Sometimes the fact that my parents hung onto things for decades does have its advantages. Both have passed away now but these were kept by my father and now belong to me…
These are just some of the treasures I now have.
I have a number of other such booklets from WW2 not to mention a WW1 bayonet that was given to my father in round about 1926 to play with! It does go nicely with my WW1 Lee Enfield 😁. I was going to do First World War cavalry as a great uncle had been in the Northumberland Hussars, but my move to Shetland put pay to that. The rifle was purchased and deactivated before it became difficult to get such things.
These still need a bit of work – first being to find all the bits I missed with the green paint. No matter how many times I look, I still spot things on the photo that were not painted. I think it might be that as the pain is wet it glistens, causing me to think the white bits are wet paint. I have just had another really close look and I am spotting more and more.
After a repaint of the green (it would seem), I need to paint the arrows in the quivers and then do some claws. A bit of highlighting wouldn’t go amiss on the bows. Then I can start on the swordsmen.
The other thing I did was darken down the fur on the big beastie. The chain and shield rims are now not blending in. I really need to tidy up the gold at the 11 o’clock on the shield though… I keep forgetting!
Am bit of highlighting on the general’s shield rim would help too. This is really where Contrast paint doesn’t work. Flat areas basically are a waste of time going for the ‘shove some paint on and voila – done’ approach.
Tomorrow I will try and get this lot finished and then at least make a start on the sword armed ones.
So I managed to get some work done on the big beastie or Juggernex as it is called on the website 😁.
I am happy with the mottling on the skin, but less so with the rest. The contrast paint didn’t work so well on the shield. I will have to highlight them both. Not to mention the gold. The gold looks better in real life, the photo has almost blended it into the skin tone.
I will need to get it flocked up, but need to decide on what and how to do it with.
Once I get these ones painted then I think I will get the cavalry… half with bows and half with spears.
Luckily the UK distributor lives on Shetland.
I have a couple of evenings left before the hols, so hopefully I will get some more painted before I head off.
I cracked on this evening and got the minis glued down onto the MDF bases. This took a bit longer than expected as these minis are large scale 15mm. So my normal 3 or 4 to a base looked wrong.
I got out the bases that I had and had a play about.
In the end I found some 25 x 40mm bases and went for two to a base. There are sixteen to a pack so two’s worked well.
In the end I ended up with eight x bows and eight x swords as well as a general and a large beastie thing.
As you can see from the photo above the large beastie had a bit of a makeover. This was because he was a bit lacklustre – to be frank he was actually boring and crappy. Which is really weird as the rest of them are lovely miniatures.
Where I put the saddle/pad were a set of straps from the legs that just fizzled out. It was almost as if a saddle was an optional extra. I checked on the website and I can’t find anything to go on it. He is a mix of lizard and mammal and there is very little texture to the skin, I really should blend in that tail section when the superglue has cured fully (who would like to bet I forget before spraying).
My attempt to titivate him is a bit off scale, but it was what I had lying around the shed at the time.
I have my source material ready for colour ideas!
The Lizardman Army was my favourite alongside the wood elves and definitely my favourite in Warmaster. Sadly they went the journey, but the Warmaster army did make me £250 which was used to buy a second hand SLR camera.
I will get these sprayed tomorrow morning and start on the painting tomorrow evening.
Okay yesterday, I foolishly said it was warm, but not South temperature… foolish me!
Taken in the garden at 11.00 this morning.
it was still 26 degrees at 18.00 this evening… anyway onto the elves…
They are pretty much done apart from the bases, so I did indeed manage to get them finished by the end of the weekend.
I am honestly not sure how I am going to base them…I might stick some of my home made flock into the coffee grinder and get it a lot finer. I will have to have a think.
So, apart from the shields, hair and the metallics, these were painted in contrast paint. I do quite like it for this scale, I am still a little ambivalent about it in 28mm. Tomorrow I think I will make a start on some 15mm Lizardmen. I have just remembered that I have a ‘Tin Soldier’ 15mm Aztec DBA army sitting there too. They would make a nice opposing force to the Scalians.
Shortly after taking the photo above – this happened…
These lucky ones hit the table, the unlucky ones hit the floor. I think they all survived.
Tomorrow I am helping my in laws dismantle a lean to and put another one up in it’s place. Wish me luck, if the temperature is anything like today I am not going to be a happy bunny. I have become acclimatised to a Shetland Summer.
