From KeithS - Trolls (63 points)

"Miserable, no good, robbing Trolls!" -- Thorin Oakenshield (at least the Rankin Bass version of the Hobbit; I really do live my life via movie quotes).


This is a quick diversion I worked yesterday on my final snow day.  They are 8 Trolls minis from Otherworld and one that is stylistically very similar but I have no idea where I got it (except for the base its hard to notice the difference at a casual glance).  I'd wanted some Trolls for wargaming that scaled well with 25 or 28mm but cheap ones were hard to come by, so I bit the bullet and went top of the line.  And they are masterful figures.  Lots of detail, plenty of personality, somewhat customizable (2 different heads to choose from and adjustable arms).  I was quite pleased with them, though I think they came out darker than I'd have liked.  I was using a green ink wash I'd not used before (PSA: kids, test your washes before going hog wild with them).  No matter, they're pretty in their own special, Trollish way.


Here's one happy camper.  They all have lots of warts or sores -- I did those in a very light olive so they stood out a bit.  I did the nails in ivory and let the green ink stain them murky colored.

This chap brought along a friend, or what was left of him (the head he's holding was an extra Viking head from that project).  Perhaps he uses it to play ball, or it might just be a snack.  I'm not sure.

From behind and one from the side.  They have a lot of personality, and personality go a long way.

Certainly wouldn't want to run into this guy in a dark alley, or across a battlefield.

The group shot (outside of the walls, of course). 

I'm pleased with the way they turned out, even if too dark for D&D standard Trolls (with their "mossy colored skin.")  They measure about 38mm from toe to hair, though they are bent over, so I figure they fall into the 40mm category.  Getting tem done really frees up some space -- they'd been sitting atop a small cabinet on my work desk for months. 

Next up, more miscellaneous old lead and perhaps a company of foes for the Trolls, aside from the Vikings, of course.

A very productive period for you Keith - these certainly look a fearsome bunch. Always good to clear up projects that have been hanging around. Well done, and yes i gone with them being 40mm - Big Nasty Trolls alright.

From JohnSe - Fireforge Medieval Foot (240 points)

Medievals have turned out to be the trickiest period I've tried. With World War II there are reams of uniform information to reference for painting. Dark Ages are pretty much "muted earth tones to taste" and information for Ancients is so spotty you can get away with painting them however you'd like, but Medievals... there's just enough heraldry to be confusing and intimidating enough to put me off getting started.

Luckily the Analogue Painting Challenge was just the kick in the rear I needed to throw caution to the wind and paint up these Fireforge Foot with a "good enough for now" paint scheme.

Researching potential paint schemes, I became interested in Edward I. The bad guy from Braveheart was involved in battles from his youth until his death, fighting across the British Isles in the Baron's War and against the Scots, even taking part in the Crusades. His livery was a striking yellow and red, also used by his son Edward II at Bannockburn, and variations on that color scheme appear amongst much of the nobility that fought with or against him. Standardized uniforms were not used during the medieval period, but it's not beyond reason that soldiers would use some sort of identifying color (either a piece of clothing, strip of cloth, or shield color) to identify themselves as belonging to the retinue of a lord.

I painted these Fireforge figures up in various earth tones, with a number of red or mustard yellow tunics, surcoats, and leggings. I gave the shields a variety or yellow and red color schemes. I thought there might be some shields provided by a lord, but most would be provided by the men themselves. Without a factory stamping these shields out I tried to vary the color tones and patterns to represent the variety of sources these shields would come from.

Hopefully the colors will tie the figures together but avoid looking like a uniformed Napoleonic regiment. I'm planning on using these as Edward's household troops, but with such a common color combination I can also use these as the retinue for any knights or nobility with red or yellow heraldry.

I sabot based these for mass battles (such as Hail Caesar), but based them individually so I can try them out with Lion Rampant.

That's 48 foot, at 5 points each, gives me an extra 240 points by my count.

Despite your difficulty in getting started with these John you clearly made a great success of them in the end. Red/yellow is one of my favourite colour combinations for any period but works especially well for medieval as it combines well with earthy browns and muted greens. I can't fault your reasoning regards the shields, quite the opposite in fact. 

48 figures in one batch is a cracking effort and your resulting 240 points gets you well within sight of your initial target of 400. Nice work!

From Barks - WW1 German Artillery (12 points)

Just a quickie this week as my time was taken up with CanCon 2016 and the Antipodean Bloggers Meet-Up!

This is a 10.5cm FH 98/09 from Plastic Soldier Company for their Great War range. I've based it on a Battlefront base and used some Vallejo Dark Earth paste for basing, which I much prefer to my previous WW1 entry basing efforts.

P.S. My Halflings from last week were really fun to play with, coming 28th of 36 in the Blood Bowl tournament with a 1:3:4 W:D:L record!

She might be small but she's a beaut Barks. There's loads of detail in the gun and the crew are just marvellous. I like the paste over the Battlefront base - you'd hardly know that's what it was. Great texture too, looks just like horrible Flanders mud! 12 points for your total... Cheers, Millsy.

