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Bare Naked Ladies and a Horde of Camels

I decided my Amazon’s would be next

This was simply because there were less of them and also they were less detailed than the Mongols. I decided that I needed to ease myself into painting 10mm again as it has been about three years or so since I did.

These were base coated black…

Foundry Bay brown (b) was put on as a heavy dry brush. After that a lighter dry brush of Bay brown (c). The difference can be seen in the photo below.

I mixed up the lighter Bay brown with some GW Cadian flesh. I think I overdid the light drybrush as they came out a bit lighter than I wanted.

The two slaves carrying the queen are meant to be a lighter skin tone. My first set of these are Caucasian with blonde hair, I wanted this lot to be different. They have obviously captured some of the hated white hair tribe….

I finished tonight’s session by painting all the hair black. Tomorrow I will hopefully crack on with the weapons and camels.

Once the weapons are done I reckon they will look a lot better. That and getting something onto the bases to hide the black.

I am wanting these all finished before I fly down to Aberdeen on Tuesday morning.

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Mongol Horde

I have decided to have another go at 10mm figures.

Do I choose a half dozen figures.., errrr No!

Here are the cavalry,

There are:

26 bases of light cavalry

6 bases of medium cavalry

10 bases of heavy cavalry

There are also foot troops and civilians to go, but as I started feeling a bit weird with the superglue fumes I thought I had better stop!

These must have been sat in a box for five years. I got them from Pendraken the year they came out.

Someone very kindly gave me the suggestion to carry on with my French and Indian Wars stuff. I was going to and then sat and thought about it. My whole force was to be for skirmish gaming. I already have 45 painted woodland Indians do I really need another thirty? Same with the militia, I have some painted up already… how many do I actually need?

When painting 10mm figures I paint them on the base. Firstly it gives me something to hold onto and secondly it seems to be quicker. I tried painting them on strips, but Nick an old time regular on the Pendraken forum gave me the idea and I have gone that way since then.

They will never win any painting prizes, but it does get an army on the table relatively quickly.

I may actually start on my Amazon warriors.. these are on the whole naked ladies. With some of them on camels. A lot easier to paint methinks!

I do think that the sculptor needed to get out in the fresh air more and meet some actual ladies and not just Dolly Parton.

I have got one army pack already painted along with the barbarians. This will boost the fantasy horde.

They will probably need rebasing as I based them for Warmaster, but since then I have played Hordes of the Things more.

Also in the box were my plains Indians as well as a pile of Colonial British and Egyptian cavalry. Let’s not forget this chap! He is around 20 years old and one of these days I will get him painted.

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The Krautians are Finished

Huzzah, all done apart from a green wash and highlight on the grass on the bugler’s base.

They have come a long way from the bare metal of the Schilling pack!

My plan was to try really hard with the faces and apart from the squinty eyed bugler I am happy with the result. I don’t mind the face, it’s the Mad Eye Moody look that I am not too happy about.

After I pushed through the ‘oh blimey they look naff’ stage of the painting I am really pleased with them. The do look rather spiffy in their blue jackets.

This is them alongside the other three dwarves from the pack.

The only thing missing from the skirmish pack are the two ogres.

I decided two was a bit of an odd number and reinforced them with some friends and actually made them an odd number…. I must apologise for the really naff teacher joke there! 🙄🙄🙄

The two from the pack are the two on the left.

It took around 6 months or so, but I got them all painted eventually.

The big question is what next?

Flintloque maybe the Ostarian or undead hussars

French and Indian Wars – two units of thirty one of woodland Indians and the other of militia.

Or maybe change scale again and sort out my 10mm Mongol horde.

Oh yeah and finish the gloves on the dwarf Officer above!

On a non painting level, I survived the exam, I spent so long thinking about the legislation etc that I forgot about the day to day simple stuff. If truth be told, the whole exam thing wasn’t that brilliant. It was a closed book exam however, that is not real life, in reality we would look up what we needed. All It did was freak out a good number on the course for no good reason. I did point this out on my feedback., Course Excellent- Exam … pants!

Did I pass, Who knows… but I think I did enough to not fail 🤔

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Washing Dwarven Faces

Minuscule amount done tonight on my dwarves.

