All posts by Gimgamgoo

End of 2017

Antares, Kings of War, Paint Table

It’s been a pretty lousy year overall. Serious illness and loss of a job puts a block on all sorts of things. I’ve also bought about 4 times more models than I’ve managed to paint. However, the year’s ended pretty well. Illness under control and improving, a new job at a fantastic place, even if it is only till next summer.

How’s the hobbying and painting going then… well, I’m going to make a New Years’ Resolution this year. Although I’m still going to try to play the massive assortment of games I have, I’ll stick to a painting focus on just 2 games.

Game One

Beyond the Gates of Antares. Although I’ve always wanted to give this a try – after all, my main opponent – my wife only really enjoys Bolt Action. I’d overlooked Antares for too long. The rules are basically Bolt Action, but with stats added in for differences in aliens. The models are now coming out in plastic for the main troops as well and the larger models are in well crafted resin with a few metal pieces. In the Warlord sale, along with a voucher, I started the set off with:

Antares

With a few more additions since, I’ve taken it to having 3 average sized 1500 point armies. Ghar, Algoryn and Concord. As there’s three of us in the house, that means we can choose an army each to play with.

Game Two

Kings of War. I bought enough Ogres to field a 2000 point army. Why Ogres? Well, I’ve always loved the pics in the KoW rulebook of the red ogres with the white paint on their faces – kind of LotR’y. Also, 3/6 models per unit rather than 10/20 should speed up the painting process to get an entire army completed. I tried one out, and although the mobile photo isn’t brill, it came out fairly well – certainly at arm’s length with my dodgy eyesight. Ogres are also Neutral. So I can align these with the few Lizardmen or painted Dwarves I have to make a large enough army to take on the Undead or Orc/Goblin alliance. Although there’s a general hatred of Restic on the internet, these models were a breeze to clean up and put together.

Ogre Trial

I’m certainly not going to forget the other games I play, which is a rather long list now.  There’s some fantastic stuff coming out for Maelstrom’s Edge. I’ve never seen such well made resin models as well as the new plastic Broken they’ve made. Mantic has just released most of the vehicles for Warpath. I’ve even (shock) bought some new GW stuff – 40k Death Guard and Dark Angel Primaris models, along with the new version of Necromunda. All built to play, but unpainted. Dracula’s America is also a great game to play with fun rules. I’ve got my Tombstone kickstarter arriving any week now, so that will also get some action. Lots of models to paint, even if it is only the odd one to break up the Ogres or Antares painting.

Hope you all have a great New Year!

Forge Father Hultr

Deadzone, Paint Table, Warpath,

Here’s a quick turnaround of updates after the long gap. After building the Veer-Myn Tunnellers, I stuck with the Deadzone/Warpath Universe and decided to paint up the Forge Father Hultr I built a week or so ago.

Although I’m not doing any awesome paint jobs for my Deadzone/Warpath, I’m just trying to get them table ready, and also, in colours to make all the armies look different.

I’d previously been doing the Forge Fathers in AP’s Crystal Blue with a GW blue wash, and a quick drybrush of crystal blue followed by shining silver. I had to keep the Hultr in the same scheme. Although I did add a slight beaten up look to it.

Here’s a couple of pics (sorry – mobile phone shots in poor light), with the 2 weapon systems it has. And you guessed it, magnetised. 🙂 One of the pics has a selection of previously painted FF models to show how they fit in the colour scheme.

FF Hultr 01FF Hultr 02

And then I got distracted and bought some Kings of War Ogres to paint. I keep seeing images of those red skinned ogres with the white face paint and wanted to do a few myself. If I do a few units, I can add ally them to the Lizardman army I was painting so there’s enough to take on my Orcs/Goblins or Undead armies.

Hopefully, I’ll have an ogre to post next time. I’ve built some, it’s just playing around with colours now till I get a scheme I’m happy with – and hopefully can be painted quickly.

Veer-Myn Tunnellers

Deadzone, Paint Table, Warpath,

It’s been a long while since my last update. Ill health, losing my job, spending all waking hours trying to find a new job… takes as much time as working.

