Final challenge entries

With the Painting Challenge over it's high time I get to posting my final entries! Points wise my challenge wasn't much of a success with only 506 points gathered out of my original goal of 1000. Personal worst of the 5 editions I've taken part in, but still I'm pretty happy with the result. When setting up my target I didn't know I'd be buying an apartment just a few weeks later and spending much of the beginning of the year redoing it before moving in. Even after that I've honestly felt quite exhausted constantly and rather spent my time watching various TV shows and spent my hobby time mostly gaming instead of painting.

Enough rambling and onto the things that I actually managed to paint up!

First up the cast of Danger 5 and their arch nemesis Hitler with some of his cronies. I'd planned submitting them for the final bonus round as they were perfect for the theme, but seriously underestimated how long it would take to paint them up and missed the deadline. Still when I accepted the inevitable it did allow me to paint up the accompanying human and lizard soldiers for Hitler that would otherwise have been left for another entry. Great sculpts from an even better TV show. Now I just have to figure out how to actually use them in some game :)

For my final entry it was time for my entry fee. The wednesday crew had decided to paint up some Spanish Civil War minis for Curt's collection and I decided to join them. SCW has always interested me, but never enough to get me started on collecting any forces. So this was the perfect opportunity to get some painted without having to commit to a project. Luckily my fellow Finn Teemu (Vain Vader) was organizing the group entry and had ordered plenty of extras so I was able to source a mini from him. I went with a Miliciana as what sane man could resist a fiery southern woman! Like all Empress offerings the pose and general sculpt was great, but the face was bit of a let down. All the minis I've painted from them have had fairly smooth faces with little detail, perhaps more realistic in the scale, but it just doesn't look as good as a some exaggerated details.

With the challenge ending I was left with a few projects on the table in varying states of readiness. Different fantasy miniatures had paint thrown onto them as well as two battalions of Napoleonic Saxons that got about all the base colours done and were only missing a final highlight and a wash. I just couldn't get myself to finish them as doing large groups of nearly identical minis just started to feel too much like work and I had to force myself to pick up the brushes. So I felt better leave them on the desk and continue when I start to feel like painting again.

Finally part of the reason why I've been fairly quiet on the blogging and painting front aside from the renovations. A product development project on which I've been working on as one of the lead designers for the last couple of years has more or less reached it's conclusion with the first production runs and project delivery to our customer. As we are using a subcontractor outside of Finland there's been quite a bit of travel to inspect and approve work. Still quite nice to see things in real life after looking at them on the computer screen for such a long time! Hard to realize the scale of things as well considering that the smallest sizes weigh about 17tons and take roughly 100 cubic meters of space. As you can see I'm also pretty adept at playing the part of the inept office worker. No helmet and taking a selfie while hanging at 4 meter height with no proper walkways is something that is exactly what they tell you not to do at the occupational safety courses that I've gone through :) I probably should write a hazard report due to that...

Marines move out!

Well Modern May is drawing to an end and I haven't really made much progress considering my goals. I started a new job and it has really kept me busy with longer hours than previously and quite a bit more travel too so hobby time has been at a premium lately. So not much painting going on and I haven't even had time to read any blogs that I've been following. Running out of bases didn't help with these guys either as I normally paint the bases first and didn't want to start on some minis before putting them on their bases.

Anyways this is the last patch of Woodland camoflaged Marines, though I'm a bit tempted to paint the second bunch in the same camo too. This was the first time that I really tried painting darker skintones. I tried to go for a Latin American and African American look on them. I guess the African American skin turned out quite nicely, but the more reddish Latin skintone looks a bit off to my eye. Might have to try a really dark central African skintone sometime too. Maybe when I get back to my Warhammer Fantasy Chaos army.

 I've got the first Oshkosh finished with the main paintjob now. Preshading, dark yellow and then some colour modulation with a lighter yellowish colour. Next up painting the details and then weathering. My frogmen team is also more or less on the way. They are a bit difficult as their gear is 95% black in real life and trying to add contrast to the minis is a pain in the butt. I've now got them painted with a black base and a few shades of grey applied with an airbrush followed by a black wash to sharpen all edges. Looks good close up, but too monotone for gaming distances.

More USMC Fireteams

Finished up another two fireteams of USMC from Empress. Only two more to go and then to some other Modern subjects. I've run out of bases so I can't get started on more infantry yet, but I guess I can start to paint the first M-ATV next.

I have a tutorial on painting the uniforms coming up soon. I just have to finalize the text and should have it up at latest tomorrow.

I also got some new basing materials mainly in the form of Army Painter 'Poison Ivy' and some MiniNatur tufts. Especially the poison ivy seems to work quite nicely as small bushes.

First USMC fire team finished

I just finished the basing on the first USMC fire team last evening. The paint job was actually surprisingly quick as there is basically only the uniform and the webbing to paint. I just painted the uniform without any highlights and did a single highlight on the webbing followed up by a wash. Works quite well and quick and easy to do.