I have been in training all day and revising all night for an exam tomorrow morning. frankly I am now knackered… however I did want to progress my dwarves. So I gave their little hands and faces a wash as well as their beards and muskets.

Hopefully I will sleep better than last night! Tomorrow I should be carrying on with the RPG (it was cancelled on Tuesday). I am not sure how much I will get done but even if I take the flesh tone back up as the first level of highlight then something has been achieved.

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Krautian Dwarves and Exploding Custard Powder

First the dwarves….

I managed a fair bit of base coating tonight as well as some highlighting of packs and pouches (not that you can really tell from this photo). For idiotic reasons known only to myself I painted the beards first then tried to paint in the flesh tone! The officer has grey hands still as he shall be wearing gloves.

These seem to be taking forever, I know that, in the grand scheme of things, they are not, but to me they are dragging on. Probably more my state of mind than reality.

Anyway onto the exploding custard powder. This is because as I found a 30 year old photograph today. It shows an experiment we devised whilst working on the Ffestiniog Railway in North Wales.

A group of us were sitting around in the hostel when we learned of an explosion in a custard powder factory. Discussion ensued as to how and why custard powder could explode, being inert as it is. Coal dust yes as we knew coal was flammable. A bit of head scratching later we came to the conclusion that it would have to be as a fine powder in the air. Queue hunt in the larder for the out of date tin of the required ingredient.

Not the actual Custard Powder used in the experiment

Having explored the properties of said ingredient we needed a way to turn the powder into a fine mist. Blowing on a spoonful sort of worked but not properly, then again who would want to volunteer to blow onto the powder to make it explode!

A bit more of head scratching took place and the Edward came up with the ideal solution….

A bike pump!

Sadly it did not work as we wished…back to the drawing board!

It was then that someone (the name now lost to the track of time) came up with the solution.

Dismantle the bike pump, add deadly ingredient, reassemble and then fire custard powder over a naked flame.

We set up our experiment in the hostel and I was just about to hit the plunger, when Edward came to the conclusion that inside, may not be the best place to attempt our initial trial.

Not an actual picture of Edward!

So after much grumbling and muttering we took our experiment outside and placed it on the mini skip. I took a number of photos that evening. Only one survives in my collection.

Here we have Edward taking his turn at the Custard Powder Bike pump.

Edward letting rip with the Minfordd Hostel Custard Powder flame thrower

We all agreed afterward that perhaps he may have been correct in his conviction that this was an experiment best conducted out of doors! Strangely enough over the course if the evening we ran out of custard powder, not to mention flour and any other substance we could locate.

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Krautian Dwarves and a Paint Jiggler

I managed to get a bit done on the uniformed dwarves

I would have got further tonight, but my delightful dog somehow knocked a box of figures down and meant my poor Werewolves had to have another touch up!

I managed to get the pack, cartridge boxes, straps and other pouch painted. Still, as can be seen from the photo above, there is a long way to go!

I was having a mooch in the shed (after safely transferring the werewolves into it) and decided to see what else needed painting. I found Dog artillery and cavalry that I had forgotten all about!

As for my paint jiggler… one of my biggest issues with Army Painter paints is that no matter how much you shake them they still don’t mix properly. They all have an agitator in to help with the process.

I eventually decided to bite the bullet and purchase a tool to do the job for me.

I would have preferred a more manly design on it, but it does jiggle the paint.

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I decided that my ‘oak Brown’ being an absolute swine to mix would be my test paint, that and the fact that I wanted to use it for the packs on my Dwarves.

The following is a before and after view of the paint.

It really has made a difference.

I suppose the only fly in the ointment is that the jiggler came in at £25.00. To be fair it had free postage but that was about as cheap as it could be. Time will tell if it has been £25 well spent.

I doubt I will get anything done on my dwarves tomorrow night as my daughter and I are off playing a Star Trek RPG.

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Finklestein Dwarves

I managed to get these three fine fellows finished.

They are awesome figures and a joy to paint.

I don’t know why, but this one reminds me of a retired naval captain

The other two are both wearing the same coats, Maybe a couple of hunters…brothers? Or am I going to deeply into this lol!

