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Luckily I got my eye closed before too much got in there, so it seems to be fine, and I somehow didn't hurt myself flailing and falling down the stairs.

It's a new one on my list of hobby related accidents though!

Keeping on with the Tale of Gamers challenge, here's the start of the last of the furniture.

Alchemist's shelves are pretty cool, though a bit fiddly with all the little gaps and so on. Still, I'm happy with them, though I wish the potions came out a little better...


First real attempt at freehanding on shields here, pretty sloppy but I figured these were a good place to practice. The Sunbursts and Trees look nice but those moons are awful, so yeah, need to practice a bit more on that. Still, having different emblems is an easy way to differentiate these and it made them a little more interesting to paint.


The rear of the racks is a lot less interesting, but I may weather it with a bit of rust and so on. Went for a different method of painting wood here, and I think it looks a bit flat actually, but that's probably down to the lack of texture on these pieces.


In gameplay terms for other games (D'n'D) these pieces are some of my favourites - the bookshelves would provide interesting tactical options if they are free standing, and add colour to rooms pretty nicely. And a weapon rack is a great way to key visually that a room is a barracks or armoury.

The bookshelves are the last bit of furniture I have to do apart from the final 10 doors (urgh), I hope to get them finished this afternoon before I head off to a colleagues house to celebrate Australia Day. (We're having Kangaroo burgers?!?)

Celebrate Australia by eating one of it's more iconic inhabitants? Sounds... about.. right?

Love the weapon racks and shelves. Really like the free hand

Hope your eye is alright Boss, never any fun when our little toys decide to fight back against being painted.

Nw your making me want to paint up my dungeon saga furniture. At least it would work alongside my Zombicide:Black Plague.

I'm still amazed at how fast you have blown through this set.

Cheers Josh, it's been a productive couple of months.

Here's the last of the furniture, the bookshelves. I've still to finish the final 10 doors, hopefully get them done today and upload them too. They just need a bit of final work.

The shelves look good. I like that the books aren't identical across all three-- that provides the illusion that they are all different, despite being the same model.

Cheers! To be honest I was pretty bored by the time I got to the bookshelves so I rushed through them, but they look okay. Glad to have all my furniture done now to be honest- it's cool and I love it but it was not fun to paint!



Here is February's pledge, crappily labelled in paint ...

The minis I'm most excited about painting are front and centre - the Red Box Games barbarians. I'm going to use them as the Brutes in the Dungeon Journal mission that involves a gang of criminals.

The other metal figure is a Red Box Games Norse Shaman. He's going to sub in as the Druid included in these missions, and the entire group will form a Hearthguard unit of Berserkers for Saga too (a priest of Woden and his fanatics).

The mass of black behind them are some LOTR Corsairs of Umbar, who will be used as the Ruffians (sword and board) Thugs (Spear) and Footpads (Bow). There's more than enough to fill in for the mission. The Trolls at the back will fill in for the Ogre Thumper, and the Ogres for the Ogre PC in the Blaine missions.

The grey dude labelled Ranger is from a Warlord Games Royalist Infantry boxed set and will stand in for the rifle armed ranger from the Blaine missions. There's also a Goblin sneak there from GW who needs a touch up to fill in for the Goblin Rogue PC.

Last but not least are the Manticores which will fill in for the beasts of the same name that is the boss of the final Blaine mission. I forgot to include one of the Descent Villains who is going to be the gang leader, too.

I'm planning on running a D'n'D campaign in the future and all of these minis should see use in that as well, so that's awesome. Dual use minis ftw!
Much more excited to be painting lots of minis again!

That's an eclectic mix. I look forward to seeing them done up.

I agree!

That's quite a lot of models! I also look forward to seeing them all done!

Also, please take a group shot of all your Jan stuff (if you haven't already done it and posted it in the Challenge thread).

Group shots you say? Well today I finished the first part of my Feb pledge, and in so doing finished all the KS minis (except the Orc Warlord, which got sent to my parents place in Ireland a couple of weeks ago and I haven't had time to get my hands on.)

So I thought some group shots might be in order!


The whole set from above. It's great to see it all laid out with the furniture - this is just the sort of set I've been after for ages. A mixed bunch of dungeon monsters and heroes with a big, cool, centre piece.

