What's on my plate

I'm thinking about making this a regular Friday post, something that will help me keep my projects in order and on track and maybe actually finish one or two of them before the end of the year. A couple of these do have real deadlines so that might help me stay on target. I'm going to sort of list these in a priority order, of course that is subject to change without notice.

1) RPG characters, finish. These are for my every other Saturday game. There are only six of them, you would think this was a slam dunk kind of thing. 1 Female Gnome Battlemage, 1 Male Dwarf Barbarian, 1 Male Dwarf Cleric (NPC, currently being played by someone interested in joining the group), 1 Female Human Rogue, 1 Male Human Cleric and 1 Male Elf Paladin. These only have to be tabletop paint jobs and are likely to see rough use. I would like to have these done for the next game so I have a week at this point.

2) SAGA Norman army, get started. These are the Perry Miniatures which are all prepped and just need to be mounted for painting and primed. I want to enter these in the army painting competition for Genghis Con XXXIV in February of 2013. So they are to get my best efforts. There are 87 miniatures here so I do need to get moving. I think rather than my normal assembly painting style I'm going to paint these up by SAGA points which should let me concentrate on just a small set of figures at a time. So 4 mounted Knights, 8 armored Spearmen, 8 Crossbows, 12 Archers or a single character. For the characters I plan on mounted and dismounted versions of the warlord plus a couple of small character vignettes.

3) SAGA Norman army, repair and touch-up. These are the Gripping Beast Miniatures which make a fine wargame army. Unfortunately some repair is necessary after they were returned to me. I have some new steel lances on the way to replace the cast pewter ones so those will become more survivable (and slight more dangerous to your opponent since they are actually quite sharp). I found some Gripping Beast crossbows to replace the two missing ones and I'm going to take a shot at sculpting a couple of tails to replace the missing ones on the horses (I think there are two missing tables). A little touch-up work after that and this will be an army to be proud of on the battlefield.

4) 15mm British Napoleonics, re-base and paint.  After initially being very enthused about the LaSalle rules my group has kind of soured on them. Although others may disagree they just don't have the right "feel" to them. It has nothing to do with the weird turn sequence either (I have several games I enjoy that have weird turn sequences), its like the armies are just to generic and don't really seem to behave the way you expect them to behave. I can't really explain it better than that. So I'm mounting these up for Napoleon at War. This will let me use them for Napoleon's battles as well. The bases are a bit larger than Napoleon's Battles but pretty close. I have remounted one infantry unit (74th Highlanders, non-kilted) and started another last night (88th Connaught Rangers). These are mounted on six stands of four for a total of 24 figures which means I have 8 figures left over from each LaSalle unit I rebase. I'll have a bunch of extra center company infantry after I'm done so I guess my British infantry force is going to get a significant expansion which means I'll need more command, grenadier and light infantry minis to fill them out. Of the six stands one is grenadier, one is light, one is command (2 flags, an officer and a drummer, this counts as center company) and three center company stands. Each unit also gets two little skirmisher stands. These will be filled out mostly with regular light infantry but I'll do a proportion of them as rifles as well. Hopefully this will be the kickstart I need to actually get the artillery and cavalry done as well.

5) 15mm ACW, finish. I just need to get the union cavalry done for this army. Its never been a high priority since the union side rarely has cavalry and I have some older stuff that can be subbed in.

6) 28mm WWI USMC next unit. This has always been a side project so I'll fill it in a unit at a time as I feel like it. I have everything I need for this army now, including a couple of little FT-17s for support.

7) LoTR Helmingas finish. Originally this was going to be a display/tournament army that would have taken place last month. Unfortunately that tournament was cancelled when the organizer moved to the other side of the state for work. I have almost all the pieces for this one, the infantry component has been started and I think I have most of the cavalry component now. I'm missing two characters Eomer and Erkenbrand to finish off the army. I do intend to finish this army as I enjoy the game. There will probably be re-newed enthusiasm once the Hobbit is released.

8) Legion of the Damned 40K, acquire. This is a truly long term project and again is meant to be more of a display army than anything else. I have slowly been acquiring Legion of the Damned miniatures, both older and newer models to create an army. Now of course its not legal as an army but I'm not letting that stop me since I don't actually intend to play 40K with them. This will be a highly converted army and some of the ideas are still gelling while I acquire the various components (the cheaper the better!).

