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@Camkierhi: Thanks very much. This is nice.

@Captain Brown: Hullo, my Captain. Somehow I didn't expect to meet you here.


Sunday night I started the Crossroads Seven:

...and now for a hop back into the past again!

My brother got himself Blood Rage around christmas 2016. It's one of those kickstartered CMON boardgames about which I like to rant for certain reasons (some of which not being valid for this game).



Right after Christmas he gave it a go. I partook in one of those games. It's basically an area control game with deckbuilding/draft elements to it. Rather clever. It reminded me of a mix of 7 Wonders (which I like a LOT) and Small World. The theme is vikings beating each other on the head. It's Ragnarok, the end of the world, and each of the four viking clans needs to acquire more glory than the other clans before the world ends, so their guys get to Valhalla.





So yeah, it's a rather fun game for 4 players (5 with one of the expansions). In fact I think it won Beasts of War's 'Best Boardgame of 2015' award. Anyway, I agreed that I'd quickly paint the minis. Which of course never goes quickly. In the beginning the plan was for my brother and me to sit down, give the minis a basecoat and a drybrush and make them look like statues. Which would have been a bit of a shame. Apart from that it would have required us to find a day on which to sit down and so on. In the end I just grabbed the box and said I'd paint them. Not to a great standard, just so they look decent enough to play with.

So on the side of commission things and other projects I was involved in I painted these on weekends and nights over about 10 weeks:

Dryad (i really like her bum):












Frost giant (good bum too, but also good beard):













...and the rest:






Bear Clan (each player plays a clan comprising of eight warriors [two poses] and a leader):





Raven Clan:







Snake Clan (I'm not a huge fan of the design on those. Bum gags above aside, I think they'd work better with clothes on):







Wolf Clan:





Ship markers (these are rather small. 25mm round bases):





Monsters (these, big and small, are allies you can hire to help you stomp other clans):




Here's the whole bunch with a white background:























That's it. I hope that you like them (despite the hurried speed at which these were finished. I'm not entirely happy with the paintjob, but I'm doing these as a favour and it was made very clear that they don't have to look great, just painted in ANY way.) and that I get to play with them some time soon so I can get another look at the rules and maybe share my thoughts on the game.

Anyway, thanks for looking!

You know, that's a really cool group of miniatures and your paintjob, tabletop as it is really makes them stand out. Thanks for sharing! I bet the game will be even more fun with your beautifully painted minis on the table!

I have a weekend away from the internet and there's a ton of pretties to look over. Too much to comment on, so I'll pick one stand out:
The geisha-alike ladies are really nice. Liking the freehand details on their dresses.

As for the space marines (not to mention that you're going to make me feel bad about my paintwork on the DI box set), if they are not going to be played with, maybe you could do each one as his own chapter. Then you are not tied down to having to pick just one. It's what I've been doing with my own "army" collection (I would get bored if they all had to be the same scheme).

@Gitsplitta: Cheers! Yeah, this being me working on a rather big project 'for free' (as evil as that may sound) and knowing that they're going to be handled by people who eat pizza while playing and all of that I didn't think this was the time or place to go fancy with the paintjobs. And ittook me long enough already to finish them too. The game's rather fun indeed. Only shame is that we barely play it now. But it'll come back.

@Dr H: Hullo. Thanks for dopping by! That's a very cool idea for the Marines, but I know I won't get anywhere with that project if I do them in a different chapter each. What I could envision is maybe doing each unit in a different chapter based on the top 3 or so from the poll I'm doing?

Here he is now!

You can visit http://www.battlebrushstudios.com/2017/08/showcase-imperial-reaver-titan.html for even more pictures!












Hope you like him!

Hey, Siggy! Great stuff! Glad to see your current work! All those clansmen look bloody fantastic!

I like him just a bit. Wonderful work Sigur!

Amazing

@Moltar: Thanks very much! And that was just the 40k stuff and beginnings of the Fantasy things I painted in the mean time!