Slightly crappier group shot:


Core Game:


The Undead portion of the game, which sees use in 2 other expansions. This is a pretty good, solid dungeon crawler game, and a good core to work from. I like the Necromancer and the Zombie Trolls the best I think, but the party is also just a classic dungeoneering party on it's own. I've included Bael and Valandor with this set, but personally I think they're among the worst minis in the set and I'm also not thrilled with the expansion itself.

Infernal Crypts:


The first expansion I did, and my favourite from all of them. I love the designs on the monsters in this one and I'm very happy with my colour scheme. Molochs and Efreeti are my two favourites. I also like the heroes in this set quite a bit. Painting this made me want to pick up a mantic Abyssals army set.

Warlord of Galahir:


I like this set too, but I've probably painted a "GW style" greenskin too many over the years. I love the Trolls though, and I am happy with the snouty look to the Mantic Orcs. The Heroes in this set are interesting and unique, but the detail is a little soft on them too. The let down is obviously not getting the titular Warlord and the stinky, stupid looking Mawbeasts.
But Orcs and Goblins are a dungeon classic and it wouldn't be the same without them.

Tyrant of Halpi:


Tricky to photograph! I like this expansion too, because, well, giant dragon. Painting the Dragon was loads of fun and I'm very happy with how he came out. But I do feel like they could have thrown a couple of extra bits and pieces into the expansion to make it more worth people's time. But a yoooge dragon is a great centrepiece to the set.

Dungeon Journal:


I quite like the Dungeon Journal - it adds a lot of extra content and some really interesting missions to the game. These figures are a bit throwaway in KS terms but I had fund painting them. The wee halfling fighter is awesome, and having a Dwarf Bartender makes me happy. The Dark Elf is a cool model but being made of multipart brittle resin makes him impractical for in game use. Would have prefered BG plastic even with a drop in quality. Blaine. Hmmm. Cool enough, but I didn't realise that he has some sort of bone crest on his head, not hair. So is he human? Abyssal?

For the rest of the month I'll be painting some brigands, monsters and extra heroes to fill out the Dungeon Journal missions.

I'm really happy with Dungeon Saga. It does what I want it to, and it's easy enough that my Fiancee can play it with me which is a huge plus. It plays fast, the components are all decent, and it gives a real feel of dungeon exploration. Painted, 3D components make me happy and can be used for D'n'D or other games (the doors would spruce up my Descent set for example).

I'm going to do a playtest of the solo play and stick it up here this week too.

Impressive stuff! A collection to be proud of!

Awesome work. I wanted to do this too but getting the set so late killed my momentum, so I'm glad to see you pull it off.

Thanks guys!
Grimdork: I figured you would blast through it before me, and I was trying to use my headstart to get it done before you could.

It's a shame the distribution feth ups with this KS soured the mood on it for so many people, but it's totally understandable.

There's definitely something to be said for being able to walk into a store and walk out again with whatever you were interested in, as opposed to the "maybe sometime in the future you might get something cool" you get with Kickstarter.

I'm not terribly upset about it, but I found other stuff to do in the meantime and now it's all kind of taking up space on the work desk

Here are some Corsairs of Umbar as Thugs for the Dungeon Journal missions.

i really like these guys, and I got this box of 24 at the old price, which made them even better. I think they make great bandits or thieves or if you painted them with stripey trousers and white shirts, pirates for fantasy games. Very versatile!

I went with a pretty homogeneous paint scheme of dark blue with red belts for two reasons - to speed up the painting and keep it enjoyable for myself (I prefer to finish groups rather than fart around on individual details) and also because I plan on using these as the Redband gang in the D'n'D starter adventure and maybe as Zentarim operatives if I ever get my planned Sword Coast hexcrawl off the ground, so I wanted them to look cohesive.

Up next, Red Box Games berserkers! Excited about these guys.

Nice work Da Boss

Only Thugs wear stripey pants???? I better go change

Nar Matey, it's Pirates!
http://img07.deviantart.net/95f3/i/2011/048/3/9/pirate_pinup_by_chronoperates-d39sfbe.jpg

Stripey pants for buccaneers.

Bit dark but they look quite bandity.

Those guys will make a nice band of thugs. Maybe we could get another photo from a lower angle?

Nice work on all that Dungeon Saga stuff. You're a bloody painting machine! The Corsairs look like they could be pretty good, but it's a bit dark to see Maybe a lower angle as well?