And this one has to be my favourite of all three. I like him so much you can see him twice 😉

Tomorrow I will try and get these chaps further forward.

I have to workout the colours of their packs and blankets. I will use Prussian troops to decide on the necessary colours.

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Cardboard Heroes

Tonight I was working Late (ish) on converting the old byre (I took this photo earlier in the day).

Then after tea and a bath, followed by a family DVD night I had no chance to paint anything.

Instead my daughter and I had a look through our RPG bag.

Behold… our figure storage for all of our heroes, baddies and NPC’s

This little lot holds around 60 ‘figures’ and could quite easily hold around 500 more!

They are all card from the very talented Okum Arts. I used to use plastic and metal figures and these took up time to paint and space to store. One day I had an epiphany and I started hunting for flats. Eventually, after a fair bit of searching on RPGNow. I found a style I really liked. They were bright and colourful and a little bit cartoony.

To my mind David Okum was the artist I was looking for. The good thing about the card minis is that one can print as many as you like.

So let’s have a look at our heroes first.

A ranger, a wood elf of Mirkwood and a couple of hobbits from the Shire

These four have battled many foes around Bree.

Some of them are below:

Orcs and Wargs

Goblins

Another thing I like about these is that the colours can be changed to add a bit of variety. These are green and grey, but there are about four different shades to choose from.

Civilians – with the layering option weapons can be removed, really handy if you want unarmed characters to stand out.

There are lots of races to choose from, I think I pretty much bought them all

Occasionally I need a troll or four!

I seem to have misplaced my ents, which is a bit of a pain as they are really good too.

As you might have guessed I like my Tolkein and the Roleplaying game that hits the spot in my mind is…

Moving away from the RPG side of things…. to

One of the other things I bought from Okum Arts was an awesome winter game called Snowball wars. This fun little game has everything you need apart from dice to allow you to print and play. We haul it out every winter and the kids all gang up on me.

Hopefully tomorrow I will get something painted.

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Krautian Dwarves II

And one is finished…

I did a bit more on them all but decided to crack on and finish at least one of them.

The rest of them still have a long way to go.

I am quite pleased with the Blue highlights on most of them apart from second on the right, it looks a bit weird. I will try and remember to sort it out tomorrow, as he is the one that had only one unpainted epaulette I don’t rate my chances of remembering to tone down a highlight.

The highlight on the black isn’t showing up very well in these photos. I didn’t want it to be in your face, but maybe this isn’t in your face enough. I went for a blue-grey colour which can be seen on the boots of the second from the left.

As I said yesterday, I really like these figures, and if truth be known I prefer the civilians over the uniformed ones. But to be honest it might be that the one I finished was really quick to paint up!

I think that, although I really like the dwarves, I won’t be getting many more as I have so much other Flintloque stuff to paint up that I would never get to them.

Off the top of my head I have the following:

Ferach

30 infantry and 6 cavalry

Orc

30 infantry plus 2 sets of Sharke’s rifles

Witchlands

30 infantry and 12 cavalry

Not to mention various random specials, individuals and a box of dark elves I haven’t got a clue what to do with. I have a niggling feeling that I am missing stuff from the above lists.

I suppose I could flog off some of the above especially the orcs. I already have one of the rifles sets painted so I really don’t need any more. I have 25 orc Militia which, to be honest, I only bought so that I could get a couple of figures that were no longer available.

And finally….

I succumbed again!

My excuse, I keep trying to convince myself, is that they are for my little boy. These are now starting to get a bit more pricey. £7.99 for three figures and a pot of gun metal paint. Now if I was desperate to collect space Marines then the value would be much better.

I will probably get the next issue to get the half dozen pox walkers and then call it a day unless something awesome appears.

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Dwarves of Krautia

I managed to slap some paint on these.

Not a lot – but enough to be able to say I have made a start on them.

They really are lovely figures that are full of character. I will hopefully get on with them tomorrow evening. I was too knackered tonight to get much further.

I am going to darken down the blue a bit with a dark blue wash and then highlight it back up again. I just think it is a bit bright for a base coat.