Anyway, part of my Warpath Kickstarter arrived last week to cheer me up. The Veer-myn Tunneller battlegroup. It consists of 3 Veer-myn (space skaven) transport/tanks with an extra wagon for more transport. I originally bought these to be just bits of industrial scenery. I was even going to carve one up and make it look like it was coming out of the ground. However, the Warpath Firefight rules seem really good, so I’m going to use them as part of an army.

I couldn’t decide which weapon choices, or whether I wanted the long transport or a short one, so I did my usual… Magnet time!

I magnetised the transport vehicle so the back wagon can attach or it can stay as a short vehicle. I then built the other 2 as tanks, but magnetised the weapons so both tanks can have the same weapon types, or 1 of each.

They worked out fantastic. They are also really, really big.

Kudos to Mantic on these, they are made of only a few parts, so no need spending hours and hours building them. They also have very few mold lines, so little clean up was necessary. Brilliant.

All I have to do now, is find a job so I can afford the massive amount of paint these beasts are going to require.

Veer-myn Transporter (10 or 20 rats)

Tunneller 01Tunneller 02Tunneller 03

 

Veer-myn Tank (2 identically made models with weapons options)

Tunneller 04Tunneller 05Tunneller 06

Photobucket… #sigh

Rants

Well, I was storing all my photos in neat folders on Photobucket.

Photobucket allowed me to use <img> tags to point this blog at them. I do pay for Photobuckets use, just as I pay for this blog. I don’t believe in freeloading and would often rather pay a small sum to be ad-free on most of the sites I use.

However, Photobucket changed their policy. There is no linking or embedding photos stored on photobucket unless you pay for their top package – which is $399.99 per year.

As a a part time blogger, mainly just wanting to put some more photo’s out there for the world, this is way too much. I only use 0.2Gb of my 10Gb space and my bandwidth use is maybe a dozen pics seen a day.

Pretty soon the pictures will vanish as web caches empty. Putting the photos elsewhere wouldn’t be a problem, but re-coding every page to point at the location of the newly placed images would be much more time consuming.

I guess it’s goodbye blog – unless Photobucket see the error of their ways. Businesses can probably afford $400 a year. But, like Adobe’s high annual fee software packages, small time non commercial folks can’t.

If I don’t post again, take care folks.

Ghost Town?

Paint Table, Wild West

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been putting together terrain pieces to make a Wild West board. Most of it is finished now. All I need to do is paint up the figures I have and await the arrival of the Tombstone Kickstarter.

I’ve also put together a few other terrain oddments, all seen randomly in the photo below as I brought them up to the games room to pack away.

There are; 3 snowy trees to use in Frostgrave, an old pub to use in Pirate or fantasy games, 3 different ponds – one for an oasis in a desert, one for a mix of fantasy gaming or Saga and another I’m still working on for an industrial wasteland. Just caught at the edge of the camera are really the only models I’ve done anything on, a T-34 Soviet tank and just out of shot, 2 German Tiger tanks (all in 15mm). The ponds all have 3 inserts with a variety of pieces I can put on such as rocks, trees, palm trees, foliage (and when I finish the industrial one; a pipe system). The ponds are painted and coated with “Still Water”. A kind of thick setting varnish – I had to use this, my wife banned me from using resin in the house.

Here’s a few pics of the Wild West board coming together.

And the 3′ by 3′ Gaming board for Wild West games from above…

I do love the 4Ground mdf models. The only problem is the time they take to put together. The 2 story buildings are at least half a day to build. Some are a real nightmare to glue together too. Yes, I’m talking to you Stagecoach. (Horses and figures still awaiting mould removal and painting). I also sanded and painted the bases on all the fence pieces as well.

Now, let’s see if I can get some actual figure painting done for next time…

Greys, Tyranids and Raptorz?

MDRG

I know that I’ve started recovering from my lengthy illness as I’ve started to get some painting mojo back, although I’ve probably done more building of models than painting in the past few months.

Having discovered the simplicity of a post apocalyptic game called ‘Mutants and Death Ray Guns’ by Ganesha Games – finding that it’s a game my wife enjoys and we can play a game in under an hour – I’ve been putting some pieces together for it.

