Tag Archives: SF

Misc, Painting, Science Fiction

The Workbench This Week, 31 December 2024

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Right at the ragged end of the year, one last blog update!

Been getting a bunch of painting done this month, including the hatted bug guy seen in the last post. There’s also some Footsore Trolls mostly done and a scattering of other stuff on the painting bench!

The workbench at the very end of 2024. A small crew of WIP science fiction figures, three lovely Footsore trolls mostly finished, a whole batch of 3d printed barrels, and a scattering of other random stuff being gradually worked on.

They’re not great pictures, but here’s a couple of closeups of the most recent finished-except-for-the-base figure. This is some sort of Games Workshop Chaos Beastperson minotaur, I think, snagged earlier in 2024 as GW’s free in-store figure of the month. They had a silly spiked club/mace thing that I chopped off and converted into a big choppy sword, but are otherwise stock.

Captain Spacecow front view.
Captain Spacecow rear view.

I’m trying to push my highlighting and edges more than I usually do, and have also been trying to add texture with paint more. It’s most obvious on Captain Spacecow’s horns and the blue piece of cloth/armour/whatever on their back, but there’s also fur texture on the torso and lower legs that isn’t really obvious in either of these photos.

The painted fur texture was directly inspired by this video from Vince Venturella. His entire YouTube channel is worth a look, he’s got loads of great videos that I’ve been watching a bunch of the last month or two.

Happy New Year and Happy Holidays. Hope 2025 is good for you and yours!

Painting, Science Fiction

A Bug Guy for Sci Fi Skirmish

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A while ago our local GW store was giving away a single Tyranid bug-warrior figure for free. Of course I snagged one, who doesn’t want free stuff? I’m never going to bother playing 40k, but a random free figure? Sure!

I glued the critter together (GW makes some… interesting engineering choices in how their figures fit together, some of the parts are weird AF…) and then it lurked on the corner of my painting bench for months and months.

Then I realized that in Corey’s in-development Under Alien Suns rules you could run damn near anything as a crew, so I kitbashed together half a dozen figures a couple months ago and decided, for the hell of it, to grab a hat with big feathers on it from my 17th Century plastic stash and glued it to bug-guy’s head.

Then in the doldrums of the year I finally primered the whole motley crew and starting painting them. Bug-guy caught my attention and he got finished today, right from primer to done (barring some cleanup on the base) just today.

Not-a-Tyranid. That’s Specialist Ghar under a dashing hat (they never explain the hat) loping through the scruffy weird universe of Under Alien Suns, or whatever other oddball SF skirmish we get up to!

I went purple for the exoskeletal bits, dark red/black for the flesh bits, and bright green for the rifle that may or may not be grown right out of bug-guy. I’m really pleased with the highlighting, especially of the purple and the gun.

Specialist Ghar’s other side. Click, as usual, for larger.

I’ll be getting paint on the rest of his crewmates in the next few days; I don’t go back to work until Jan 6 of 2025 so probably have time to finish all of them!

Links

Links of Interest, 14 April 2013

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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…

Misc, Science Fiction, Stargrunt

The Dropship Drops Out?

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Over on the excellent 15mm science-fiction focused Dropship Horizon blog, a rather startling notice that Mark, the blogowner, is planning to “bring the tyres to a halt and turn off the engines for the final time“.

The pace of posting had slowed slightly over on Dropship recently, but with interesting developments still going on in 15mm SF, it’s unfortunate to see Dropship Horizon shutting down so abruptly.

Hopefully Mark leaves Dropship up and running even if he isn’t actively posting, as his links and articles are an invaluable resource for 15mm SF gamers. Having done basically nothing with this website for quite a number of years before reviving it late in 2010, I certainly understand that people’s gaming interests wax and wane and sometimes it’s time to move on, but even a somewhat dusty resource is better than nothing — Dropship’s collected information can still help 15mm SF gamers for years, as this site was doing even during the years I was neglecting it.

Best of luck to Mark in his other gaming interests, and here’s hoping that some day in the future he relights Dropship’s engines, brings up her running lights and starts posting cool 15mm SF things again!

(I guess this means I should update, refurbish and republish my mothballed list of 15mm SF miniatures companies, just in case Dropship does go entirely offline!)

Science Fiction, Stargrunt

15mm Science Fiction Sources

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15mm science fiction (Stargrunt II, specifically) was one of my starting places in miniature wargaming; I don’t do much these days but I still have all my figures and I still keep an eye on the field. These are great days for 15mm SF gaming, with a bunch of new companies involved with rapidly expanding ranges, as well as new stuff from established companies like Ground Zero Games.

I used to maintain a long page of companies involved in 15mm SF – many people still link to it, so you might have followed a link expecting to find it, but I’m no longer as heavily involved in that scale & genre as I once was, so I’m going to refer you to Dropship Horizon instead. Dropship is an excellent blog devoted almost exclusively to 15mm science fiction gaming, and even better, on one of their right-hand sidebars they have a long list of 15mm Sci Fi Manufacturers!

Dropship also has news and reviews of the latest and shiniest stuff from those manufacturers, some neat projects of his own, and a good group of commentators to boot. Go check it out!