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@Gitsplitta. Yeah, it was an alright event. Good to hear that you like the pictures.

@Solar_lion: Cheers, thanks for the comment!

@GiraffeX: Yeah, I always took you for a General de Brigade man. Looking forward to the weekend. It of course means a deadly exhausting Saturday as I know from experience (driving out there, staying at the hotel, getting up very early the next day, get to the event, SALUTE, get everthing back into the car and the three and a half hour drive home on which I usually am a danger to myself and others due to tiredness. ). Well, it's not THAT bad. Should be a really good day. Plus: Staying at a hotel room makes it feel like a grand journey. :p

@Moltar: Thanks muchly, Sir. Not too long ago someone on the Facebook Oldhammer group proclaimed that the Man o'War cover picture was his favourite piece of GW artwork of all times. Not sure if I'd agree with that but it IS an amazing work. Where did you get it as a poster?

Nice selection of nice looking models. That (bit of a) ship is excellent.

@Dr H: Yar, pretty amazing, isn't it?

Tomorrow I'm off to Austrian Salute where amongst other things I will hand over the American Civil War miniatures I painted recently. I did the finishing touches on them (flags and varnish) yesterday. Here are the flag bearers:



1st Texas Infantry, General Lee's flag and The Regiment In Regulation Dress. Flags always are great of course, that goes without saying. But Especially with the ACW I think they 'make' the look of a unit. Quite remarkable.

Hope you like them!

Franz Ferdinand finished!






Roight, I'm back from Austrian Salute, and here's my report!

In which you will find out how I won a painting competition without entering.

Congrats on the painting comp

Looked like a great day out those tables look really nice especially the Freebooters fate one.

Camels for the win though, if your loot contains camels and pigs it must have been good

@GiraffeX: Thanks GiraffeX. Well, it was more of an awkward win really. To be completely honest though, I'm glad that IF some of my work is submitted for the competition I made first place. I'll pass the compliments about the FBF table on to the guys who ran it. I really liked the look of that one too. Again of course, party due to the Dreadfleet sea blanket. Oh yes, I'm rather happy with my loot too. I actually cleaned and based the pigs just earlier tonight. I remember having this game of Dux Britanniarum in which my Saxon Raiders' job was to drive a bunch of pigs they's just nicked from some British settlement over to their camp, with the Britons hot on their heels. Of course the pigs weren't very cooperative to the saxon cause and I ended leaving all but one pigs (the least stubborn one) behind, otherwise the angered British would have gotten me. Now I can replay these things with my own pig models. :p Dux Britanniarum is a brilliant game. I should play it again some time. More people should play it in general. :p

Well, I'm back to painting things, still working on the 32 Polish Lanciers. Now in the evening I painted the pigs I cleaned and based last night.

Say 'hello' to Napoleon, Snowball and Squealer (of course):


Finally that pigsty I built about two years ago got some lifestock to serve its original purpose!

Very nice Sigur, but I'm curious... why base the pigs? Could you just as easily have glued them into their new home?

Cheers. The idea is that there are very few settings/periods in which people were/are not fond of the taste of bacon so pigs make for great mission objectives. I very vividly remember a game of Dux Britanniarum (Saxon Raiders vs. Romano-Britons. Excellent, excellent set of rules.) in which I, as the Saxon Raiders, had to drive a few pigs my boys just had nicked from a British village across the table and back into my camp's safety before the angry Britons would catch up to get their stuff back. Of course the pigs did not cooperate and I had to leave all but one behind. The rest of the pigs just ran off into a forest, away from the Saxons and Britons alike. And that's just one of the possibilities. Say a witch turned the warband's leader into a pig you have to catch to bring her to your own wizard to turn her back, but your guys don't know which one it is unless they look the pig in the eye, the pigs are positioned all across the table and randomly move around each turn and it's your objective to get to them, roll a dice and see if it's her, then return the pig to your table edge (or spend x amount of turns to turn her back into her original form). In short - they make for great "dynamic" mission objectives for skirmish games.

