Town House

Late last year, I finally took the plunge and ordered some terrain from Tabletop World as I've had my eye on their stuff for a while. Their Christmas sale tipped me over the edge, so my cupboard now has a few of their pieces. It's time to paint one up.

One of the challenge here was for me to paint as much as I could with just the airbrush. Bit of time spent with the airbrush and slow going as I've learned about tightening seals, and airbrush maintenance when you haven't tightened them (whoops), paint mix in differing humidity - but all positive stuff.

This is the first Tabletop World sculpt I've played with, and it's fantastic quality. So a work-in-progress scenery piece done purely with the airbrush to this point ...

Black primer, Sombre Grey, Cold Grey, Dead White as normal then Devlan Mud wash - applying it very thin to the surface then using air to push into the recesses. Little scruffy, but going the right direction and considering this is my first proper use of an airbrush to do more than a boring base colour, the results to-date are better than expected.

Not quite brave enough to tackle the timber with the airbrush and not undo all the stonework, so that's painted by brush as normal.

Couple more tweaks to colour on the wood and touching up some edges of the stone with pure white to give contrast and correct a few mistakes when painting the wood ...

One of the nice things about these terrain pieces from Tabletop World is the level of detail present everywhere, so I'm looking forward to painting up the metalwork next. Windows will be blue just to offer some visual contrast inside and out, and should offset the lead strips in the window nicely.

At this point I realised there's been no shots of the inside of the house so far ...

On the wood I've gone for a bit more variation in colour than on the outside beams, and the walls are painted to look like they've been rendered. I put the airbrush down and started painting in the wood to frame the stonework, and feeling pretty pleased with how it looks now.

One final push and I was able to finish up the Town House. Very pleased with how this turned out for my first terrain piece in quite a few years!

I know that picking out the bolts on a rusted area isn't really accurate, but I like the contrast it offers.

Getting the feel of the airbrush now, it was the main tool for painting this and shaved days off painting terrain by brush. It's no longer a chore, but something enjoyable and this should help to clear down the backlog of terrain pieces sat needing my attention.

Does the colour scheme look familiar to anyone? I based the colour scheme loosely on an old friend ...

I may come back and adjust the windows, as blue windows with the blue roof isn't quite right. But it'll stay like that for the time being - and the next building can be a test piece for that change, rather than continually tweaking the finished one.

Even inside the house, detail is abundant. I love the crumbled render that reveals the original stonework underneath.

It's a good height inside too, the daughters have confirmed it's suitable for their Happyland figures to sit in without feeling cramped. Which is good to know.

Star Wars: Armada Rebel Fleet test

A friend picked up the Star Wars: Armada game recently. It's not quite to my taste, but I volunteered to try and paint up a few of the figures as the small supporting fighters for the big ships don't come pre-painted. There are 70-80 of these and they're tiny, so I wanted to generate something that would be quick to replicate without leaving myself in a hole for the rest of the year.

A-Wing

Y-Wing

X-Wing

B-Wing

Basically they were primed white, washed with thinned down Army Painter strong tone with a few white elements picked out. After that just a couple of quick details like exhaust wear, engine colouring and unit markings.

Did I say they were tiny? Here's an idea of scale for these figures ...

Black Scorpion: Preacher

Finally completed the hired hands from Black Scorpion, with the Preacher joining the party ...

Group shot of the finished crew ...

Sadly I dropped the Navigator and the candle snapped off and I can't find it anywhere - so that's why he's relegated to the back row :( Miffed about that, but I'm hopeful it will turn up at some point.

Enjoyed painting these, but the sculpts aren't as crisp in the minutiae as others I've painted recently - and when, like me, you're limited in ability it's surprising how often you rely on the features to do the heavy lifting for you. With that said, I picked up their Salute 2016 figure this year and that looks to be a little step up in quality again, so more power to them.

While this finishes off the set of five, it doesn't see the end of the pirates just yet. So here's a teaser for what's coming next ...

To paraphrase Princess Leia ... aren't you a little short for a pirate?

Salute 2016 post-mortem

So, Salute 2016 was pretty fantastic. Felt slightly less crunched up than last year, with wider concourses and a better layout - and plenty of brilliant things to see. It was also an expensive day and represented the last of my big miniature spending for the year before tightening the wallet. While everything was fresh in the mind, I jotted down some less-than-comprehensive notes.

