.
It’s been a quiet month here on the Warbard, but things have been ticking along in real life. The space station scenery for Infinity is taking shape, and today I sat down and cranked through assembling every single Infinity figure I owned. There were far too many boxes and blisters hanging around, so now there’s a long line of bare pewter figures waiting for putty and then primer before actual painting can start!
I’ll try and get some space station photos up later this week; I like how it’s coming along.
We’re also getting into the convention season locally, with the new LANtasy taking place in mid-March and Trumpeter Salute 2016 over in Vancouver on the first weekend of April. All I’m doing at LANtasy is playing Blood Bowl, probably with my existing Skaven (rat) team, so prep for that is minimal. For Trumpeter I’m running a Pulp Alley game set in the jungles of British India between the wars; I have enough figures for that and enough scenery, but might try and get a few extra figures finished and one or two bits of scenery. I also need to run a game or two of Pulp Alley to remind myself how the rules work, as it’s been ages (probably over a year?) since we last played it!
New paint rack in place, top right, and an Impudent Mortal elevator spread out across the bench.
My Impudent Mortal order arrived last week, and I’ve assembled the new paint rack already. It’s an exact duplicate of the one I bought back in 2014 and should help keep the rest of my workbench relatively uncluttered, at least of paint, figures, and small projects that can go up onto the shelves of the rack somewhere!
Spread out across the foreground is the components of Impudent Mortal’s Near Future Elevator Set, which should make for good looking scatter terrain on our Infinity tables soon! More about those in a future post as I actually start assembly of the first one.
Also in progress and needing a post soon is new dugouts for Blood Bowl, to go along with the scoreboard I made in November.
First post of the New Year! Happy New Year, hope 2015 was good and 2016 is at least as good.
I spent the week between Christmas and New Year moving, and a fair bit of the time since getting stuff sorted out and properly moving into the new apartment my girlfriend and I are sharing now. An important part of that was organizing the hobby space, of course, for which our second bedroom is going to serve nicely when we don’t have guests over.
I’ve taken advantage of the fact that everything went into boxes for moving to keep the vast majority of my gaming supplies boxed up and in the closet for now, only bringing things out one project at a time to finish and organize things.
Some further changes are coming soon; I’ve found replacements for the pair of battered, decades-old swing-arm lamps (one at each shoulder) that currently light my bench, and I’ve ordered a second Impudent Mortal paint rack to go with the first I got back in late 2014 which should help keep things a lot better organized.
Painting right now is mostly Blood Bowl guys, although I have a bunch of Infinity models I want to get paint on, especially as we have another Infinity event coming up in February!
Various Reaper Bones figures for Blood Bowl, including a really massive feral treeman! Click for slightly larger.
I’m going to be moving between Christmas & New Years so I’ve been busy packing stuff and cleaning; I’ve been in my current digs about three and a half years and the gaming stuff especially has kind of crept all over the place, so it’s a good opportunity for some sorting, de-junking, and reorganization of my work bench. The new apartment will have more space for hobby stuff, which is both great and slightly worrying as wargaming has a proven ability to fill all available space!
Anyway, after boxing up the majority of the gaming stuff and doing some initial straightening of my actual workbench I decided to do a bit of painting to relax, and to work on some figures that have been lurking, mostly ignored, around the edges of my bench for ages now.
Primarily, that mean finally getting some proper paint on the massive Reaper Bones Spirit of the Forest. I based him and added some Blood Bowl-style shoulder pads ages ago (possibly 2014?) and he’s sat around the edges of my painting mat ever since. A base coat revealed that the figure has all sorts of cool detail on him, plants, vines, fungus, and moss all over. I got some of that tonight and I’d run him on a BB pitch without being too bothered, but this really is a figure that will reward some time picking out more details. The one downside really is the sheer size of the figure – that’s a 2″ washer I’ve based him on, and his toes poke over on both sides…
The other figures are a wizard (far left) for those (rare!) times when a BB team gets to hire a Wizard as an inducement; a gnome Apothecary to patch people up and get them back on the pitch; an Ogre so I can proxy my still-unpainted Amazons as a Human team; and finally a big Minotaur that I picked up because I liked the look of the figure but who might now become the centrepiece of a Chaos team from some of the other Bones figures available.
Almost all my painting the last few months has been on the BB Goblin team, so it was nice to get paint on other figures and especially satisfying to start on the giant Treeman.
With holidays and moving I might not get one more post completed this month, so if I don’t, Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Season’s Greetings, and Happy New Year to everyone!
(or, you know, Bah Humbug if that’s more your thing!)
