Welcome to the Painting Challenge. Here you will find the fabulous, fevered work of miniature painters from around the world. While participants come from every ethnicity, gender, age and nationality, they have three things in common: they love miniatures, they enjoy a supportive community, and they want to set themselves against the Challenge. This site features the current year's event along with the archives of past Painting Challenges. Enjoy your visit and remember to come back soon.
Saturday, 9 March 2024
From DavidB: Little Red Riding Hood, Children's books, Lady Sarah's Cart (95 points)
Thursday, 9 February 2023
From ScottC: 1980's Mash Squad & Sci Fi Ariadna Bikers [1980s][Scifi] (145 pts)
Another double whammy for ScottC the past week.
For my 1980's project I decided to paint up my Warlord Games 28mm Mash set. I bought these guys years ago and always wanted a good excuse to get them onto the paint table. They'll be an excellent set of civilians in any future modern or sci fi games!
For my Sci Fi feature, I knew that I wanted to paint my Infinity Ariadna biker models. I loved being able to switch themes and jump into a more modern/sci fi theme for this batch of figures!
Another fun week of mini painting and more to come! My Black and White project is just about wrapped up.
Point totals:
11x 28mm infantry = 55 pts
5x 28mm mounted = 50 pts
Bonus Points = 40pts
Total: 145 pts
From TeemuL: Very nice minis again and from different themes. I'd only hope for a map... But yes, the Mash squad looks very useful (and the minis are full of character) and the bikers surely have their uses, the green on the bikes look great.
Thursday, 7 January 2021
From ByronM - A visit to the Larder - Noodle stand for Infinity (25 points)
For today's post I have another Chamber of Challenges submission. This time a visit to the larder and therefore I had to come up with something food related. I was stuck on this for a while, I had one idea but wanted to use it for a future room so was going to 3dprint something, and then came across this great model in my pile-o-shame.
This is an MDF / Resin model that I picked up years ago in a kickstarter deal from Antenositi's Workshop. It is a great blend of MDF, plastic, and resin parts and came as a set of 4 or 6 different versions of vendor stands. For this entry I am using the noodle stand. These are great little terrain pieces that add a lot of character to a table, as well as a lot of scatter terrain, which is desperately needed when playing Infinity.
It was quick to assemble and the MDF came pre-painted so it was essentially glue it together and done. The only part that needed to be painted was the food on each side (which came as a resin cast part).
I painted everything up to try and represent pieces of meat, noodles, cabbage/lettuce, and sauces. I am pretty happy with how it turned out, and the wife called it "Cute" so maybe that's a win?
As for points, I just had to paint the food portion (same on both sides) which is fairly small, so I am going to suggest counting it as if I painted 1 28mm figure instead of trying to figure out terrain sizes and claim 5 points for this along side the 20 points for completing the challenge room.
Monday, 9 March 2020
From ByronM: - Tons of Terrain! (280 Points)
First up is a set of shipping containers that we designed almost a year ago, that I wanted to paint a bunch of but never got around to...
These are made to stack together in various ways due to the little tabs on the top and notches on the bottom. Our old ones did not have those and it always bugged me when we would accidentally knock them over. These hold together so much better. The old ones were also simpler and did not have obvious ways to climb them, so these have a ladder on one end and doors on the other.
While we sell them in groups of three, I wanted a lot more of them done so here is the first batch of 10 with another batch coming soon.
At 7" long x 2 3/4" x 2 3/4" in size each they are not small, and cover a lot of table space. This should mean that 4 of them fill a cube, so total the 10 are 2.5 terrain cubes.
Next up is some generic terrain, made for almost any game, but mainly for Warhammer 40k after the new version came out a while ago that essentially made anything other than LOS blocking terrain useless. So this is a very simple electronic relay station or generator station or whatever you want it to be.
It is fairly large at about 6 1/2" x 6" x 3 1/2", so it blocks a lot of lines of sight on the table, while being simple and cheap. The volume is equal to 0.6 terrain cubes.
Last up is a complete set of our Basic Infinity Terrain set, which is admittedly VERY basic. However, that is the point. We have more detailed and advanced sets of terrain for Infinity, however more detail comes with more cut time and therefor more cost.
For anyone who has not played Infinity, it is an amazing sci-fi / anime kind of game that in theory is super cheap to get into as you only need 8-16 models. Or at least that is how it is sold.... In reality the figures are cheap(ish) but the real requirement of the game is terrain. Being super realistic and with every single model being able to interupt an opponents turn to fire any (and every) time they see something move, you need TONS of terrain on the table. So the expense of the game transfers from miniatures to terrain. With lots of terrain the game is hugely entertaining, tactical, and fun. With little terrain (and a little in Infinity is 2-3x what you would use in any other game) the game is over on turn one!
This means that many starting players need something to fill a 4'x4' table fast and cheaply, and that is where this set comes in. It gives them 21 buildings and 7 crates for a low price that they can get done in an afternoon and be playing the next day.
The buildings are all quite large. The large is 9" x 5" x 3 1/2", the medium is 6 1/2" x 4 1/2" x 3 1/2", the smallest is 4" x 4" x 3 1/2", and the crates are 4" x 2" x 2". So each of the 7 sub-sets that make this kit up total to 1.5 terrain cubes, so the whole set of 7 makes 10.5 cubes! Add in all the ladders and walkways and I round that up to 11 cubes.
Then you can add on some ladders, stairs, walkways and scatter terrain as you can, and then replace them with more detailed terrain later.
The funny thing is, I never wanted to make this set, and delayed for years doing so. I finally caved due to pressure from the local Infinity community as they needed simple, fast, cheap terrain. Despite me not wanting to do anything this basic (they really are just boxes), it quickly became one of our best sellers due to the price point.
Also despite selling tons of them, I never painted up a sample set until now.
Oh, and they all pack into each other for easier storage.
Overall this lot of terrain totals up to 14.1 terrain cubes or 282 points, but feel free to round it down to an even 280 to keep it simple. Also, even though the painting on these are simple, wow does it take a long time to paint this much even using a simple scheme....
***
Wow, Byron - the only thing tougher than painting terrain is making terrain! You have shown once more your skill in painting but also as a true engineer of the hobby - the many satisfied customers of Northern Lights Terrain already know this, and it's great to see more examples here. Well done. These look great. In particular I'm a huge fan of shipping crates, but this all looks awesome.
In terms of points, I will "keep it simple" by instead marking you up to 285 points, as it has been shown that painting terrain hurts one's head, and those who make the effort should be thus compensated!
GregB