Aaaaargh Zombies!!!

Not much painting done in the last few weeks with long working hours and other more "important" activities taking the little free time I've had.

However things have taken a turn for the worse with the arrival of Zombicide Season 3 Kickstarter and helluva lot of Zombie related goodies! Plenty of new scenarios to play through and a ton of new Zombie types to battle against! So there's one more thing competing from my slightly limited free time :)

Finland was understandably in the lower priority list when sending out stuff so seeing peoples posts from the last month or so about their stuff was annoying to say the least. However all is well with the arrival of my package late last evening. In addition to the huge load of stuff that everyone gets I did decide to order some extras that aren't that easy to get hold of here in Finland like the Zombie Dogs and Dog Companions.

After having gone through the pile I had to get a game in so we picked one of the shorter scenarios from Rue Morgue with the lady of the house and got ready to smash in some heads. These new Skinner zombies are a nice addition with multikilling weapons potentially only cutting up a zombie who just continues it's existance as a crawler. The scenario was a bit too easy for a Medium difficulty one, but still it was probably for the best as it was already quite late and quick completion meant more sleep to be had :)

On the painting front I now have 5 battalions done out of the 13 that I'm painting for our Russian campaign. They are still missing flags and basing so not much to show. I need to speed up a bit with the last 8 as there's only 5 weeks left to paint them. I've now squeezed down the painting time for one battalion to roughly 8-9 hours so a single battalion doesn't take long. It's just that finding more than an hour of painting time per day has been difficult to say the least.

Painting Challenge entry 6: Winter War Finns

Here is the first batch of my Finns from the Baker Company Kickstarter. I'll write up a review about them later when I've painted more, but I'll have to rant a bit now too :)

Judging from the quality of these minis it really seems that the guys at Baker Company are a victim of their own success. Some of the sculpts just seem extremely rushed and the quality differences between them are massive. There are actually a few sculpts that are something that you would call medium quality minis. Not nearly as good as something for the Perry Bros for example, but still reasonable proportioned and with good detail. Then there are some with proportions that are totally off, with really skinny ankles being the biggest problem. Looks weird and makes the minis quite fragile.

This might be a bit  finicky, but seriously nearly all of the boots are totally off. Nearly all of them look like modern military boots with their laces etc. and they are too narrow compared to the legs. The proportions kind of make it look even worse. If the boots were actually bigger then it wouldn't looks as funny.

And finally the casting quality was really bad on some of the minis in my batch. I guess I spent about 2 hours removing all the mould lines, ingates and overflow areas. I hope this is just because Gavin has to cast these in a hurry to fulfill all the pledges and the final product will be done better.

Anyway now that I've got that out of my system here's a bit about the painting too :P I started the snowsuit from Khaki and worked through 5 layers finishing with highlights of pure white. I tried to go for a slightly yellowish dirtier looking unit, but I guess I went a bit overboard with the offwhite and white highlights so in the end they look quite clean. Decided against adding mud on the legs and elbows too, so maybe they can just represent a unit at the beginning of the war.

The snow is from Noch and it's a combination of their snow paste and snow flock. Looks good on the minis, but it actually shrunk quite a bit overnight leaving weird holes in some of the bases. I guess I have to fix those and next time remember to apply a smaller layer of it so that it won't happen again.

These are some of the better sculpts from the batch. Nice faces, didn't have much flash and they have nice poses too.

Mr. Monkey Face and the Running Man. Seriously are these two even sculpted by the same guy?

Winter War is upon us

Well I finally received a long awaited batch of the Winter War Kickstarter minis! The package included a full Finnish platoon and a Russian platoon without the HQ section. This pretty much covers the main pledge minis with all the stretch goals still to come. I had totally forgotten these guys when I drew up a schedule for the painting challenge, so I'll have to modify my timetable a bit and sneak some of these guys in!

Minis are quite nice especially for the price. The sculpting isn't phenomenal with the heads and arms looking a bit weird on some minis. Nothing critical though and won't be seen from a distance anyway. And there are also quite a bit of mould lines that need to be cleaned up. I guess this comes from Gavin having to cast over 400 sets of these so the moulds are under a lot of stress when they are used constantly. I'll post better pictures when I've tidied some up and based them.

On the background you can see my first entry to the painting challenge too :) An objective marker for my paras. Basecoated and the ground and Jeep have been started. Too bad that it won't get published until the fortnight bonus round ends. I was kind of hoping to get a nice lump of points with it to jump into the first place for at least a small while :)

  The Finns

The Ruskies

Last days of the Winter War Kickstarter

The Winter War Kickstarter is nearing the end and it's going to be pretty epic by the looks of it. At the moment for every 1 pound invested you get about 4 pounds worth of miniatures as all the unlocks until 40,000 pounds have been free for anyone investing in a platoon. So if you are not taking part in it yet jump in now! There's only a few days left. Next unlocks are trucks for both armies and an Aerosan for the Ruskies.

Winter War miniatures

Well I managed to jump onboard another Kickstarter project before even seeing any progress from the Empress one. But then again as a Finn seeing someone do minis for the Winter War in 28mm was too good of a deal to pass.

Baker Company is running their Winter War Wargaming Miniatures Kickstarter to create both finnish and soviet forces for this early WW2 period. At the moment a platoon comes at 60 pounds which might seem a bit high, but the amount of free strech goal minis is quite epic. At the moment I'm going for the Border Assault pledge which give a platoon of both Finnish and Soviet Troops and a few hundred pounds worth of extras for free. I'm a bit anxious though about all the stretch goals and them making the whole project too costly for Baker Company to go through with. But even getting half the stretch goals would still make the whole thing a great deal.

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.