From Barks - Imperial Assault Hoth figures (79 points)

Here are the rest of my figures for the latest Star Wars: Imperial Assault release.

Echo Base Troopers. I like the effect on their goggles.

This was my first ever attempt at snow basing, and I've been scouring the internet for tips for several months prior. Here's my final recipe:

• Builder's plaster to build up the groundwork
• Paint pale blue-grey, then drybrush white
• Paint the figure, then varnish
• Concoction of Woodland Scenics' 'Realistic Water' and 'Soft-flake snow' and Secret Weapon 'Ground glass'

Princess Leia. I like her attitude, and the contrasting pale tones of her clothes.

I enjoyed the monochrome Snowtroopers, they look sinister.

The Repulsor tank. I struggle painting vehicles. I repeatedly found myself washing it down and highlighting it up but just couldn't get happy with it.

Wampas! Not the most difficult paintjob, drybrushing over a blue-grey.

Barks kicks of this week's Antipodean contingent with another round of gorgeous Star Wars Imperial Assault miniatures. I must admit the more I see of these the more I'm coming around to them. It's Snow White and the Seven Stormtroopers folks! 

One of the hardest things to paint is large areas of white. Often any shading or definition looks forced or overdone but this is quite the opposite. Leia's outfit in particular is most convincing and certainly does justice to a wonderfully posed sculpt. Topped of with a good dusting of a thoroughly researched snow effect and she's enough to make anyone's brother go weak at the knees [ahem!]. 

I'm scoring the Wampas as 40mm minis so all up this wintery effort adds 79 points to the total Barks. Cheers, Millsy. 

PS. Am I the only one who thinks the Wampas look like they're snowboarding? "Whoa duuuuude, you like totally shredded that tauntaun!" OK, I'll get my coat...

Thursday's Minion

Thursday's seem to be coming round at an ever decreasing interval! It feels like just yesterday I was last on deck but a quick glance at the calendar proves I've not been abducted by aliens and lost time after all.

So what have we got for you today? The queue already contains some cracking work from EvanH, Barks and JohnSh so hang onto your brushes and enjoy what's coming later today.

In the mean time I leave you to the lyrical stylings of Aussie 80s hard rock trio Spy vs. Spy. Anyone who's ever seen "The Spys" will know they sweat blood on stage. They're the single loudest band I've ever seen, easily kicking even Ministry and The Oils to the curb for sheer decibels. Amp it up folks and look into the eyes, not anywhere else, look right into those scary starey eyes...

Cheers,

Millsy the Minion

From KeithS - A Pair of Warlords (10 pts)

Most of my weekend was spent either gaming or working on my nautical entry, but I did pop out these two guys in a little spare time.  They are both 28mm from Gripping Beast, one a warlord for my Saxon army and one for the Vikings for games of Saga.  I had originally thought to do the Viking in red and the Saxon in blue.  However, in my usual gung-ho fashion, without thinking I started the Saxon in red.  Being lazy, I finished him thusly and did the Viking the same.  So, they do look pretty similar, which was not the intent.  Oh well, I do like the figures.  GB does some great stuff.  I wish I got their stuff for my armies!


The shields are leftovers from my previous Viking/Saxon efforts.  They looked nicer than the GB ones.

Reverse angle.  I did manage to make sure the hair color was different, though it led to my age-old question: which are more likely to be blond, Vikings or Saxons?

The Viking.  He will go with the Mithril fig I painted a week or so ago, giving me two warlords to choose from, one in red and one blue.  Options are good.

A small entry for me, but a little forward progress.  My fleets are almost done for the nautical entry -- just waiting on my good friend Amazon Prime to deliver a fine-point opaque marker!

And a fine pair they are indeed sir!The shields really do set them off , Its always good to have a choice.

From MartinC - Paint Bomb....Misfire (95 Points)

I had such grand plans, a >350 point bomb, but life got in the way. Specifically the 28th anniversary of my 21st birthday on Friday which left me sofa ridden all day Saturday, I am officially too old for 7 hours of power drinking.

