CRC’s Crazy Compendium 2; Eclectic Boogaloo

I suppose it’s cheating to take quotes for the titles of these Game of Thrones chaps…but it takes me just as long to find the ‘perfect’ quote as it does to come up with a witty (or just usually god awful) pun, so it is what it is.

I’m still sort of stuck with single minis at the moment for a number of reasons, so this banner chap is all I’ve been working on the the past day or so. I wasn’t really paying attention to how much time I spent on him this time round…so I don’t have that info. That being said there were a few things I was trying out that I wanted to go over in detail. Firstly I decided that I wanted the mini to look much more practical (let’s ignore the Stark colours on the tabard here) but also have some interest in colours, so I wanted to do something a bit different with the chainmail that makes up a fair bit of the mini.

Fairly simple work here going from a basecoat of Leadbelcher (GW) followed by a coat of Wyldwood Contrast (GW) to give the oily brown look before drybrushing another layer of Leadbelcher over the top just to add a bit more of a metallic look. You could do this with Agrax Earthshade (GW), but the colour is not as deep as with the contrast as you will see with the rest of the metal being done with Agrax over the Leadbelcher.

The rest of the mini was painted using normal methods, but I did want to go over the banner a little as it is the same as the tabard…but with extra steps. The tabard was just done with a Celestra Grey (GW) up to White Scar (GW) transition, but there’s a few extra bits I did with the banner that I wanted to go over.

To start with I covered the banner with a coat of Nuln Oil (GW). This was to try and deepen the shadows a little, but really you could skip this as you can see it does very little (though if you’d use a brighter prime then maybe it would do more good). Over that I thinned Celestra Grey and coated that over the whole banner but focused successive layers onto the folds to try and build some shade tones…it sort of worked. This is the same method as for the basecoat on the tabard though not quite to such an extreme level. After that I moved on to Ulthuan Grey (GW) to build up the highlights on those folds. I tried to be a subtle as possible, though you can see some stark (accidental pun) contrast between the two colours that I fixed later on.

Then I moved up to White Scar and focused even smaller areas on the folds. This Celestra Grey > Ulthuan Grey > White Scar is the method I used for the tabard. On the banner, though, I found the colours to be too blocky and un-blended so I topped the flag with a glaze made up from White Scar mixed with Lahmian Medium (about 4:1 with medium to white) just to blend it out.

After that I painted the wolf with some black to grey general steps and picked out the trim on the flag with a green as a small homage to the TV series that for some reason added green to the Stark colours. Basically I didn’t know what colour to put there so I picked green. It works. I also took the time to try and add some black lines to the edges of the white to frame it a little better. In the end he ended up like this:

So minus the wolf motifs possibly changing to a brighter grey colour, he’s all done! Pleased with how he turned out…though when I get to painting the rest I may not go quite to in-depth on the paintwork… 😛

Weathering! A fun little final step with vehicles/armour/scenery/ect. Final being an important part of this…seeing as this tank has been unweathered for quite some time…as is evident from the horrid ‘before’ picture because I’m an idiot and didn’t think to take a new one before I started…

So that terrible picture aside, what I wanted to go for with this mini was a clean tank but one that is in action. Even a newly painted tank has to drive to the fight, so the main focuses here were dust and some water streaks from splashing through puddles. This is why I’ve mainly focused toward the bottom of the vehicle.

For the dust I used Tallarn Sand (GW) as a drybrush along the lower portion of the tank. I tried to brush in a circular motion to show a bit of turbulence in deposition, but in parts that wasn’t as easy to do. In parts I followed this with a lighter drybrush of Ushabti Bone (GW) in places. I did this before the streaks as I wanted them to be more like water run-off so have some darker streaks over the dried dust to look like wetter parts. I will plan on putting a base on the tank eventually and I don’t plan on adding any water to it, but I like to think that at least one river could have been crossed to get to the fight.

