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!
LPL7 Round Two – Reporters from Pulp Figures. Click for full size.
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!
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.
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!
Over on my favourite wargaming forum ever, the Lead Adventure Forum (LAF), the approximately annual Lead Painters League painting contest has begun to accept participants. This is the 7th time LPL has been run, and it’s always great fun to spectate and vote, and even more fun (although also more work!) to enter the contest. I participated in LPL3 in 2009 and LPL5 in 2011, and have sent my entries in to participate in LPL7 now.
It’s a fun, friendly competition, very much in keeping with the overall spirit of LAF. Participants submit photographs of teams of five (or more) figures; they’re randomly paired with one of the other participants, and may the best team win! The use of groups of five figures – all of whom have to appear in the main photograph together – makes LPL a balance between painting skill, photography skill and presentation skill. It’s a great chance to stretch my painting abilities and my photography skills, and clear unpainted or unfinished figures out of the lead mountain.
I should be able to finish this year’s LPL, including all three bonus rounds, without buying any more figures. It helps that all three of the bonus rounds are close to areas of interest, and it’s nice to put a ten-week fifty figure dent in the unfinished figure pile!
The rules are in this LAF thread, and as I write this there are only 18 entries in for 50 total slots, so get to it and enter!
The final round of LAF’s Lead Painters League 5 was another bonus round, this one “A Scene From The Movies”, with bonus points for two teams and a vehicle or scenery piece representing a scene from a well-known movie.
I thought about doing The Sand Pebbles with American sailors and Chinese mobs, but didn’t get around to ordering Chinese figures in time (I already have appropriate American sailors in the lead mountain), then Bob Murch of Pulp Figures showed up at Trumpeter Salute back at the beginning of April with some unreleased Thugee strangler figures, and I knew I had to do Gunga Din, an old black and white movie I’ve see a few times and enjoyed!
Even better, I planned on painting up another few WW1/Interwar British riflemen and running them as opponents; the actual movie is set in the late 1800s but I figured I could get away with using slightly later pulp-era Brits!
In the event, both the opponents and the new bonus scenery piece never got done, but I did get the very nice Thugee stranglers painted and shown, and they quite handily won their Round 10 outing against some Roman gladiators inspired by the movie Maximus.
My Lead Painters League 5 Round 10 entry, inspired by the 1939 movie Gunga Din. Figures by Pulp Figures. As always, click for full size.
I have to wonder how much sheer novelty factor added to my vote count — there are a grand total, to my knowledge, of perhaps 4 packs of these Thugee stranglers out in the wild, and Pulp Figures is a well-known enough company that most of the time Mr. Murch’s figures are ubiquitous. Being able to show off brand-new figures that have literally never been seen elsewhere (not even the Pulp Figures website has the full set of 5!) has to have been worth a few votes!
The original Gunga Din theatrical trailer from 1939 is up on Youtube:
Round 10 brings LPL5 to an end! I managed 8 new teams over 10 rounds, 3 wins, and a final placing of 55th out of 72nd, which is roughly where I figured I’d end up and roughly where I placed compared to the overall field back in LPL3 last time I entered. More importantly, I have a whole bunch of freshly painted figures crowding the edges of my painting desk now, quite a few more than I’d have had without the prodding of LPL5 driving my brush!
I’ll do a proper LPL5 wrapup gallery post later this week.
Week 9? There was no Week 9. Well, OK, there was, but it involved me running my ECW Parliamentarian Horse again, and them getting beaten. Again.
However, I still like the models and the paintjob I managed on them, so here they are again for everyone to admire:
For God And Parliament! 28mm English Civil War horse charge down a country lane. As always, click for full size.
In better news, LPL5’s final, ultimate round, Round 10, with the bonus theme of “A Scene from the Movies” is running right now. All sorts of great stuff, including a bonus-worthy set of miniatures from me that I really like, and that other people do too, judging by the voting!
For the 5th Lead Painters League’s 8th Round, something entirely new from me: 28mm English Civil War/Thirty Years War cavalry!
These are Warlord plastic horse, nominally ECW Parliamentarian horse but really destined for our gaming group’s quasi-historical nominally-Thirty Years War games. They’re also the first 28mm cavalry I’ve ever done, the first plastic wargaming figures I’ve ever done, and the first non-20th C historicals I’ve ever done. All at once!
For God And Parliament! 28mm English Civil War horse charge down a country lane. As always, click for full size.
Unfortunately they got beaten soundly by a nicely presented and very characterful set of 28mm Middle Eastern figures.
Still, I’m pleased with how the paintjobs turned out. I’d be remiss if I didn’t credit this Games Workshop article on painting horses with making the horse painting and the resulting horses both more interesting! (I’ve just said something nice about GW, in public… this might just be a sign of the End Times…)
(I also just noticed that this is post number 100 on The Warbard! Now, that includes a lot of old website material brought over as posts, but it’s still been a busy 4-and-a-bit months here! Many more to come! — Brian)
“Whatever happens, we have got/the Lewis gun, and they do not”
— with apologies to Mr. Kipling, of course.
My LPL5 Week 7 entry was more Brigade 28mm British, this time a Lewis gun team and supporting riflemen. The Lewis gun team are very nice sculpts, slightly more detailed than the riflemen from the same range. They got matched up with a rather nice set of pirates, including a great pirate ghost, and defeated, though.
The Lewis Gun, my Round 7 LPL5 entry. As always, click for full size.
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.
White Russian Rifles, my Round 6 entry for LPL5. As always, click for full size.
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.
Hunting von Lettow-Vorbek, Tanganika 1917 (Click for a full-size version, as always)
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.
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!
