Well I made it to 22:30 before needing to retire. I have been hot and cold all day and my back was a nightmare most of the day too.

I managed to have a couple of meetings today as well as answer some emails. So as a reward I sliced some Sohei for Ronin. I was going to do a samurai force but unfortunately the miniatures were sorted into groups of four or eight miniatures.

The ones I did do will be ready by tomorrow morning.

So in my pain filled time in bed, in between sleeping and yelping (sadly my back is still buggered) I had a mooch on my minifactory and ended up joining Highland Miniatures on their Patreon …they can be found here

I have been considering them for a good while and eventually bit the bullet.

The following image popped up in my Google image reminders, I made this kit to help out a school who wanted to visit the castle and have a Knight in it. I didn’t have the heart to tell them the castle was from the 16th century

Just call me Typhoid Mary!

Started to feel cold and shivery, started feeling a bit sick and have lost my appetite… so just to be on the safe side I took a Covid test….

The T line appeared almost instantaneously…. Definitely no faint lines for me!

I suppose on the upside I can have a lie in on Monday. On the downside all this uncontrollable shivering is not good for my bad back!

Okay, totally out of context but Joe came over this evening for a yarn about what we fancy playing in the future.

We also had a quick gladiatorial game too.

It started of easy enough, my Retiarius against his Murmillo.

He won initiative and hit my boy for three wounds, unperturbed I struck back and totally missed.

A couple of turns later I managed to get him in my net, I had already dropped it once!

I totally failed to hit him, even when he was wrapped up…

I managed to get some solid hits onto him but not enough to delay the inevitable…

It was nice to dust off the arena again… obviously I now want more Gladiators!

Okay not exactly, but I followed Eric’s advice and put a brown wash over the red. This desaturated the colour a bit…

Brown wash on the left, original on the right. I definitely am a lot happier

Tonight I was all set to paint this chap. He is my veteran monster hunter. Complete with a werewolf pelt on his shoulder as befits his role. He has also lost an eye, obviously fighting something scary.

Unfortunately ,just as I had got set up ,my wife came in to say that whilst on a walk she had come across both a lamb and a sheep wrapped up in electric fence wire. So off we set armed with cutting implements to rescue said beasties. We did our duty and I sang born free really loudly as they ran off, kicking me in the groin as they fled.

I only wish animals would sit still and be rescued rather than going loopy. In the end we had to sit on them to allow us to cut them free.

By time all the excitement was over then I really couldn’t be bothered to paint anything.

I will hopefully get him done tonight. I am going dark green jacket with red trim as well as dark grey overall trousers.

Yes this evening I got the prints of the build plate… I was rather pleased with really like the the quality…

So we have a scary scarecrow, a hag with an apple, a vampire, a boar and a bear. I really like them, which is why I bought them I suppose, I might redo them and make the top three a bit bigger for Silver Bayonet. I did them in a mix of flexible and ordinary resin to try and make them a bug more durable.

I also took a photo of last night’s goblins…

The two on the right are a couple of mice in plate armour…well just because really .. the one top right is a Filbolg, she is rather cute…

And finally for this evening I got another dwarf painted…

Well, if you remember I had been printing off many bases of 2mm Ancients ready to play some games. At the time I really didn’t have a rule set in mind. I decided to give these ones a bash… to be honest they arrived about 6 weeks ago and I have just now got around to mentioning it!

These rules run at 120 pages and include ten scenarios. They run from around 105 BCE (Marian reforms) to around 200 CE.

There are twenty army lists available ranging from Brittania in the North to the deserts of Africa in the South.

The bases are large as each one represents a lot of men… ie in respect of the Romans… a base is a legion.

In the photos below, I could do with some more cohorts on the Roman base 😀.

I will have to decide on a base size that will allow for a full legion to sit on it.

So my metal pikes arrived today so I decided to do a test run on one of the pikemen. First off I clipped off the pike and then attempted to drill out the hand. In doing so I snapped the arm at the biceps. Eventually I got through and snapped the fingers off too.

Now this is about half the width of the other one, 1mm diameter actually. I reckon drilling all the hands out will be a bloody nightmare. I think I will do a pile of hands with the holes drilled though in the software. That way I can snip hands off and then superglue everything back together and paint it up in situ.

Amongst our many beasties we have a pair of geese. These are Shetland geese and as such are a bit rare. Every year the goose sits while the gander mooches about picking up unattached grey lags. For the last four years she never hatched a single gosling… so this was a definite surprise!

We do wonder if he wasn’t the only one picking up unattached grey lags!

Tonight my Codine kicked in and I wasn’t up to much so I did some bits and bobs.

First off I put 60 individual 6mm miniatures onto group bases. Miraculously I even managed to get them found when they pinged across the room. These along with the Flintloque miniatures are primed ready for painting tomorrow.

I also did a little sketch of what my diorama of the Battle of the Five Armies is going to look like…

And finally there was rather a nice double rainbow this evening…