From StuartL - A Miscellany at Graveyard Beach - 251 Points

Hello all,

Recently work has been irregular, unpredictable and generally taking up far too much time that could be spent on more valuable things like painting minis. Between working online, meetings and other such time consuming things, actually being able to sit down and paint for any length of time has become a bit of a novelty. Similarly, since I have been spending too much time in front of my PC for work, I haven't really felt like sitting down and typing out comments for every post on the challenge recently. My apologies to everyone. I do try to look at everyone's work, there have been some great entries in the past few weeks. So if I didn't comment on your submission, I apologise. 

Which brings me to this post. Rather than submit several entries over a couple of days, I have put them all together into one submission to save some time and effort.

First of all, here are some Weird World War II US Rocket Infantry.

The models are from the Dust Tactics game. I bought into the game heavily when Fantasy Flight was running it, as it was available from Amazon here in Japan at a reasonable price. Sadly, FF decided to drop the game, and then there were a series of debacles with Battlefront and the designer of the game running a kickstarter. The models are that soft kind of plastic that a lot of board game makers favour, but they look pretty good when given a lick of paint.

For five 28mm minis, these should add 25 Points to my total. And, as WWW2 is a new genre from me for this challenge, they add a Squirrel point to my tally too.

Earlier in the challenge, I painted up 5 old GW Lizardmen Skinks. Since then I dug out a bunch more of them from the hobby stash and painted them up too.

Here we have 42 of the old minis, still on their square bases. On the minis posted earlier, I had used a green wash on the skin, but on this batch I went with brown. After comparing the two, I find that the brown gives a much nicer shading to the figures and makes them look more natural. (As far as fictional sentient lizard folk go). I'll probably revisit the first batch at some point with a brown wash.

For 42x 28mm minis, these add 210 Points to my total and to my GW side duel as well.

When visiting my local dollar (100 yen actually, but it's roughly the same) store a week or so ago, I found some bags of plastic palm trees that looked like they were a reasonable size. I picked up five bags and brought them home to see how they would look as terrain.

They are a still a little on the small side perhaps and a bit rough around the edges, but good enough for the gaming table. The pirate figure in the picture is just there to give a sense of scale. I have since gone back to the shop and bought up the rest of their stock, so I should have enough of these to make a reasonable amount of scatter terrain.

The trees fill a roughly 3" by 3" by 4" area of the table, or roughly 1/6th of a terrain cube, so should score me 3 Points.

Finally, the part of my entry related to the Graveyard Beach section of the Chambers of Challenge. Some Pirate Ghosts.

These five spooky scoundrels are from Reaper's Bones line of minis and are cast in a translucent green plastic. I quite liked the look of it as it was, so I painted up the scenic bases and weaponry on the figures, but left the bodies and clothing more or less untouched.

To try to give them a bit more definition, I added a thin coat of Vallejo Transparent Green to the 'skin' areas of the figure. It doesn't show up in the pictures very well, but I think it helps.

Each of these undead pirates has a skull on their base (their own perhaps?) as well as a mix of flotsam and wreckage. 

As for points, I am not sure how to score these. As 28mm minis, they should come in at 25 points, but large parts of them are deliberately unpainted. So perhaps scoring them at half the usual rate? That should get me 13 Points, rounded up. If one of the minions disagrees, they can alter my score as necessary. I believe there was some mention of bonus points for the chamber if the undead had a nautical theme? There are also 5 Skullz for my side duel.

So, in total this submission should get me 251 Points, which I believe puts me over my target for the challenge with three weeks remaining.

My running Duels totals:

GW Points - 1016

Skullz - 456

Squirrels - 18

From StuartL - WWW.WeirdWorldWar2.Com (45 points)

As you can probably guess from the title, this entry is for the Weird sub genre of World War 2 games.

These models all come from the Dust Tactics 1:48 scale line of miniatures, which was later rebranded Dust Warfare and is now just Dust. I first got these minis when Fantasy Flight Games were producing the game. Once it seemed like they had milked it for all it was worth, they dropped the license and it went over to Battlefront. One disastrous kickstarter later (I'm glad I missed it to be honest) and the game is now being produced by the creator of the game universe and seems to cost twice the price it once did, so I probably won't be getting anything else for it.

Up first is a squad of very heavily armed and armoured British Airborne. I don't know how they jump out of a plane with that much kit on, but they are all set to avenge the disaster at Arnhem. Armed with some kind of phaser cannons and rocket powered fists, they are an unstoppable force on the battlefield. Unless you shoot them in their completely unarmoured heads, which seems a terrible design flaw.

This guy is some sort of special character (you can tell because he is wearing shades and chomping on a cigar, only special characters do that). Because he is so bad a$$ he has TWO phaser cannons. I made an attempt at painting the correct unit insignia on the models' shoulders, though really it came out as burgundy and blue splotches. But if you squint your eyes and look at it from a distance, it just might look like a poor attempt at the British Airborne's divisional badge.

