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 GrimDork wrote:
I hear you, I'm not even working right now (landscaping, what can you do with snow on the ground...) and this time of year still has me hardly painting

Yeah, we had 40 degrees 2 days ago. Even indoors it was a wipeout, since we've had such a cold spring, so 40 was quite the shock to the system.

It was 60 yesterday, after a foot deep snow a few days ago. Wonky here.

I think we're talking across formats, as it were. I meant 40C, which is 104F - but yeah, a lot of our spring was unusually cold - pretty much around 60F and raining for a week at a time, then punctuated by a couple of days in the 95F range, then back down to 60F-ish...

Oh lord yeah sorry forgot the location tag. 104 this time of year does sound absurd!

Haven't been posting in my thread lately. This is mostly because I've been busy turning this:


into this:



I also speed painted 6 boxes totalling 30 DUST Zombies in the last week - 6 days from unboxing to varnish. Which is some kind of record for me.






They're rough and ready - far from beautiful or showcase models, but they're finished and completely appropriate for purpose, which is zombie-cannon-fodder.

Those look pretty sharp for such speed.

Does this mean that you might be getting some gaming in? /jealous.

I've had 2 games of Kings of War in the last week, and will be intro-game-GMing a couple of friends in a game tonight. It might have been a game or two if they'd arrived about 4 hours earlier, but c'est la vie.

I fear the DUST Zombies will remain gaming virgins for some time, though. Can't (re)learn too many systems all at once...

I hear you there with being unable to do too ,many games at once. I remember playing the second smash brothers and switching back to the first and being abysmal at it. Bit different, kinda the same thing.

At least your zombies are done and collecting dust instead sprue grey collecting dust

I've got more zombies that fit that description, though - Studio Miniatures, Zombicide... the (grey) horde never ends!

I sure wish I still had some of the models from when I was painting 20 years ago.....well maybe just the model, the paint job would have been horrendous, unlike your ogres that have weathered the years amazingly well.

Keep up the good work I am interested to see how things go.

Aren't the Zombicide zombies a different, not grey color? If it were me (and it might be someday) I might almost just paint the handful of player pieces, and leave the zombies to their default color. It isn't as if they'll be staying alive long enough to earn paint right

I haven't been at this for quite that long... so I do have many of my first minis. Blah. Trying to sell them

Thanks Archer! I'm still sad about the models that I did sell off back in the day. A fully-painted RT-era Imperial Guard army with a large detatchment of Squats was the biggest set. I'm still hurting over that one.

Grimdork - all must (eventually) be painted. I'll probably leave the zombies with colour-coded bases, and perhaps give them a dominant colour per set since the game colour-codes them (orange jumpsuits, etc). Having said that, you can see there's quite a few Zombies in the queue before the Zombicide ones come along... especially if I'm to paint my Sedition Wars ones thanks to you!

And now, a bit of an update:

So with the paint enthusiasm seemingly on the go right now - for another couple of days at least - here's the stuff I'm working on right now. You'll notice that those bloody Mantic Ogre Shooters have been temporarily put to the side. The lack of pleasure I was getting from painting them certainly affected my enthusiasm, so I figure a short break from them should help me come back to them somewhat refreshed in a little while. Once those six are finished, I'll be able to start on the FUN Ogre stuff! Or the Chariots. Those are less fun.


Axis Gorillaz (feat. Damon Albarn)

Anyway, finishing the DUST Zombies recently got the next few boxes of DUST stuff opened - Axis Gorillas! That's another three boxes disposed of (cleaned up!)


Swordmasters of Hoeth WIP on a temporary regiment base.

My recent games of Kings of War (BetRep to follow sometime in the next week, hopefully-maybe, caused me to start on a unit of Swordmasters of Hoeth, which I guess would be Palace Guard in the KoW Elf army, but is standing in for Twilight Kin Darksome Guard right now. Whatever. They're Elves! The best part of these (so far) is that they were completely unpainted just a week ago. At the glacial pace I paint, getting to this point is pretty amazing. The basing has set me back 2 or 3 days, since it's slow, unfun and tedious. (Hi, Cash!)


Basing almost complete. Then crests and boots!

I'm painting them up a little different to other High Elf armies I've seen. I've had a small collection of unpainted WFB High Elves for 15-18 years, but never had the enthusiasm or a reason to paint them. Ever since The Burning Crusade was released for World of Warcraft, I knew how I wanted to (eventually) paint my High Elves - as Blood Elves rather then the typical White/Blue/Silver with Gold & Red accents most HE armies are painted in. So I'm going Red/Yellow/Gold with Silver and Green accents. It's giving them a nice autumnal feel, as well as regal & rich - though obviously the colours are highly saturated.