I did manage to paint the 2nd unit of Principes, Aventine figures. This left me with only 1 more unit to paint to compete my Republican Roman army. However I bought 3 more units from 1st Corps on Sunday (only 90p per figure) to give me a full 10 cohorts. I do now have a definite plan for finishing the challenge with another completed army

Another 16 figs and 15 hand painted shields - 95 points I think. 

As for next week I suggest that everybody gets a hard hat and moves to the Anderson Shelter. 

Lovely stuff Martin - nice job on the shields they look consist as well.  Oh dear what is he planning next week - maybe someone can take him to the pub!

Wednesday's Minion

Hump day again people. Wednesday is a favorite day for many people. After Saturday, Friday, Sunday, Wednesday, or Hump Day, is probably most people's favourite day.

This weeks in flight entertainment by Freya - Its Wednesday already

some lyrics you might empathise with 
 
Now it's already Wednesday - half the week is gone
Yet another Wednesday of things I haven't done
The week flies by like an aeroplane, that's got no destination
And now it's already Wednesday - How'd three days get wasted?!?

 
So it looks a quiet day so far - but lets see!

From TeemuL - 28mm Amber Wizard (5 points)

As I mentioned earlier, my hobby time is decreasing and most of that little I have used for my next bonus round. I still managed to paint at least one new model for this Tuesday (one of my targets was to get something ready for every week). So let me present you an Amber Wizard.

He is a plastic 28mm wizard from GW. I bought this second hand in case my Empire army needs a wizard at some point, but at the moment I'm more focused on the dwarfs. Anyway, I think this one will see more action around the Blood Bowl arenas for an easy 150 000 gold piece for a quick fireball.

Maybe the lack of properly painted wizard resulted on an unimpressive magic yesterday, when my wizard was not able to do any harm on 5 skavens on D6 roll of 4+ (1,1,2,2,3). Money well spent.

Back to this model, major part of the miniature is a wolf cloak, which I painted grey, gave a brown wash and then couple of different highlights to make it more interesting. It barely shows in the pictures, but his beard is whitish grey where the wolf cloak is more brownish grey. Rest of the colors are quite earthly colors, fitting the nature of amber wizards. Some red was a must, so I painted the stuff to bright red.

5 points only, but I'm ahead of my schedule.

Nice work Teemu. No worries about taking things a bit easy if you're ahead of your schedule.

From: PaulS : Painting did occur after all... (104 points)

Given the lack of updates over the last few weeks, I was worried I wouldn't get anything done this week either (you can blame Lego Dimensions for that!), but it turns out I did manage to get a few bits completed after all!

To kick start things this week we have 4 new heroes from Dungeon Saga. Left to Right we have the enhanced version of the wizard, the enhanced version of the halfling thief, Valendor (a spirit of magic... or some such thing) and finally the standard version of the halfling thief.

From the group shot you can clearly see the size differences between the halflings. The standard version is almost a quarterling instead she's so small!

Next up we have a selection of cultists made using the Frostgrave cultists pack. I absolutely adore these plastics... cultists are always useful in many different settings. These guys have been painted up in the same colours as my pulp cultists (which I'll put into a group shot on my blog later in the week)

After the cultists, we have two creatures from Shadows of Brimstone. Handily, if you paint them white, they work nicely as some of the snow creatures in Frostgrave too. Here you can see them in scale with poor Helga, who is penned in by the giant spiders too (see further down!)

 

They have strange crystal growths coming out of their backs. No wonder they are cranky!

 

The spiders are from Mantic's dungeon critters set. Along with the rats and bats from last time, these are the nicest Mantic kit I've seen. Ever. Each spider is slightly different. some are black with red markings; others are furry brown

 

 

For a week that I thought was going to be pretty quiet, that turned into 10 28mm heroes/villains, two giant monsters and 8 giant spiders.  

It's posts like these that make me appreciate Curt's adjudication over the last few Challenges - deciding how to score "off-size" critters fairly is not an easy job. I think I'll score the two snow monsters as 40mm and count the spiders as 28mm. That comes to 104 points for this submission.