9) Genghis Con XXXIV entries. Its never to early to start on competition entries. I have all the components for my diorama and construction and painting can commence anytime now. I haven't decided on which individual piece I'll do, but I'm determined to have at least two entries in the competition this year.

10) Danish TYW in progress. Another display army for me, currently no one is playing so I don't feel rushed to get it done. My enthusiasm waxes and wanes on this one, however, I do want to get some work done on it to see my painting style mixes with the oil-wipe technique.

11) ATSF "the Patch" general work. Although construction proceeds at a snails pace it does slowly move forward as I work on rolling stock, motive power and the occasional building. The first priority there is to finish the brick freight house that I started. I found the clerestory windows that I misplaced that I need for the roof so I can get back to construction on that.

I think that's a reasonable accurate list at the moment. Of course its going to change on a whim, as other miniatures surface. I'm pretty sure that I have pirates and cowboys hidden away in drawers that would like to get painted. I'll probably add those to the list after I get my ships from the Laser Dreamworks Kickstarter and I get a look at the buildings from Battle Flag and Sarissa Precision.

So what's on your plate?

Danes TYW/ECW- Paint Session (2)

Yesterday was the second Saturday of the month so I was off painting with the CMPA. This month we tried out a new spot; Atomic Games. Its a nice little store, the air conditioner actually works so that's a huge plus! I did manage to almost finish blocking out the colors on the Danes, not quite but pretty close. Normally I go in and finish the shading and highlighting in each area. I'm trying a different approach this time around and see if it makes it feel like I'm making more progress. Visually these are looking pretty good at the moment.

I decided to re-prime the horses that I had done with the Tamiya Hull Red and Camel Yellow. This time I opted for Army Painter Fur Brown and Desert Yellow. I think I like these colors better. Here they are after I have applied the oil paint and rubbed it off.

Army Painter Desert Yellow

 Army Painter Fur Brown

 Army Painter Leather Brown

 A few in progress shots.

Danes TYW/ECW - A Real Paint Session (1)

I'm finally getting some paint on these guys. This bunch will be a unit of Danish Arquebusiers so I will try and not make them look to uniform, I'll leave that to the Cuirassier units. I didn't really get that much done last night but at least some progress is being made. I basically painted most of the metal bits black and painted the manes and tails of the horses. Definitely have a ways to go, the horses all need hooves, socks, blazes, noses and eyes painted, plus a few highlights.

Danes TYW/ECW - Oil Wipe take 2

Just over 24 hours after priming I tried again with the oil wipe technique. Much better this time. I still managed to rub down to bare metal but only in very small spots so I can deal with that. I really like the way the burnt umber went on the Army Painter, Brown Leather, but not so happy with the Tamiya Dull Red or Camel Yellow. First I managed to rub away to much of the Dull Red off, so first lesson (which I already knew) enamel still isn't primer. I'm going to check to see what Army Painter has for Red or Yellow types of primers when I have a chance this week. In the meantime the first unit of cavalry is drying and should be ready for painting tomorrow. I may go ahead and rub down the rest of the brown leather primed cavalry,

So here are a few pictures of today's results.
Here are all six of the brown primed cavalry for the King's Cuirassier Regiment.

Red primed horse, brown primed rider

Yellow primed horse, brown primed rider

Danes TYW/ECW - Primer Round 2

Its been hot and muggy today. The heat isn't unusual but the humidity is. Its up to 55% today, pretty darn humid for a high altitude, dry climate like ours. I was up early applying primer to the Danish Cavalry units this morning. I opted not to use the Tamiya Nato Brown and just went with the Army Painter Leather Brown Primer, along with the Tamiya Camel Yellow and Dull Red. I know those sound like weird choices but they certainly seem to work when you check out the tutorial that olddorg posted his Metal Mountain blog: painting-horses

I deliberately didn't bring my oil paints with me this weekend so that I would make sure the primer had plenty of time to cure. Hopefully I will be more successful with the oil wipe tomorrow night.

Here is all the cavalry primed and ready to go.

Danes TYW/ECW - First Four Cavalry Units

The initial fiasco with the oil wash at least let me catch up all the cavalry so its all ready to prime. Each unit will consist of four bases with three mounted miniatures on each one. Christian IV had pretty deep pockets at this point in time having defeated Sweden under Gustavus Adolphus during the Kalamar War and controlling the shipping into and out of the Baltic.

