Got a couple of half decent photos of Warlord’s Pike & Shotte Mounted Commander that I’ve got on my painting bench right now, along with a whole bunch of pike & shot soldiers for him to command.
This is one of Warlord’s all-metal figures, and very nice too, a good level of detail and a pose full of attitude as he slouches along, pewter wine cup in one hand and a huge broadsword on his hip. There’s an eyepatch under that wide hat too, although I don’t think you can actually see it in these photos!
An officer of the English Civil Wars; 28mm figure by Warlord Games. Click for larger.
I set myself the painting challenge of doing a black horse, black coat and hat, and black hair on the commander. The clothing is done with a base of Reaper Walnut Brown (a very, very dark almost black brown) with a few drops of Pure Black in it, highlighted with Rainy Grey; the horse is mostly Pure Black with some Walnut Brown highlights and then a coat of artist’s India Ink over the whole horse except the mane and tail.
Loads of highlighting and some detail painting left to do, but I’m happy with the progress so far and thought I’d show him off here!
I posted my Round 1 entry for the recently concluded Lead Painters League 11 (run over on the awesome Lead Adventure Forum) way back in mid-April but never got around to posting my other entries.
So here they are all at once, including Round 1 again for completeness sake.
Note that I repeated one entry in a later round, so there are only nine entries here instead of ten. My Round 2 entry, Patients of Ward 13, were re-run as my Round 9 entry after the English Civil War musketeers I’d hoped to run didn’t get finished in time. Interestingly, the Patients lost their initial round but won their re-appearance, which is unusual as repeat figures rarely win LPL rounds in my experience!
There’s captions for each photo with more details, including manufacturer info for all the figures.
LPL11 Round One – Old Sabertooth’s Clan. Pulp Figures 28mm pulp cave-persons!
LPL11 Round 2 – The Patients of Ward 13. Statuesque Miniature’s Pulp Asylum line, 28mm. A strong contender for my favourite set of figures in my LPL11 entries, and they also wound up being my Round 9 entry after the planned ECW figures didn’t get finished in time.
LPL11 Round 3 – Backalley Bruisers. Thugs and petty criminals from Pulp Figures.
LPL11 Round 4 – The Young Majarah And His Minders. 28mm Pulp Figures, probably my favourite group of figures and favourite photo of this LPL!
LPL11 Round 5 – Last Hydrant For 12 Parsecs. Really old 25mm Vargr dog-aliens from the Traveller universe, produced by MegaMinis at least ten years ago and finally finished!
LPL11 Round 6 – For the King And England! 28mm Warlord ECW figures.
LPL11 Round 8 – Parliament And England! 28mm Warlord ECW figures; my least favourite round of all. The figures were rushed and incomplete and the photo is just straight-up bad!
LPL11 Round 10 – Dagon At Dockside. The bonus theme was “Big Brother/Little Brother”, and I happened to have Pulp Figures’ Dagon and fishmen around!
Bonus photo – this was the setup for Round 6’s English Civil War shot, on my dining room table!
If you want to see all 300+ entries (30+ participants, 10 rounds!) you can head over to the LPL 11 forum on Lead Adventure Forum. I highly recommend it, loads of awesomely talented painters participate, not just hacks like me!
A handful of links I thought were worth sharing this week.
Historical Enterprises, Inc are a historical reenactors garb/costuming company with all sorts of great articles on their website. If you need plausible colours for your Medieval, Renaissance, ECW, etc figures, this article on fabric, dyes, and colours is based on practice up to the 14th or 15th C but almost certainly applicable before and after that.
John Bond created a great looking pond from teddy bear fur. I’d never considered using fake fur for water features, but it looks pretty good!
I’m considering creating an imaginary English shire to set my ongoing English Civil War project in. There’s a long tradition of “imagi-nations” in wargaming, especially Seven Year’s War or Napoleonic gaming, so an imagi-shire seems like a reasonable thing! In that vein, I found a couple of English place/village name generators to help populate an imagi-shire with plausible-sounding names; The English Village Name Generator and English Place Names Generator being two among many!
There’s been a dozen or more Infinity figures and a scattering of other stuff on my workbench this whole time, but the only figures I’ve painted have been the six goblins for the Blomp, five of which were really simple paint jobs, really just two colours and some washes! My painting mojo has been in hibernation all winter…
Then Lead Painters League 11 was announced over on the Lead Adventure Forum. I’ve participated in previous LPL rounds but not for a number of years now – LPL3, LPL5, LPL7 – so I wanted to get back into that particular groove, and allows me to continue my “tradition” of participating in odd-numbered LPL rounds.
I realized that if I dug into my lead mountain stockpile of figures I could do every single round of this LPL including meeting the three bonus rounds (Tribes, Ship’s Crew, and Big Brother/Little Brother) without having to buy a single figure, and by pulling out figures I’d started to paint years ago then abandoned I could reduce the painting load considerably!
The first thing I did, though, was clear all the Infinity figures off my workbench. They’ll be back, no worries, but I realized that my painter’s block was at least partly linked to the fact that for most of the last two years nearly all I’ve painted has been Infinity figures for one faction. They’re lovely figures and I’ve done a lot of painting on them I’m happy with, but a massive changeup was clearly needed!
The workbench this week! Click for larger, details in text.
I pulled a whole mix of stuff out, began working on it, and the painting mojo came roaring back! There’s some Warlord ECW/TYW figures, a mix of figures from Pulp Figures, some fishmen types from Reaper, and a few other things from other manufacturers. I’ve applied more paint to more figures in the past five days than I have in the past four months!
Part of this painting spree will see the table at Trumpeter Salute 2017 at the end of this month – more on that in another post soon.
Last time I mentioned a couple of YouTube painters that had good series of to-the-point, well-edited painting videos. Victor Ques is another I should mention; his ongoing “Weekly Painting Tips” series just hit episode 100 and has lots of good content. For his 100th episode he did a really nice 15 minute video talking about when to use some of the techniques he and other painters talk about; it’s a really good overview to accompany the technique-specific videos he’s already done.
Victor Ques’ recent video on painting techniques.
Painting Buddha doesn’t seem to be producing videos anymore, but they had a really high-end multiple camera setup, with a camera on the miniature, a camera on the palette (so you can see how colours are mixed and thinned) and a talking-head camera. Their painting black armour tutorial is well worth watching, even if it’s more advanced and involved than a lot of us are going to do regularly!
A few quick links to finish off with!
Bricks’n’Tiles is a small Windows program to create endless, seamless brick, tile, and other textures for creating paper or card buildings with, but even if you don’t use Windows or don’t feel like you need to buy the program, they have some sample sheets downloadable from their website that are potentially useful.
Free Islamic Calligraphy has a lot of high quality graphic files of Islamic calligraphy, including the awesomely sci-fi looking Kufic style. Lots of good stuff if you want to add some easy Islamic (or Haqqislamic, for Infinity players!) flavour to your scenery.
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.
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.
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!)