General
Better organisation of the queue than last year, so when the doors opened it was significantly quicker to zerg into the hall. Arrangement of rows of demo tables interspersed between the stands rather than the much bigger space at the back from last year, made it feel more spacious. We rarely encountered bottlenecks wandering between stands. Not having the coffee stand at the back and rows of seats made a difference too.

Miniatures
I'll dive into specifics when time allows, but as a quick summary my haul includes goodies from Anvil Industries, Bendyboards, Big Child, Black Scorpion, Broken Toad, Hasslefree, Heresy, Infamy, Joek, Meridian, Miniature Factory, Purgatory, Warmonger, Warploque and Wonderlands.

There were even more companies showcasing great ranges, but I couldn't afford or justify everything - and these appealed the most.

In addition to the above, courtesy of Prodos we had an up-close look at their Space Crusade figures. We got to look at Calypso and Nyx at length, and while the cheesecake nature of their hero range isn't to my liking (at all), the casting quality is stunning. There were almost no mold lines - just crisply detailed models.

Paranoid Miniatures' new game looks interesting, and the figure range looked great. Others that caught the eye were Darkstar, World of Twilight, Hawk's painted Dropzone display, and the always wonderful Freebooter,

Companies
From the perspective of being an early Kickstarter backer, seeing the larger stands of Infamy and especially Guild Ball this year was very pleasing - more power to them.

Also, so many Kickstarters coming up from smaller companies. I think 2016 is going to be a very busy hobby year for new projects looking for sponsors. Ones to watch this year for me will be Purgatory and Wonderlands for their upcoming skirmish games.

Judging companies on serious topics at a show like this would be silly, so here are the two most important awards.

• Best beard of the show: Meridian Miniatures. Also, what a thoroughly nice chap!

• Best sweets: A tie between Hasslefree (I'm a sucker for Vimto lollies) and Purgatory (jelly beans in posh packaging) as the tasty treats for people giving them money. Honourable mention to Bendyboards' enormous jar of flying saucers. Basically I spent most of the day off my tits on sugar.

Painting Demonstrations
I decided this is the year to get an airbrush, so was very keen to watch the Harder & Steenbeck demonstrations from the supreme skills of Angel Giraldez but couldn't get near his airbrush demos, as it was literally always three deep and a throng of tall* people with enormous rucksacks.

(* for values of "tall" being more than my 5'9")

Happily, while it was a little quieter, I managed to sneak five minutes apiece on the Studio McVey and Element Games stands with the ridiculously talented Robert "Rogland" Karlsson and Andy Wardle to talk airbrushes and pick their brains briefly on the subject, as my own experience is 10+ years out of date and amateur level.

They have convinced me of the merits of having one in the toolkit, and Andy was kind enough to run through the basics of the dual action so now it's a case of finding a suitable brush and compressor for me - but early contenders are the H&S Evolution 2 in 1 and the Iwata Revolution. If the Revolution's good enough for Mr Wardle, I imagine it will suffice for me :)

People
It was a pleasure to chat with a lot of the stand teams at length, and their talent and enthusiasm was evident for all to see. From Gary at Purgatory about the world building he's doing for his game, through to Mike and Lee at Bendy Boards for tips on how best to sculpt terrain on their Mob Ball team trays, everyone I spoke to was just so damned nice.

Hat tips go out to Mr Lee on Broken Toad's stand who looked like his feet had given up by 15:30, but was still smiling and focusing on the imminent beer on his horizon, and Jérémie Bonamant Teboul for showcasing so many of his incredibly painted figures on his stand.

Sumary

If you enjoy buying miniatures, looking at miniatures, talking about miniatures with the people responsible for crafting, publishing and painting them - and generally having a wonderful day out in the mothership of nerdom, then you'll probably enjoy this next year.

And if you saw this t-shirt ...

... then you saw me.

Black Scorpion: Navigator

Despite a hectic week of family events, angry babies not sleeping, work and Salute in London (more on that later), I managed to squeeze in a little time to finish another of the piratey entourage up - here's the Navigator.

The sculpt on this one is bugging me as his face gets lost in among all the detail of the books and scrolls loaded up alongside it. I've plumped to add a warm glow from the candle on one side of the book pile, then a cooler green spooky glow from the mystery scroll on the other side - happy with this as it changes how the figure looks depending on the angle he's viewed from.

Next up is the Preacher, who'll be a little less sensible in his choice of clothing. Getting a rhythm going for these guys now, and quite enjoying myself.

