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Tenochtitlan in Technicolor II

First layer of the lighter colour on…

The steps are being left the darker colour as numerous people tromping up and down them would very quickly knock any colour off.

The smaller ones still need the step sides painted as well as another coat or two to make them less patchy.

I fully intended to get more done tonight, but firstly everything aches apart from maybe my ears, as today was office move day, it was meant to be Monday, but others decided that today was better!

Started at 09.00 and got to this level at 16.30. A fridge is a total swine to get up stairs as well as downstairs even with a trolley. What make it worse is that our fridge came upstairs and theirs went downstairs, we suggested we leave them where they were, but sadly the owners wanted their own Fridge!

The reason for the move…. well our two Social Work departments needed to work closer together, so they moved offices to be closer together, sadly not from another part of Shetland or even a different part of town… err no they moved offices in the same building. One floor down and about 20 metres closer, to be fair some of them did move about 40 metres so therefore they are about 10 metres closer. I despair sometimes I really do!

Apologies for the rant!

Second reason was that the kids went to the local Halloween party and finally I was so achey I had a hot bath to try and sort some of the muscles out.

Hopefully I will get the cracked on with tomorrow.

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Tenochtitlan in Technicolor

Well a desert yellow to begin with…

I wanted to seal the MDF so blasted it with my Army Painter spray can. It will become a lighter colour by far. I will also add some red and blue to the levels near the top of the tall pyramid.

I will get round to painting them tomorrow. I am just going to use craft paints on the bulk of them and then get a Matt varnish over the top

The other thing I managed to do was to stick the tank to a square base, I know I had a crappy day at work today, but tonight I realised how crappy.

Tonight I stuck a circular thing onto a square base and tried to work out which way the base and the tank went!

Regarding the tournament, only eight people can attend as it is in the smallest room in the building, this may mean I cannot attend due to having to have the kids that day. My Eldest wants to take part too. Unfortunately my wife is working the same day ☹️.

We shall have to see.

Tomorrow is, as they say, another day!

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Building Tenochtitlan

Well okay maybe not all of it 😉

Here is my big temple. Standing about 8cm tall. The sides are 9cm on each side.

Here it is defended by some Aztec warriors.

A nice size to go with the 15mm figures.

I also built three smaller pyramids (or simple Lizardmen dwellings as they are named on the website). These come in threes, the main one as an individual.

These are about 4cm high and 6cm on the side.

Each of the smaller one has an opening on one face. As seen by the one on the left. They work very well as minor temples too.

They are all made up of concentric squares in two layers with internal supports.

The step sides are then added, these help strengthen the whole thing. I used super glue, but could have used PVA instead. The upside of the super glue is that they were ready to get onto the table in a few minutes.

The thing I really like about these is that due to their construction you don’t get any tab holes showing anywhere. Because of the double layers, the stairs look the right scale.

Now these models don’t have any instructions, but to be honest it took about thirty seconds to work out how they went together.

These came from Dragonfrog games, found here

They both were £6.00 each so in my mind really good value for money. I didn’t have to pay postage as Martin runs his business from Shetland which is rather handy 😁

I suppose I have to now think about what to do colour wise. Part of me wants to leave them as they are and another part wants to make them brighter. Most pictures I have seen of Aztec temples when in use are stuccoed so therefore a creamy white.

In Hordes of the Things the Strongholds (temple) sit on a base 600 paces (15cm) square, with the actual stronghold being 200 paces (5cm) square. So either the big one

It suddenly dawned on me that my Alternative Armies Skull piles fit well on these…

Tomorrow I will work in some form of plaza for the temple to sit on.

The other thing I did tonight was squidge some Greenstuff into lianas and leaves.

The unpainted leaves are to go onto the Triffid base when it is cured. Once dried I will get them painted up.

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HOTT Conquistadors Finished…

Well apart from the obligatory basing ‘not done yet’ comment!

The Leonardo tank and knights finished tonight.

A side view on the knights.

The lances were separate, some twit never thought to check they would fit! It could be the reason that they are bent! The lances are rather long, these haven’t been glued in yet so I could replace them with something a bit shorter if needs be.