@Gitsplitta: Yeah, he is a bit lovely, isn't he. I love doing titans. Hope to get to build/paint some more in the near future. (rumour has it that my services are too! ).

@San76: Thanks very much for dropping by and commenting!


I guess it's time for some army shots of the Nurgly dudes.







I gave in in the end and added not only the red tufts but also green toxic puddles.












Here are some more finished shots on white, before finalizing the bases:







Hope you like them!

I really love the way the pale grey looks with the fleshy colors and the reds. Really excellent choice of colors Sigur. Bravo!

@Gitsplitta: Cheers, I'm a bit proud of the choice I made with the reds.


Another WIP on the Crossroads Seven. Redefining "snail's pace" on these:




Automatically Appended Next Post:
Since I'm not proceeding well with the painting itself I may just as well keep the updates I should have posted a while ago coming.

Say, have you heard about Guild Ball?


Over many moons past I painted quite a lot of Guildball stuff. Pretty much every single team by now.

I started with the Butchers and the Morticians. As usual with a test mini:



Once that was green-lit I did the rest:










The Morticians seem like one of these typical things many mini designers fall for when they're new and only do digital sculpting: the minis are spindly as heck, don't go together too well and are just plain insane to glue. Very glad Steamforged learned since then and that problem got better. But on the Morticians it was bad. In fact so bad that they redid some of them.












Fishermen!

















Shortly thereafter I was given Captain to paint (Season 2 model) as well:




So stay tuned, there's quite a lot more Guild Ball stuff to come!

Fantastic painting Sigur, I have always been jealous of peoples work when they can blend up to white. Thanks for sharing very inspirational.

Good Lord man.... just a constant parade of excellence!

@Yorknright: Thanks very much! There's a downside to this once you start blending up to white on EVERYTHING and end up with white highlights on everything, making minis look chalky and lifeless.

@Gitsplitta: Cheers. Well, it's about 18 months condensed down, skipping all the complaining, endless WIP pictures and ramblings.


Speaking of endless WIPs, here's another one of the Crossroads Seven:





...and some older Guild Ball stuff. One of my favourites, the Brewers!








(see, bit of OSL playing there on the helmet and a little glass bottle fanciness going on there as well)




Later on I did goals for some of the teams as well. Butchers were the first ones to get one...



Yeah, a bit yucky. Some people commented that it's a little bit 'out there' and it probably is. The research for this one wasn't too much fun either. There are some things which leave you a bit queasy after the google image search to get something to look 'right'. (My top5 in this regard: "rotting flesh maggots", "horse skin sores/diseases", "gutted pig", "burnt skin", "octopus" because these things freak me out!)



The tree is by Eureka I think, as is the butchered-up pig. All I had to do was find a chain that fits, somehow put it on the carcass (the pig can be taken off the tree for transport, so I had to bend a branch so you can hang the pig on there) and do the base. For additional effect I added a little bucket which I think I made of some pencil cap or a Vallejo dropper bottle cap or somehting like that filled with blood and with a little piece of entrails hanging over it for over-the-top effect. Because some blood is unsettling, over the top blood and guts is less unsettling and more gimmicky. Like a realistic explosion on a film has impact while Micheal Bay explosions with helicopters flying through and sparks flying around just is a spectacle. So I went with quite a lot of icky stuff to start getting diminishing returns (the game is pretty cartoonish after all), but not go all-out gory. Because that works very, very, very, very rarely I think.



...and then the Brewers:



The barrels at the bottom are resin cast, the barrel on top actually is from the Empire plastic cannon set. Turns out you can turn that into a very pretty barrel. All you need to do is carve in wood texture and so some more cutting. The wooden beams and wedges to keep everything in place are made from chopsticks, the beer mug is from Avatars of War's plastic Dwarven Barbarians set. I also added a cloth wipe in the tartan colours of the Brewers to tie the thing together with the team and to leave no doubt as to whose goal that is.