Black Scorpion: Cabin Boy

So this week's contribution to the cause is another crew member, the Cabin Boy. Everyone's welcome to give him a first name ...

Played with weathered leather on the coat and it didn't work out as I wanted, but you know what? That's fine. I'll just try again on the next one to see if I can make it a little better. He's painted up as the mini-me of the Captain, who you haven't seen yet, so this is a nice test of techniques and colours before the big man himself.

Yes there is a small mold line on his foot. But you didn't see it, did you ...

Although after looking at the Crystal Brush finalists this year, I did feel like putting my collection in the oven and climbing in to join 'em. But seriously ... go on, take a look, they're beautiful.

Onward toward the more characterful figures in the party, with the beleaguered navigator and flamboyant preacher looming on the horizon.

Black Scorpion: Chef & Surgeon

So the Bank Holiday weekend over here has given me a little more free time than expected and my pirate adventures have started in earnest - with two hired hands from Black Scorpion Miniatures that I picked up at Salute last year.

I used the same green as a base on both then went for cooler colours on the Chef and warmer colours on the Surgeon (renamed Redshirt as he'll be first to die, I'm sure) and then cooler colours on his lady friend as a contrast. This is the first time I've tried painting chest hair, and it wasn't a total disaster and the striped legs turned out surprisingly well. The eyes are so small I could barely paint the eyeball, so haven't even attempted an iris.

After the fine detail of Guild Ball's 3D sculpted, precision tooled figures, these took a little time to adjust to as some of the features simply stop being present e.g. couple of fingers, and the lady's left boot. None of that detracts from what great figures they are and a lot of fun to paint.

Guild Ball Fishermen: Shark

Well, Shark is completed and while I'm not 100% happy with some details, he is definitely now finished!

The scale armour won't photograph for me for love nor money, but it's better than it was - so that's a small mercy I guess!

And as the team is now completed here's a big, almost in focus, group shot.

It's quite satisfying to see the whole set together.

The project's taken nine months from start to finish, but that's no bad thing - especially when you're slow and have been limited on time, as has been the case for me. Also, I've seen visible improvement from starting with Salt until finshing Shark today and that's great to see.

Onto the next team and here's hoping they'll be finished before Christmas.

Miniature Inventory

Outside of painting, a lot of my work time is spend arranging, planning and managing people. That's required a lot of tracking over the years to juggle a large number of tasks and projects. Yet, one element of my painting routine that was lacking was setting goals and paths to achieve things - deciding on how best to motivate myself to complete something and move to the next. As part of my efforts in 2015 to get back into regular painting, I did a complete inventory of all my miniatures to establish what was in the collection and what I wanted to paint.

I track all of my figures in Trello. I use it for a number of things, and for the project management and development minded among you, you're already familiar with Kanban boards I'd imagine - and that's what this does, so you can build everything in the collection by pending, building, painting and finished.

You can make it as detailed as you want and I like to group by units or teams and track progress. So it's a lovely way for me to check what figures in a team I have, which are completed and what's still to-do. It's been quite helpful in the last eight months on tracking progress across multiple projects.

Then I keep a number of different labels by game or manufacturer, and you can filter on those to see where everything else is.

The below gives an indicator of how woefully behind I am on painting up my Guild Ball teams ...

... but when's the small matter of 500+ unpainted figures ever slowed a painter down, right? Right?

Anyway, it's great to watch the pile reduce and have listed outputs as a little motivational kick, especially when I've lost track of the figures I own and incentivising myself with "treats" of completing a team set with new releases, or being out at a show and ensuring I don't pick up something already in the collection.

Guild Ball Fishermen: Angel

Quicker than expected, but I managed to finish up Angel from the Fishermen ... and now my eyes hurt.

I've been putting this one off a while now because the detail was so tiny yet overwhelming but, armed with my new magnifying lens and a burst of Monday night enthusiasm, it's now finished up and I'm pretty happy. Also ... man this was nice to do after nothing but tabletop quality hordes over the last month!

Good quality skin tones still elude me, but the face is definitely a face - complete with eyes (fifth attempt). Metals turned out alright, and a little variety in leathers even if they're not so noticable on the hasty photographs. Hair was an experiment which came out reasonably well, but I had X-Men comics' Jean Grey in mind and when I looked her up it's nothing like her! So which comic book hero am I thinking of?