Zombies!

Next up we have some zombies from WarZone, circa the early 1990's. These would have been purchased during the file sale phase after WarZone 2nd Ed managed to kill our local enthusiasm for the game, and Heartbreaker started to crash and burn. I never actually played Dark Legion, but regardless was willing to pick up a couple of blisters (I'm guessing 2 or 3, since I have 10 figures here?) on closeout. I basecoated the flesh on these about 8(?) months ago when I started assembling my Studion Miniatures IGG KS figures, but like so many projects over the years, (Ogre Shooters!) they got shoved to the side. The initial plan was to use Army Painted dip on them (and the others) but since the DUST Zombies went together just fine and quick using the AP washes, I'm going in that direction with these instead. They have more details and individuality than the DUST figures - and lots more exposed skin, bone and viscera, but I'm still hoping to have them finished in a couple of days. Again, these are more likely to see the tabletop in 40k working alongside Typhus then a WarZone game, but painted is painted, and they can work across several games.


Some DUST Campaigns

Also inspired by wanting to clean stuff up, I decided to unbox these two of my DUST campaign box expansions. Seelowe because of the Character-model Gorilla inside (who you can see above in the background of the Gorilla pic), and Icarus for the Quonset huts, which I figured I could paint reasonably quickly. All of the rest of the contents got shovelled into the DUST Core box set.


Quonset Huts from DUST.

Considering that these have only been out of their box for about 14 hours, (including my sleep overnight) they're not doing too badly. Hoping to finish them today, and varnish overnight/tomorrow. I might even buy some more, since they're good looking, cheap and effective!

And that's it for this quick WIP post. I'll update again when some of it is finished!

Nice, good to see you rolling right along

Do the batrep if you have time, I've got limited experience with KoW and would love to hear a play by play.

Gorillas AND zombies? Dust sounds.. interesting.. to say the least

What's getting you on the elf bases? Are they glued down before you paint the bases? I couldn't do it. I mean I used to, all the time, but not any more. I've got to take everything I paint and put it on a nail or the top of an old paint pot or something, and any bases get painted separately before joining the two. It's not for everyone, but it's a line I draw. Like some people leave guns off to better/more easily paint the model. I do it with bases.

Man... those gorillas look hitty. Nasty even before you give them what look like electroshock bludgeon fist things.

Keep it comin

Basing for me depends on the model. If the figure is easily glued, then sanded, then I do that. If the figure is going to be a bit of a nightmare to glue before sanding (like these guys) then I do the bases separately, then glue the models down and then fill the gaps at the sides, then re-sand the edges, then re-ink, then re-drybrush. It's not hard, just tedious - mostly because you spend a lot of time waiting for the PVA/sand and then the ink to dry before you can move on and keep painting. In the second pic, you can see where I've painted the edges brown over the white putty on the edges of their bases - so these guys are now ready for the PVA-sanding, though they're going to be in a game in an hour or so, so that'll have to wait till either after midnight or tomorrow morning. (Probably after midnight so the PVA/sand is dry at least tomorrow morning....)

Once the figures are completely done, I'll add a little static grass. These guys are too small and fill too much of their bases to get tufts.

Quonset huts are almost done. Just waiting for some washes on them to dry, then I guess some drybrush weathering and dirty them up a little. So likely tomorrow, and varnish them right after.

DUST is a Weird-WW2 game, and while I admittedly haven't played it yet (soon, now that I have a space to play!) by all accounts it's a pretty good game, and many of the figures can double-duty in 40k, Incursion (a good boardgame quite similar to Space Hulk), Tannhauser (a W-WW2 boardgame cousin to DUST), and of course, DUST Warfare, which is the "wargame" version of Dust.

I've got a Reaper gorilla that would work perfectly with these guys (and in Incursion, from memory). Actually, I think I may have several of him, since there's one in metal and it also came in Bones Vampire, so I'll have 2 or 3 more from that. I just need to find a 40mm diamond-plate base so it matches the rest of the Troop - which I think I should have around here somewhere...

Haha that gorilla... gotta love the mini gun.

I definitely appreciate collecting models for their cross compatibility.

Looking forward to more

Exciting stuff here! Will keep an eye on this.