So yeah, hope you like them.

Next on the list were the Alchemist's Guild team. First, as always, the test mini:








..and then the rest:












I really dig the colour scheme. If you'd ask me which was my favourite GB team I painted so far I really couldn't tell.



They also got a goal afterwards:



That one was rather straightforward. I got the flame/smoke bit resin cast from the customer, along with the request to do "something" with it. Maybe I could find a big test tube/petri dish thing, but I couldn't and it would have looked just way too huge, so I went with a simple crater (base, milliput, some pebbles, done). For additional detail, and to tie it together with the Alchemists team I used the pink/magenta colour I'd used for all the chemical stuff on the models on the cloud as well, and I strew some pieces of torn apart cloth in the team colours around the crater along with a single shoe (it's a bit burnt up at the top), indicating that the whole thing looks like an unlucky Alchemist.





Along with them I also did some additions for the Morticians and Butchers which had been released in the mean time (Bonesaw and Tenderiser):













I'll post another WIP of the Crossroads Seven later, but don't expect much. Yet again, barely any advancement...

Smashing work on the Nurgle things.
And great work on all the teams.

So many pretties are making my brain leak out my ear...

 Sigur wrote:
@Gitsplitta: Cheers! Yeah, this being me working on a rather big project 'for free' (as evil as that may sound) and knowing that they're going to be handled by people who eat pizza while playing and all of that I didn't think this was the time or place to go fancy with the paintjobs. And ittook me long enough already to finish them too. The game's rather fun indeed. Only shame is that we barely play it now. But it'll come back.

@Dr H: Hullo. Thanks for dopping by! That's a very cool idea for the Marines, but I know I won't get anywhere with that project if I do them in a different chapter each. What I could envision is maybe doing each unit in a different chapter based on the top 3 or so from the poll I'm doing?

Here he is now!

You can visit http://www.battlebrushstudios.com/2017/08/showcase-imperial-reaver-titan.html for even more pictures!












Hope you like him!

I think you've done a great job, my only criticism are the white airbrush blotches all over the legs? dont really understand that aesthetic. Other than that stupendous work!

@Dr H: Thanks very much! As much as they are digitally designed and 3d printed and all (and it shows), the casting quality on these figures is really, really good.

@supreme overlord: Thanks for the comment! It's mainly to break up the monotony of the black armour and make it look more interesting. Kinda what some sharks look like. I have to admit that the lighting isn't exactly flattering. In regular lighting the pattern is a bit less contrast-y.

Loving the new Guild Ball additions, Siggy! Alchemists look smashing!

@Moltar: Thanks very much! As much as I have to critisize about the sculpts sometimes (mostly the way that they're made ) the casts are of exceptional quality.


Another WIP on the Crossroads Seven for Malifaux:



Busy, busy week, so the whole process is crawling along. These figures also are 7 very different characters of course, which makes it even more sluggish an affair.

Hey, here's the Union team:





A bit of a starker colour scheme there.



This weekend a friend of mine got married (all the best, L. and U.!). I was the best man, which was kinda exciting and included various interesting tasks. Everything went well, the coupe is off on their honeymoon know. I think I fist-bumped the priest at the celebration later that night...

Anyway, that whole thing is the reason why I got so little done this week. The day after the wedding was my birthday. I was in surprisingly good shape, so I went out and bought myself a boardgame!



Yeah, that's the one with the App. Which is why I originally wasn't too keen on this. I don't like technology interfering with boardgames or miniature wargames. I don't believe in 'dead systems' or 'dead games', because it's a concept bred by companies who make people think that "official support", "rules editions" and such are important things. Which they are not at all. Publish the rules, that's it. Anyway, with an app or a server accompanying a game a game truly can be killed as the app doesn't get updated for newer operating systems or formats, servers are shut down (hi, EA! Say, why do you shut down servers for video games after a year just because you publish a new version of that game?) and so on. This is do not like.

