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 🤔

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.

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.

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.

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.