I am quite pleased with how these have progressed, roughly ten days start to finish. And if truth be known I painted more than I actually needed as there are two bases of spears, a cannon and a second Lurker done too.

This is my initial army list, it may change as I think about it 😉 I don’t want an über army that is a bit on the extreme side, but the spares allow me to have a think about things.

General/ hero @ 4 points

Behemoth (tank) @ 4points

Blades (sword and buckler men) x 2@2 points

Shooters (crossbows and aquibusiers)x 2 @ 2 points

Beasts (war dogs) @ 2 points

Lurker (snake or Triffid) @ 1 point

Hordes (native allies) x3 @1 point

Total points 24.

Flexibility of the spares (lurking at the back)…

Lurker @ 1point

Cannon @ 3 points

Spears @ 2 points each.

Unpainted are a lot more Spaniards and a lot more Aztecs, so the possibilities are endless 😉, well maybe not as I would have to paint lots more.

Part of me is tempted to get the Aztecs painted up for a second army choice. It is possible, but with only ten days to do it in then I might be pushing my luck. 🤔

What to paint next, is now on my mind??? But first get the bases on these finished, and then onto something new ( probably the hundreds of 10mm Mongols) or an Aztec army. 🙄

Finally my measuring templates came today.

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HOTT Conquistadors X

Nearly there….

Managed to get the metalwork on the gun done, as well as just about finish the command section.

The biggest problem I have is what to do with the flag? I have seen many different miniatures with many different flags from holy icons, to a red saltire type thingy with nobbles.

The monk still needs a bit of work on his face, not to mention the hair on the other two too.

The Triffid thingy was the other thing worked in tonight.

I pretty much painted it in washes apart from the bone colour.

So this is the army parts painted…

And this is what is left to do…

As I shared my arty pictures yesterday, I thought I would share my 10 year olds photos tonight. She wanted to take a few photos, She scampered off and returned with these ones

Tonight I have a conundrum… why is it that when I follow certain people’s blogs only some of them appear in my WordPress feed… I suddenly realise that they have posted various things that for some reason haven’t registered.

I might go for the tank to start with tomorrow as it should be the quickest, for speed I may just use the wash method again.

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HOTT Conquistadors IX

Well this lot are nearly all done

The metalwork on the gun needs doing and the the sand on the bases then they are all finished.

Next up is the command stand, the yucky pink on the flag is to act as a base coat for a red flag. The monk needs another coat of paint on his habit as I ran out on the pallet.

I did a bit more on the Triffid too.

I really think that this army should be ready in time for the tournament. If truth be known the spears and gun are extras to allow me a little flexibility when planning the composition. I need to decide on the snake or the Triffid as my Lurker…oh and get the tank painted and based.

Today we had Autumnal Shenanigans in the nice weather.

A nice afternoon out in Scalloway, followed by cake 😁

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HOTT Conquistadors VIII

Managed to crack on a bit tonight.

The swords and spears are almost finished, the shooty things are not far behind.

This leaves the command group and the cavalry to sort out.

I have made a start on the Triffid as seen in the photo above, and also, the tank is put together. A simple case of glueing the top and bottom together followed by the guns.

I will get it started sometime soon.

I decided to see what the horde looked like alongside the conquistadors,

To be honest, I am quite pleased with them. There is enough colour in the Spaniards to group them together as a fighting force.

I am ashamed to say that tonight’s painting was brought to you by this!

I still can’t see how the person that made the ‘Lord of the Rings’ also made this. Chalk and Cheese. I was looking for the Road to Eldorado, but came across this first.

I will finish the trilogy (trilogy!) and then start on the proper films 😂😂😂

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HOTT Conquistadors VII

A smidge more done today.

I managed to get some painting done twice, some just after breakfast, whilst waiting for the BT Engineer (more on that later) and then after the kids went to bed.

As you can see from the image above, my spear points are nowhere near the level of my jungle vines. I will attempt to do something with them. I cut the pikes down from full length to half length as did the original conquistadors. However it looked a bit naff just as a pole. I do in fact live in awe of people who can actually sculpt the figures, never mind the spear points.

Some other Fabbo news…

My tank and scary flower came… Whooppee!!!

The tank and Triffid are a nice size..

