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Making a Start

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.

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Twenty Minutes at Gas Mark 8 & New Reading Material

I have had a bit of an easy day today. I nipped into town to get my new book that the book shop had ordered in for me…

When I was a kid my parents got me a subscription to Look and Learn. The one main thing I can remember about it was the Trigan Empire. That and somewhat spurious articles. So when the kids and I were in the book shop last week I saw volumes two and three so just had tofrt the first one.

I managed to get the cavalry put knto bases and some sa d put on for texture… now this is where I almost had a mishap. I was cooking dinner in the oven and the pva wasn’t dry and I wanted it to be… can you guess where this is going?

So I popped them and their Cork tile on a tray in the ovenfor a couple of minutes…yeah right…about twenty minutes later I looked to see if the PVA was dry and realised to my horror that they were still in the oven…. luckily everything survived the process…

Here they are after their spell at gas mark 8. There were a couple of big bubbles of something, either superglue or basing glue, but a poke with a nail flattened them out. I will try and get the whole lot sprayed tomorrow morning.

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Out in the Verse.

Tonight we played the Firefly boardgame. We started off with the first mission for new players. This was pretty much over in an hour… I managed to win the first game by some totally legal means…

As it was over so quickly we moved onto another set of missions, this one took about two and a half hours. We had to be the first to get to $12000. Joe managed it, but unfortunately still had $6000 worth of jobs outstanding. Luckily I had just finished two of mine so actually ended up winning by default. To be fair his dice rolls were spectacularly bad, anything but a one, produced three ones in a row….

The game was a laugh, so it is something we will probably play again sometime.

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Clearing the Decks for Action

This evening I thought I had better get rid of some of the half finished projects on my painting station. As the 2mm cavalry and infantry were on the top I went with them.

Because of Birthday, bath and bed, I really didnt have time to do too much. Flesh over everything then starting to add different browns etc for the cavalry and then white for the shield fronts on the Greek infantry. These will get the bronze armour done next.

As for the 6mm Italian Wars stuff, well I am going to have to go back through my blog to see what size I printed them at… 60% I think, but I will have to give it a look see.

When I said yesterday that I thought I had enough arqubusiers… this is what I am talking about…

Now I think I gave Joe a pile, perhaps not, that might be the reason why I still have an armies worth in a box.

I am actually feeling a little daunted with the task ahead. So to get myself into the groove I am going to go for well painted (relatively in my case) on the front row on each base with speed painting on the following ranks. As you can see by the photo I showed yesterday, there isn’t much room to see a lot of high quality paint work.

To be honest I could probably get away with painting the outside two and then getting the rest done in a dark wash, with the odd splash of colour on the upper torso and head. The one thing I do know is that I am going to hate painting pikes by time this is over.

I know I am grumbling a bit, but I do reckon they are going to look pretty good by time they are all finished.

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Bitten off More….

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.

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Parcel in the Post

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!

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Working on the Pikes

This evening I decided to do something a bit bigger than the 2mm miniatures and settled on the Pikes, that is not to say that the 2mm bases stayed unwanted and unloved in their box…certainly not… I slapped some flesh base coat on some undercoated ones…

Anyway back to the pikes…

As you can see they are a bit further forward. Most of the armour has been given the base coat. Now these still have a lot of white on them, that hopefully, sooner rather than later I will get finished.

I had better get some shot and crossbow done next, then onto some knights.

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Unclean, Unclean

Well I have decided to have a night off, as I am starting to feel a bit bleurgh. I think I have caught my daughter’s cold. I really hope not as she was floored for a week with hers. Luckily my lateral flow rest has come back negative.

I got the Aliens off the build plate and they are rather nice…

As it was very sunny here today I shoved them on the Windowsill to get some natural curing done.

I was thinking of spraying mine gun metal and then using the black Contrast Paint oder the top. Won’t that can happen is that it doesn’t work. If that is the case I will spray then black and highlight by dry brushing with blue.

If I do perk up then I am going to get some more done on my pikes…mi have got about a month before I need my army for our big Lion Rampant game.

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My Tiny Farm

Tonight I managed to get the 2mm farms just about finished.

This time the buildings are stuck down so there is no going back now. The only problem is, is that there aren’t enough buildings to make the town now…

I tried them out for size on the town base. The town base now has the church/temple on it as the rest are glued elsewhere. Luckily I have another set of thirteen printed and cured. The above still needs trees etc to make it a bit more interesting.

The other thing I managed to get done this evening was to slap some paint on some 28mm Pikemen…

Still a way to go, but they are getting there. Yo be honest a lot of each miniature still to do is armour.

I got a couple of aliens printed successfully last night. I will drop a photo of them tomorrow.

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Watching Paint Dry

I managed to get the sand covered in PVA this morning, so it was ready to paint this evening…

I got cracking with the bases painting the base green level with added brown for roads and building areas…

This photo was taken four hours ago and the paint is still wet… so I have indeed been watching paint dry this evening. I couldn’t be bothered to go and get a mixing tile so grabbed the next best thing…

Yes a good old Tesco Yeast extract lid was washed and available.

My Friend Carl pointed me in the direction of a new Kickstarter…and as I am running an Alien RPG … I just had to go and have a look…. we all know where this is going don’t we! Aliens

I am doing a freebie one this evening… five and a half hours… I am used to 50 minutes…. I am doing a couple, one for me and one for Carl. Freebie

I will find out tomorrow how well they have come out.