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Like many of us, I made a 2025 New Year's Resolution to paint at least one miniature a day. Surprisingly, I kept at it and currently have finished 327 minis so far (today is Day 228).

I don't really have any method to my madness other than to pick ancient (some decades old) projects off of my gaming table or from a nearby drawer or cabinet. Then I paint them. Because I have the laser beam focus of a gerbil, I have collected a lot of different miniatures for varied games, periods, and genres.

Since I have already completed 327 minis, I will post pics and notes of them a few at a time until I catch up to the present and then continue the blog weekly or so from then on until the last day of this year.

The first project completed were 26 15mm scale Russian Napoleonic skirmishers for the General d'Armee 2nd Edition ruleset. My local gaming group plays a lot of historical miniatures and our favorite periods are the Napoleonic Wars and World War 2. We favor the 15mm scale as most of us have been at it since the 1980s when 15mm miniatures were the hot new thing (taking over from 25mm).



The 26 Russian skirmishers are comprised of 8 line infantry in shakos, 8 line infantry in caps, and 10 Jagers in shako. The metal miniatures are by Old Glory 15s (OG15) produced by 19th Century Miniatures in the USA.







The detail on 15mm minis is limited but I did try to paint buttons and the sword knots with the right colors for these units. The line infantry have white trousers and the Jagers have dark green trousers with red stripes as well as shako plumes to distinguish them.

All in all a good start to my year of painting.

I wish that I could say after starting this year off right by painting the Russian skirmishers, that I pressed on diligently with more miniatures. However, I got distracted by several projects that had nothing to do with painting my pile of shame.

The first distraction was terrain. My gaming group needed more hills so I bought a couple of one inch thick 2' x 2' XPS foam panels and cut them with a hot wire foam cutter into the hill shapes that I wanted. I managed to give them sloped edges without making the edges so thin or feathery that they would break easily.





For paint, I asked my hardware store to mix me a quart sized can of nice bright green latex paint. Unfortunately, my idea of nice was something akin to GW Moot Green.



After my eyes recovered from the retinal burn, I went back to the hardware store and got them to mix me a nice, sane brown and a very comfortable green. This enabled me to paint my new hills with hues that my gaming group could enjoy.



The last photo is from today, and the hills have survived two or three gaming sessions per month for the last seven months. I should have sealed the flock on top of the hills. It has scuffed off a bit. When I reapply flock, I will make sure to seal it.

All of the hills came from one 2' x 2' XPS panel. I still have one more to make more hills, but that project has yet to distract me.





Automatically Appended Next Post:

The second distraction was a miniature wargame rule set for ancient battles, Age of Hannibal, by Little Wars TV. The rule set allows fast and simple, but really fun, simulated battles of the ancient times. The rule set also includes quite a few battle scenarios. My friends and I had already played the Battle of Issus, Alexander the Great's crushing victory over the Persians in 333 B.C. Now we wanted to play something with Romans so we settled upon the 218 B.C. Battle of the Trebia River.

Now, neither I nor my friends own any ancient miniatures so we play these large battles using paper miniatures! I download them from a website called Juniorgeneral.org, edit them to make units that do not already exist on that site, and print them in a 10mm size. Then I cut them out, glue them with PVA to thicker paper, cut them out again, and glue them to 40mm x 40mm square bases. It takes a few days but voila, a cheap and easy army.

My friend agreed to create the Romans so I only had to create the Carthaginians.















It is not art but it is very effective and the armies are very light and easy to transport to the game store.

The good news is that after these distractions and working on scatter terrain trees, which I will not inflict on you, I returned to painting my pile of shame.