They also came with a free 28mm figure… Alternative Armies were adding a ghostly bride to everyone’s order

Some skulls completed the order from them…

But there’s more…

My Tin Soldier Aztecs came too!

And there is even MORE!!!

David from over on TIM (The Imperfect Modeller) A great blog: https://theimperfectmodeller.wordpress.com/ it is well worth a look.

Well anyway he very kindly passed on to me some 15mm minis that he had been given, so a mega big thank you to him.

I haven’t had a chance to have a proper look, but there are some pikemen, 2 cannon and crew and some mounted and command types too.

So that was the awesome part if the day, the rest was a bit frustrating… the BT Engineer who was supposed to come this morning hadn’t arrived by 19.00 tonight.

What makes it worse is that today was my last day of leave and the weather for once was nice (it’s been raining most days and blowing a hooligan …it is again!). The family could have gone out and done something but No. So I phone up BT and some oik told me it was nothing to do with them and that I would have to phone up Openreach… he gave me a number to call… which was no longer in service.

I eventually managed to get hold of them via their chat service! A nice pretendy lady (most of them are automated these days, the chat, not the ladies) told me that no Engineer had been requested from BT…. so back to them I went… A lovely real life lady tried her best to find out what was going on, but by this time it was past 20.00 and most if her colleagues had gone home. But according to her the Engineer had been requested and he had done the work…..

She is phoning me back tomorrow.

Why did I need the Engineer…. Well we got Broadband here when we moved in… sitting at roughly 0.5 mbs. We are never going to get mega speeds where we areBut over time the ageing infrastructure is starting to effect things. We now get 0.3 if we are lucky, often 0.02 if we get any at all.

BT have been next to useless. Not the engineers or most of the help staff, but BT themselves. It will cost them too much money to upgrade our little hamlet. We are however paying the same as everyone else. Their answer… Leave! We tried, however they have a monopoly on the exchange it would seem and we cannot. The one time we could have done, then the new company refused to take us on due to the crap infrastructure.

We looked into satellite Broadband, but the bandwidth options weren’t much use.

Both of my wife and I can work from home, technically but with the speeds we are getting we are forced to travel into Lerwick to work from there.

Apologies for the rant….. I am calm, I am calm, I am calm.

Anyway today’s painting was brought to you by…

Or Acapulco as I have been calling it all night. A really silly film to watch as all speech is subtitled! I reckon my paint usage has quadrupled tonight as it kept drying up before I got to use it.

A bit of a silly film, although I do like it. But as I was painting conquistadors, I thought why not.

Tomorrow I hope to be calmer and get more stuff painted….I think ‘The Road to Eldorado’ tomorrow night.

It has an Aztec kind of a twist…

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HOTT Conquistadors VI

I decided on a test base to see what these would look like…

The dogs need a bit of work, probably a glaze will sort them out.

The thing I notice about the swordsmen is that the sword just seems to be hovering near the hand and not grasped in it.

The rear view of the same base…

I quite enjoyed doing these. I started adding a bit of colour to the rest of them. I thought they were all identical in Morion and cuirasses. They aren’t. The pikemen are in quilted armour and the arquebusier’s are in their tunics. The crossbowmen are similarly attired to the sword and bucklers.

I actually think that these will be a little more colourful than I first thought.

Tomorrow I shall hopefully crack on with these and get a few more finished…

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HOTT Conquistadors V

Only a smidge done tonight, I have been carrying on converting the byre again today.

I was going to spray them, but unfortunately half a dozen Guinea Pigs are in the shed where I would normally spray things, come to think of it a lot of 8×4 OSB sheets are in the way too.

It was down to the brush and some dark brown.

I may give them a dark wash tomorrow, but I will see how I feel when I have a look at them again.

I had a mess around with some Greenstuff the other day and made some Jungle bits to go with my Lurker MKII.

I was quite pleasantly surprised when I painted them up… the tree stump still needs a bit of a dry brush and highlighting.

To be honest I rather like how they look on the Snake base.

A few tea leaves and other herbs to act as ground cover and I think it will look rather good.

Tomorrow I will crack on with the Conquistadors. I also got an email from the lovely people at Alternative Armies to say that my order had been dispatched. I should have the Leonardo tank in a couple of days 👍.