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@Stevefamine: Thanks very much!

I finished a bunch of Dark Souls figures last night, so I made a funny:

Nice work on the... chest, Siggy.

Wow, you did a spectacular job painting those lions! Pretty cool figures to boot!

@Dysartes: Thanks very much!

@Gitsplitta: Cheers, much appreciated!


I'm sure you remember the big, big Orks army I painted between 2017 and 2020. In 2021 I got to add the first three vehicles (Scrapjets). But look at that number of boyz:





They need more than three vehicles. Speaking of which - could it be that I never posted the scrapjets from spring last year?






















So yeah, that's them, but that's not enough, so I have to get as many more as possible done until Pentecost.

Here's the ones I got on the desk now (in fact I got them ALL on the desk right now, and it's a huge mess, but these here are the ones I'm trying to get done first):



A good, old-fashioned WIP shot. Just like in the olden days. Speaking of which, that Warboss on bike I painted over 10 years ago already, for an Evil Sunz army:



That was a fun army. Anyway, lots of painting to do. The base colours are on so far, but that only means that the actual work can start now.

Very nice - conversions and, obviously, painting

Love the red , right up my street that is.

Pretty spectacular all-round man. You never disappoint! That massive mob of boys just makes me smile to look at!

That is a fairly large horde of Boyz.

Cheers,

CB

@Arakasi: I agree on the conversion part and thank you for the painting part.

@Camkierhi: Cheers! Well, they gotta be red, don't they.

@Gitsplitta: See, that's all I ask of people - to refer to me as a "pretty spectacular all-round man". Anyway, yeah, I was kinda lucky I got to take that army shot after having painted this army batch-wise over the course of 3 or 4 years. Meanwhile GW decided to put Ork Boyz on 32mm round bases, so, the fine gentleman who hired me to paint his army sent them ALL back to me in one to and had me re-base about 80% of the infantry. It wasn't much fun, but it allowed for these army shots. So there's something.

@Captain Brown: Ever-observant, Sir! Thanks muchly.



Heyhey, here's another WIP shot of those first few vehicles:




Slowly but surely getting there. Next big step will be the crews.

Hope you like them so far!


In other news, I went on a little trip the past Friday. There's an excellent wargames store in the general vicinity of Salzburg, called Silent Night Games. It's located in Oberndorf, the town in which Silent Night, Holy Night was first played in 1818. Pretty much everything in that town is "Silent Night [something]", and we like it that way. Anyway, the games store is excellent, run by an excellent wargaming veteran who also organized the events over there. The shop is a bit of a hub for the wargaming scene in Western Austria as well as South-Eastern Bavaria, and I happened to have quite a lot of finished figures for people who meet at that store I decided to make a day out of it, drive over and deliver the figures in person. It's a 3.5 hours drive back and forth (American friends will laugh at the tiny distance) each, but oh well. I also hadn't met the guys in over 2 years (in some cases even longer) due to the pandemic, and I hadn't travelled any such distance over the past 2 years either, so off I went.

It was exeedingly nice. When I'm over there for wargaming events I usually stay over night, but since I just delivered some figures I wanted to make the drive there and back home in one day, so I just stayed in the store for a few hours to chat and watch a game of Kugelhagel. I really enjoyed chatting about all those small figure manufacturers we all love so much and how their figures compare, look at the two players' collections and talk about esoteric Napoleonic formations (first time I saw the légion irlandaise in action. Or Wurttembergers). Also had chats about the brilliance of 2nd edition 40k colours schemes, the correct hair colour of Ragnar Blackmane and Eldar on the whole. Good stuff. Felt knackered when I got home way past midnight, but on the way home whilst driving through Vienna I passed a house with excessive christmas decoration. So there's that. I kinda miss seeing wargamers doing wargamey things. Not that I don't play at all, we just had a really interesting multi-player game of Sharp Practice the other week, but it's nice to see other things for a change as well.

