The workbench this week… is up and running in our new condo! We had an offer accepted at the beginning of February, got the keys ten days ago in mid-March, and are largely settled, set up, and getting on with things.
Set up in my new office/hobby lair but still looking fairly familiar. New larger cutting mat, though.
Gradually getting the painting and hobby stuff sorted and functional; the new room isn’t as large as the one at our rented place but forcing me to organize and stay de-cluttered is not actually a bad thing…
Tiny Messerschmidts for some fokkers to fly around in. (credit for that joke apparently goes to Douglas Bader…)
Decided to work through the stash of 1/1200 WW2 aircraft I got from Last Square a few months ago, starting with a trio of Bf110s and five Bf109s for the Luftwaffe to cause trouble in.
Always the random Reaper figures. Need to add some details to one or both treasure piles so they aren’t so obviously identical, but they’re neat sculpts!
I’ll be at Trumpeter Salute 2023 in Vancouver in about three weeks running a 1/1200 naval game of some sort, probably KM Schnellboote attacking an RN-defended British coastal convoy this time. This’ll be the first Trumpeter Salute since 2019 (a smaller event happened in 2022 but I didn’t get to it) so it’ll be fantastic to be back!
(Or, The Workbench This Week, 12 April 2020, also known as the 43rd of Marprilay, Blursday the Somethingth of Pandemic)
Strange times, faithful readers. Strange and stressful, and one of my stress responses is to flit from project to project, starting things and then flitting off before they get very far.
This long Easter weekend, though, I’ve been nudging myself to actually move a few things noticeably closer to actual completion. The first small sign of this is the three critters below, two cats (from Eureka, I think) and a Reaper War Dog finally moved along to the flocking-and-base-detailing stages.
Two housecats and a war dog. Click for larger.
The cats have been on the edges of my painting table for almost exactly five years now, as my email archives tell me I made the Eureka USA order for them (and other stuff) back in March 2015. There’s another two of them somewhere in the “nominally in progress” mountain somewhere, but this white cat and the orange tabby will have to do for now.
No idea how they’ll be used in games yet… maybe I’ll come up with a Pulp Alley games that involves chasing cats around a quaint English village looking for a clue one of them has attached to their collar. No gunfire, you’ll scare the cats into hiding!
The rest of the workbench. L to R: ECW cav, Renedra building, Frostgrave and ECW plastics, the critters, werewolves, and such! Click for larger.
So what else is on the rest of the workbench, hopefully lurching closer to completion? A whole mix of stuff (surprise…)! I’m quite please with the progress I’ve made on the nice little Renedra Wattle & Daub Outbuilding, some long-neglected ECW cuirassier are seeing basing progress, I’ve been building some Frostgrave wizards and soliders as mentioned in my last post, and the whole mess of werewolves (over on the far right of the photo above) are meandering onward.
Stay home, stay safe, attempt to stay sane, and I hope you and yours are well.
Much chaos in my non-gaming life, so time and brainpower to actually paint is kind of hard to come by, but this weekend I sat down and organized my pike & shot foot figures for Pikeman’s Lament and other English Civil War or Thirty Year’s War gaming.
I now have exactly 60 figures assembled, based, and in progress for this project; I know it’s exactly 60 because the 4Ground 25mm bases I’m using come in batches of 60 and I just finished the first batch of two that I’ve bought!
All the pike & shot foot so far. See text for details, and click for larger.
Starting from the far left, there’s a unit of musketeers in blue uniforms, then a pike unit in blue (on the close-order base from Warbases). To the right off the back edge of the cutting mat is another dozen musketeers, this time in green. In front of them is six foot characters/officers/leaders and one mounted officer, and on the skirmish base to the right is the first six forlorn hope firelock musketeers. Finally in the front right corner is another dozen pikemen, in green uniforms. All the figures are from the Warlord Games Pike & Shotte range, all plastic from their infantry regiment box. This is one full infantry regiment box plus a couple of extra sprues picked up separately, except for the firelock/forlorn hope figures who are the first of the Forlorn Hope/Firelock Storming Party box I’ve assembled.
The blue pikes are closest to being done, and a few of the green musketeers got finished as part of LPL11 recently. Most of the bare grey plastic figures were assembled just this weekend to fill out various units and add some more leader/officer/character figures to fill out some units.
Unassembled, I’ve got another 14 musketeers, enough for a second full unit of “blue” musketeers. That will give me a “full” pike and shot unit of 2:1 shot:pike ratio, which will look good on the table! There’s also another 12 firelock musketeers, and a dozen cuirassier heavy cavalry. Finally I’ve got another dozen regular cavalry fully assembled but not shown above; six of them are fully painted and the other six have been almost finished for… about four years now, or maybe longer…
Four new foot characters, and some finished ones behind. Click for larger.
