Hey Hey It's Thursday!

Those of you not native to these fair Antipodean shores quite likely won't have seen
Hey Hey It's Saturday! It was an enormously popular variety show, hosted by a man and an ostrich puppet and it gave us wonders like this...

Years of "exposure" does things to the mind and today's stylings from Barks and The Kiwi quite possibly reflect that. Is this a good thing? I'll let you be the judge....

Cheers,
Millsy

From KeithS: A Postscript of Painting (75 pts)

In addition to lots of adventurer figures, I managed to make a dent in my other backlog pile that's been taking up space in my workspace.  First up, a wolf pack consisting of nine wolves scaled for 25mm, give or take.  At least three are Heritage as they match the Warg cavalry I painted for the nostalgia entry a few weeks back.  The rest are Ral Partha, I believe.  The Heritage are definitely the best.  I love their expressiveness.

From the flank:

A close-up.  I gave most red eyes (per Tolkien) but the three heritage got blue eyes, as somehow that seems more evil to me.

So, while working on them I happened to look down through my magnifier to see this -- a little unnerving to have him staring back at me!

Next up a few minor bits.  My wife has started playing D&D after a mere 20 years of being together.  Her character has a dog companion and a magic owl now.  Happily, I had both sorts of figures in my collection, so here they are:

The family portrait with the figure best representing my wife's Elf thief (a figure from my previous Adventurers batch):

This guy is another 32mm by Mithril for their Middle Earth line.  He's way too big to fit with my other adventurers, so I decided I could use him as a Viking warlord for use with my 28mm figures.  He's pretty tall even next to them, but not unreasonably so.  Further, I really like the sculpt and want to use him for something.  So, maybe not 100% historically accurate, but I'm not too worried about it.

Another miscellaneous guy, a Minotaur based for outdoors.  I'm sort of wishing I'd done him with a dungeon basing now, but oh well.

And, last but not least, I bought a small herd of Aurochs at the last Fall In convention in Pennsylvania with the vague idea I could use them as decoration for a Saga game.  I finally got to them this week.  They're big (should've put a 28mm figure for scale) but not too tough to paint, except that I have minimal skill yet on blending patches of different shades of hide.  Still working on that, though its hard to see the lighter underbodies in this photo.

That's it -- a productive two weeks to be sure!

A host a various beasties that is for sure.  I like the idea of the wolf pack - and yes they are very expressive.

From KeithS: To Dungeons Deep and Caverns Cold... (225 pts)

I had no idea what I was getting into by joining this painting challenge.  I had a plan, more or less, for what I intended to accomplish.  This entry was not part of that plan.  However, as is often the case, it proved to be both the most challenging and the most fun for me.  That said, I present Keith's descent into the hell of old lead.

I've mentioned a few times that I have a lot of old, unpainted figures dating back to the 80s.  While rummaging through it for previous work, I kept coming back to the unpainted adventurers that make up the bulk of them.  Feeling a bit cocky of late, I decided to paint up a few I liked.  After sorting, I lost my mind and settled on 45 or so I thought looked the best.  Most all are Ral Partha or Grenadier.  My thought was that 45 25mm figures would be comparable in effort to 32 or so 28mm Vikings and Saxons.  Wrong, of course!  It's really difficult to production-line so many figures with so many different features and color palettes.  But, getting in over my head is what I do best.

To add to the fun, I decided to base them for dungeon delving rather than my usual flocking.  I experimented with spackle (too brittle, though I beefed it up with a good brushing of watered-down white glue), then went with Milliput sculpted by hand to look like a dungeon floor.  That whole process, including trial and error, was pretty slow, but I do like the results.



The group:

A random close-up:

 Another close-up group shot:

Below are a few highlights.


For whatever reason, I really am drawn to this one.  I guess its all the silver detail on her attire.

The only evil humanoid of the lot.  He looks angry:

Another sorceress type:

Female cleric.  I had two of this figure, but like the colors on this one better:

Male cleric:

 Another wizard with scroll.

