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I've been pretty lazy on the blogging front as of late and have amassed quite a backlog of unpublished miniatures that I've painted during the painting challenge.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.

Achtung Panzer

Here is another bunch of minis that I managed to finish up. These were painted with the Royal Scots to keep me from getting bored with all the red and white. The Stugs and Königstiger are from Battlefront and the 251 with it's riders is from Plastic Soldier Company.

As these were the first 15mm vehicles I ever painted I decided to try how some techniques from bigger scale models work on these. All are preshaded to varying decrees and then painted over with the camo. It shows a bit through on the yellow parts and adds some life to the paintjob. After painting I applied the decals and added a quick oil wash to bring out some details.

I also tried a product called Easy Mud from Marutechnics to do the tracks and lower hulls. Works reasonably well by either painting or splattering it on. Quite easy to overdo it on this scale though.

All in all, I'm pretty pleased eventhough I'm not too happy with the decals from Battlefront. The quality and accuracy is really bad. Need to find some other manufacturer for these.

Progress

I've managed to get some more painting done in the last couple of days. I've got the first half of my 1st Royal Scots finished and waiting painting and the rest are only waiting for finishing touches so the battalion should be done by the end of the week! I also switched to using the Off white color from Vallejo when painting all the straps and lacing for the brits. Seems to cover a lot better and the color is better than in the other white paints that I have tried.

  

I also managed to get some armor painted for Flames of War. Just testing different camo patterns and how preshading looks like in this scale. Nice and fast to paint with an airbrush and yields pretty good results. The preshading doesn't show that well in these iPhone shots but looks adds nice depth when viewed closer. Need to finish these boys up too.

I also tried my hand at painting the Ambush pattern. It worked out pretty well on the backside, but I had masked off too much of the yellow base color on the turret and front part of the tank when I started so I had to correct it, which didn't work out that well. This guy is going into paint removal next as I find that the older style camo looks better (even when this camo would be done correctly) and it's also a lot easier to paint.

I'm back

Well I'm finally back from my trip to the Alps. Despite some avalanches disagreeing with our chosen skiing lines everything went really well and now I can get back to painting. Trying to catch up with my University courses and trying to get some work for my company done isn't exactly helping in speeding things up though, but I've managed to get the 1st Royal Scots forward a bit. Quarter done and the rest with the base colors of grey and red painted.

My temporary dinner table workstation in all it's "glory". Living in a small student apartment with my better half leads to some harsher requirements for my hobbies. The paint station is self made to fit into our cabinets. At least it keeps things tidy and forces me to just have a smaller amount of projects going on at one time. 

During my trip I had also finally received my package of Plastic Soldier Company Panthers and sdkfz 251's that had been ordered already in November and couldn't resist putting a couple together. I must say that I love the quality and the detail on the minis. On the downside they are quite slow to build up. They are joining the rest of the waiting armor for my Panzerkompanie. Maybe I'll get them done after the next british battalion.