The four new officer/character figures are made with arms from the Warlord plastic pike & shot infantry command sprue, and a mix of pikeman bodies and bodies from the command sprue. The two on the left are pike bodies; the two on the right are command sprue bodies. The two completely finished and based figures in back alongside the mounted officer are also made the same way, with two spare pike bodies. I have more command or character type figures than I’m ever likely to need for Pikeman’s Lament, but they’re fun to assemble and there’s lots of single-figure small skirmish games out there like Pulp Alley that I could see tweaking for an ECW setting!
As soon as I saw how the figure on the far right came together I thought about cutting the head of the halberd off and turning it into a magic-user’s staff of some sort! Hmmm, mix and match the fantasy Dragon Rampant with Pikeman’s Lament? Dragon’s Lament? Pikeman Rampant? The two games use the same basic core rules, so it might be possible, and gunpowder/Renaissance fantasy (vs more standard medieval fantasy) has always been an interest of mine!
I haven’t actually sat down with the Pikeman’s Lament rules to put together some companies, but the figures assembled and based here are enough for a full size 24pt force with some different build options. I’m going to try to get one or two of the almost-finished units actually pushed through to completion this week, and hopefully get a PL game of some sort in next Sunday, but we shall see…
Same room as before – our guest bedroom/office/workroom – but we’ve moved the shelf unit I used as a painting and building bench to the other end of the room, away from the door. It’ll be slightly closer to my computer desk, which is out of frame to the left in the photo below. I’ll have a bit of natural light from the window just to the right, and more space for shelving along the wall below the window eventually.
It will also make the room more usable as a guest bedroom, because the guest bed is now right close to the door and all the messy hobby stuff is at the other end of the room!
The relocated workbench. Click for slightly larger.
The next several Lead Painters League entries are barely visible in the photo, lined up across the centre of the shockingly tidy desk surface. If that CSI TV-show “Enhance… enhance… enhance” voodoo were real you could peek into the future and see my next four or five LPL11 entries in various stages of completion, from “Ready to photograph” down to “O Dog am I going to get these done in time?!”…
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.
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!
Quick and dirty late night snapshot of my workbench!
Troll surgery and various other things on the bench. Click for larger, as usual.
Front and centre is a Reaper Bones troll (in white plastic still, hence kind of blown out in the pic…) next to his orange-painted buddy. I’ve cut both arms at the elbows, repositioned them, and gotten started on puttying to cover up the damage. He’s for my goblin Blood Bowl team, eventually, so the rather rough putty work will be covered with football pads similar to the ones worn by the right hand figure, who has just had pads added to his basic pose.
Most of the rest of the clutter is also Blood Bowl related; there’s a wizard and a doctor just mounted on their bases to the right, a couple of goblins lurking, and two Bribe counters in the left foreground – the plastic sprue will eventually be painted to look like gold bars.
The background is mostly Infinity stuff, a pair of new figures for my Haqqislam forces and six consoles from Warsenal. More on the consoles sometime soon, as I’m writing up a review of them and the Supply Crates I also got from Warsenal.
Quick overhead snapshot of the painting bench recently. As you might have guessed from recent posts, I’ve been in a “clear the decks” sort of mood, finally finishing off a number of smallish projects that have sat around ignored and dusty for too long, some of them over a year…
The workbench this week. Lots of stuff going on, see text for details!
Clockwise from the top left we have (deep breath…) a batch of nine Pulp Figures thugs, two-bit crooks and menacing bystanders; a quartet of Baby Crocs for fantasy football from Impact Miniatures; a lady in a blue dress obviously being held captive by a gang of terrifying savages (Pulp Figures again); three twisted and disturbing stone monoliths intended as markers for a friend’s Chaos team in Blood Bowl (previously); Phantom Ace, Pulp Girl and little Lillie Poots from Statuesque Miniatures; some extra bases I whipped up with Milliput and pennies, one of which has an unprimed cobra in a basket on it from Pulp Figures…
Central to the whole assembly in their hospital-green robes, we have six Frothing Lunatics from Statuesque. (previously…)
Across the foreground from bottom right, we have a really, really massive Warg from Reaper Miniatures, being painted up as a quasi-supernatural Terror to inflict on people in games of Pulp Alley; a dino skull and some bones being done up as Blood Bowl markers for my Lizardman/Crocodilian team; the previously-mentioned finally completed pulp-era luggage and the Kali bronze; a quartet of light deck guns from Pulp Figures suitable to arm all manner of vessel or vehicle; three more Blood Bowl markers made of Renedra plastic barrels intended for my brother’s Scotling team.
Finally, last but not least, clipped into the two wooden clothspins (useful things to keep around a hobby bench!) there’s a pair of spiked footballs from Impact Miniatures. Blood Bowl again, obviously.
This assembly is only slightly tarted up and organized for the photo, everything here really is in progress or was recently finished and it really has been getting that crowded on my painting bench the last while. It’ll be satisfying to get more stuff completely finished, into storage and more importantly, onto the table and into use!