PS. Great to meet you and congrats on the result with the 'flings. They take a lot to master from what I've seen so that's an outstanding first effort.

From BrendonW - Violent people through time (187 points)

Greetings. Hope your painting is going well. This weeks BrendonW instalment contains......

12 x 28mm mounted troops, 13 x 28mm Infantry (2 x hand painted shields) all plastic.

First lets begin in the Dark Ages. Various Conquest Games Plastics armed with bows ready to make the Violence especially in Englaland.

Next and still in the Dark Ages. Gripping Beast and 2 Violent Berserkers made from Warlord games Celts bodies but with Gripping Beast Heads. The archer has parts from a Conquest Games kit.

Next is Gripping Beast Arabs ready for violent acts. Really happy to have made so much progress on this force so far. Painting patterns on the horse blankets behind the saddle is great for testing creativity and patience.

Finally forward in time to some civil war violence. Perry Miniatures Light Horse.
1 Bowmen and 2 lancers. Again really happy to make such good progress on the two boxes of these I purchased. Really nice miniatures with so many options.

That's it. Photography not so good this time round. Will hopefully be better next time but you get the general impression of my work. Cheers

Brendon kicks of Antipodean Thursday with another cracking selection of historical miniatures from the Gripping Beast, Conquest, Warlord and Perry stables. I must admit when I first read the title my brain translated it to "History of Violence" and I was a bit disappointed not to see Viggo Mortensen feature somewhere!

I think your horses are getting better with every post Brendon and I especially like the dun in this batch. I think you should give a skewbald a go in your next batch to really test yourself! Another grand batch of 28s mate and well worth the 187 points including a couple for the shields.

Thursday, Thursday, Thursday in the afternoon.....

It's Thursday, Thursday, Thursday in the afternoon. That means we lucky Antipodeans are up and about even as the rest of you sleep the sleep off whatever it was you were drinking on Wednesday night.

Things have been pretty quiet this week but I can promise some goodness from Barks and our resident Kiwi if nothing else so stay tuned folks!

As for me, I'm heading off to the Man Cave to finish my entry for the next bonus round. Here's an artist's impression of me hard at work earlier today to help set the tone...

Caution! May contain goats and thunder.

Cheers,
Millsy the Antipominion

ByronM - 28mm Spectre Modern SAS troops in Digital Camo (20 points)

Continuing with my foray into modern figures I have been working on more of the excellent figures from Spectre and their Kickstarter I backed a while ago.

This entry is a small group of SAS recce troops that I have done attempted to do in a digital camo pattern for desert warfare. This proved to be a major pain in the ass.

This is the basic look I was going for.  Easy, right?

I found a few tutorials out there on various ways to do it, and didn't really care for how most of them turned out.  In the end I found a video tutorial that showed a method to paint the base colour first and then use square toothpick tips to apply the pattern. It actually worked fairly well, but then I went and did something stupid and washed them to give some depth, and it completely washed out all the light colours. DOH! Back to the starting point and I had to redo all of the camo.  So, at least one of these guys has 6 layers of methods on him. Luckily the figs has so much detail that it still shows through.

Overall, I am still not very happy with how the camo turned out, but after painting one of them multiple times and starting to get very frustrated I had to just take them as they were before I lost it.  I may look at trying some more digital camo sometime in the future, but it will not be any time soon.

I am pleased with how the figs look on the table, but close up they just fall apart to my eye.  Maybe it is due to the fact that the camo hides the detail and I just want to be able to see it.  I tried to pick out some details like straps, barrel tips, etc, but in general everything I find online shows almost everything being the same colours to help blend things in, even my barrel tips and sights would not really be black/grey but would be camo coloured.

Before anyone points out the fact that SAS does or does not use USA digital camo 5.11, I am not painting these specifically as SAS, that just happens to be the figures base.  I picture these as any elite recce force, not specifically SAS.

So, points wise these 4 face off against the 20+ militia I painted up previously, so it is time to see how that works on the table.  So, 4 28mm figures at 5 points each gives me another 20 points to my total and to the Modern Challenge I am in.


A very nice set of elite special forces types Byron. I think the camo has worked fine, but as its your army if you want pick out some bits why try it and see? Now it reminds me i have not watched Blackhawk Down for a while.. weekend viewing i think.

From SeanS - 4 Ogres and a Rat (21points)

Hi All,

Not as productive as I need to be to get on track, but here is a small selection of figures I finished while watching the Cardinals get shellacked by the Panthers on Sunday.

These characterful little sculpts come from Splintered Light in their 20mm fantasy range here.

I decided to go with the Reaper golden skin triad, but used only the shadow and mid and then wased with the shadow again. I think some areas could have used a dark lining where the golden shadow hits a darker color, but only realized that in hindsight.

I thought I'd show  closeup of these faces as i liked them a lot. Perhaps I should have used a tripod, the picture isn't as clear as I'd like.

Here we have the Giant Rat from Reaper. I got him with the Basic Learn to Paint kit : Fur and Armor. The Drybrush highlight of the fur didn't really come across. In general I've taken to picking out fur with a small brush instead of drybrushing. Funny as that used to be my go to technique.