And a reminder of how flippin' small this lady is ...

... which is probably a personal best on the size scale. But honestly, trying to visually refocus on anything is a hardship now. Only Shark left to do from the Fishermen to have a full team painted and then I can consider the next small project - but it's in danger of becoming a chore at this point, so need to push through and get him done quickly.

Zombicide: Black Plague - Runners

Continuing my plan of having a fully painted tabletop game, here are the Runners from Zombicide painted up, all fourteen of them.

Runners are fantastic pieces in the game and by the simple virtue of having two actions instead of one, they make you rethink a number of cunning plans as they can be on you considerably quicker than expected if they gain an extra activation from the card.

Despite them being great on the table, I didn't enjoy painting these and think it shows. Not happy with them, but want them gone. Couldn't tell you the reason why I didn't, as the sculpts are perfectly fine, but I've literally dashed through them and feel glad they're off the desk and on to the board.

The original plan was to have different base colouring for each monster type, but after a little thinking I've opted to paint the base rims red, same as the Fatties. I realised it's easy to distinguish between Runners and Fatties, and as there'll inevitably be expansion boxes, having the monsters from the core game with the same base colour probably makes more sense, so if they release a box of toxics they'll get green and so on. The vanilla Zombie Walkers, Necromancers and Abominations will get boring black bases. Mmm, vanilla.

What's next? Well, I'm finally biting the bullet and finishing up my last two Fishermen for Guild Ball - about a year after starting the project. After painting a lot of tabletop quality recently, I'm looking forward to doing something a little more complex!

Pink Horrors of Tzeentch (and their Yellow cousin)

Fun start to the month. My plans were thrown aside when my eldest daughter declared she'd like to learn how to paint. At the tender age of five, I thought it best to start simple, so pulled some very old figures out of storage and cleaned them up. Behold a few original Pink Horrors of Tzeentch.

They're having a bath of nail polish remover to rid them of their old skins, as this is how they came when buying them on eBay many moons ago. Three layers of paint on the poor things, so I'm sure the Changer of Ways would approve of this transformative soup. But then a spanner in the works ...

"Daddy, what are these called?"

"These are Pink Horrors, sweetie."

"Okay ... I want to paint mine yellow."

*sound of my left eye twitching*

... and lo, the Great Conspirator messes with my head once again. But not the end of the world! We kept the painting simple, literally just main colours then a thin red wash to complement the beak.

One of my brood sitting still for nearly two hours in itself would be an achievement, but having something to show for it is remarkable. She wants to come back and add pink bracelets in the future, but it's now matt varnished so she can handle it without fear of rubbing off any of the paint she's applied so far.

While the daughter was cracking on with hers, I painted up its companions in a similar style but with the right colours, damnit. So it was application of base colour (Squid Pink) then literally just thin washes of purple, red and blue over various areas. This is also the first time I've used cork for basing and it's great stuff! My first go isn't too grand, but with a little more practice it'll make a solid and quick basing technique for ad-hoc projects.

Sadly my trusty daylight lamp is irretrievably broken and I had to use the camera flash for lighting, which isn't too great. The bottom right fellow, who I've nicknamed Gumby is probably my favourite, but they're lovely sculpts. While it's not the best output I've produced, it's not often you get the kids wanting to join in on hobbies and high on the fun scale. I hope she does want to give it another go, as it was a real blast.

There'll probably be a small pause in painting in the next couple of weeks as I've got a new job (hooray!) and want to throw myself into that when it starts later this week.

Zombicide: Black Plague - Fatties

A more productive January than I thought it would be, so here come the Fatties!

They're not all in perfect focus, but I'm sure you get the gist :) One of the figures, poor grey chap in the middle row, suffered from me varnishing him in low temperatures this morning before adding blood for the photos yet the others weren't affected.

Alas, my magnifying lens and light on an extendable arm fell apart this morning so I need to fix it or source a replacement in order for me to pick out tiny details. It was instrumental in finding teeth, stitching and eyes on these figures.

Colours blocked in, lots of shading and washes, purple shading on the skin as they didn't look ill enough, then couple of details picked out with highlights (ropes, eyes, teeth, ropes etc.) and much blood applied - so these are quick and dirty paintjobs, literally! I want to keep them grimy in contrast to the upcoming hero figures who'll be a little brighter. The flowers are there because ... who doesn't love flowers?

I'll start on the Runners next with the goal of having those completed in February.