So I've been browsing over at The One Ring forum again lately, and one of the cool things the community over there does is have a monthly little painting competition for LotR models. The January theme was "Monsters" but, you know, January is over - but I found the Feb theme of a unit of models to be a little off-putting (I'm better with individuals, generally - and especially with start-to-finish stuff). Then yesterday afternoon, a thought hit me - grab out an appropriate monster of some sort from the pile of unpainted Reaper Bones figures I have from the Kickstarter, and speedpaint it as a personal challenge. I knew that it wouldn't be winning the TOR comp, but if I managed to finish it, I'd have a pretty cool prize anyway - a decently tabletop standard finished model for wargaming - KoW being the current hotness (even though I have a couple of completed Ents anyway.)

So I took a look through, disregarded several dragons since it was already 6pm on the 30th of Jan and heat-straightening dragons wasn't something I felt like doing, and eventually found this guy - Good enough for an Ent or Huorn!


"Proof" pic, as required at TOR.


It turned out to not be a fun easy mini to paint as I'd hoped, but pretty horrible, with ill-defined "what the hell is that supposed to be?" "details" all over it. It's not going to win any prizes - over on TOR or anywhere else, but I was at least on track at the end of the first night for a half-decent tabletop model by the end bell.


I also decided to grab a pic before adding the moss and foliage. You can see much of the muddy "detail" on the model that I decided to cover...
I considered OSL for the eyes, but decided against it. I wanted to keep it a little more subtle for this model. I went with green Entish eyes over red Huornish ones.


Here we go. I'm just happy I managed to get this guy done in about 28 hours from baggie to finished - and most of that being drying time from washes, inks, glue and varnish. Thanks to this comp, I now have another model for the table, and since I can be as slow as all hell to paint, this is a very good thing.

Pretty kick ass for the time you spent. The moss really brings it to life.

The grass on his back and shoulders really adds a lot of interest to the mini. It gives him a sort of Swamp Thing vibe.

I am constantly amazed at how good adding a little bit of 'flock' to a model either the base or in this example directly to the model can look.

I will definitely rip this idea off if I ever get around to Tree-kin, Dryads and Treemen.

Great job.

I think he came out really well, I like the vines and moss effect.

What make are the vines? They are very effective looking.

Thanks guys, I was quite happy at how well he turned out. The vines (and flowers) are Army Painter while the multicoloured static grass is AP Steppe Grass while the brighter green is from a (giant) bag I bought many years ago of bright green static grass from a model train store. Might be Woodland Scenics.

Ahh woodland scenics... I went through 2-3 of their economy tubs doing my original fantasy board (all static grass, 4x6 feet lol). Good stuff, I like their tree kits. They look good, and you can turn the inevitable shedding into bushes later

What's next after your treeman mini-break?

Well, I've finished 3 Quonset Huts from DUST Tactics (but suitable for any games from WW2-40k) (WIP above), 3 Jersey Barriers and 5 Hesco Barriers, 10 WarZone Zombies (WIP above) and 5 wooden barrel stacks. I just need to photograph them and get them up on the internets, which I've been too tired to do for the past couple of days.

I've got a couple of Bones Golems I started awhile ago that I plucked off the shelf this morning before work to throw back into the rotation to finish, as well as all those Gorillas and High Elves I started a couple of weeks ago (WIPs above).

Excellent. Will. Watch this space.

Really cool treeman model!

Here's some of the most recent stuff:



A pair of metal GW Dark Elf Repeater Bolt throwers.

I got the pair cheap off eBay already assembled and primed, so the day after finishing the treeman last week, I decided to spray them with my two custom sprays that I got made for my DE/Twilight Kin - since I no longer play WHFB, I'm happily basing everything for Kings of War with it's more relaxed basing options - so round 40mm bases from Proxie Models to the rescue. By the end of the day, they were all but finished. Of course, I need to do the crew sometime soon as well... I guess.



Secret Weapon Hesco Barriers


Secret Weapon Jersey Barriers

Over the Christmas-New Year period, I picked up a couple of sets of Secret Weapon Miniatures' "Bag O Crap" thanks to a post in Dakka Discussions (which I now can't find!). Essentially miscasts and bits that don't make their quality control standard. I've half-written a review of them, so I'll save the detailed commentary for later, but suffice to say that a couple of other resin companies might want to take note of what Quality Control means. Puppetswar in particular. These were done in Mid-Jan, but I didn't get a chance to photograph them until now.

These painted up nice and fast, and (will) look good on the tabletop. I'll probably need to buy a ton more of each, though... I went for a bright orange plastic that had both been sunbleached and dirtied up in use for the Jersey Barriers. Despite being pretty small and simple, I'm quite happy with how they turned out. These barriers will work nicely in everything from moderns to zombiepocalypse to 40k and everything in between.

Next up: More Zombies!

All looks pretty good. But a question arises... what kind of zombies?

WarZone 1st edition zombies...