The flesh was just good ole Reaper tanned skin and the boils were Rosy skin, a wash of red and then a drybrush of rosy skin again. He is 28 mm scale on a 25 x 50mm base.

Here's a shot of the group so you can make a relative size comparison. The Ogres are pretty large, but I've only scored them at 4 points each as many of my 20mm offerings have been fairly small goblins and such. The rat I scored at 5 because he is essentially a riderless mount. So 21 for the lot.

Just wanted to show this weeks change in photo set up. Normally I use static lights, a tripod and a laptop to remotely control taking photos. This time I used some remote flashes. This set up evolved as I was messing around, it's not quite right. All of these photos were still under exposed, so I tweaked the levels in GIMP. But I did manually adjust the shutter and aperture and hand hold the camera for these. Thanks for looking.

Fine painting Sean, the facial detail is excellent and as you say they are very characterful, and rat is particularly nasty looking. Adjusting things in GIMP... hmm wont go there.. Nice work.

From KeithS: Saxons, part 2 (160 points)

My post-Snowzilla painting entry is the Saxon finale, consisting of 32 unarmored 28mm figures from Wargames Factory yet again.  This is all they carry for Dark Ages, though I would not be inclined to purchase more, given better options out there.  Still, they turned out well enough.  My painting was much hampered by snow shoveling so, even though I had an extra long weekend, my arms were so sore that painting was almost impossible!

Like the unarmored Vikings, the front faces of the figures had pretty soft detail while the backs were again a good deal sharper.  But what really irked me about these ones were the awkwardness of the poses, especially the arms and most definitely for the bowmen.  There simply aren't any arms to make good poses for them, though I cut some to make them at least a little better.  Oh well, they look pretty enough and I paint for gaming, not display.

First up, some photos form the front of the group.  I painted the dragon banner based on the photo from the box.  The shields are decals -- I did not need all that many for this group because of archers and because I wanted to mix things up a bit and give some guys two weapons.  I was out of kite shields so they got a mix of "Saxon" and "Viking" round shields, which are more or less identical except for size.  The color palette is the same as I've used all along, and I've kept to making them all mix

Where'd you learn to hold a bow!  Clearly he's a levy and lacks experience! (A more skilled person could've probably made big improvements with the poses and I certainly learned a lot for the next time I need to do this).

 Some dramatic poses along the castle walls.

I rather like the shields with multiple heads on them.  I also really like that the set came with a lot of seaxs (seaxes?).  I tried to use as many as I could...heck, if you're gonna have Saxons you gotta have seaxes!

A side view -- they look serious and have a bit of a sense of motion.

From the back.  The quivers are really too big for the figures, but they are easier to paint that way.

Seax and spear, witha  sword to boot.  He's like Danny Kaye in The Court Jester..."the knights will choose their weapons!" "Oh, I'll take one of those, and one of those, and some of those..."

The obligatory group shot:

 

Overall, not the greatest figures, but plenty good enough for a game of Saga.  Thankfully, it's time to shift gears to something else.  100 Saxons and Vikings about wiped me out. I may revisit them at some point a bit, as I need some proper warlords to lead these happy bands!  Next up, Trolls!  I might squeak them in today as they're almost done.  If not, there's always next week!

Today's bonus pick...my car and truck on Sunday morning!  Really put a damper on the painting!

Keith continues a stonking day - with yet more Saxon, Thats a fine collection you have built up - nice a colourful too. Aaah snow... that kind of covering would see the UK in meltdown - can you meltdown with snow?  Best stay in and paint..

From AaronH - Twelve 28mm ECW cavalry from Warlord Games (120 points)

This entry is twelve 28mm ECW Cavarly from Warlord Games (despite the misleading title to draw you in).

Twelve horse.

These are a plastic set from Warlord. I am a fan of their ECW line. The faces have a lot of character. The plastics are very nicely modeled. These don't disappoint. They've done some clever things with the headgear to give you some nice variety. The horses are fairly splendid for plastic.

The models are easy to assemble and paint. Truth be told these are easier than their infantry.

The trumpeter looks like he may have landed wrong.

There's lots of variety on the sprues. Pistols, swords, a mixture? Done. The horn is nice. I'm not so sure what to do with the lance though.

A handsome mount.

I really like the horses that come with this set. Good conformation and lots of spirit. They also come with plenty of holsters, in different styles.

If you choose carefully you can really give them an active, mid charge, sort of look. I did not choose carefully.

I am still not a fan of painting horses but these were almost fun. They are especially remarkable when compared to the Wargames Factory Celtic nags I painted for last year's challenge. Night and day.

All in all I highly recommend this set as a cheap and quick way to bulk up your ECW horse. I have another regiment of twelve of these and I'm actually looking forward to painting them.

The Wednesday crew continue to up the ante, with more lovely cavalry. These could even tempt me into a new period. The unit works really well together , lots of movment - the thing i always want from mounted troops - grand job!