I have to admit that I read a tiny little "last page funnies" article in the latest Wargames, Soldiers and Strategy magazine which was about a viking raid participation game with vikings landing and having to nick livestock and provisions from the villag and for funsies they said that the cockerel was very averse to being carried away and that each model which tried to catch it would receive a wound on a 6 rolled on a d6. Stuff like this, or the randomly moving pigs/having to roll if you can herd them in the direction you want, always adds a fun element to any game I think. And this is what skirmish games are about really. I also like to emphasize the human aspect about these models and as we all know, an army marches on its stomach.

Last but not least I didn't glue the pigs to the sty for the same reason I don't glue trees to a forest base any more but keep them removable: it's so much more convenient if models are taking cover in this piece of area terrain and whatnot.

Great explanation Sigur. I didn't think about that but you're absolutely right. I might be able to do the same thing in 40k with squiggs rather than pigs! One band of orks raiding another for their prize fighting-squig, or having to sneak back into a camp they were driven out of by an opposing force to re-claim their warboss' pet squig "spot".

Perfect! If someone claims the objective you roll a d6, on a 6 the squig breaks free and has to be overpowered.

Sounds like a plan! May have to bring the squig cage and a "free" squig to Adepticon with me for pick-up games.

Thanks for the great idea Sigur!

Oh, right, means more work for you. Didn't consider that. Do you have another one of those squig models for the "freed" one?
You're going to Adepticon? When will that go "down" as they say?

Oh yes... I have several free-range squigs. No problems there.

I think it might be the largest 40k gaming convention in the world. One of the largest certainly. They also play a lot of other things besides 40k. Warhammer Fantasy, Warmachine, 30k are probably the main ones... but they've expanded every year so more and more games and tournaments seem to get added all the time. The tournaments are the big attraction... especially the 40k championship and the team tournament (4 people per team). We've been in the team tournament for 4 or 5 years straight... and we were all a bit burnt out (and many of our team members couldn't make it this year), so we're just going to hang out, play pick-up games, shop & do some demos on new games. I'm also helping RiTides with his very cool Kick-starter venture.

Also bringing my oldest son with me for the first time... which should really make the event special. Event runs from Thrs to Sunday this week. So I'm in my final days of preparation.

Lovely flag work, Franz is good and nice little piggies.

@Gitsplitta: Aces. By the way, your frequent avatar changes are starting to unsettle me. I keep on thinking "oh, there's a new comment", but then it's just old Gits' comment. Yeah, I assume that Adepticon might be the biggest thing in 40k tournaments. I assume it's a multi-day event? Interesting to see the event branching out a bit. I hope that some more niche-y and not-currently-on-kickstarter things get some limelight as well. I'm sure that you and your son will have a great time at Adepticon. Make sure to post some pictures!

@Dr H: Cheers, mucho appreciado (this is a very cringeworthy phrase I just learned on Californication the other day. Very glad I could share it to make other people miserable as well ).

SO! Yeah, commissionwise I'm still working on the Chevaux-légers polonais de la garde (light horse lancers of the guard. From Poland.).



Almost done doing the riders. All I still have to do is paint on the buttons, neaten up the gloves a little and do the sabre scabbards. And then of course add the lances and little pennants on the lances. Those I'll print, cut out and glue on. I'll probably have to paint those a little by hand as well, because my dang ol' printer isn't too good with printing really strong colours so I usually have to recolour those flags I print by hand. Usually adds to the prettiness of them though.

The picture above doesn't show all of the guys I did in this batch (26 in total now, six more dudes to come, but they're a little fancier). but i cropped it this way because I liked the look of it better this way. I want this made into a photo wallpaper or gift wrapping paper.

...and as we're talking Napoleonics already, here's a cool little picture of hats. Hats (and helmets) worn by the French army during the Napoleonic wars. Maybe handy for identification of stuff.



Napoleonics is a scary thing to get into, because there is just so much information out there. It's not like it's any more complicated than say WW2 I think. That being said, I'm still kind of awed by the whole period myself of course. But I'm getting there I think. One bit at a time.

