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Sengoku…I hate Sashimonos!

Ooh I forgot why my huge two Dragon Samurai army never got their back banners… tonight I remembered!

Their helmet rims stopped them running up the back so instead I had to angle them into bits of the body where they could have some form of connection (rather than a couple of mm where it touched the helmet). I put 22 on and it took for evvvvvvver! There is more glue on me than there is on the miniatures. But never mind, these are done (guess who forgot to get any more from Tin Soldier! So it looks like it will be pins and paper for all of the foot Samurai and Ashigaru.

Some how I believed that the amount I got would be enough. Yeah right… 30 is just about enough for the cavalry, the 15 Ashigaru are going to have to wait for theirs.

The other thing I did was to add various weapons to the peasants. As with most things the weapons wouldn’t go in the gap for their hands… superglue saw to that… eventually!

My original plan to get these glued and sprayed today fell short. I will get them sprayed tomorrow and see how I get on from there.

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Sengoku… So it Begins

Tonight I decided to get all of the Samurai I had put onto their bases. And … because I am me, I have just ordered some more! Well there weren’t enough foot Samurai or mounted monks or…. yeah I think you get the picture!

This lot is DBA army list 127. But because I am me everything goes on 30×40 for cavalry and all infantry on 20×40 apart from the horde who use the cavalry bases. Makes buying bases in bulk a doddle 😂.

Start of the Samurai Forces

On the left we have five bases of Ashigaru archers, with a base of Ashigaru and monks in front of them. Next big block are the peasants led by a monk (well I had one figure spare). In front of them is a champion and General. Next up a set of three bases of cavalry and then three of mounted archers with a unit of Ninja next (well you just have to don’t you 😱).

I have still to add the Sashimono to everything as well as put the various improvised weapons into the hands of the peasants.

The army is from Tin Soldier. I do like the style of these. They are a little cartoony for some people but they do work for me… the Ninja are Battle Valour Games. Luckily the UK supplier is a mate of mine and he had some in stock to buy (handy when he lives on Shetland). They fit in quite well scale wise.

The other thing I did today was to print some of the funky trees. These were done at 75% and 50% of the full size. They are shown next to the unfinished full sized one from yesterday.

I am printing a full sized one again just now. It will finish after midnight which is a bit of a pain. The 75% one took just under 3 hours and the smaller one just under an hour and a half to print. I did add a raft to help get them off the bed so they would have been quicker without.

Tomorrow I will use the remainder of my white spray to get the Samurai undercoated.

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New Books

Today a little surprise came… Once again I totally forgot that I had pre ordered something.

As I have a whole host of 15mm FIW I thought I would get a set of rules that I could use with them.

Because I am stingy I didn’t purchase the cards, probably should have done. I thought they might have had them in the back of the book so that I could photocopy them… there aren’t any.

I did try Sharp Practice, but didn’t really get on with it.

So some of my FIW miniatures are below.

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2019 Round-up…

This is a rewrite of the post I did last night. Somehow it disappeared. If truth be told, it might have been a case of user error as I was tired and hurrying to get it finished before midnight! Update, having just nearly done it again, it is not a good idea to hit discard draft instead of update draft.

On the non hobby front, I ended up with two new jobs. The first was in the back end of May being a temporary Deputy Head Teacher (vice Principal) of one of our two High Schools. This was a secondment until I started on as the Head Teacher of one of our small Primary schools. In June and July this had a massive knock on effect on both my painting and blogging. In June I managed only six posts and about ten in July, partly for being knackered and secondly we went on our hols to Orkney. Since the start of August I have blogged every day for 148 days straight.

To be honest in the vast majority of those days I have managed to paint something, sometimes whole units and other times I might have managed to paint a bit of braid on a couple of miniatures. I have also tried to show a bit of where I live as well as giving the odd interesting story from Shetland.

So anyway, what have I painted this year?

Probably not as much as I would have liked, but yeah, life and work sometimes gets in the way. To be fair, I reckon that the use of this paint has speeded up my rate of getting things painted.

These are a case in point…

All done in a Harry Potter film. From white undercoat to Finished in one sitting isn’t too shabby, to be fair they weren’t the most complicated of miniatures to finish .

So onto the quasi list….

4 DBA/DBM\HOTT Armies

I really noticed the difference in painting these. Way back into last January I made a start on the 10mm Wood Elf Army. This was done in two parts, the first part was painted in regular GW/AP paint and took forever, there were a few posts on how slow they were. And I quote “nearly lost the will to live but pushed through the barriers of whatever was stopping me getting on with them.” The second part (See below) was done with Contrast paint and it really, really speeded things up. These were done in about 4 hours over a weekend.

