CMPA 3rd Saturday Painting

Third Saturday of every month is the CMPA's monthly painting get together. We are currently painting at Total Escape Games in Broomfield, CO from 10:30am - 4pm. If you are local or visiting the area feel free to stop in and paint with us or just sit down and chat for a while.

Today I broke out the revolutionary war minis I have been slowly working on. This batch includes a mix of Fife & Drum, Minden and Wargames Factory. I received a bonus on this paycheck so I went ahead an picked up the Warlord Games Red Devils 1000pt army box. Its been on the shelves for a long time so I was able to negotiate a discount on it. I also picked up a Vickers MMG, a 3# Mortar and a Piat and Light Mortar pack. I'll have to stash these away for a bit though to many other projects in front of them.

Skin is done, just waiting on some clothes!

Skin is done, and their clothes are started. Need to be sure not to get to uniform with the colors on these. Militia wore mostly civilian clothes. So more random in appearance than the line troops.

AWI - A small start, laying in the skintones

After I got my airbrush up and running again I finished off the priming on the AWI militia that I had sitting on the workbench. This batch includes the minis I received from Fife and Drum and the first ten plastic minis that I put together from Wargames Factory. At first glance the Wargames Factory minis are significantly larger than those from Fife and Drum, which I expected. After applying the primer and starting on the skin they don't appear to be quite so much bigger.

I didn't get nearly as far along with these as I wanted as real life continued to intrude on my painting but I got the skin started and the eyes painted. I'll bring the skin up a little more and call that good and then start on the rest.

Wargames Factory AWI Continental Militia Build

I have been doing a lot of AWI reading and then looking online at AWI miniatures. I decided to do something a little different and see how the Wargames Factory Continental Militia would build up. My first experience with Wargames Factory was their original Zulus and British Colonials, not particularly stellar models by any means. However, its been a long time and a full change in ownership since then. They have certainly come a long way. I found these very easy to build and they look pretty good as well. My quick pictures don't really do them justice.

I changed out the blade in my x-acto knife and went to work. A sharp blade is a necessity when working with plastic so don't skimp on this. I opted to build one sprue's worth of miniatures so for the Continental Militia that would be 10 models. The instructions are pretty good remembering that arms that share the same alpha numeric code go together and of course that alpha code will match the body (example there are two arms labeled E1, one left handed and one right handed and they fit to body E as a matched pair). First mistake of the evening, I cut all the bodies from the sprue so I could clean up the mold lines all at once (mold lines are typical for injected molded plastic and is easily removed with the edge of the blade with a scraping motion, avoid the use of files). Once I had all the bodies cut off and cleaned up I realized that I didn't really know which ones where which. I found myself referring to both the instructions and one of the other sprues to verify that I was working with the right body.

Just following the alpha numeric sequence will build up ten models pretty quickly. Now some of the arms are interchangeable, what I didn't check is if they matched the model's uniform or not. The hunting shirts aren't an issue but the civilian clothes might be. I would recommend building up one of the three sprues according to the directions as they are written.

Body A - Will accept arms labeled for A, B & D
Body B - Will accept arms labeled for A, B & D
Body C - Without more experimentation will only accept arms labeled for C
Body D - Will accept arms labeled for A, B & D
Body E - Will accept arms labeled for E, F & H
Body F - Will accept arms labeled for E, F & H
Body G - Without more experimentation will only accept arms labeled for G
Body H - Will accept arms labeled for E, F & H
Most of the arm variations simply are giving you a choice between giving the model a musket or a rifle.

You have a choice of heads wearing the round hat, the tricorn or the soft cap. They all have the same expression. While I understand why they did this I don't think it would have taken much effort to work in some facial expressions. I'm not fond of the tricorn simply because it looks a little odd when seen from above because of the way its molded.

The one issue I have is that the attachment point for the head is ill defined at best and because of the slope all of them will have a slightly head down look to them when looking straight ahead. When they are in a firing position it looks fine as it looks like the model is looking down their musket or rifle.

I would like to purchase some Fife and Drum miniatures and get a feel for how they will fit in with the Wargames Factory models. See if I can mix them or if they need to be in different units.

Here are some pictures of the results of the building process.

The box, although I really should have taken a picture of the back and not the front.

The instruction sheet. I'm making notes on this as I go.

Body F, kneeling and firing

Body B, standing and firing. While I'm carefully cutting I did manage to break this gun barrel. It bothers me enough that I'll go in and replace the whole right arm.

Body A, standing and firing.

Body E, cocking. Note that the right arm in this case is not an "E" arm but an "H" arm.

The first group as I work my way up the left side of the sprue

Body G. Note the head down position created by the slope of the shoulders.

Body H, there are two of these on the sprue, 

Body D, again there are two of these on the sprue. I went with the knit cap on the model on the right because I used all the round hat heads.

Body C, again note the head down look. I tacked this one to a base since it wouldn't stand on its own.

