Tonight I thought I had better crack on with things so I put Dredd on Netflix and did some painting…
So here we have the front rank for two Pike blocks.
I then made a start on the Spanish Pikes…
Now to differentiate the two lots I did these in less flamboyant colours on the whole. There are some bright colours in this lot, but also a lot more browns. Some of the heads on the Spanish are weird, they have a sphere with two holes in it. I am not sure whether it is some kind of weird helmet or if it is meant to be an unhelmeted head. To me a Spaniard wears a Comb Morion or something similar.
The one thing I was correct about… I already hate painting pikes! Only about 600 to go😬
We got another Firefly game in this evening and this time Joe’s luck improved, managing a good win.
I had a bit of time, so I got a wiggle on with the Landskecht, by wiggle, please read darkened the armour and cloth with a wash….
Since taking the above photo I also got the hats painted. They need to have the feathers repainted white and then some colour added. I can hopefully get these ones finished tomorrow. I will make a start on the Spanish tomorrow too. I have now printed another forty pike strips to add in the rear ranks. I will do another forty and see how I get on. Joe will probably need a pile more too.
I will start recording the finish dates tomorrow and will close the competition at the weekend, otherwise someone could honestly say tomorrow sometime in the future.
Today I got the metals undercoated ready to start painting.
The wind and rain stopped long enough to throw some white undercoat onto them. To be honest that was all I could be bothered to do, but I put District 9 on Netflix and made a start on the Landskecht….
Still along way to go, but a start is indeed a start. These will get a dark wash over them, or at least the armour.
So when do you think I am going to get the whole lot finished…let’s have a little sweep stake… closest gets a little prize. So for full disclosure, it will likely be 3D printed. In case you missed it… this is half the infantry…
So get your thinking caps on, how long will it take Stephen (the painting butterfly who flits from project to project) to get his 6mm Italian Wars army finished. The only thing not visible in the two photographs above is a couple of artillery pieces and crew.
I will have to do a bit of a diversion to paint up my 28mm Imperials for a game sometime in October, I hope it isn’t September!
If you recall, I decided to blast through the rear ranks by sort of just doing them simply to speed up the process.
If you want to join in add your finishing date in a reply. I am happy to answer any questions before you decide on a date.
There is the famous saying that someone has bitten off more than they can chew. … this evening I decided to get the metal and the resin infantry based on painting sticks and it was at this point that the enormity of the task ahead struck me…
What we have above are the miniatures for two of the four Pike blocks the guns in the foreground are for the Tercio as well as some Skirmish troops too. The pikes on the right are the front rank troops of the second pair of pike blocks.
Now technically from every stick of miniatures I will get two pair of pikes, meaning 120 miniatures or 60 pair, which will be able to go onto another base to make up the numbers. But even with this happening I am going to have to fire up the printer again and do some more pikes.
Typically I have plenty of arqubusiers spare… I think.
I did a test to see if my theory on the extra miniatures filling out the extra bases worked… it seemed to…
Here we have three quarters of an imperial eight stand Pike block, minus the skirmishers and doppelsoldners. To be fair it does look like a densely packed Pike block.
I have actually run out of lollipop sticks… I took a pile into work for the kids to make models out of… I am off to get them back tomorrow. I just have some more here, I just don’t know where they are.
I reckon with the bits and pieces I have left then I will be able to make a third Pike block, but will need more printed to make the fourth. As I am printing anyway, and have these already painted on the front rank then I might as well do the fifth unit… perhaps, or common sense will arrive and make me stop and consider things.
It is my daughter’s 13th birthday tomorrow, so I doubt I will get much done tomorrow evening. Joe is coming over on Friday for a game, so it might be a while before much progress is made.
Well after starting to worry that something had gone wrong with the Irregular order … (probably because Joe had given me some money to order his when I ordered mine). I got back today to find this on my kitchen table…
Funnily enough I had just said to Joe that I hoped the box would be here before we had a game on Friday… I excitedly opened it and a mountain of lead appeared before my eyes…
Actually this is only half the stuff, I added the wrong photo!
Next up was: a… trying to remember what I ordered and b… checking it was all there. Unfortunately the PayPal page for Irregular was still up and that was the one that refused to work properly, so off I went into PayPal for my actual receipt. All things were present and correct, with a slight panic that the Spanish Pike were missing, only to find them in a separate bag.
So, like you do I set them out on the table…. and voila an army appeared before my eyes…
It kind of looks quite impressive until you realise that these aren’t based yet….
More impressive… in fact it is still missing three cannons, sixteen bases of Tercio shot and nine bases of skirmish infantry… I think that is all! As you can see from the above, the Pike have only the front rank in metal. The rest of the bases will be 3D printed. The shot etc will also be 3D printed.
The above is a 500 point army, a one thousand point army, even in 6mm, would be massive and probably twice the price too.
Obviously whilst messing around with this lot all evening meant no painting… I doubt the things I wanted to paint this evening are going be any less painted tomorrow. The plan for this lot is to get them, and the resin bits and pieces onto painting sticks ASAP so that I can get them undercoated ready for a mammoth painting session. Oh yeah, along with the 6mm Samurai, 2mm Ancients, 28mm Imperials, 10mm things too. I am going to pretend the 28mm ruins don’t exist!
Tonight I managed to get a whole lot done on my unit of flagellants.
I was hoping to get them finished, but sadly it was not to be. Hopefully I will get them done tomorrow. Now quite often I see these type of miniatures with pale skin, but they way look atitthey were out and about throughout the lands so mine are a bit tanned.
