Inspiration, Painting

Fancy Photo Setup (or not…)

Leave a comment

After I was done taking photos of my Lead Painters League Round Five entry, I figured the setup I use might be of interest to others. So here’s a photo of the highly sophisticated setup I used for this week’s Russian Civil War-based entry!

photo_10may2013
Fancy photo studio… click for full size.

Some leftover 3mm MDF balanced across a couple of junk chairs a roommate pulled out of the basement for some reason, on a porch that badly needs repainting! My little tabletop tripod at lower left is balanced on top of one of the banker’s boxes I used to store and transport scenery. The ground is a square of craft felt I sprayed with brown ink a few years ago; the colour backdrop is one of the ones I have available here on the Warbard for anyone to print.

The building is of course my scratch-built Russian onion-domed church; the wagon, hedge and tree should all be familiar to regular readers. The Russian Orthodox cemetery is the most recent addition, with it’s laser-cut crosses.

Lighting was provided by that convenient nearby fusion reaction (eight and a half light-minutes away is nearby by cosmic standards…) and agreeable meteorology.

A home-made lightbox has been on my to-do list for… about a decade now. When the weather allows, an outdoor setup works nearly as well.

There are a number of great photo-taking tutorials aimed at wargamers out there; check Google or YouTube for more details. One of these days I should do a links post to my favourites!

Painting, Pulp

Lead Painters League 7, Round Four

2 Comments

Last week’s LPL entry moves from the Lost Worlds of Round Three to the mysterious corners of the Indian subcontinent with some 28mm Thuggee cultists, also from Pulp Figures.

lpl7r4
The Dread Thuggee. Click to view larger.

These murderous chaps come from three different Pulp Figures packs. The three right-hand figures – the leader, acolyte and sword-bearing bodyguard – are all from PBT-24 The Mad Guru. The swordsman is from PBT-21 Thuggee w/ separate assorted Weapons & Picks, and finally the rifleman is from PBT 23 Thuggee Fighters w/Martini Rifles. I’ve got another six or so figures to finish, as well as a couple of neat scenery bits that come in the Mad Guru pack.

Most of the skin tone comes from W&N Burnt Umber acrylic artist’s ink, applied nearly full-strength over a basecoat of Reaper Intense Brown with a quick highlight (before the ink goes on) of Reaper Oiled Leather. The hair is mostly Reaper Walnut Brown, which is a very-nearly-black dark brown.

Unfortunately for them, these skulking murderers ran straight into a really spectacular group of cavalry from one of the best painters in the contest, and got soundly thrashed, although lots of people said nice things about them! Luck of the draw; I’m a pretty solidly middle-of-the-road painter so a lot of how well I do in LPL sometimes comes down to who the random matchup for a given round is!

Round Five of LPL7 is running over on Lead Adventure as you read this. Round Five is one of the Theme Bonus Point rounds, with this round’s theme being “Historical Civil Wars”. That’s right up my alley, so go see how my Russian Civil War figures are faring this week!

Painting, Pulp

Lead Painters League 7, Round Three

Leave a comment

More Pulp Figures goodness from last week’s LPL round. This crew of underdressed primitives was started sometime last year, finished over the winter, and have finally gotten their moment of glory, beating a very nice little regiment of 15mm Napoleonic figures in the third round of LPL7.

lpl7r3
The Shaman’s Crew, all from Pulp Figures. Click to view full-size.

Round Four is going on as you read this, and can be viewed over on Lead Adventure. Alas, the Thuggee figures I’ve fielded in Round Four aren’t doing as well as the Neanderthals did. Perhaps they’re overdressed?

Pulp

Awesome Junkers Aircraft Poster

Leave a comment

Via the excellent Dieselpunk, an great 1919 poster from Germany, advertising civilian air travel with Junkers aircraft.

“Air Transport With Junkers Aircraft”, 1919. Click to see larger over on Flickr.

This would have been part of the effort by the German aviation industry to “civilianize” as rapidly as they could, to try to salvage something from the post-Great War wreckage, and the restrictions the Allies were imposing on military aviation in Germany. It’s also a fantastic poster, in a style I really, really like and occasionally attempt to emulate.

Painting, Pulp

Lead Painters League 7, Round Two

3 Comments

Round Two of the ten-week Lead Painters League over on Lead Adventure Forum didn’t go so well for me, but at least the Blood Bowl dwarf team my reporters lost to was full of unique figures well painted!

lpl7r2
LPL7 Round Two – Reporters from Pulp Figures. Click for full size.

The reporters are from Pulp Figures, of course.

The 7th Lead Painters League contest continues for another eight weeks over on LAF. It’s a fantastic contest on a great forum; I compete to force myself to push my painting up a notch and get stuff painted and finished! My Round Three entry is in already and will go up over on LAF Sunday morning; Rounds Four and Six are done except for basework and photography; Round Five is going to take most of the time before it’s deadline to complete, as it’s a bonus round with a big crowd of figures to finish off! Beyond that I have enough figures in progress to cover Rounds Seven through Ten, although I’m still debating what to do for bonus points and a spectacular finish in Round Ten… wish me luck!

Painting

The Workbench This Week, 27 April 2013

Leave a comment

Much activity on my workbench this week, with a frankly intimidating number of figures under the paintbrush, along with some other stuff like a set of the luggage I got a while back.

bench27april
Deliberately bad photo – see the next few weeks of LPL7 entries for what’s hiding behind the dragon & the paint jars!

