Squirrel Duel - First Update

    Hello all Squirrellers, and welcome to the first update for the Squirrel Duel.

    It is still early days for the challenge yet, and many members of the family Sciuridae are huddling in their nests for warmth during these cold months, and so are many of our duelists it seems. I have checked through the posts with the Squirrel label and cross-checked with individual posts by everyone who said that they were interested in joining the Squirrel Duel. I know that some of our contestants may have posts in the queue waiting for their posting day/time, so I apologise if you feel that you missed out. I will count your Squirrels the next time I prepare an update. 

    So, without further ado, here is the current scoreboard, with challengers listed in alphabetical order.

    Now, there is one small point that needs to be cleared up. Our illustrious/infamous Snowlord has posted three entries with the Squirrel label so far, but one of those entries wasn't for a full point.

Curt's beautifully painted Raven Guard

    There were only three figures in this entry, which means Curt owes 2 more Raven Guard to earn the full Squirrel. Now, I am sure that he is good for it, (and he even acknowledges it in the post in question), so I have counted the entry for now. However, I will be monitoring his posts carefully to ensure that he follows through. I'm honestly hoping Curt paints more of these figures anyway, because they look fantastic. 

    We have only scratched the surface of the Squirrel Side Duel so far, and already we have had some varied and interesting entries. Here are a handful of the ones we have had so far.

    

Kerry's camel cavalry

MartinC's adorable halflings

Ray's retreat from Moscow

Killian's Zona Alfa explorers

    Thank you for all of the Squirrel entries so far, I look forward to seeing what other fantastic miniatures get painted up to join our side duel. 

    -The Squirrelfinder General

From AdamW: Terrain: We build too many walls and not enough bridges (5 points)

Happy New Year all, and hope you all have a successful challenge.

I'll start with an apology for the blandness of my first entry. I was busy before Christmas renovating our cloakroom, so wasn't able to get any paint on anything miniature. 

My plan this year involves painting projects that are all several figures, so the first one won't be ready for a while. 

Whilst clearing up my painting area I came across this stone bridge. It has been languishing for some time (I prefer to not count how many weeks/months/years things sit in 'the pile').

A simple paint job with a mixture of browns and grey acrylics, some washes and some weathering powders and below is the result. A quick and dirty entry to get an entry in before the deadline.

I promise to make some more interesting entries as the challenge goes on. Probably.

This a 15mm bridge, however, would also work as a small 25mm one.  Dimensions  11"long, 3" wide and 2" high.  I've no idea of manufacturer as it came in a bundle of buildings someone was clearing out.  It was resin and sat badly as was twisted, however, I managed to straighten enough for use.

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Hey Adam, that looks very much like an old armourcast bridge I have, but not quite, so probably need someone else out there to validate which company this was made by.

No matter who made it, you did a great job getting it ready for the table.  While a fairly big piece these types of terrain pieces are pretty simple to get ready for the table so I am going to mark it as about the same time as painting a 28mm fig.  I can see you did multiple colours which make it look very realistic, but still a pretty fast piece to do up.  I would be very happy to see this piece on one of my tables!  Great work.

- Byron

 

from RayR - Retreat from Moscow - Illyrian regt 40pts

I've been chasing my tail over the Christmas festivities, painting whenever the chance came my way, which to be honest was quite a lot, but due to a spilt pot of uniform grey, instead of painting just one unit like I planned, I've ended up starting a few units at the same time, so today, I put most of the figures aside and chose one unit to complete, which i did in the last 5 minutes! Its not my planned unit of WWII Finns either.

Here we have another unit for my and Lee's Retreat from Moscow project and no, before you ask, we haven't had a game yet........

Four regiments of the Illyrian regiment served in Marshal Ney's 10th Corps, in Razout's 11th Division, under Brigadier Compere, along with two regiments of the 2nd Portuguese.

The figures are a mix of Front Rank and Perry Miniatures, and some have a distinctive blue/grey cost, for no real reason other I wanted them to stand out .