Painting wise I don't like these modern forces that much as the uniforms just aren't flashy and nice to paint. And however you paint them they just don't look that good at least to my eye. Practicality and camouflage tends to be boring compared to the flashy uniforms of Napoleonic era for example. Still an interesting era to game and the minis are excellent. Empress really does deliver when it comes to sculpting and casting quality. The faces are maybe a bit lacking at least to my liking, but still they are better than average even if they are not as characterful as something from Paul Hicks or the Perry Bros for example.

On the bases I decided to use some lichen for once as I found a large bag of the stuff from my cupboards. Looks OK I guess and adds a bit of variety to my normal forest bases to separate them a bit. I might still add some scatter from tea leaves or the like on the ground to make it look more like a thick undergrowth.

Painting Marpat

I got started on painting up some marines with a trial rifle team of 4 men. Digital camo seemed like quite a daunting task beforehand and trying to google for good tutorials just yielded multiple different takes on the subject that didn't really seem to be either practical or then looked a bit off.

Trying to imitate the pixelated graphics is pretty much suicidal and isn't very realistic either in this scale. I guess the best way is to get the uniform to look similar to what the real-life version would look like from roughly 30-40 meters away. To simulate the pixels I painted the paint blotches in horizontal and vertical stripes to have some sharp angles etc. This was actually surprisingly fast to do with the whole lot taking roughly an hour to get to this stage. Looks a bit rough still, but once the body armor and webbing are painted and a wash is applied, I'm hoping that it will end up looking a bit like the real thing.

Next up is painting the rest of their uniform and gear and then all their faces. I'm still not decided on whether to paint them with skin colours or with camo paint on their faces too. Maybe a simpler version of painted faces followed by slightly faded camo colours might do the trick. At least remembering from my own time in the army, the camo paints started to wear out very rapidly especially in the summer, leaving you with really faded colours that piled up in the creases of your skin.

In the background there's a small peak of an anti-tank platoon for Flames of War. Uniforms are finished. Now they just need weapons, helmets and the guns themselves painted.

Preparing for Modern May

My painting output has been a bit low lately, mainly because I tried to paint too many things at the same time and started losing interest. 14 28mm with a few cars and two platoons for Flames of War at the table at the same time just seemed to look like nothing is progressing at all. So to get a break from painting the same camo pattern over and over again I decided to prep some minis for next month, which will be Modern May.

These are some of the USMC minis from Empress Miniatures Kickstarter from last summer. I bought into the deal with 3 platoons and some extras like the Oshkosh and some special forces. Splendid minis with amazing detail all around. Today I put together the Boonie toting USMC platoon to paint them up as a recon element for use in pacific themed games as well as an Oshkosh M-ATV to be used in Afganistan scenarios.

I've also got a platoon of them with helmets which I'm going to paint up for Iraq/Afganistan. They will be supported by two Oshktosh M-ATV's. This bad boy is a pretty impressive resin kits from Empress, but boy are they pain in the ass to build. Mine needed quite a bit of sanding to get parts to fit. And even when they fit together trying to glue everything together really caused some issues. I don't know what it is with super glue, but it never seems to stick when parts are correctly aligned, but when something goes on a bit wrong it sticks in a millisecond and makes it impossible to correct mistakes. So now I have a front bumper that is slightly lopsided and one part of the back carriage that just doesn't stick whatever I do with it.

Anyway I was a bit optimistic with my painting output for Airborne April so I'm scaling my goals down a bit for May. I'm starting with the marines meant for the pacific theater and if I seem to have too much time on my hands I'll try to get some desert uniformed marines done too.

• 20 USMC in boonies and woodland camo
• 4 Devgru
• 5 USMC divers
• 2 Oshkosh M-ATV
• 20 USMC in helmets and desert camo

Not all is lost!

Your everyday equipment for a nice stroll around Taksim

 Despite being awfully busy with travelling the country and checking out the riots in Istanbul I've actually managed to have some progress on the hobby front! At least in the sense of increasing the pile of unpainted lead in the closets.

Empress miniatures have started a Kickstarter project aiming to bring out Asian themed 28mm modern USMC and PLA troops. I've been drooling over their previous products for a long time now as they are just absolutely some of the best minis I've ever seen in the scale. Great detail, good poses and extremely reasonable pricing. So naturally when I saw the Kickstarter page I had to go for a pledge giving me both USMC and PLA troops to take my Force on Force gaming to a new theater. It's also a good opportunity to change from the 1/72 minis that we have been using with our reservist organization to 28mm that is used at my local club.

Their kickstarter has already passed the first few stretch goals giving out both Navy Seals and Chinese Special Forces. Next up Australians and after that who knows now that they have also bought out Imprints range of 28mm vehicles.

Check the Kickstarter out here.