My package from Tin soldier came, lots more Aztec Goodness…

The thing that suddenly struck me is that errr… My reinforcements actually outnumber the first group… whoops!

So I have six bases of slingers, three of peasant with hand weapon, three of Eagle warriors with back banners and the same for the jaguar warriors plus a command unit. Forty seven miniatures in total.

Tin Soldier also put in a few Samurai samples… I really do like them… I wonder what my next 15mm army or two is going to be 🤔.

So here we have Samurai with katana, a mounted monk, an Ashigaru and Samurai armed with a bow and a lowly peasant with a selection of smacking implements.

I really do like these, they remind me of the 25mm Dixon Samurai range which I always wanted, but never could afford when I was a kid. By time I had the disposable income I was playing at a club where we ran a 15mm campaign.

You will have noticed that I glue my miniatures down before painting, well I do in 10 and 15mm. When I first got my Pendraken 10mm I painted them individually glued to a lolly stick and it seemed to take forever. A few months into conversations in the forum and a guy call Nic Harwood showed how he painted his armies. He did it by glueing everything down to begin with and then took it from there. I tried it and really liked the method. To be honest because of the 3D nature of the minis, it can be tricky to get a brush in, especially with shit loads of miniatures on a base. Which is why I stick to two or three 15mm and maximum of five in 10mm. If things are really close together because of the shape of the mini then I glue the outer ones down and paint the other separately…Mainly this is if I need to do shield designs or the like.

This method isn’t for everyone as, if I am really being brutally honest it is, in my case, used for speed painting and will never ever win any competitions. On the up side it does get minis on the table. If you look through all my 10 and 15mm blog post you will see that I have used this method throughout.

All off the above were done the same way apart from, ironically enough, the Aztecs that became my horde troops for my HOTT force. These were painted individually as I was messing about one day and decided to do a skirmish force of one mini equals one man. I added them in to show the differences between the two.

Oh and I promise to finish the Scalians… honestly Ponestly!

Well when I say all done I am considering getting the command pack and some more peasants. As in reality there were more than likely lots more peasants than there were nobles. I will look to get a couple of hand weapons and then one of slingers.

So that is them all done and awaiting some form of flock.

I am quite pleased with how fast these were finished. From bare metal to finished in seven days which for me is a bit speedy. The models really helped and I think the Contrast paint speeded things up too.

I also made a start on the Scalians, by a start I mean superglued the mounts to the 30×40 bases. I had exactly the right amount left. My Conquistador cavalry will have to wait until I buy some more.

The riders come in three bits… legs are attached to the mount, the body is glued to the legs and finally a separate tail needs to be attached. as with the swordsmen, the shields are separate.

I will have four bases of bow and four of spears. It should make a nice force, but because I am like I am I have been hunting for 3D printable dinosaurs … as if I haven’t got enough to paint already!

I survived my first day in the new job, still another to go before the kids turn up.

I eventually got round to going out to the shed to get my pot of GW Abbadon Black… I swore, but more of that in a minute. I needed the black to paint the hair and obsidian shards of the warriors which I managed to do tonight.

There is certainly less white showing on these now. I need to put the pupils in on the suit wearers helmets and the gold/jade accouterments. The arrows on the archers and the slings on the slingers, but there isn’t really that much left to do apart from the bases. sadly I didn’t get them finished, but it was a self imposed deadline so it isn’t really a biggy.

As for the black… I can honestly say I detest with a vengeance the GW paint pots, I really liked their old pots as they sealed nicely and the paint stayed wet…. to prove a point, I am still using the hex pots and the round ones from before that.

Anyway out to the shed I skipped to get my pot of black and it had fallen over….

The nice black shape is the paint from within the pot, nice and dry, luckily it was in its own little compartment so it only affected the black pot. No matter how careful you are, the seal just won’t stay clean, yeah I know I could attack the pot with a baby wipe after each session to clean it up, last time I did that I was cleaning paint off the furniture as well as the pot. The above is my second or possibly third pot of Abbadon black, the Sunburst yellow is my first and only one. To be fair the temperatures in the shed were hitting 30 C so perhaps the liquid expanded a bit and cracked the seal, I had a brown in a similar state (but much less escaped).

Talking of paint… As I had run out of (or near as dammit run out of) white spray paint I popped into my auto shop to get some more, a snip at £4.99 for 500ml. Gw is £10.49 for 400ml so a bargain in anyone’s money. It was then that the chap said it was buy two get one free, so for under a tenner I got three spray cans to keep me out of mischief for a while.

These cans work really well, if the temperature is down I warm them up a bit first, but to be honestI have been using them for a year and have had no problems. I get four colours, white, black, grey and a red colour.

Hopefully the first day in the new job won’t be too bonkers and I will get the Aztecs finished tomorrow. I picked up sixteen Scalian cavalry today and they be next on the list. Probably the Conquistadors after that.

Well as a I was cracking on with the Aztecs I thought I would have a mooch at what was left in the Aztec box…

The word ‘Bum’ or possibly something more expletive ushered from my lips…

So there are about 60 conquistadors to paint and roughly 20 packets of 8 miniatures so another 160 Aztecs. Problem with the Aztecs is that they are tiny compared to the Tin soldier ones… I got these before the Tin soldier ones as the local club were going to run a Conquistador campaign which never got off the ground. To be honest I think I will get rid of them as they will never get done, not helped by the fact that I am negotiating getting 16 Scalian Cavalry tomorrow.

I didn’t get a whole lot done on the Aztecs this evening apart from painting designs on the shields. Some of them are copied from the codices and others are made from my head!

I also repainted the peasant shields a grey colour.

I was going to paint all the embellishments on the suits gold, however on reading up a bit more they preferred jade to gold so I may change my mind… first I have to find out what shade of green jade is!

I sadly didn’t get these finished today, but I did make some progress on them. After buying some green, I decided to leave the feathers yellow. Still a very long way to go, but getting there. Still need to do the various shield designs amongst other things.

I took my unopened pot of red back and swapped it for the green, I also got the really bright blue and for some reason known only to myself a pot of orange. What makes it worse is that it is exactly (or near as dammit) as the orange I mixed for the Cuachic veterans – you can see them 4th row back – spot the difference in the shades of orange!

I am thinking about doing the shield rims in an off white colour as I do quite like the contrast with the field colour. The advantage is that I can then use a contrast colour to change it as required.

I will see how far I get tomorrow.

On the job front I can now officially resign from my current position and take up the role of head teacher (principal) as my disclosure documents arrived today. I am officially squeaky clean, well apart from my one and only speeding ticket.