I also managed to get the ruins successfully printed at 18% size…
While was having a mooch for things to paint then I came across the trees too. I had printed some last nightwith the reduced sized cows… yes I really am that bonkers! The trees really could have done with some supportsas there are some pancakes on the bottoms, but,they still work, and to be honest they were a test to see if they would print.
As I have decided to go for 6mm Italian wars then, as you can tell by the blog, I have been reducing 28mm buildings to fitmy 6mm.this was because I couldn’t really find any suitable ones to print. Now if you remember, a while ago I found a guy making 6mm Samurai, I didn’t bother looking in the moderns section. Outof the blue today YouTube decided that I would want to watch one of his videos, lo and beholding January of this year he made Italian style buildings, so asylum can imagine I am quite chuffed and am printing a villa, church, some barns and smaller farm houses right now. I will photograph them tomorrow. You can watch the video below…
So today I did a fair old bit of slicingon the resin printer as the FDM one is having a bit of a lie down, looks like one of the back springs needs replacing.to be honest mostly it is still the stock setup.
So after a bit of a false start with the sails, I ended up with this little chap. As per normal he is 18% original size. Again an awesome little model from Iain Lovecraft’s ‘The Frost’ Kickstarter….
Amazingly enough I alsomanagedto print some treesto go with the 6mm forces. These are from the guys who did the 6mm Samurai and are a freebie… there were in fact a larger number of the trees, I chose two and because am paranoid I splayed out the base of the deciduous one in Mesh Mixer.
I will have to add the name of the designer of the trees tomorrow as I honestly cannot remember of find them again.
I decided that the Flintloque miniatures had sat there long enough so I did some more work in them this evening too.
Believe it or not the printer has decided to behave itself, so I have been printing pikes like they are going out of fashion. I also shrunk the command strip a bit. They now fit nicely with the pikes…
Now in case you are wondering there are 75 strips of pikes above. This in fact won’t be enough to cover my four units of Pike… each base has three ranks behind the metal front one, with two wide for each one … okay there are two spare which can be seen in the photo above. I will use these to make casualty markers.
There are twenty printing now, so still a long way to go.
When I shrunk the command strip I decided to live dangerously and didn’t support the flags as I worked on the principle that at the size they were then they should self support… thankfully I was correct in my gamble.
I also worked on some big pikes too…
They are nearly there, hopefully I will get them finished tomorrow.
Finally I got a couple of parcels, the first was this one…
The second was my Furioso supplement, which turned out to be the rules I already had, so they have gone back to AA for a swap. I was really looking forward to reading them…. hopefully they will be here soon.
Tomorrow is some more work in the house and I need to get the shed back in operation as I have a postponed game I there on Friday.
So I have had another frustrating day on the printer front, I have relevelled the print head, warmed the resin, checked the supports, lowered the print head speed, increased the print head movement and still it is being N absolute swine. I tried printing the zweihanders in various orientations to check it wasn’t problems with the supports…
All five printed perfectly, so I tried a test print with some halbediers, light artillery and artillery crews and boom, only some printed. I now have two with the long match as I did the test twice. This miniature refused to print yesterday.
Needless to say, it is getting a smidge frustrating to say the least.
Now daggerand brush asked about the resin I use and I said I was pleased with how it worked in terms of flexibility and the lack of shattering. I said I would do a little flexibility video to demonstrate things a bit better.
The hole in my finger is courtesy of a small kitten who did NOT want to go to the vet! I learned a really important lesson whilst doing the first video… do not shove a 6mm Pike into one’s kitten tooth hole. It hurts, a lot, I swore lots too.
I am now printing off another test, this time without the raft just in case it is having an effect. My originals didn’t have one, so this is a bit of a vain hope that it is that. Next stop new resin, just in case the original has got something wrong with it – to be honest the bottle is nearly finished so if I need to swap it out then so be it.
Today I was up with the larks to open up the school for a let and to sort out some more loft space … only to remember at 12.30 that they are in Unst today and with me tomorrow… it wasn’t too much if a buggeration as I needed to sort the loft anyway… it did give me 5800 steps . When I got back I set to work slicing pikes, now as I am a pillock I decided to increase the size from 60% to 65% for the pikes to compensate for the difference in base height.
Here is my Pike test… I put them four deep, but could drop it down to three…see what you think….
They are a bit on the large side, but is it too much, please let me know what you think as I am actually unsure. Having had closer look at the block I have realised that it is the ommnad strips that are on the larger side, the rank and file troops are actually smaller.
This is the hand guns and cannons with the pikes and gendarmes.
I think this is going to work…
I have got some zweihanders printing now, along with some Spanish sword and buckler men as well as some mastiffs.
I also increased the size of the cannon to make it into a heavy gun. I am not sure what to do for a light gun as they were sort of giant handguns on a stand. Come to think of it the Holy Roman Empire kickstarter I backed has some in… time to do some shrinking I think.
So the shrinking has happened, both the culvern and swivel guns… however I am going to have to wait to print them as unfortunately I have had my first failure in a long time…
The sword and buckler men and dogs printed fine… I have one zweihander out of sixteen and none of the officers. I have relevelled the build plate just in case. To be honest the temperature has dropped a bit, but the hand guns had a failure in the same place twice, which makes me think level has altered over time.
So in an hour I will find out if they have printed correctly the second time around.
Bogenwald 