Saxon reinforcements aka the final Painting Challenge entries

With the painting challenge over it's time wrap up with my final entries. In the last few weeks I focused more or less solely on painting some Saxons. Our 1813 campaign is rolling forward and they will all be needed soon. And it doesn't hurt that they yield quite a few points while still being relative fast to paint ;)

All of these units are from the second Saxon Division. I've almost completely finished the first one, it's just missing the Leib Grenadier battalion which will need some green stuff work as their uniform differed slightly from the normal grenadier uniform. And after these I'm only missing 3 more infantry battalions from the second division and then that's completely finished as well! However they might have to wait a bit longer as I'm actually missing some line infantry miniatures and will have to wait for reinforcements. I have enough figures for one more battalion and if I use casualty figures on the bases then for maybe another one after that. I was going to order the missing Hussars and command figures and the final two batteries of artillery so it isn't that big of a deal.

First up combined grenadiers of battalion von Sperl.

 

Then we have Regiment Niesemeuschel in their red facings as well as a casualty base. I really need to crank out more casualty bases as well. I've only done this and all the light infantry ones until now so there will be quite a few to paint up!

 

And finally the two batteries of 6 pounder guns  that were attached to the second division. I still need to paint two batteries of horse artillery and two foot artillery batteries that were in the Corps reserve. Quite a lot of firepower with 8 batteries in total for two divisions and their attached cavalry.

And finally some rats! These were actually painted in late December, but were without bases as they were waiting for the rest of the unit to be painted. I never got around to it during the challenge so in the last evening I figured I'd just make some quick bases for them to get the finished. As paint test minis their main point was to see which would please my eye more, fur or skin shade, on the arms and legs. The clothing is also fairly dull and not the bright bluish green of Clan Mange that I'm going for. But I think I'll reserve that shade for just small details on the basic rats and use it more on characters and units like Stormvermin.

The bases are super simple as there will be far over a 100 of them so I need something that can be done fast and in bulk. The bases were just covered with dark brown Vallejo pumice, an assortment of pigments and then mostly covered with fallen leaves that I made with an assortment of different Green Stuff World leaf cutters. I'll also probably be adding different tufts and maybe some still water on some of the bases, but to be honest I didn't have the time on these guys. The PVA wasn't actually 100% dried when I was taking the images and it was already getting fairly late.

Painting Potpourri

I've been pretty lazy on the blogging front as of late and have amassed quite a backlog of unpublished miniatures that I've painted during the painting challenge. I haven't been very active in following other blogs or hobby forums either. To confess, I've usually actually done that at work, but since switching to a new place my workload has been way up as has been my motivation so workdays are usually actually spent working and when I get home I don't really feel like sitting on a computer anymore.

Still I've been painting fairly actively whenever I've had free time as it really helps me wind down after a hectic work day. I'm nowhere near the numbers some people are able to produce in the challenge, but I'm pretty happy with my output.

First up some Fantasy additions. I started on my Skaven army with some of the bigger machines in the form of a Doomwheel and the original old school Screaming Bell. Points wise I already have nearly half of the points of my initial army done with these guys finished. Now there's just the small matter of painting 100+ Clanrats...

 

I also painted some sideline support for my Blood Bowl team with the sportscasting team and a Bloodweiser babe. I'm pretty happy how they turned out, especially the five o'clock shade on the Ogre, Bob. And as a final Fantasy entry there's my contribution to the Monstrous theme with a Reaper Eldritch Daemon. It was a nice test bed for slightly different painting techniques. Most of it was done with a zenithal highlight basecoat and washes all through my airbrush. Then I just picked out some of the details by brush and it was done.

I also added some more tiny tanks to my early war German force that I painted for Flames of War a few years back. Until now the force has been mostly just mechanized or infantry with little armored support outside of light tanks. I've been planning to expand the army with some armor, but never really got around to it until now. There's been rising interest in playing Early and Mid War games at my club and when I saw that my local store had a box of PSC Pz38's in stock I immediately grabbed it. But as 5 tanks just isn't enough I also ended up ordering another box to have enough tanks to field a full company.

As the original army was painted already some years ago and to a fairly basic tournament standard (I did it to play at the European Team Championships) it was actually pretty refreshing to do a similar quick paint job on these guys. Basecoat of Panzergrau, highlight of lighter grey and an Ammo of Mig enamel wash meant for panzergray. It's nice to finish a unit of tanks in about one day with only the long drying time of enamels limiting the speed I can go through them.

 

And finally some more Napoleonic Saxons. This time a combined grenadier battalion of the 1st Division. They should probably have some with yellow facings as well as it should include some men from the battalions with yellow facings in the division, but for clarity's sake I decided to stick with just greens as about 2/3 of the manpower would have had that facing colour anyway.

With these out of the way, it's time to try focus on pushing towards my goal of 1000 points in the challenge. It's going to be tough, but with careful selection of subject it should be doable. Blogging wise I don't know if I'll be any more active than this. I'm a bit tired of the whole platform and find forums and facebook groups much more interactive and interesting nowadays. This would probably be better as a platform for longer texts and tutorials and the like. But as a place for just posting pictures of painted units like I've been doing lately, it's not that great. It all comes down to effort I guess. Either I need to spend some more time on this for it to have any meaningful use, or then just focus on something else.

Renovation news, secret santa and painting challenge entries

Phew it's been quite a busy 6 weeks. Apologies for my absence and lack of comments on other blogs as well. We got the keys to our new apartment in the middle of January and since then I've been there every single day after works and all the weekends except for a Flames of War tournament. Finally there's light at the end of the tunnel and our renovation is starting to be finished and we are moving in on Friday. Practically every single surface in the apartment has been redone except for the bathrooms which I'll do later on in the year when we've settled in. Walls and ceilings were painted, I've installed new wood floors and redone the stairs. In addition we tore down a wall to open up our living room and gotten a brand new kitchen. We ended up hiring a company to do the kitchen, but I did the rest myself with help from friends along the way. Quite an exhausting experience with practically no free time for a month and a half, but still quite rewarding to see the whole thing being finalized.