Nice painting on all of these Paul - especially the death's head on that spider :)

From ClintB - 28mm Arnie is getting Old! (50 points)

Yep the title says it. Yep the Terminator film first came out in 1984, in October, so it is nearly 32 years old. In those days terminators coming from the future were all shinny and new. However Games Workshop did an alien race (now protected by "Intellectual copyright!") called the "Necrons", whom they claim are the remnants of a long dead race.  Most people follow the GW look when painting these and make them all shiny and new looking. I on the other hand wanted mine all broken decaying and not looking like they belong in a showroom. The Current "Codex" claims they have been dormant for a million years. So mine have a liberal coating of rust!

These were bought second hand on evil bay and while they did arrive assembled they looked like they had been painted by a 4 year old who lost interest. So as I grow this force to fight my nephews Chaos Marines I am getting what I can cheap and weathering them like crazy! The gun tubes were painted Bright blue when I got them so I have tried to match them to the green clear plastic of GW. Not 100% successful, but close enough to get a game with without anyone complaining too much.

So here we have 10 Necrons ready to face the brave new world and kill everything in sight!

These robots look nice and rusty Clint. Fifty points worth of nice and rusty in fact :)

From BrettM - German Infantry (56 points)

Been a while but finally got some stuff done and ready to post. Have to admit I enjoyed painting the US infantry more than these Germans.

I of course somehow lost a base for these infantry so was unable to base the last 4 I had painted. I realize that will be a deduction on points. However I have to order more bases from battlefront and who knows how long that will take.

I have 25 guys that are painted and based. I have that as 50 points. The other 4 guys not based would be an additional 8 points minus any non basing point deduction. I swear I read that somewhere but now can't find it. Apparently I need to overhaul my way of keeping track of things in my office.

Ahhh, the infamous lost base. I imagine that we've all been in that situation at some point. Nice work on these Germans, even if you didn't enjoy painting them as much.
You did read correctly that minis which aren't based "appropriately" score less - it's a 25% reduction. That means that this entry will score you 56 points.

LeeH - 6mm Carthaginian War Elephants (6 points)

After my large 6mm Citizen Infantry submission last week I needed a few days to lay down and whimper. I have had a busy few days so I actually had very little time to get much painting done anyway and consequently I don't feel too guilty with my modest output this week. My only submission today are these two War Elephants.

Yes Tamsin, there are four Nellie's pictured here - I'm not diddling myself out of points again! - but two of these (with the red blankets) were painted in November, prior to commencement of the Challenge and long before my admission to these hallowed ranks. The Carthaginian army list for To The Strongest! says I can have two units of elephants so now I do.

The Carthaginians employed a now extinct breed of North African elephant and at one time records suggest they had as many as 300 stabled in the walls of Carthage. This breed was more docile and easier to train so in order to make them more aggressive they would be given alcohol before a battle! Hannibal famously took 37 war elephants over the Alps and if ancient sources are to be believed all survived the journey. However most died shortly after arriving on the Italian Peninsular, possibly from the after effects of their arduous journey...or maybe they just had a really bad hangover!

Up to 70 elephants were used at Zama but these inexperienced and poorly handled animals were ineffective against a Roman army that had by now learnt how to fight and defeat such apparently mighty beats of war.

I wasn't sure how these should be scored (as Mounted Figures or as Vehicles) and in the end I had to refer back to older submissions to the Challenge to see if there were any previous rulings on the definition. True enough I found an old post that described War Elephants as "the tanks of the ancient world" and therefore counted as vehicles. So these two Nellie's should net me a modest 4 points, but at least I finished something this week.

Nice nellies Lee! But you have again diddled yourself out of points - you forgot the crew figures. There are six of those, counting as half figures, @ half a point each, which would be 1.5 points, so I'll round it up to 2 points, giving you 6 points for this entry.
As for needing to take it easy after that mass of Carthaginian infantry last week, I can fully appreciate that as I felt the same after my points bomb of 6mm Reb infantry!

From MichaelA - 28mm Cult heroes (30points)

I am hoping that these six 28mm miniatures will be my first eligible entry in the 'Pulp Challenge' side duel.