All that being said - I still got it. :p It's something new and I wanted to try it. Of course I'm a bit X-Com fan. More so of the older games (and Xenonauts of course), but they did a really good job with the new (2012-ish) X-Com. Haven't played the sequel much, because it interested me way less. No idea why they went away from the original and introduced busywork reeking of all the UFO games we got between 2003 and 2008-ish. Those were OK, but also had unnecessary stuff like the whole Laputa-flying-around-thing and so on. I'm OK with building bases, hiring and managing staff, choosing and training soldiers, and then sending them into missions against Sectoids and Crab people.

Anyway, the board game consists of a real-time phase (during which a count-down runs down) in which one of the players reads out infos about alien attacks, crises and so on and a phase in which players take turns trying to manage all the stuff that got piled on them in the real-time phase. In that phase players have all the time they want. It's a game for 1-4 players, it's fully cooperative as the antagonist (the alien invasion) is 'played' by the app. Last time I played something like this was either Atmosfear (original VHS vesions as well as an early 2000s DVD one) or The Legend of Zagor. :p



If you're not familiar with the X-Com universe, here's a very quick summary: Aliens invade Earth, an internationally funded secret organization, X-Com, is hastily installed to deal with the alien menace. Apart from funds each nation is contributing their best soldiers and equipment. Of course that's no match for the Aliens, so X-Com have to salvage Alien technology (and corpses), research it and turn it into equipment to use against the Aliens. And to find out what the Aliens are after, why they came here, what their plans are and how to get rid of the invasion fleet.




The first two computer games (UFO:Enemy Unknown / X-Com:Ufo Defense and X-Com:Terror from the Deep) are absolute classics due to their dual nature of grand strategy and economic planning and heart-stoppingly atmospheric turn-based tactical ground missions against the aliens. These games egularly feature in top5 lists of the best PC games of all times. Because they are. They've been remade and cloned countless times, but the only official remake was released in 2012. They did a good job with that, even though quite a lot was changed. FFG being FFG they bought the license and turned the thing into a boardgame.


Anyway, so now I got the X-Com board game with the app. And we played it in the evening too. Each player has one of four roles:
.) Central Officer, who does satellite things, orbital defence, intel, has some cool tricks to help and coordinate the moves the others do and reads what the app says). In our game this was my brother.
.) Commander, taking care of finances and apart from that mainly defends the airspace against UFOs.
.) Chief Scientist, who allocates scientists to projects, does alien autopsies and chooses which projects are being researched on
.) Squad Leader, who's job is allocating the right soldiers to ground missions and base defence and carry out the missions.



During the real-time phase it's pretty frantic, and each player has to make decisions at a call. Which is a really, really good way to get rid of players talking about every single decision and certain people, maybe the logically more gifted, take over the game and play for others. Which is a problem with many cooperative games. So for example the app says "Chief Scientist, allocate one of the three research project and scientists". The Chief Scientist then has say 7 seconds to decide what to research (out of their hand of research project cards) and allocate between 1 and 3 scientists to the project. Problem is that each scientists allocated to one of the up to three different research projects costs 1 budget point overseen by the Commander. So I, as the Chief Scientist, first ask the Commender what my science budget is this round. In general there is quite a lot of haggling for budget from each of the players. It's a pretty fun game with plenty of replay value from what I can tell. Not the least due to different difficulties and invasion scenarios.

Oh, and it comes with miniatures. 12 X-Com soldiers models, 8 fighter jets and something like 15-ish UFOs. Sounds like something that's achievable to get painted, right? So I started doing that today.



Got the jet fighters painted and started painting the X-Com soldiers (as 3 different teams of 4, each in different colours). The sculpts aren't great, but that's never stopped me from painting them. :p


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Oh, and a tiny update on the Malifaux Miniatures (the Crossroads Seven):

Some new WIP shots of the X-Com soldiers:



As said above, the sculpts aren't spectacular (especially on details), but serviceable, and on top of this these are 'just boardgame figures' and 'just for myself', so time is tight to get those finished.