I know I’m late to the party with this, but Ganesha Games do quite a bunch of variants for different eras, so we’ve also taken to playing Flashing Steel (a piratey/swashbuckling variant) and Song of Blades and Heroes (a fantasy version which I think was the first set of these rules). Now I’m hoping they’ll hurry up and translate the Italian Wild West version as well.

With the Kickstarter for Tombstone , I’ve been inspired to also build a Wild West themed board – some of which you’ll be able to see in the background of the photo’s below.

I still have a backlog of models to take photos of, but as I had the case of figures open to put some MDRG away, I popped them on the table and took some photos. The light was bad and I used the flash a few times, so apologies for the quality. I need to stop buying plastic/metal/resin/mdf models and save for a decent camera and light box.

Here’s the first Western figure I tried painting next to the Sheriff’s Office.

Although for our first games of MDRG, we used Mutants (using Deadzone figures) and Humans (using GW Chaos Cultist figures), the first band I painted up were some ‘Greys’. The ship is just a piece of themed terrain for the game and isn’t used as such.

After that, I had the urge to paint some GW Tyranids. I never wanted to collect an army of these ever, but always fancied trying out that red/bone colour I see so many photos on the net. These are going to be used as Xeno-Parasites in MDRG.

Finally, a couple of pictures of my MDRG gang of Raptorz. It took an age to find some models to use for these, in the end, the ones I liked the best were from Ral Partha. 2 sets of 3 make a perfect sized pure band of 6 for MDRG. I saw some painted in a tiger-like scheme and that was it, my mind was made up. Base coated Bone, an airbrush of yellow towards the middle to top, then an airbrush of orange on the top. Washed with soft tone, then add stripes, claws and eyes and these things were painted rather rapidly. Good enough for my ageing eyes and shaking hands anyway.


I think we can see who’s going to win this fight…

Anyway, I’ve built 6 different 4Ground Wild West buildings and a fantasy inn for the Pirate games… It’s time to peel off my 2nd skin of PVA and get some painting done.

A ‘giant’ update

Kings of War, Paint Table

Pun intended.

I’ve been looking on and off for a good giant model for my Orc and Goblin army for quite a few years now. I was never impressed with the Games Workshop giant,  it looked far to gormless, flabby and non-menacing. The Forge World model was larger, but still didn’t impress me, and obviously nor did it’s 3 figure price tag.

I’d looked into other manufacturers, but most of these were older metal models and the giants weren’t usually much bigger than trolls.

Anyway, after searching for that Fire Elemental (The D&D collector’s series Fire Myrmidon in my last update) I realised they did a few limited edition giants. The Storm Giant looked a little too ‘ancient greek’ and the Fire Giant had molten armour on (although it’s a fantastic model). I opted for this Frost Giant. I won’t be painting it with blue skin like a D&D frost giant. It will get human coloured flesh with an assortment of leather patched armours. It was only a 7 piece resin model and didn’t need much cleaning up either.

The photo shows the size compared to an orc and a troll. Perfectly huge, but it fits on a 50mm square base. A excellent addition to the Orc and Goblin armies I’m (still) painting for Kings of War.

It’s been a while…

Paint Table

My Blog hasn’t been forgotten. It’s been close to half a year since I updated it, but I’ve had a really lengthy illness which I’m still not over. My doctor has advised me to get back to things that I enjoy, but it’s been a difficult thing to do.

Over the last few weeks I’ve treated myself to a few new figures and although I’ve been managing to build them, the urge to paint hasn’t quite been there. I can sit at my paint table for hours looking at stuff and not managing to pick up a brush.

So far, I’ve started putting some green stuff onto bases for the next additions to my KoW Salamander (Lizardman) army, and after much searching, I found a great model to be the Greater Fire Elemental for the army – a D&D Collector’s series Fire Myrmidon. It’s a resin model, and although the lower half was horrendously warped, a quick dip in a boiling water bath, a reshape and a cold tap fixed it up beautifully.