All of these are Bicorne Miniatures and mostly out of the California lot that I purchased.These required the most work. Horses had to be removed from the bases (and I'm most impressed on the amount of super glue that was used for this purpose) and I attempted to removed the riders. I think he may have used epoxy to glue the riders on because they aren't budging from the backs of those horses. None of the mold lines had been so that took some extra time too. The last unit came from the Colorado lot. Riders and horses were still separate and a start had been made to clean up the castings.  So some 50 odd castings later I'm ready to try and apply primer again.

Danes TYW/ECW Bad Start

So I was pretty excited and Thursday I was ready to give my first attempt at using the oil wipe technique. I pulled out my water soluble Windsor Newton Burnt Umber and mixed up a nice wash, a little thicker than my acrylic washes but thin enough to flow into the depths of the detail.

I grabbed five of the Arquebusier Cavalry and applied a nice liberal wash and in my high dry climate I figured that was a long enough wait, I didn't want it to dry on me. I took a some cotton rags and started to lightly rub off the wash. Looked good at the start but then I noticed that I was rubbing down to bare metal. I tried it on the next letting up on the pressure I was applying. No go, still taking paint down to the bare metal.

I finished rubbing the five figures that I started with and could see quite a variation on how much metal was now visible. Clearly not a successful evening. I have used the Vallejo acrylic primers with a lot of success but I have never subjected them to this kind of pressure before and obviously it was not up to the task. My only good choice was to strip everything down to the bare metal again and go with an enamel or lacquer primer.

I have a couple of different paints I'm going to try this time. First up will be Army Painter Leather Brown (and actually is a primer) and three Tamiya colors: TS-33 Dull Red, TS-62 Nato Brown and TS-34 Camel Yellow. Why not Humbrol as used by Metal Mountain? Because Humbrol is not readily available in my area except in small pots and I wasn't going to be home this weekend and wouldn't have access to my airbrush. I figure what I have on hand right now should do the trick.

Of course now that I have everything stripped (and found a few more mold lines to deal with) its raining hard and it looks like its going to keep on raining for the rest of the evening. Hopefully tomorrow I'll get some primer on these guys and they will be ready for the oil wash on Monday.

Here are some pictures of the bare pewter showing through after I wiped off the oil wash. It varies a lot, from a whole patches to just some buckles.

Danes TYW/ECW First Batched Primed

Well I finally made some progress today on the Danish Cavalry. I pulled out the airbrush and my bottle of Vallejo Surface Primer (RAL 8000 German Green Brown). I'm pretty happy with the primer coat on these, looks nice and smooth, no fuzzies.

Danes TYW/ECW - Still Prepping

I didn't actually manage to paint anything this weekend but I now have 2 dozen or so cavalry ready to be primed. Hopefully there will be no interruptions and I'll be able to do that tonight and then do the oil rubbing tomorrow and if I'm really lucky start painting them up on Wednesday.

As I said no painting this weekend so there was no love for my Rohan Helmingas. This issue with these right now is that I want to paint them but I have no reason to paint them since the tournament was cancelled. So they have been set to the side for a bit while I work my TYW Danes. I'll probably pull them out and do some work on them just to ease the monotony of painting horses and what not.

I also find myself in something of a painting slump. I have a bunch of stuff that is more than half finished, some of which wouldn't take long to finish, and I just can't seem to get the brushes out and get it done. Hopefully sitting down with the airbrush and priming will get me back on track. Hope everyone has a good week.

Danes TYW/ECW - Prepping and thoughts on painting

For me the prepping process of getting miniatures ready to paint can really be a drag especially for an army. I was hoping to have all the Bicorne Miniatures Cavalry ready to prime by today. That is not going to happen, between working late every night this week and discovering that the previous owner must have used a bottle of glue on each one he assembled progress has been slow. Not being able to get the riders off is going to cause a little bit more work when I go in to airbrush the horses, I'll just have to mask them off or be a little more careful with them. I'm also going to try a different technique with these. I was reading the Metal Mountain blog (http://themetalmountain.blogspot.com/) and he uses the oil rub technique. He applies a colored primer (brown in this case) and their first dark shade with the a heavy, heavy wash of burnt umber (I think, I'll double check that before I do it) which is then rubbed off before it dries completely . I really like this look on his ECW miniatures so I'm going to give it a try on mine and see how it goes. I see similarities between his technique and my own style so I'm hoping I can pick it up pretty quick. The main difference will be that I'm going to try it with the water soluble oil paints and see how that works. I had hoped to have these miniatures ready to paint this weekend but since I didn't quite get to the priming step last night with the first dozen cavalry that's not going to happen. Looks like my LoTR Helmingas are going to get some brush work instead.