Before I created my lighting setup, I used to take photos outside when the light was decent, and do it in the shade rather than direct sunlight.


That's just with a cheap digital camera and some flocked boards to provide a "flat" kind of background.

The backgrounds I use now are just colour printouts of some cloudy photo background pics off the internets - literally several of these:
https://www.google.com.au/search?q=photography+background&espv=2&biw=1920&bih=965&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwif7LzN8fDKAhXCq6YKHWIzDRcQsAQIGg

Yeah, indirect light makes a big difference. I sprung for one of these a couple of years ago, and it's made a world of difference. You could probably make something just as good with some foam core and a light or two from a couple of different directions.

So I went back to the brick wall and dungeon floor background, and for whatever reason it's giving much better results on my iPad camera. Weird!

Here is a better look at my Corsair/Thugs:


And here are the Red Box Games Norse that I've done. The Matt Varnish (vallejo brush on) that I used came out all shiny, so once I've figured out why I'm going to re-coat them to make them less shiny. I don't normally use varnish because I nearly always have some sort of issue like this, but I love the RBG minis too much to have the paintjobs chipped! I'm using the two handers as Brutes for DS, and the cloaked baldy as a Druid for the Dungeon Journal missions. They will see use in my Saga Vikings force as Beserkers - I see the druid dude as a priest of Odin and the berserkers as his cadre of religious fanatics fighting to enter Valhalla. Lovely sculpts and despite the shiney-ness I think I did a decent job on them. I'm going to try and paint my RBG stuff this year, I've previously been too intimidated by them to do so, but I'm going to let myself relax and just paint to my normal standard with them.





And last of all, here are 8 spear armed Corsairs who will sub in as Ruffians for Dungeon Saga or yet more brigands for Dungeons and Dragons. These aren't as nice a sculpt as the sword and board armed ones, the lunging spear especially suffers from the plastic medium he's cast in.


With the 4 Journal Heroes, that makes 24 models so far this month. Gonna crack on and try and get some Ogres and the Gang Leader for the brigands done too. That'll leave just 12 minis til the end of the month to meet my goal.

The RBG guys look fantastic-- you really brought them to life.

Cheers! Hopefully they'll look a little better once I varnish them again and take the shine off.

But it really doesn't take much to make Tre's minis look good - they just ooze character. I am happy with them though - the temptation to stop doing board games and just lash into my RBG stuff is pretty strong!

Great work on all of these. I can't believe how fast you're powering through them all. With the Vallejo matt - make sure you really give the varnish a damned good shake before using it. But on the RBG guys you could just matt down their pants, weapons, etc and leave their torsos shiny (or even satin) if you want a Frazetta/Conan-esque sweaty/oiled look.

 Azazelx wrote:
Great work on all of these. I can't believe how fast you're powering through them all. With the Vallejo matt - make sure you really give the varnish a damned good shake before using it. But on the RBG guys you could just matt down their pants, weapons, etc and leave their torsos shiny (or even satin) if you want a Frazetta/Conan-esque sweaty/oiled look.

That's actually a pretty good idea. I usually leave exposed guts and stuff on zombies glossy, but it never occurred to me to do the same with, say, Chaos Thugs.

Yeah, I've done it before in the deep, dark past. You can even use a "streaky" look with the varnish to give a subtle drippy-sweat look

That's a decent idea! Could turn this disaster into a success yet

I'm winding down (my mid term is nearly over, it's the reason for my productivity this week!) but I hope to get a few more models done before I call it a day.

Next up are these Descent Ogres, which can act as Ogre Brutes in Dungeon Saga, or the Ogre PC. I think I'd lean towards using them as the Ogre PC due to the gak eating grins and dynamic, disco dancing poses. I like these minis - they're kind of self consciously cheesy and they were simple and fun to paint. Of course, they'll see use in Dungeons and Dragons too.





Being from Descent, I needed to differentiate between Master and Minion, so I decided to give the Master some bright red equipment in keeping with his disco nature, and the minion some light tan equipment. Red/Tan is the colour of the bare plastic for the two monster types. I know some people put a ring of red or tan around the bases but I think that looks awful.

These guys are from the Visions of Dawn hero and monster set which also includes Trolls and Manticores. So I'll be doing the Trolls next.