So in a bid to garner my first points towards this keenly fought duel, I present these fearsome Cultists, after all what could be more 'Pulp' than a cowl wearing, club wielding Cultist?  These were originally from the 'The Servants of Ra' box set, a faction for 'In Her Majesty's Name' ruleset released through  Osprey Publishing.

Available from 'North Star Military Figures', I'm afraid I struggled for an original take on these and plumped for the red as shown on the original box art.  Now what to use them for?

Nice work Michael. These chaps will be useful in so many games. That's 30 points toward your Pulp challenge (and the main challenge of course).

From ClintB - 28mm Betteshanger Miners (111 points)

Betteshanger Miners;

The following is taken from Wikipedia.
Betteshanger colliery opened in the late 1920s and was the largest of the Kent collieries. It had two shafts of almost 2300 feet, plaques can still be seen where the shafts were once sunk. The colliery was served by a railway branch which left the main line between Deal & Sandwich.
Betteshanger had a tradition of union militancy; it was the first pit to come out on strike during the second World War and took active part in the miners' strikes of 1969, 1972 , 1974 and 1984-85
A sit-in was staged at the colliery in 1984 and those involved were sacked for trespass. The Kent Area's NUM initially refused to return to work until those sacked were reinstated and continued to picket the rest of the country after the NUM's national executive had voted to return to work,so Betteshanger was actually the last pit in Britain to return to work after the strike.

Thereafter, Betteshanger became known for the brutality with which strikebreakers were treated. Posters had gone up in the village with photographs and names of the 30 men who had broken the strike. It was the last Kent colliery to close, closing for good in 1989.

So where does this leave wargaming? Well these will be a socialist faction in Kent loosely allied with the Anglican league. Not working against them but neither fully supporting them in their fight against the London fascists. I will fully write them up for the VBCW forum. Probably next week.

The figures are a mix of makes, Sloppy Jalopy, Ironclad and Musketeer miniatures. Oh and one Warlord "Dad's Army- Verger" While the Flag was created by PETE BARFIELD  (LINK to Petes Blog). I have permission from Peter to offer the flag to any who want it in the challenge if they are to create this force. So if you want the Flag email me at Clintburnettagain(at)Hotmail{dot}UK[dot]com and I will happily pass the PDF of the flag on to you. the flag is not the official/real Betteshanger colliery flag, but one created for VBCW.  The flag was slightly too large when printed so I have had to turn one of the banner bearers just to fit it on the base. Oh well such is life! But you will notice the white horse emblem of Kent prominent on the flag which bears the motto "Invicta".

These troops carry a mixture of weapons, mostly rifles but also 2 Thompsons, a shot gun, a pistol and a Lanchester smg (Used by the royal navy).

All in all there are 22 figures with a flag and ready to join my previous miners and reek havoc on the Gravesend Fascists. All 28mm and all ready for battle now as I have over a platoon of miners if we include the ones from 2 weeks ago.

Thanks for looking and all comments welcomed.

I've been waiting for these boys to appear! And what an awesome appearance they've made. As for the banner, Petal's done a great job with that. As for the trouble fitting it on the base, just be grateful it wasn't one from the Yorkshire pits - you know, the ones that are so big they are on wagons.
This bunch of belligerent blackleg bashers should give you 110 points, but I'm going to add a point for the work with the banner.

Tired Tamsin Tuesday

*yaawwwnnn* Wassat? It's Tuesday? I'm on duty? Oh...bother. I'd better put on my uniform and do my stint in the cabin. I could really have done without that bout of insomnia last night...

Good morning ladies, gentlemen and Ray. We are currently cruising at 41.395 points towards our target altitude of 73,050. We have been joined by another passenger in the past week leaving just 21 still to arrive. With just under 4 weeks to go they'd better board the flight soon or we probably won't reach our target altitude.

So, for you entertainment today we have:

• Some belligerent miners
• Some men in hooded red dresses
• Some pachydermal tininess
• Some rusty robots
• Some Germans
• Something magical (besides me!)

Medications will be distributed shortly. Today's crayon colour is neon pink.