For those who may have missed it this little guy is most likely ECWC-004 from Bicorne Miniatures. Now I'll get some guys with Carbines in their hands to round out the unit.

I swear they followed me home - Thirty Years War TYW/ECW Minis

The Thirty Years War is a period that I have always wanted to do and a year or so ago I picked up the FOG rules and Warlords plastic stuff. I got a lot of that together and just decided that I didn't like the looks of the plastic and they weren't much fun to paint so they fell to the wayside. Over the last two nights I have picked up a couple of collections of ECW/TYW miniatures, mostly Bicorne and Wargames Foundry with some Perry Miniatures and Warlord Games thrown in for good measure.

The first box came from California with a very odd mix of troops in it, like a dozen three horse artillery limbers but no artillery pieces and about 40 officers but only in 3 poses (and what am I going to do with that many officers anyway?). I think what really made it worthwhile though are the 94 Cavalry miniatures. About 2/3rds are Bicorne and the rest are Wargames Foundry. I have pawed through the foot troops and there should be plenty of musketeers but there doesn't seem to be enough pikemen. Will do some more sorting of these over the weekend. There is one very odd pose for some of the pikemen as well. Odd enough that I'm not quite sure how they are supposed to be holding the pike. I have gone through the Bicorne site and I'm just not quite sure what figure it is to even ask for advice on it.

The second lot was much cleaner and had a mix of Bicorne, Perry and Warlord. I probably won't bother with the two boxes of plastic Warlord Games infantry although I may pull some officers out of there. Again there is a bunch of Cavalry (including Dragoons!) from all three manufacturers. Plus a lot of Bicorne Pikemen and a smattering of Warlord Games metal Pikemen. There are some personality figures from Bicorne and Warlord Games.

Included in the personalities is the Warlord Games' version of Fairfax who is on one of the worst sculpted horses I have ever seen (the sculpt of Fairfax himself is quite nice). I think the best use of this horse is to use it as a dead one, that would give me the added satisfaction of getting to stomp on it (I learned that little trick from Chris Fitzpatrick, owner and primary sculptor of Crocodile Games. He has also sculpted for GW and Ral Partha). In general I dislike Warlord Games pewter horses, they just never seem to be quite right and the plastic ones drive me crazy since all of the manes hang off on the horses' left side. Crazy enough that I'm probably going to convert at least half of the ones I decide to use to hang off to the horses' right side.

Since it doesn't look like I'm going to get my Normans in time for the convention painting competition this is going to be the army I put together for the show. I'll go through the FOG rules and figure out what I need for the Danes but I think I need five units completed for the convention so probably three pike and shotte units and two cavalry units. Should be fun but I have a lot of work in front of me to get these done in time. But then my entry for the convention is almost done now so that's pretty much all I need to work on.

So here are some pictures of the preliminary sorting. I'll do a lot more over the weekend so I can figure out what I need to order for the competition, if I need anything. I think I maybe coming up short on command figures for the various units, but I'll figure that out this weekend.

Warlord Games Boxsets. I'll use the Cavalry boxes for sure, the horses are plastic but the riders are pewter. Probably will skip the Infantry box. I have a box of Swedish infantry as well but it has metal command figures that I will swipe out of it.

 Warlord Games blisters; Woohoo two packs of cannon! Not sure what I will do with the dead livestock pack

Gotta love those little black boxes from Perry Miniatures! The larger boxes contain Cavalry, and the small boxes have musketeers in them.

 This is the Wargames Foundry Cavalry that I pulled out of the box. Its going to take some work to get in shape for painting though.

 This is the stash of Bicorne Miniatures stuff. Pike, shotte and more Cavalry!

 Ziplock bags full of the various infantry and other oddball piece that made up the CA lot. Mostly Bicorne with maybe a third of it from Wargames Foundry.

Some of the oddball stuff included, not one but two copies of the Sedan Chair and three copies of the Surgeon's set, will go right along with the dozen or so three horse team limbers.