However, given that I’ve committed to the Lead Painter’s League 7 contest for the next eight weeks or so, you’ll have to forgive the line of paint jars obscuring most of the really interesting stuff on the bench! The dragon, cave men and captive have been lurking in the back of my bench for ages, so I moved them to the front to show them off a bit! The dragon is from Reaper and probably mostly done, unless I decide it’s entirely too blue and head back to the drawing board. The cave dudes are Copplestone; their captive is from Pulp Figures. The figures in behind are from… mostly Pulp Figures, actually. You’ll have to follow my progress in the LPL over on LAF to see them sooner than here!

Historicals, Painting

Lead Painters League 7, Round One

Leave a comment

Round One of Lead Adventure Forum’s Lead Painters League 7 (LPL7) painting contest has wrapped up. The (non-mandatory) bonus theme for this opening round was “Headquarters”, so I touched up some of my Russian Civil War White Russian figures from Brigade Games.

lpl7-1
My LPL7 Round One entry — a Russian Civil War White Russian colour party.

By the time this is posted the Whites will have won their round against a rather nice Second World War company HQ of French goumiers – North African colonial troops – and Round Two will have opened. You can check out the whole contest over on LAF. LPL7 is ten rounds long, so ten weeks. I’ve got Rounds One, Two & Three done and entered, but things are going to continue to be fairly quiet around here as I’m neck-deep in painting up Rounds Four through Ten!

Conventions, Historicals

Martin’s Trumpeter Salute 2013 Photos

Leave a comment

Martin, an long-time friend who now lives in Vancouver, has been slowly posting his photos from the recent Trumpeter Salute gaming convention. As I mentioned in my writeup, he’s got a significantly fancier camera than mine, a fairly recent Canon DSLR, and he also hauled a lightweight tripod to the show, so many of his photos are really excellent.

martin_rcw2
Bolshevik forces laid out before setup. Cavalry & armoured car, then the Red Sailor platoon, then a mixed platoon of Red Militia and Red regulars.
martin_rcw1
The Red’s left flank as the game begins. The sailors on the extreme left have already started to advance.

Martin’s entire set from my Even Whites Bleed Red Russian Civil War game is over on Flickr. He’s also got some good photos from the War of 1812 game we both played on Sunday.

Links

Links of Interest, 14 April 2013

Leave a comment

Another semi-random collection of links to things that have caught my eye recently!

Over at BigLee’s, a nice roundup of methods of stripping paint from miniatures. Given that product availability varies around the world, it’s nice to have a fairly comprehensive guide like this; it increases everyone’s chances of finding a stripping method that is both available in your area and works with your miniatures (you can use things on metal minis that will destroy plastic!) & chosen paint. (hat tip to MinatureWargaming.com for this link!)

Ghosts of Hefei is a Kickstarter campaign for a set of gang warfare rules set in China in the 2060s, with both 28mm & 15mm gang figures planned. I’ve done a few Kickstarters, and might well be pledging for this one too… They’ve posted some shots of very nice looking 15mm figures so far. (this one is via Dropship Horizon, which should be everyone’s first stop for 15mm SF news!)

To round out this short Links of Interest, TooFatLardies are having their “Something For The Weekend, Sir?” Sale on until the 22nd of April. 20% off everything in the store… this might mean it’s finally time to snag that copy of their recent science fiction rules, Quadrant 13…

Reviews, Terrain

Wagons from Frikkin’ Lasers

Leave a comment

Got a nice box from J&M Miniatures earlier this week, and even before I cut the tape on the box I could smell the future… oddly enough, the future (of wargaming scenery) smells like scorched MDF. Laser-scorched MDF.

Specifically, a whole whack of 4Ground’s wagons. Corey had ordered approximately enough wagons to provide logistics for an invasion of Russia (well, OK, six…), which he might get around to showing off here at some point, and I’d tagged a single extra General Purpose wagon onto his order. I’ve previously reviewed 4Ground’s Generic Horse Cart, so it was nice to get my paws on the cart’s larger relative, the GP Wagon.

In the ziplock, you get a single 8″x5.25″ sheet of 3mm MDF full of laser-cut wagon parts and a single double-sided sheet of illustrated instructions. That and a dab or three of white glue are all you need to turn out a very nice wagon.

wagon1
4Ground’s General Purpose wagon, still in MDF sheet form.
wagon2
Wagon mostly finished, upside down so I can get the wheels in place.

The GP Wagon is a bit more involved than the Horse Cart, but everything is very precisely cut and well engineered. I’ve built injection moulded plastic kits that fit a LOT less precisely than this MDF wagon does! The only time I found the photograph-illustrated instructions less than clear was when beginning assembly of the front axle/steering assembly, but a bit of dry fitting reveals that the pieces really only go together one way, which makes it hard to really screw up.

wagon3
Finished, with the wagon pole pivoted vertical and a 28mm Copplestone Bolshevik militiaman for scale.

You have the option of adding canopy hoops over the bed of the wagon for the classic covered wagon look, but I elected to leave them off this one. The next will probably have hoops, just because! The finished wagon is just over 3″ long (6″ including the pole), about 1.75″ wide across the hubs, and about 1.5″ tall. You can fit three figures on 20mm bases into the back, two if you use oversized 1″ bases. I’ll probably paint both this one and the Horse Cart eventually, but even in bare MDF they look pretty good, with the dark laser-burned cut marks providing nice contrast to the normal honey-brown MDF.

Wargaming & Such (formerly Brian's Wargaming Pages)