Trying to find any info on the units proved quite difficult, I hoped that they'd have a different uniform colour, like the green coated Croatians, I'd have used different figures if that was so, but it seems they wore an identical uniform to normal French line......how boring!

Points mean prizes

My Illyrians will give me 40 points

8 figures x 5 pts each.

From DaveD . Welcome back to the fray Ray. Thats not such a disaster I feel.. you are now ahead of the game for next week. Those lads look suitably chilly . I like the choice of the blue grey greatcoat . I certainly works . 40 points it is .

From Frederick C - Ranging Shots - SciFi Medical Station, and Scatter Terrain (20 points)

Following the end of AHPC XV I thought I would work on the various terrain pojects that I had prepped or that challenge. I did complete some Middle Earth/Osgiliath ruins, but after that things came to a crashing halt. In the run up to AHPC XVI, I had a hard time making any progress on prepping any new figures for the challenge. When registration opened up in Nvember I saw a lot of comments from past participants saying that they had lost their 'mojo', and they would not be participating this year. I confess that I could strongly relate to those feelings, but I thought that unless I had he push from the challenge, I would get nothing done. I have dropped my point target to half of what I have achieved in past years, and at the moment I feel I may be hard pressed to achieve that. So no opening salvo this year. Just some ranging shots to see how my terrain projects might fare in order to  decide if it's worth continuing with the leftover projects from last year that got shelved. 

For my first submission for this year's challenge I present some pieces of SCi-Fi terrain from ScotiaGrendel. long with some 35mm Figures for size comparison only

Scotia Grendal Sci-Fi Scatter terrain with a meter stick in the foreground 

 

Six Sci-Fi shipping crates L 25mm x W 20mm x H 20mm 

Sci-Fi Shipping crates

 

Ammo and Fuel cache L 100mmxW50mm x H 30mm

Fuel/Ammo cache view 1

Fuel/Ammo ccache view 2

Diagnostic station L 74 x W 33 x H 40

Diagnostic station and medical bed View 1

   

Medical bed L60 x  W 25mm x H 20

 

Diagnostic station and medical bed view 2

Row of Cryochambers LL110mm x W 30mm x H 40mm

Cryochambers row & single
 

Single cryochamber L15mm x W 30mm x H 40 mm 

cryochambers View 2

 

Cryochamber controls

Row of Cloning/Bacta tanks L62mm x W25mm x H 40mm

Bacta/Cloning tanks view 1

Bacta/Cloning tanks View 2

 

Single Cloning/Bacta tank  L 30mm x W 25mm x H 40mm

 

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Thanks for the entry Frederick, I really like a lot of these pieces and while all fairly simple, they will add a ton of cool factor to a table!  I can see them being used in a ton of different skirmish games to spice up the table a bit.  The colours chosen keep them usable for so many different things.

As for points I am going to count each of the 3 major elements (vats, cryochambers, and medical station) as the equivalent of painting a 28mm figure, and then the same for the boxes and barrels together, so 20 points are being awarded to you for some great little items. Awesome work Frederick, keep it coming!

 

-Byron 

From TimP. Single 28mm Figure: Axe Killer (inspired by Dead Man's Shoes) - 5 points

 Just to get on the leaderboard and stay in the game.

Figure from Pandyman Miniatures in the UK for their game Threat Level: Emergency Response - modern Police/EMS game.

From DaveD . Well that you off the mark Tim . He’s enough to cause nightmares by the look of it . A few more pics of your entries in future would nice to show the all round skills! 

KentG - Terrain, Feudal Japanese period terrain (60 points)

 I’ve been planning my Feudal Japanese project for a couple of years now, 

I ordered ten buildings plus a bunch of the bits, only a small amount has arrived

so I thought let’s crack on into them.

I’m not used to painting buildings and to paint the panels two layers each was a real challenge 

But I’m super happy with the final outcome, this is my first attempt at painting 3D 

Printed buildings, it’s amazing what can be achieved.