Today has been a warm one, nothing like the silly temperatures down South, but still warm enough for us. So this afternoon, as promised, we went of for a game of hide and seek in one of our few woods up here. I am pleased to report that my Ninja skills have not left me.
Anyway…Elves. I blasted on with these again tonight and managed to get them to the nearly finished stage. Basically weapons, metalwork, hair and hands to do and that’s them finished.
Looking closely at the actual bases, I have noticed that some have bi coloured trousers that need rectifying.
Hopefully I will get these finished tomorrow, then potentially move onto some 15mm Lizardmen (Battle Valour- Scalians) that I won at the HOTT tournament earlier this year.
Got the elves sprayed white and decided to give the new ones a Contrast paint job too.
I am really warming to these paints especially for the 10mm minis. This is the Plaguebearer Flesh over a white undercoat, I really like the way it is a very yellow green. I gave the faces a quick blast with the Guilliman Flesh. It really does bring out the detail. The red colour is the Blood Angels Red.
I will crack on with these tomorrow and hope to have everything completely finished by the end of the weekend.
Today I promised to take the kids to the loch. It is really shallow, especially when the tide is out.
Not a bad place to have on the doorstep.
It was a little misty to begin with today, but still very warm. When the sun came out it made really pleasing patterns on the water…
And on a totally different note, we had a massive visitor to Shetland today…
For those that watch ‘Shetland’ (never seen it myself) but Jimmy Perez’s house is second from the left.
Sadly I cannot remember who took this photo, it definitely isn’t mine.
Woah, three days of painting in a row, looks like I might be getting going again.
Okay to be honest I tried out some more Contrast paint on the Proxy MI.
And to be even more brutally honest… I painted their boots and faces with contrast paint… not exactly the height of achievement, but at least it is something 😱. I do quite like the blue-grey on the body armour. The green on the radio op and engineer works quite well too. The flesh wash is ok, but I went over my flesh wash so that might have made a difference.
What I really want is a black (but they didn’t have any) – I have 25 odd arachnid warriors to paint up and I reckon that the Contrast paint would speed them up a fair bit.
I will see what I can get done tomorrow. I would like the elves finished. I think this is the last of them, but knowing my luck there will be another 60 hidden somewhere.
Well, I managed to get some painting done over the last couple of days…
I decided to have a bash at the 10mm elves. As I had some contrast paint knocking about I decided to give it a go on a smaller scale.
Now if you remember, the last lot of these that I painted really ground me down (https://bogenwaldblog.wordpress.com/2019/04/15/back-to-the-elves/ ). Now I don’t know if it was the different paint, my state of mind or a combination of both, but basically I enjoyed painting these. The contrast paint really worked on them. As I only had three pots of it I painted with washes as well just to keep the momentum up. They have come along a bit since this photo was taken this evening. All that is left now is the metalwork, washes on the hair and then the bases painting.
I decided to get some new contrast paint ( the eagle eyed mathematicians amongst you would have realised that I had more than three pots in the photo above)..this was used on the 10mm stuff as well as the 28mm MI. Now to be fair I am still getting to grips with this paint, but, it does definitely seem to be helping speed things up a bit. Some of it seems to work better than others, but it could be that I haven’t shaken it up enough, or that perhaps a grey undercoat (in the case of the MI) isn’t the best.🤔
We have had a house guest since last Friday, today was his last day and he really, really wanted to see some Puffins… he had been to Sumburgh the day he arrived, but they were all out at sea. Today was a nice sunny day… 22.5 degrees which was a bit warm for us hardy northerners 😂. We took him down to see if the blasted birds had come back, luckily a good dozen or so made an appearance.
I forgot the camera so had to make do with my IPad. Here we have a phot of a pair, the one on the right is flaring into land. Then something amazing happened…
A chick (puffing) appeared, this is a lot more rare than one might expect. Bonxies (Shetland name for the Great Skua) would have him in a flash so they normally appear at night to have a bit of a wing flap (you can just see him at the entrance to his burrow).
As for the radar… Fitful head had a radar station set up during WW2. This helped foil a Luftwaffe raid on Scapa flow in Orkney. They picked up the raid and gave the AA gunners in Orkney a heads up as to direction and speed.
Being a bit exposed on the Southern point of Shetland, sometimes grumpy German gunners would vent their spleen as they flew past…. you can see the effect here…
So that is a little bit more on the out and about on Shetland Blog 🤣.
Bogenwald 