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I've been pretty lazy on the blogging front as of late and have amassed quite a backlog of unpublished miniatures that I've painted during the painting challenge.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

Reaper monsters

A couple of quick paintjobs to get back in the groove. These are both from the Reaper Bones range of cheap plastic minis. Overall quite nice and characterful sculpts with good detail. I especially like the face sculpted on the Ogres club, small details like this really bring the models to life. Still there are limitations and the production method was showing with some areas having detail that was obscured, like the legs of both minis) and there were a lot of mould lines to clean, but still for a few euros per model these are still a bargain.

I wanted to keep them nice and fast to paint and with large skin areas that was quite easily achieved. A couple of highlight layers on the skin areas and everything else was just finished with a base colour, a wash and another layer of the base colour again.

As I said in the last post I haven't really felt like painting for a long time for some reason. I guess it's partly to do with the fact that I tend to paint larger units at a time so it really starts to feel like a chore soon. Painting these two fellows only really took me a few hours and was a really nice change to my routine. And it was actually fun to paint again! I guess I should probably do this more often to keep my motivation up. Painting up large units at a time has it's virtues with projects advancing faster, but especially after last spring it somehow really wore me down.

Frostgrave monsters

After finishing my warband for Frostgrave I needed some random monsters to populate the tables. I bought quite a few random minis at Salute with this in mind and dug into my archives for old random purchases to paint up.

As Frostgrave usually only has a few monsters on table at a time and I was under some time constraints to get them finished for our game day these were mostly speed painted with drybrushing and washes. Luckily skeletons and furry creatures are easy to get decent looking that way.

The Skeletons are from Wargames Foundry from the Casting Room Miniatures range and present the two Skeleton characters pack. Lovely sculpts with some very imaginative poses. Unfortunately they are very fragile with only a millimeter thick spine and due to that one of the pack is missing as he snapped and I couldn't get it fixed yet.

The Bears are from Foundry as well and the succubi an older Reaper sculpt that I got as a freebie from Caliver books for buying some Frostgrave items from them.

And the final four are some of the more random miniatres that I had in my collections. These are Tom Meier's sculpts from his own company Thunderbolt Mountain Miniatures. He has a line of miniatures sculpted from the stories told by his young daughter. The missus wanted some of the ballerinas riding unicorns and carrying bombs so I figured I'd order some minis as well. 3 Bushwoolies and a flying sabre-toothed mole completed my order and finally after a few years in the cupboard I actually got them painted. Considering that I prepped them for the 2014 edition of Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge it's a bit embarrassing how long it took to get them painted. Especially as they only took a short time to get them all painted.

That's the first half of my monsters. I still have quite a few Heresy Miniatures and Reaper Bones left that have now been based and basecoated. Haven't managed to do any painting in the last two weeks though so not much progress after that. I'm leaving of for our summer cottage in the weekend and a hobby bag has been packed. We'll see what I find the motivation to paint there. Epic 40k, Flames of War, Napoleonics and Frostgrave stuff is all packed up. I'm just going to paint what ever strikes my fancy when I'm there, so it remains to be seen what's ready next :)