Here's a view of the backs. The soldiers already have the obligatory country badges on the back of the necks (featuring soldiers from the US, Germany, Argentinia, Austria, Finnland, the Republic of Congo, Israel, Brasil, South Korea, France, Canada and Japan).



Of each of the 4 soldier classes you get three figures in the game, so three full teams of 4 soldiers makes sense. In the 2012 game (and its sequel) they give players quite a lot of options to play around with outfits, and especially so with colours so making them look different makes even more sense. In terms of gameplay of course there's no differences.

Yet again hopping to something else for a bit - I got another new toy! It's a fortified manor house for my 28mm medieval/fantasy village.


A shot of my most recent game of Advanced Song of Blades and Heroes


Once again it's from Ziterdes' (by NOCH) range of hard foam buildings. I really like them.



Things I also got while I was at it: hip-tall stone walls, a tiny little shed (doubling as an out house), an observation platform for the windmill and a nice stone fountain (pictured).



I also just received a whole lot of 25mm horses for Napoleonics from Minifigs in record time. Casts look fine. The customer I ordered these for will still find problems with them (he's been an astute horse-rider all his life, loves horses of course and takes great care to make them look right). Either he will 'fix' the too round ears as he's always done and give them more convincing snouts or he'll outsource that to me.

Sigur,

The X-Com soldiers are coming along and the village you have built is fantastic.

Cheers,

CB

@Captain Brown: Thanks for the comment! I'll post more pictures of the gaming table and some battle reports in the near future.

Here's a size comparison of the jetfighters with some 6mm figures. The fit is quite OK. Of course the jetfighters are rather cartoony (almost as bad as 40k ones ), but they seem to fit rather nicely in terms of size.



...and I did the UFOs today. 24 instead of my estimated 15. I kept the work to a minimum and just tried to make them look halfway decent to play with. In the end the blue parts will be shiny.



These are a prime example of things which will look much nicer against a dark backdrop (such as the X-com boardgame board ).

X-COM soldiers look to be coming along well and it sounds like a fun game.
Malifaux organist looks like he'll be a great addition to his group.
Wow that medieval city looks totally awesome glad to know it's still growing.

@Moltar: Cheers. Yeah, it's a bit hard to tell how well they come along, because much of the detail is rather rough, so I keep on thinking if I shoudl paint it proper or just do some decent highlights and it's bettter not to draw too much attention to it. Oh yes, I'm rather proud of my little town.


Late last year I did two more teams. First of which was the Masons:







...as well as a few more additions to existing teams:



All very cool models really. It's a real shame I didn't take a better picture of the Butcher lady in the far right, because she's maybe my favourite Guildball model so far. Excellent face and I'm a bit proud of the hair too (even though it doesn't quite show in the picture). Now for the bad part: The name of the character is Fillet, as in "a piece of tender, high quality meat". Which has to be the worst name for a female character possible. And I'm not sensitive of that kind of stuff usually, but if even I notice that, it's got to be bad. Nothing to get mad about, but rather weird (especially for a company who are setting up their own paints range and rejected the name "chocolate brown" for that colour that's always called chocolate brown unless you're GW because it might be interpreted as racist. The mind is boggled.). Maybe I'm just weird about it because I like the model so much though.

If you're still taking votes for SM Chapters, Sigur, I'm going to suggest Brazen Claws...

@Dysartes: Sure do, noted. Good call too, I like it!

Done and done. Thanks for FFG's big boxes the minis even fit nicely in there.







Due to other commitments (mostly in the shape of the 8th Polish Lancers, 1810, in 25mm) I had no time to varnish the minis for tonight's game. But I'm a daredevil and a dreadnought and I hope that the primer does its job well. :p