Righty, here's the other photos from the figures in the Explorers Expansion for the Dark Souls boardgame:



The white background makes them look especially monochrome. But (other than with many other things I paint ) I do know my way around Dark Souls a little bit, and I take care to make the figures like they do in the videogames. In real life they're a little bit more colourful actually.








Then there's the Black Dragon Kalameet expansion:







He's a proper big'un. A megaboss, on a 150mm diameter base. Painting him was also interesting, as I tried some new things.


Anyway, hope you like them!

 Sigur wrote:

Is it bad that I kinda want to see the one on the right modified to have hundreds of tiny legs added to the bottom?

Nice work on them, though, Siggy - do the models come across as less monochrome if you take pictures on a black background, out of curiosity?

@Dysartes: Cheers! like that one?



Yeah, I'm not sure that a black background would change much about that (apart from the fact that black backgrounds are for hacks who try to hide the figures of course *)







*) Not my actual opinion. I love everything.

Already nice work!

ps: Sent you fb message

Dark Souls models are looking fantastic

Thanks for sharing

@moskolector: Cheers!

@IGtR=: Thanks muchly. I aim to get those to look 'proper correct'. Wouldn't want to have the DSIC (Dark Souls Internet Community) screaming at me.



Heyhey, sorry for the long silence. I've been sick as a hound the past few days. Really annoying cough and all the other things as well. It's not the 'rona though, so that's good, eh? Anyway, I'm getting better now, which means: back to the painting desk.

For the Deffkilla Wartrike I had an idea which amused me, so I spent a long time trying to fit all those bloody letters onto the driver's back. Turns out that it's barely-to-not visible once the model is all put together. Oh well, still time well spent, because the model makes me giggle now.








More meaningful updates soon, I hope!

I played something! and with my own figures too! Yup, for 2 years we've been planning to get this campaign started, now it finally happened. We're doing the "29, Let's Go!" campaign for Chain of Command. You can read about it and a battle report of the first game here:


https://www.tabletopstories.net/language/en/2022/05/29-lets-go-game-1/




Hope you enjoy the article!

Love that war trike & rider. Time adding humor to models is ALWAYS well spent!

@Gitsplitta: Cheers! Yeah, I thought so too. Also, it's just way better to know that a job is well done. Cutting corners is for activities you don't enjoy. Also, in the particular case of me painting stuff for others I think that people appreciate more rather than getting a paintjob which from a mile away looks like it's done by somebody who tries to be clever and 'efficient'. (We've all seen that sort of paintjob).



Heyhey, another bunch of vehicles is done!















Hope you like them!

OK, the vehicles are brilliant as is to be expected. My question is did you have that tinted cotton fluff already or did you make it just for these photographs!

@Gitsplitta: Thanks very much! I'd made the tinted fluff 2 years ago when I painted the first three vehicles for this army.


Okay, here we go with the single shots:


Kustom Booster Blasta:








Kustom Booster Blasta:









Warboss on Warbike:



Kustom Booster Blasta:








Deffkilla Dragster:





Shokkjump Dragster:







Waaaaghbikes:







....and that's that for now. Hope you like them, Madams and Sirs!

Oh, what a day… What a lovely day!

I really like the little touches of verdigris here and there. Not to much... just little splotches to compliment the red.

@bbb: It sure is!

@Gitsplitta: Thanks very much! Yeah, it makes for a good contrasting colour between all the red, black and white/silver.


...and I even forgot to post the snazziest of them all yesterday! Here's the Boomdakka Snazzwagon:








And that's that, at least for now!

Wow, white curvy flames! You are a brave man.

I do a lot of those with my Bad Moons but it's black flames on a yellow background, which is a lot easier.