Now that we've been packing things away the whole scale of my hobby seems to show itself as well. I was actually pretty surprised myself as well with just the board games taking 5 large moving boxes straight away and the miniatures even more. I ended up taking some to the new place already to put them on the shelves to make space for packing dishes, clothing etc. I'm starting to think that thinning out the collection might be a good idea sometime...

Also I ran into a slight issue with transporting all my painted miniatures! Normally I store quite a lot on showcase shelves and when I started to pack them away found that I ran out of foam trays to pack them in. So I had to empty one tray out in my new wardrobe to make space for more stuff from the shelves ;)

With that out of the way it's time for some of the Painting Challenge entries that I managed to finish before our renovation kicked of properly. First up a pair of King Tigers and Wirbelwinds for my Flames of War Germans. The later model without Zimmerit was my Secret Santa gift and definitely came in handy as I needed one for the tournament in late January. So thanks to my mysterious benefactor once again! The other one was dug up from my lead pile. It was bought used as part of an eBay auction. One of the only minis that was actually useful from the lot as most were put together wrong, missing parts etc. Definitely the last time I'm buying anything just looking at a tiny picture online.

They were all painted with colour modulation using 4 different shades going from dark yellow to an ivory shade. Camouflage was added on top of that with some further modulation on the camo shades on the later Königstiger. Enamel washes, chipping and mud were the used to weather them.

As my final Flames of War German entry for the challenge I painted up some Sturmgewehr armed infantry. I'd originally planned to field Panzergrenadiers, but in the end ended up switching to Volksgrenadiers so I need to paint up a few more stands armed with assault rifles. I still haven't really figured out how to get camouflage clothing to work at this scale, but from your normal gaming distance you can't really see it anyway.

And finally some refs for Blood Bowl. When I saw Forge World bringing out limited edition referee sculpts I couldn't help myself. I'm a sucker for everything that says limited and with them being such nice sculpts I immediately placed an order for them. They were a nice little side project to paint up. Certainly refreshing between the Flames of War stuff.

With this post done it's back to packing our stuff. A couple of more days to endure and then I can hopefully have some desperately needed hobby time for myself. At least at the new place I'll have a small room for myself and all my things so it's an improvement!

Painting Challenge: Blood Bowl - Da Jestaz

Time to get my latest entry from the Painting Challenge up. Blood Bowl Orcs from the new plastic box set from GW. I had originally planned to get these done before New Years, but as it would turn out these were deceptively simple looking and took way more time than expected. I almost got them ready for last week, but couldn't get the decals and basing done in time. Well at least they are ready now!

Thinking about colour schemes I decided to go with my local hockey team, Jokerit (Jesters), which is currently playing in the KHL as the only Finnish team. They used to be one of the top teams from the Finnish league, but a couple of years ago they signed up for the Russian equivalent of NHL. First two seasons went pretty well with them being one of the top teams from the league, but honestly this season has been pretty embarrassing. I was thinking between this and the team I played most my years in junior hockey, but in the end decided to leave that scheme for the human team. As Jokerit was the local rival back then for us it felt better to picture them as the brutes.

As I said they ended up much harder to paint than expected. As they are push fit models with connecting points in visible areas they really had to be put completely together before painting, which made reaching some of the detail extremely difficult. My method of painting them was also pretty suboptimal. I normally paint all the areas with a base shade before washing and then doing the highlight layers, but I guess on these picking a proper order and doing an area from the start to finish starting from the recesses and working up would have been far better. There were countless times when I messed up some area I had already gone over when I tried to do something in a small crevice and had to go back and touch it up again. Also the combination of red and yellow was far from ideal. It's pretty unbelievable how you can get a shade that doesn't cover a lightly washed version of itself  in under 4 coats of paint. Needless to say they were a pain at times to paint.

I was thinking quite a while about adding weathering on them, but in the end I ended up with leaving them cleaner and with a more cartoony look. Just seems to suit Blood Bowl minis better. Plus if I get fed up with it it's always easy to go back and add scratches etc. on them. However to break the monotony of the armour I decided to paint the checkerboard pattern that somehow is so iconically orky. Another thing that got left out was the team logo. I tried to freehand a suitably Orkyfied version of the Jokerit logo on them, but my brush skills just weren't up to it. Luckily it was easy to remove the shabby tries from a varnished surface.The logo will be added at a later time when I've gotten around to ordering suitable custom decals for them. It's just so much easier to design it on the computer and get it printed out. I'd do it myself, but I want it to be white and haven't  found any place where I can use a printer that is capable of printing white. Luckily Fallout Hobbies does custom decals for a reasonable price and I've used them in the past and liked the quality, so I'm gonna get a sheet from them when I've figured out the logo for the human team as well. Player positions and numbers are from the normal GW sheet that comes with the box. As a more ideal team composition would have 4 Black Orcs and 4 Blitzers I left my player numbering empty for them in preparation for the future whenever I end up buying reinforcements.

Since taking these pictures I've gone back and added some pigments to their boots to vary the tone as suggested by Martin on the challenge blog. Definitely ups the look of the minis. With these done it's back to Flames of War for the last couple of vehicles I need for the end of the month. I've also got the two Blood Bowl referees to paint up that are about half way through, but that I didn't get ready for last weeks entry. We'll see about this week. Painting time is a bit limited with a business trip and the whole renovation thing disrupting my free time.