I also painted up:

A Conquistador Force

An Aztec Army

A Scalian Army

I also painted up various other random 10 and 15mm minis I had lying around.

again, Contrast paint made all the difference.

I painted a whole load of infantry for Starship Troopers as well as the odd Bug

j

A lot of September was printing and painting tanks and making/printing terrain

for the Games Day

Later on again in terms of 28mm, I managed to get both forces from Beastgrave painted…

Some troops and nasties for Aliens

I also painted more troops for Flintloque

And finally onto some Harry Potter minis and some GW minis too

This is not an exhaustive list, I have painted various other bits and pieces of 3D printed stuff too as well as other miniatures.

The 3D Printer has been busy this year, it has gone through three rolls of filament.

Well done if you have managed to make it to the end of this post

So rather than say what I am planning for next year, I will leave that for another post tomorrow.

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Ogres… Nearly Finished

So tonight I mooched around trying to find something to paint and came across these two already primed…

So a quick paint job and we got to here…

I probably spent twenty minutes on each. Once everything is dry I will sort out the strapping on the fur bracers and greaves. There are the usual bits that were missed first time round. I have come to the conclusion that it is caused by the wet paint reflecting light, therefore any actual white bits fool me into thinking ‘wet paint’ making them invisible until everything has dried. As I spent a whole while sneezing as these were drying then I decided to call it a night.

These were a ‘prize’ for taking part in the last HOTT competition. Technically one belongs to my daughter as she got one of them for attending too. They are on 40×40 bases as they are behemoth from HOTT.

Whilst mooching for miniatures to paint I cam across a whole host of part finished projects. So far, in the house, I have some 15mm FIW militia and woodland Indians, a force of based 10mm Mongols, a pile more 10mm Sudan war British and Egyptians, a tribe of 10mm Sioux. In the big shed I have all the Starship Troopers stuff as well as various printed miniatures and terrain (let’s not talk about the Aliens V Predator minis nor the Journeys in Middle Earth either).

All in all too much stuff. I didn’t make it out to my shed as that would add more to the lead and plastic mountain.

Tomorrow I shall finish the two ogres and then take stock and come up with a plan. I am not sure why as I probably won’t keep to it anyway.

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One More Sleep…

Well that is it, all the preparation for tomorrow’s convention are almost done.

I almost forgot to put the wash on the road, but luckily remembered in time, it has darkened down nicely, but is still light enough to be seen as a road. I found photos that showed really light roads amongst darker desert and this is what I was aiming for.

So here is the finished village…

I also got my display boards done too…

Regarding the firing rules, I have come up with a change that I think will work. Under twelve inches needs a 5 plus to hit, twelve to twenty four inches needs the 6. Up to thirty six is the 7 then beyond that is an 8 on 2D6. To aid with this I have a piece of dowel 36 inches long, this has been coloured in sections to aid distances for firing. There will be photos of it in action tomorrow.

From what I recall, there are the following:

Rapid Fire,

Zombies

Pod Racing

MTG

My Tanker game

There may be more too.

Whilst I remember, I go through bucket loads of superglue sticking things to bases etc. I decided that enough was enough with the 5g pots (sometimes 3G).

On the left 5g of superglue for £3.95 …. on the right 150ml of superglue for £7 posted.

I reckon it should keep me going for a while.

Tomorrow I shall regale you all with tales of our little convention 🙂

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Walls with added Agriculture

Today everything got a second spray with watered down PVA. Once it was dry I added some vegetation of sorts.

I pretty much looked through my tufts to see what might be useful. Don’t ask me what anything is meant to be as I never got round to googling crops in the desert, well okay I just have…

 Crops grown in the desert include watermelons, apples, green onions, cucumbers, corn, hot peppers, melons, bell peppers, radishes, carrots, cabbage, soybeans, pears, tomatoes, squash and spinach.

 Many farmers raise alfalfa as feed for their animals. It uses four times as much water as wheat. But wheat is also wasteful because so much of the plant ends up as straw.

So now I know!

Anyway everything is pretty much ready for Saturday.

I hunted out my palm trees…

The one conundrum I now have is distances.

A player rolls 2D6 and has to get higher than six for ranges up to 48 inches and needs a seven beyond…Now do I half everything as I am playing 15mm. Therefore gun range becomes 24 inches for the six and over 24 becomes the seven. I would keep the movement distances of 2D6 the same.

I think this would work as although range has reduced, it means crews fire at a more effective range. As can be seen below there is no reductions for range apart from the 48 inches.

Therefore 24 inches will work just as well… I hope… I don’t want to go down the inches into centimetres route and thought this would make it easier.