Green Stuff bases:

Greater Fire Elemental model:

I’m going to base spray the elemental in white and mainly use yellow, orange and red washes/inks/glazes to paint it. My problem is this: Do I use darker reds/oranges in the recesses and work outwards to lighter yellow. Or the reverse – have the lighter yellow in the recesses and work outwards to the darker reds? Googling flame pictures doesn’t really help as you can see below…

Flames: Bright centre and dark tips OR Dark centre and bright tips?

If you have a prefered way in which you do your flames, let me know in the comments.

Work to blame?

Devil's Run, Gaming, X-Wing

I’ve been behind with my painting schedule recently. Work has been tough recently. 75 hours a week of work leaves little time for painting and spending time with the family. With a week off, I was expecting to get loads painted, however, my wife decided we did need to paint – 2 of the rooms in the house. Although she did all the fantastic hard work – I still had loads of ‘junk’ to sort out and clear. Then matters got worse because we bought a PS4 for me and the lad to play on… and then the week off had gone. 😦

I did manage to paint up 4 Viking Hearthguard for Saga, a couple of M10/Jackson tank destroyers for Tanks, 2 stage 3Z zombies and a Veer-myn crawler for Deadzone. I’ll get these and few other things from the last month photo’d better soon. At the moment, the space I’d use to take photos is taken up with junk from 2 other rooms.

I did manage to take a couple of pics of some of the vehicles I’d started on for Devil’s Run. I missed the first Kickstarter for this game due to lack of funds, but managed to join the second one. I also bought the original game I’d first missed. What a great game it is as well. Several weekends running have seen my wife’s Law Haulage take on (and defeat) my Haul’s Angels. A game I’d certainly recommend.

Haul’s Angels so far:

Law Haulage so far:

And a work in progress shot:

The top two left cars are conversions from a box of old cars I found when I cleared my Mum’s house out. They’ll do as Speedsters for the Haul’s Angels and I’ll get the Pursuer for the Law Haulage to give them another speed car.

Devil’s Run had a miss this weekend and we had a 3 way 100 point X-Wing game – trying to use some of the newest wave 9 ships. Great fun. Although the finishing order went Imperials, Scum & Villainy and the poor old Rebels last.

Till the junk is cleared and I get some photo’s done…

Maelstrom’s Edge and a freebie

Frostgrave, Maelstrom's Edge, Rants

Since my last update, I’ve finally decided on my colour schemes for a few more of my Maelstrom’s Edge models. The Karist Angels and Angel Minnows along with the Epirian forces.

Both schemes had to be pretty simple, taking a short while to do per model as well as be repeatable.

The Epirians were done with Halfords camo green spray as a base coat, then airbrushed with Vallejo German camo green. The beige colours are Vallejo German Beige with brown wash. The bot handler has had a female head in place of the standard head, mainly because… erm, I had some on the worktable and I just fancied painting something with hair 🙂 I think one of the characters near the end of the Maelstrom’s Edge novel Sacrifice was as well.

The Karist Angels were an odd thing. I didn’t plan on painting them, I was just undercoating them ready. I base coated them in black, then gave them a once over with the airbrush using purple, pink and a touch of white. I planned on leaving them for another day. However, the Games Workshop so called ‘Air paint’, even thinned down 50/50 with airbrush thinner caused the models to have a horrible powdery white look – I decided to Wash them in purple ink. Well, that more or less finished the look. A drybrush in pink and silver for the talons with black glossed skulls. Pretty easy to do and they’ll look fine on the game table.

Karist Angel

Karist Angel Minnows

Epirian Bot Handler and Spider Drones

With the “re-boot” of White Dwarf, Games Workshop gave away another free figure.This single sprue  with half a dozen pieces is meant to be £18. Rather costly considering it has mold lines all the way up the middle of it’s spiked legs making them difficult to remove without damaging the spikes. GW usually are the pinacle of design of plastic sprues, but putting mold lines here is annoying. Anyway, it’s now a piece of Frostgrave Scenery. My only annoyance was that the vitamin pill tub I attached it to, is slightly larger than the one for the last White Dwarf freebie statue I made.