The second group as I worked my way up the right side of the sprue

There are still a lot of pieces on there, lots of arms and heads. There are not a lot of accouterments options but that's okay with me. Fewer pieces to get broken or broken off.

I built these pretty much straight from the instructions. I was a little frustrated with Body E because I was trying to build the version shown on the back of the package which you can't actually do with the "E" arms. That's when I figured out that the arms are more interchangeable than the instructions allude to although the box states that the arms are interchangeable. It was nice to learn that for a fact.

AWI Packages Arrived

Well after my grumpy blast about my painting block it looks like some retail therapy may have been the cure. Two books and three boxes of minis for my AWI project (although its hard to call it a project just yet) arrived yesterday, courtesy of the War Store and Amazon.

Everything just received a quick glance at this point. I spent the evening over at Genghis Con helping to man the painting room and I probably won't have time for a good look at these till Monday. Still I have to crack open all three boxes, you know just to make sure everything was there. Off the bat these look like really good kits. Its hard to tell before I start some assembly but at first glance they look good, much higher quality than the kits being produced by the original owners of Wargames Factory.

Inside are two sprues of infantry, one command sprue and a sprue of bases. As they say enough for 30 miniatures.

British Infantry Sprue

Like the British box inside are two sprues of infantry, one command sprue and a sprue of bases. Again enough for 30 miniatures.

Continental Infantry Sprue

The mix in this box is a little different. Inside are three sprues of infantry and a sprue of bases. Again enough for 30 miniatures but no command to go with them although there are a couple of horns on the sprues. 

Militia Infantry Sprue

Along with the minis came a copy of The Rebellion by Warlord Games. While I'm not sure if Black Powder will be the ruleset I want to use, the historical information in the book is worth the price of admission. I received a book from Amazon as well; A Guide to the Battles of the American Revolution. I think this will be a great companion book to go along with the Greg Novak books. I'm looking forward to digging into this one.

Sorry for the poor picture on this one but its late on Thursday night and I'm not going to re-do it!

LoTR Rohan Helmingas Warband - 1st Look

If you have been reading this blog then you already know that I can be all over the map with my projects. I like to be able to go back and forth between periods just to break things up. My armies get done slower but it keeps my interest up.

I spent some time working on one of the three warbands for my Rohan army for the September tournament. Since I'm unlikely to actually win the tournament through strength of arms I'm going for the painting win. This is an official GW tournament and as such there is straight forward checklist of items that a judge is looking for when he is judging the paint work on the armies. Conversions, even minor conversions, add huge points to your painting score, but there must be conversions on something like 90% of your army to get the check. With that in mind I'm working on doing at least some minor conversion work on every miniature that will make up the army.

First up is Grimbold's warband made up of 12 Rohan Warriors. These are all plastics from the basic Rohan Warrior box. I'm trying to go very wysiwyg with these guys, so no throwing spears or bows, just shields and hand weapons and since the Helmingas prefer the axe to the sword I have swapped out weapons on half the miniatures. I sacrificed weapons and other interesting bits from a couple of sprues of Hirdmen from Gripping Beast and Bondi from Wargames Factory. I'm not sure I'm happy with all of the head swaps that I made. In particular the heads from the Gripping Beast sprues just seem to be to big, the ones from the Wargames Factory sprues look a bit closer to being the right size. Its a little difficult to use these heads to begin with since the GW LoTR figures are much closer to true 25mm miniatures and the Gripping Beast and Wargames Factory are definitely 28mm miniatures. They may look fine after I get them painted up but if I'm going to make any changes I need to do that now since I will need to resculpt the hair before painting them. Head swaps are usually the hardest thing to do but they really are a piece of cake with plastic miniatures. The same is true with weapons swaps and in this case I swapped out the whole hand, that was much easier than cutting weapons in two and grafting them on to existing hands. Everything else is just the addition of belt knives and pouches. Very minor stuff and very easy to do with plastic miniatures.

I have also run into a problem trying to acquire some of the miniatures for this force. A lot of the models particularly the mounted versions of the Rohan Royal Guard are out of production. My guess is that they will soon be available in Finecast resin. I don't want to wait that long or spend that much money on them either. I spent some time looking at images from the movie and determined that there isn't that much difference between the Royal Guard and any other Rohan warrior. The biggest difference is the helmet. Only the Royal Guard have a crest on the helmet with some horsehair flowing off of it. Two of the plastic Riders of Rohan have this style helmet (with the cheek guards). They will take more work but I'm going to use these two riders as the stock models for converting all ten of the mounted Royal Guard that I will need for Eomer's warband. I will probably do a little extra work on the horses to make them stand out a bit more as well as the horse in the Royal Guard blister is the same horse in the Riders of Rohan box.

Let me know what you think about the heads. Its definitely not to late to change things out and they are only plastic and I have another box to work with if something doesn't work. At this point the work is going smoothly and I'm on schedule to complete the painting in time for September.