And a close up of the other three guys for completion's sake. Interestingly, all three guys have a knife on their belt, just in case that rocket powered fist isn't enough.

To give them some long range support on the battlefield I also painted up a walking tank. One of the points I liked about Dust was that the allied tanks looked kind of Sherman-esque. This one bears a resemblance to a Firefly, though the turret is kind of small. I may dig out my Tamiya Firefly and play about with swapping the turret to see how it looks.

Continuing my theme of being a nerd for insignia, this model borrowed some spare decals from a 1:48 Cromwell kit. These mark it out as being from the 5th Royal Tank Regiment, 22nd Armoured Brigade, 7th Armoured Division 'The Desert Rats'.

The model actually comes apart, which made painting it a bit easier. The turret is removable and there are some other weapon options available for it including a flame thrower and some tulip rockets which I may paint at some point in the future.

By my reckoning, I have 1x 28mm scale vehicle and 4x 28mm scale infantry for a total of 40 points and another notch on the Squirrel tally.

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Weird War 2 is becoming quite the topic du jour - excellent work on these chaps, but if the infantry are 1/48 scale, surely that means they're substantially bigger than 28mm? I'd better sling a few bonus points your way just to be sure. Five should do it!

Ev

From PaulS: Random selection of work part 1 - 65 points

This week has been a bit... bitty with the first bonus round coming up, running out of undercoat for terrain and running out of basing materials.

The first selection finished are 10 anti-walker bollard-things. These were collected from multiple sets of DUST tactics and were one of the few things I kept when I sold it all on as they are useful bits of terrain for any game that involves big tanks. You can see the Strawbear ably demonstrating scale once again.

After those, I decided to revisit Imperial Assault. Inspired by Samuli's excellent work on his Vader, here's mine. Not quite as neat, but not bad for 10 minutes work. The 4 guards were also pretty quick, taking another 20 minutes to complete. I forgot to cut them off their bases before painting though, so they are still on their original solid bases. At some point I may go back and try to cut them off, but for now they are on concrete.

Lastly is a little worm from Shadows of Brimstone, which should be useful in a number of different games, especially things like Strange Aeons where Cthulhu monsters are everywhere. The Burrower is a simple little kit with about 5 pieces, including the rockery base that it comes with.Sadly this leads to the typical problem of some of the earlier Brimstone kits in that the detail is a bit soft and there are some obvious joins in there that can't really be covered up without obscuring the detail that *is* there.

To give you a sense of scale on this little worm, the Strawbear had offered to kindly act as a scale point again. This thing is terrifyingly big... I have no idea where I'm going to store it... but should cause carnage whenever it appears in the mines!

The terrain takes up just under one box, s is 20 points. Vader and his minions should be another 25 points... the Burrower? I have no idea! I leave that up to the minions to decide as it is a 28mm monstrous creature about 3.5 times the height of the Strawbear!

From DaveD, stand in grognard minion..or is grognard minion standing in... who knows

A nicely eclectic mix. I do like Vader and his guards , and as for your Burrower , that looks like the stuff of nightmares ... I have done this a 40mm vehicle at 20 points - so a grand total of 65!

From PaulS: Industrial Terrain (20 Points)

One of my big themes this challenge is to build up a set of terrain for use in Necromunda. As you'd expect from Necromunda, everything needs to be grim and grimy, so lots of rust and dirt will be needed across everything. My pot of rust, that you saw used on the Blighthauled, is starting to run low... so I've been having a play with some of the AK Interactive liquids to see how they compare.

The first batch of items are barricades from the Necromunda box. The darker ones are all using the Modelmates rust. The large barricade on the far right is using the AK liquids and the front two on the left are using a combination of both. My personal preference is the Modelmates stuff as it gives a much grimier effect with an awful lot less effort. 1 pots vs 3. Turns out that Modelmates went under a few years back. thankfully it seems they were reselling a cinematic effects rust medium so I can actually buy it in much larger quantities for cheaper!

Next we have all the doors from the core box with some lighting effects thrown in for good effect. A lot of these have graffiti on them, mostly my cult logo, as seen in red on the small door. These clearly all belong in 'Stealer territory.

Necromunda tables need lots and lots of cover, as well as multiple levels, so what could be better than a massive stack of crates? these came from the DUST game and were one of the few things I held onto when I sold everything off. 15 of these should provide a bit of an interruption to shooting, which works well for my close combat Aberrants.

Lastly we have the active player token. Rusty and grimy from the slums

Here's a group shot with the Strawbear as a scale reference. This lot would take up about 1 cube, so should be about 20 points

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Oh curses, the reaving Strawbear returns once again! Oh, the fear, the horror, the, um, ...sneezy straw!

Awesome work on these terrain bits, Paul. That Modelmates rust is ace. I'm going to have to get some of that to try out. I also really like the inclusion of your Genestealer clan tags, nice one that. Our group is just about to move from Kill Team to Necromunda so these will be great inspiration for when I have to bang out some terrain.

20 points for you, Paul!