I like how this one turned out, especially his shield which sort of matches his axe.  Squiggly dragons - my specialty:

Gandalf type.  Can't see it in this photo but his staff is topped by a crystal (this guy was a pewter figure):

I like the implied action of this one:"

A somewhat Middle Eastern look:

Swordsy:

Another swordsy chap:

This one is actually a 32mm Dwarf by Mithril.  I liked the figure but have no use for 32mm figures, but I thought he made a good Viking-type and scaled well with the 25mm humans.  The shield is a leftover from my Vikings -- not sure where the original one is:

Another cleric:

A female elf archer:

That's it.  The fire is lit, though.  I just bought nearly 100 old figures on eBay for eventual painting.  The dam has burst.  All is lost for me...

Oh i feel the pain , batch painting 45 figures with different colours - your are truly mad! - and then doing dungeon basing - now that is dedication! Another very colourful entry - and over the 1000 points mark - new target time?

From ByronM - 28mm French and 18mm Martians (270 points)

It has been a while since my last submission, but that has been due to both a lot going on both at work and home over the last few weeks, and due to working on a really big submission (at least for me).


28mm French Old Guard


First up in my entry this week is a unit of 31 - 28mm Victrix French Old Guard - "The Grumblers", or more properly in French les Vieille Garde or les Grognards.  This is a continuation of a project I started 3 years ago now, as a promise to Curt to at least try painting some Napoleonics.  I have continued with that and now managed to complete 1 unit each year.

While I love the look of Napoleonics at 28mm scale, I have a love/hate relationship with them when I have to paint them.  The issue, for me at least, is that 28mm means doing lots of detail, but since units are 28-32 men each, and the unit is treated as a single entity, I find it hard balancing how much detail is the right amount.  I like painting 28mm to high levels of detail, but when your dealing with large units you tend to paint for effect and overall look not individual figure appearance.  My OCD brain has issues with those two things being in direct contrast to each other and therefore I am never really happy with the outcome.  Sure, I could spend the normal 4-8 hours per 28mm fig to do a decent paint job, but then these units would take a month of painting 4-8 hours a day.... NOT something I really want to do.  But also never happy with the outcome when I shortcut.  I am sure everyone deals with the same thing, it just bugs me, again see OCD comment above!

The Gumblers are my favourite unit, as they suit my mentality of being able to complain and grumble about things.  They are famous for many reasons, but being allowed to opening complain about things without fear of repercussions is my personal reason for liking them. 

The Old Guard were made up of Veteran Soldiers hand picked for membership into the Imperial Guard which was Napoleon's elite formation which was often referred to as "The Immortals" as a whole.  To enter the Old Guard, soldiers had to:

• Be larger than normal size, be physically imposing
• Have served at least 10 years
• Be under 35 years old when joining the Old Guard
• Have fought in at least 3 campaigns and been in units in each that were at the front and survived being under fire

All of this means that these units were some of the most famous and therefore favourite for many gamers.  That means that they are more represented on the table top then they were in real life, especially given the fact that being an Elite unit, Napoleon liked to hold them back and therefore they often did not see much combat, other than in large groups as a final push to destroy the enemy.



That means, that realistically I should not really have a unit of them, but I could not help myself.  They are for a game, and I am not one of the fanatical historical players.  While I like keeping this reasonably historical, I have no issue changing things, in fact I despise when playing historicals and someone says something like "they wouldn't do X or Y unit would be here", ITS A GAME!!!!  I like keeping things reasonably close to actual history, but have no issue stretching things a bit. 

So, here is my French Napoleonic force so far.  I hope to add some light cavalry this year, and maybe some artillery, but that might be too big task with everything else I have going on, we will have to wait and see.

Given my progress rate, it will be about another 10 years before I can actually play a game... Sigh.  See love/hate comment about Napoleonics early on.