Awesome stuff, Siggy! Franz is simply smashing. Really good to see all of those riders lined up in production - they're looking great!

The hat chart is fantastic. If there're one thing that armies did best in those days, it was trying to look more fabulous than the other side!

I can't help but think of TF2...

And the award for this weeks most tedious paintjob goes to ......... SIGUR! for painting a thousand horse riding guys in monopose! and doing it to exacting levels, well done!

I really love coming onto your log, Sigur. Historicals don't seem to have much of a presence on Dakka so they always feel very fresh and exciting, then, of course, there's the outstanding painting.

@Cosmic: Thanks very much. Yeah, Napoleonic uniforms look amazing. They're a lot more functional too than one would think. Anyway, glorious stuff. A few local guys and I have started talking about doing 6mm Napoleonics using the new Blücher rules set by Sam Mustafa. Looks really promising. To be honest, we're just waiting for the sucky exchange rates of Euro to Pound drops again before we order.

@nerdfest09: Thank you, thank you. Well, it's just 26 guys if I remember correctly. And monopose isn't that different to 26 multi-part plastic figures. The main thing about painting these guys is that the sculpts are very old by today's standards, kinda "flat" and most of all there is a LOT of freehand painting involved. And last but not least I'm very unsure of what I'm doing there. I got wonderful colour plates the corresponding Osprey book (Napoleon's Polish Lancers of the Imperial Guard), pictures off google and of course the recreated uniform I was shown by the client, but I'm never quite sure if what I do there is exact enough, is the right colour and so on. With Space Marines you know okay, that's a marine with red armour. Beforehand you check with the client if he wants dark red or "popping red" and that's it. So it's really insecurity which makes me progress slower on this project.

@sockwithaticket: Thanks very much, glad you enjoy the log. Yeah, Historicals are a bit underrepresented, but oh well. If you go to historicals forums it's all full of Bolt Action and Saga, so it's not that important where I slap my historical stuff/ historical commission work on. And I like being the guy who brings up some of the "different" stuff. Wargaming is so immensely diverse and out of all things this diversity is by far my favourite aspect about the hobby.



Weekend! Very nice weather too, so maybe time for some sport. So I put the Polish lancers (for whom I started painting a bunch of horses now) aside for a bit and got out the four more Bloodbowl Orcs I got:



Two more Blitzers, two more Black Orc Blockers.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Oh yes this is nice. Here we are a few layers later:



Seems like things are starting to take shape.

Started doing some details:

Looking very nice Sigur, the orange has come out quite amazing.

There is only one Black Ork in the shot though, I'm sure the other is a lineman.

Quiet, you! Cheating is okay in Blood Bowl, as long as the opponent doesn't notice! Yeah, you're right. I'm not sure if I'll ever get my hands on a proper BoB any time soon, so I thiought this guy would make for an alright-ish stand-in.

lol very true, his pose does make him look ard to he should fit in ok.

Alright, GiraffeX's words have been eating away at me, so it's entirely his fault that I had to put Blorcy horns on the guy's helmet:



Also got some more details done.

That's better Sigur, the horns make him a Black Ork for sure

@GiraffeX: I can smell the sarcasm right over here! Thanks for the comment though. At least I don't have four of the same model as BlOrcs now.


Oh, hi. Welcome back!

The Orcs are finished just as Sunday draws to a close:





The colours are a little dulled down due to the three layers of varnish. (Blood Bowl can be a rough sport on the minis). Hope you like them!

Well, here's something out of the blue. Something I'd planned to do over the christmas holidays, until I realized that mr.T-34/76 in the top left and Mr.ZIS-5 truck are absolute houndesses to prime. Primed the buggers three times. Hope it works now. The Half-track (hard to recognize as such as with the lack of wheels or tracks at the moment ) is an M5/M9 Half-Track converted from the Warlord Games M3 half-track kit. In the upper right you can see a T-34/85 I also converted a little to make it prettier. I also added stowage to all of the vehicles.

Did someone say 'horses'? I distinctly recall someone saying 'horses'...

And the award for painting the most...........Agggh I couldn't even write let alone paint that many horses!