@Gitsplitta: Cheers. I love painting curvy flames. Not sure they're that much harder to paint than black ones actually, but I'll take your word for it. Anyway, I find them way easier to paint than even zig-zag or something like that. And they're even more effective usually. With this army especially, the curvy flame and the checkerboard pattern are my go-to patterns (as you may have noticed over the past years ). Oh yes, Bad Moons need the curvy flames. It's part of their way of life!




Spurred on by the WW2 game last week I took stock of my very small German WW2 collection in 28mm. I was rather sure I had a not-too-pretty Pak40 by Black Tree Design somewhere. So I started rummaging through boxes and instead unearthed a leIG18 with crew. Even better. Then I headed over to Warlord's website, fell over due to the head-spinning price increase on everything. Got up, ordered some pretty Empress figures from the Netherlands (hooray for mainland Europe stockists!).

Until those arrive I decided to make 'little' support stuff. The sort of stuff you only think of when having to deal with a limited list of supports and you don't get distracted with all the shiny toys.

For our first game Col.Bourne made some last-minutes low-level supports for Germans (minefields, entrenchments, barbed wire), and had a pretty ingenious idea for depicting minefields. You can seee it here in the picture in the upper right:



Just four posts, makes for great, flexible minefields. Excellent. So I nicked that idea immediately, and made 8 such posts for 28mm gaming and 8 for 15mm gaming (usually we play Chain of Command in 15mm, so I have all sorts of stuff for that size, but 28mm's been rather neglected so far).



I read that the German army used all sorts of markers to subtly mark minefields for friendly troops. I didn't feel like using the old "achtung, minen!" sign. Then I found a photo of a sign saying "Minenfrei" (meaning "free of mines", cleared). Which would be more entertaining, as a sort of detestable trick. Then I read that at some point they used posts, painted olive drab, with little flat parts cut into the wood facing the 'friendly' direction, painted red, with a black M painted on. I like that because it's easy to do and it's a very optimistic idea as well, expecting never to come through again, facing the other direction.



At the same time I made some entrenchments based on these suggestions (whilst listening to the ESC and feeling a bit sick. Not due to the ESC though.):

http://northern-wargaming.blogspot.com/2015/07/ww2-entrenchments-in-28mm-with-tutorial.html

By no means perfect, but my main objectives were not to make them too large, to keep them as generic as possible (so I can use them for several periods) and simple/sturdy. Entrenchments on top of a table are always a bit odd anyway, aren't they. Of course there's the proper way of doing it....

https://tinyhordes.com/dug-in-soviets/

...but the way I did them should work alright. Especially since it's mostly guns which are sitting in entrenchments anyway.

Oh, I also made a media from some plastic warlord sets (and an arm from the Wargames Atlantic Partisans set. Very useful.), rummaging through his little medic's purse.



...and right now the figures from Empress arrived! Ooooh, they're a bit pretty. I'll do a review of them as soon as I find the time. The figures look great. Of course the Gewehr43 is a problematic thing. I bent their barrels all back into shape, but one was so bent (way beyond Krummerlauf), it snapped and I'll have to replace the barrel somehow. Oh well. The Pak40 looks great as well.

Col.Bourne's AAR of the game is up now on his blog, depicting the scenes from the US point of view:

https://leadpoet.blogspot.com/2022/05/chain-of-command-probe-at-la-cambe-turn.html

Well, I'm slowly painting some Empress Germans I got.

Heyhey, tomorrow we'll proceed with our campaign and I'm worried already. So I painted these Empress Volksgrenadiers (and one Warlord dude).



My plan is to use these for replacement in my platoon, so expect to see NONE of them on the table ever! If things go to plan.

Germans are looking good, Siggy.

Quick note - there are a couple of images in your latest Ork Vehicle Gallery posts where the img tags are b0rked. It looks like you've gone [/igm] rather than [/img] to close them out. The Snazzwagon post is OK, but the other two have one each.

Yikes, stripes, you're right! Thanks, I think I fixed it.

Thanks for commenting on the Germans. The campaign will continue tonight!