18+mm All Quiet on the Martian Front - Slaver Units

AQotMF is a great game that gets little attention, and will get even less now that the company that created it has filed for bankruptcy.  It is however an awesome little a-symmetrical game that is a lot of fun and has a ton of potential.  It is one of my top 5 favourite games. 

These miniatures are roughly 18mm scale being HO scale officially, but are actually even slightly bigger than that.  The small force I painted up here to expand my Martian force is based around the massive Slaver tripod, which has the ability to control multiple units around it that are not able to make their own decisions.  These include the Martian Drones and the Labototons (human slaves with their brains replaced with robotics).

Part of this force is two units of drones, a ground based unit and a hover unit.  I never like flying stands that have pieces that can break off in a model, so instead of using the pins, I clipped them and put magnets on the top and in the model as can be seen on the one on the right.

Next up are two units of Lobototons, which has to be a new favourite name for a unit type.  Units can be mixed between two types, but I chose to do a unit of each type individually.  This means 9 "slicers" and 9 "zappers".  The names are pretty obvious for their purpose, and I love the idea of sending in slave units to clean up resistance Recruit new Martian allies.

Time to send in units with fire support and cut up the enemy in close quarters.



The total force shown here is: 1 large tripod, 6 drones, and 18 infantry.  Last year Curt counted AQotMF as 20mm as they are closer to 20mm than 15mm, but open to whatever seems right.  I think I would feel better about splitting the difference and counting the infantry as a point value between 15mm and 20mm so that is what base my points estimate on below.  The vehicles for AQotMF though are HUGE and I have no issue with counting them as 20mm, after all that tripod is on a 60mm base!

Overall



So there we go, after a long break between submissions, I think this should give me a nice points boost.  I believe this should be 31 28mm figures @ 5 each = 155, 18 inf @ 3= 54, 6 drones (count as mounted?) @ 6 = 36, and 1 Tripod (vehicle) @ 12.  For a grand total of....  257 points.  Feel free to adjust as required though.  

Well there is a mix if ever i saw one... Old Guard and Martians - what a wonderful hobby varied hobby we have.  I have scored this lot at 265 (a bit over your 257 estimate) points as mix of 18mm/20mm and unusual size items - plus an extra bonus 5 for the Old Guard - bcause they look so good as a unit. - which just puts you into the top 10 ahead of Corporal Millsy and within touching distance of your challenge target ...



From MartinC - Amazingly I've done some painting (70 points)

My long weekend away to Flitwick (near Bedford - I get shouted at for saying it's near Luton) was fab, went to London and the V&A is a must, I only got drunk once (getting old), watched "The Martian" and "Deadpool" (both fantastic), bought new shoes (mine died on Saturday) and built some decking.

Nice model of Fort William, Bengal, in V&A

Anyway I'm rambling. I got back Tuesday lunch time and spent my free afternoon painting some more Republican Romans. These are some allied Voloscan Skirmishers. These are from Aventine and are great figures. I added extra spears by drilling the shield hands and adding a spear made from a plastic bristle with the end flattened and cut to a point. I also based them as skirmishers, no round bases so I cut some out from card so they are actually hexagonal. 

The shields are "copied" from the Aventine website. I bought the figs with cloaks and made then into wolf skins. I think that some more heavy infantry will be required to give a proper allied force.

Overall that is 12 figs and 10 shields so 70 points?

Properly colourful they are Martin..I like to see the extra effort , drilling and addng things - always nice to see unique items.. You are getting a dab hand at the shields - again another great unique feature well done

Wednesdays Minion

Morning all.. the clock ticks its way again and we have reached mid week again - in the main doldrums part of the challenge - The Wednesday crew do however have a few items of interest to share with you

This weeks in flight entertainment comes in the form of "Just Wednesday" by Inspiral Carpets.. who knew there so many songs with a Wednesday theme...

With just over a month left to the deadline - are you getting ready to gird your loins (no Ray you don't need new shiny budgie-smugglers - or to share them with us...) and race for the line....