What do people think?.

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Walls, a Village and some Camels

Tonight I got some watered down PVA onto the fields, below you can see it pooling…

I also managed to get sand onto the village, I intend to darken the road a bit, probably with a wash…

I also printed out the cards and records sheets and laminated both…

I now have enough of everything for six players using tokens or eight players using dry wipe pens.

I also found some camel riders from my Sudan wars games, although my armies are in 10mm I have a mini game involving 15mm miniatures. This idea is found in the Science Versus Pluck rules. If things go horribly wrong then each officer has a miniature and needs to fight a skirmish game to see whether they make it or not.

Anyway here are my Peter Pig Ansar that I painted this evening. Well I felt that I needed some camels as the game is taking part in the desert 😂. Sadly I couldn’t find my 15mm sheep and goats that would have graced the table.

For speed, once again, these were done in Contrast paint.

Tomorrow I will add vegetation to the fields and spray the PVA mix onto the village.

I had a look at my ga I got mat today and suddenly realised that it was a lot smaller than I thought it was. I have a sand coloured piece of felt that is bigger. I will also put a shout out to the club and see if anyone has anything bigger. If not then I will go with what I have.

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Walls, Conundrums and a Christmas Card idea

Well tonight I got some more work done on the walls, they were dry brushed lots and then sand was put on the bases.

These will get some colour variations added then will get a spray with watered down PVA… oh and then I will get some vegetation on there too,.

The following is going to be my Bethlehem scene with Mary, Joseph and ickle wickle baby Jesus…

Still the sand to add, the well is just about visible under the shade of the palm tree.

Sadly I don’t have any 15mm middle eastern civilians, plenty of 10’s but no 15’s.

So onto the conundrum…. drum roll please…..

WaT requires a board to mark everything on, whether a tank is loaded, acquired etc. As I said yesterday I was going to print off the Thingiverse one and here it is…

The hexagonal tokens are the universal tool that shows how far a turret can turn for each appropriate dice. 60 degrees rotation per successful dice. Now Cura, the slicing software, gave a time of 5 hrs 30 minutes to print, it was actually closer to seven. My new roll of PLA hasn’t arrived yet and I reckon I can probably get another one out of the remainder of this roll. This type needs a plasticised sheet behind it so it can have things written on it in the blank boxes, which is again more work.

Option 2 is to simply print out the ones from the book and cover them with the laminator…

Option 3 is to basically use what I have already

The problem with this last option is that I made them double sided…

The only issue would be making sure things didn’t get wiped off and having somewhere for the temporary damage dice to go…

To be honest for ease, I will probably go for option two or three. I also just remembered that I need to make a crib sheet for all of the different attributes.

Today I had to go and get all of my crap out of the crashed car. It did look a bit broken, however when I was there I noticed this…

All of the other tyres were inflated and this one has run on its metal rim. It looks like it had a blow out on the back driver side. Either way the car is totally buggered.

Tomorrow I will carry on with the village, hunt out the palm tree bases and generally crack on with things.

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Walls, Cheat Sheets, Photos and a Well

Today has been, what can best be described as, bitty.

The walls were nice and dry so I gave them an undercoat of grey primer, only to find I still had enough desert yellow in the can, so they got a blast with that too when the grey had dried.

Once the undercoat had cured, I gave the walls a wash with home made sepia wash with a home made black wash over the top of that.

Once the wash has dried, I will get going with some dry brushing.

When that is done it will get some vegetation added. This will be a mix of green and desert yellowish colours. The green will be used as crops etc on the inside of the walls as these areas would be watered.

The small well for the village can be seen in the middle of the walls.

The other thing I managed to do was make some support materials for the game…

Firstly I printed off a simple map for the Battle of Sidi Rezegh which took place in late 1941. I also added a pile of photos showing various axis and allied tanks in operation Crusader.

The other thing I wanted to do was a cheat sheet for the gamers and lo and behold I came across these.

This has certainly saved me a shit load of work… so a big thank you goes to:

https://onseanstable.com/2018/06/08/what-a-tanker-full-metal-dashboards/

He (I reckon he is called Sean) added PDF’s to the page, which means I can get it sorted super quickly. His had metal in between the paper to make them magnetic. I am going to print dashboards out on the 3D printer. Each one will take over 5 and a half hours each. I am kicking of with them tomorrow. Tonight I am printing off the WaT Universal tool. I am printing off six, these are taking me a couple of hours to do (in total thankfully). They still have an hour to go so no photos until tomorrow 😉. Hopefully you can keep your excitement in check until tomorrow evening. 😁