First up is a fountain which I added some Vallejo water not

Width  90 round  70 Height  

Shrine Gate, Torii Gate, please excuse not re had to paint the red 4 times 

To get it to cover fully, the funny thing is it’s the bamboo I really like about this 

Piece of terrain 

Width. 100 Length 80 Height 90

First of the buildings had so much fun painting all three with another 7 still

To do

Width 100 length 130 height 110

I wanted this one to look a little older so changed the colour of the wood

and put a wash over the paint to dirty it up a bit

Width 130 length 130 height 90

final this has to be one of the favorite so far a very cool piece for the table

added water to the wee pond bowl but this time added some blue wash to the bottom first

painting the inner panels was extremely hard but the more i did the happy i was with them.

Width 170 length 140 height 110

tried to do 4 different colored woods

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Wow, what a great first terrain submission to look at and judge!  Awesome work overall Kent!  I really like all the different tans and browns that you used to give everything a similar but different look from one building to the next.  All the little details make these buildings spring to life and I am sure everyone out there will agree that they would love them on their game table.

You also did a great job on just painting them, and by the looks of it NOT trying to drybrush details on, as that makes the layer lines show up on 3d prints.  With prints its generally better to just get colours down like you did. 

As for points I am going to go with the fountain and the gate as each being about the same work as a figure so 5 points each, while the buildings are obviously a ton of work and detail,  I am going to say that each one would likely take me at least 6 hours and score them at 15 points each and then throw another 5 bonus points your way as I think these are excellent examples of terrain! That gives you a grand total of 60 points and a big congratulations for some great terrain for your table!

- Byron

From KillianF - 10mm Warmaster Black Orcs (42 points)

Good day all,

Firstly thank you for the kind comments on my first post. It's provided more than a wee bit of motivation for the next few batches.

Instead of the long-promised Goths, I procrastipainted 4 bases of Forest Dragon 3d Printed Black Orcs. I also nearly finished 3 bases of Wargames Atlantic plastic Boneblade Skeletons, but they require a little more work to be complete. Painting both however allowed me to compare 3d printed and plastic models. The ability of 3d printing to capture detail and, critically, depth at 10mm far eclipses plastic in my opinion. As fun as the Boneblades are, I have a large backlog of 3d printed Forest Dragon that I think will bump up the queue.

 

Off to do sum krumpin'

If you've got the sneaking suspicion I just picked models I could get away with a quick drybrush-wash-highlight, well done, you're quite right. That was precisely what I did. Paint smart, not hard.

Although the banner was handpainted. Why paint smart when you can paint painstakingly in minuscule detail that no-one will notice?

Black Orc Banner

Points:

40x 10mm Infantry (Orcs): 40

Total points claimed: 40

Claims

1x Squirrel Point (again please check)

Thanks again, and see you all soon.

KF 

From DaveD. Who doesn't like to a rampaging bunch of Orcs.  These look just the part . lots of aggression and I do like the massed ranks look. That's always to bonus of 10mm . That's also fine colourful banner they acquired as well. Let’s call that 42 for the total look .

Hey and Congratulations to you and your wife on your first born ! 

Sunday Welcomes back Terrain to the Challenge!

Good Morning everyone (Or whatever time it is you are reading this),

Here it is, the first Sunday for terrain posting in Challenge #16! It is a balmy -16 degrees Celsius here in Winnipeg with a clear warm day of -10 projected which is a nice change from the more wintry -28 it was a few days ago and the yet more snow we got yesterday.  Oh well, there is a reason that Winnipeg painters are known to be pretty good and damn prolific...  we have 6 months a year of this stuff to hide from inside!

The view this morning from the kitchen getting my coffee

Just a reminder that there are no hard and fast rules for terrain points this challenge so everyone is subject to my evil machinations! <insert evil villain laughing>. If anyone is not up to date on the basis for my dastardly plans on how to deal with terrain and points please check out the entry post here: Terrain Submissions and Scoring for Challenge XVI.

Anyway, on with the show!  With the challenge now in full motion and handed off from Curt to the Minions we have at least 2 entries of terrain this week with maybe more to come later? 

- Minion Byron

P.S. Oh, and I know Christmas is over, but I wanted to pass on a Christmas tip for all you parents out there for next year to help keep the kids in line over the holidays. It worked a treat here...