Bogenwald

Today has been one of those days, kids in school were great, it was the world around me that was being a pain. As you know I had a COVID test on Saturday that came back Negative yesterday morning.

Unfortunately my daughter needed a test today because she got a bad cough (Probably from me) and as she has had a test I am now on lockdown for 72 hours or until her test comes back Negative.

In the midst of all of this my son’s School phoned my wife to say that he had gone into quarantine there. As I am the only teacher in my school and couldn’t leave and my wife was having to wait in to get my daughter tested then we had what was best described as an impasse. Luckily the test arrived, to allow my wife to pretty much break the law to go and get my son. As I am not in tomorrow then we needed to find a relief teacher, oh what fun we had there, as there aren’t any!

This sums things up perfectly…

Anyway onto the Khmer, I got a smidge more done tonight… mainly hair and more work on the elephants…

Now the one thing I am looking at now is the cavalry, on the Irregular page they used the same colours as mine…AKA I copied them. The more I look at them the more I think that I need to re undercoat the horses heads as I have seen absolutely no evidence of caparisoned horses. A job for tomorrow then. I am printing more hexes this evening. One wood hex and a couple of river hexes. I bumped the infil to 15% as the original 5% was okay for the flat tiles but anything else needed more. At least tomorrow I will be around to keep pressing print all day … ‘every cloud has a silver lining’ as they say.

I managed to squeeze in a bit of painting this evening and got a teeny bit more done on the Khmer. Not a huge lot, but progress is indeed progress.

The parasol is attached to an howdah. I used a micro drill to get a hole in it then cut off the pin to the right height. Typically I put it on the wrong ‘purple’ elephant! The hero and standard are in the foreground. One will go with the general and the other with a second elephant to act as a sub general, well that is the plan. As it isn’t exactly the world’s largest army then this may change. What may happen is the rider and standard will go onto their own base to act as the hero, that in the long run might be a better idea.

On a different note, the printer still seems to be going okay on the hex tiles, I will soon be able to get some farms printed, these were part of my Gold level tier in the Kickstarter.

And finally, and on another different note, my belated birthday pressie arrived from my mate.

I reckon this is the final book in the collection as sadly they aren’t making any more! I have pretty much all of them in either print or electronically (the majority are print versions).

I was hoping that we would have had some other areas to explore… eg Moria, but sadly not. I was just having a quick look there and someone seems to have picked up the line. 2nd edition was going to cover the Lord of the Rings and Moria so there is hope yet.

The 6mm Khmer have had a bit more paint added this evening. I decided to push on a bit more and got most of the spear shafts done. I also went over the armour on the cavalry and sorted out the elephants to get some white undercoat back on.

I got some colour started on the pads on the elephants too.

You may notice my two parasols made from pins and split lentils. I thought these were going to be a whole lot easier than making them out of Greenstuff.

The other thing I managed to make a start on was the printed civilians in 28mm…

I also started to print the helmet, after about 8 hours I pulled the plug on the first bit as the ends were starting to curl. I swore an awful lot.

I have re-sliced everything and added a raft to them all to try and Stop it happening again. As I have printed these, I am beginning to get worried that the finished helmet is going to be huge. Some of the cutting up has caused problems with the slicing as it won’t let it get onto Cura, all in all a frustrating day in the Printer front.

On a totally different note. A little man dropped a parcel off at my house today to allow me to stick a swab down the back of my throat and up my nose. Sadly I have developed a bit of a cough, personally I reckon it is a cold that has caused my asthma to flare up a bit, but we decided to be better safe than sorry. That is me self isolating until I get the results back which should be either Monday or Tuesday.

The worst part is that the cough pretty much went away after the test. I occasionally do a little, single cough every hour or so, but not like it was this morning. I will keep you posted.

I didn’t get to eat until gone 20.00 this evening as I became dad’s taxi for my eldest. I drove home to pick up the new car, and then drove into Lerwick to pick them up and to take their friend back home, which was pretty much back at where I work… so I am actually surprised that I managed anything tonight.

But here we go… progress….

John has suggested I add a parasol to one of the elephants to denote the general so I will give it a try with a pin and a teeny bit of Greenstuff. Funnily enough on the Irregular website the elephant shown has one…

I am gaming tomorrow night so may not get much done… we are carrying on with adventures in Middle Earth. Luckily we managed to get the first mission finished last week before we were overrun by baddies.

So after last night’s struggle to paint anything, I was a teeny bit more productive this evening. I actually managed to get a base coat on pretty much everything apart from the cavalry.

This army has a lot of elephants but none that scream general at me. So as it happens one of my individual miniatures is on a rearing horse, so I will add that to a stand of hefalumps to denote general quality. I am also going to blag one of my Ashigaru Nobori carries to give it some sort of banner.

Okay not accurate, but it will add a little something extra to help with the command base. Now as I have said before, I haven’t got a clue about the Khmer, So for all the purists out there…sorry. These will be simply classed as type, heavy infantry (or whatever the manufacturer tells me their designation is.

As I was painting the elephants this song kept going round and round in my head…

So I thought I would let you all join in too… all together now… one, two, a one, two, three four….

Hopefully I will think of a different song tomorrow…. I have now been hooked on PUBG by my son… off to jump out of an aeroplane and try and find a suitable weapon before some other sod nicks it…