The vents all over the hull were coated in thinned Black Templar Contrast (GW). Just thinned it with water to deliberately change the properties a little bit. If you used the Contrast Medium (GW) I suspect it would look a little smoother, but I was going for something a little rough. The other streaks were done with Wyldwood Contrast (GW) in a similar manner and applied to areas where water should pool and then dragged down to create the streaks. I might have gone a little too far with the glacis plate in the front but I did limite the number of streaks I put on the turret to show the lower chance of water splashing that high in general use. On the top plate I just dropped some of this colour into recesses where the water would pool.

To show some smoke and soot from the chimney stacks I drybrushed and stippled Corvus Black (GW) around the top of the chimneys and around the cutouts on the sides of them to add a bit of discolouration. Didn’t go overboard here as I just wanted to show use rather than heavy use without deep cleaning going on. I want my Marines to look clean so it plays into the angelic side of their nature. If this was a Guard tank I would weather the thing to hell. 😛

Still not sure about that front plate…but for now I don’t have any Macragge Blue to tidy it up a bit, so it’ll have to stay as it is for now. Of course chipping is another method of weathering that can be done, but that’ll have to be saved for the next Bolt Action tank I work on…which might be a while away (I need to do more infantry first…).

Just running a few tests on image size and doing some general background work on the project, so my apologies if this keeps popping up on the feed for a while. As a consolation prize, here’s a picture of a cool rock I have; it’s a granite pebble.

Ok, the faffing about should be done now. Project should run smoother, faster, and more reliably with the reduced pictures…we didn’t need that level of zoom…

Vargo Hoat is done…almost… I missed a clasp on the end of the belt but I’ll fix that later. I managed to avoid screwing up the cloak while getting to the other details and I managed to get my idea for fancy trousers done too! Most of the colours are fairly simple tones for leather and such. The skin tone is entirely contrast but to give a slightly different tone I used more sandy colours like Ushabti Bone (GW) as the base coat so that slightly more brown tone shows through. It’s not perfect, but it works well enough.

The trousers were something I haven’t done very often with stripes, so I decided to paint the trousers in blue first and highlighted them right up (I used the same pattern of colours as the Royal Artillery Officer’s jacket below). After that I took some thinned Celestra Grey (GW) to paint the white stripes. Using the thin paint allows some of the shading of the blue to show through, then it’s a matter of highlighting up to some pure white. Actually a bit simpler than I thought it would be, though painting in straight lines is a bit tricky sometimes…

No immediate plans for a next project at the moment. Dealing with a bit of hobby burnout (or just general burnout) at the moment. I might do something a little different next time just because I like to keep up with things like this. I might do something geologic that I could tie to hobby time…maybe following on from a conversation of painting stone golems as different rock types…but who knows.

Next model I’m working on is Vargo Hoat from A Song of Ice and Fire Miniatures Game by CMON. To begin with I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do with this mini before I realised he had quite a lovely cloak (that probably didn’t come from Essos). Vargo is one of those characters that everyone dislikes, even the fictional people within the books (I don’t think he made it into the TV series…), but he does switch sides at one point from the Lannisters to Roose Bolton and I though a turncloak with a nice cloak was too good an opportunity to pass up.

The outside of the cloak is in Lannister red, but the facings and the lining of his cloak is in the Bolton colours of a reddish pink colours. There’s not as much contrast between these colours as there would be between the red and the white of the Starks, but I like this subtle look a little more. That being said, it looks a little more interesting than everything being a dark shade of brown and/or black particularly bearing in mind that much of his armour is studded leather.

The real downside with being this happy about the cloak is that I’m a bit afraid to paint anything else in case I spill onto it and ruin it… Ah well. The show goes on. Timing wise this did take a fair bit of time with all of the thin layers and such, but in total and counting drying time for the shades I got this done in about 2 hours. The longer you take here, the smoother your transitions will be, but if you do find some things looking a little stark once you’re done a nice glaze of either red or pink should sort that out nicely.

Happy hobby everyone.

*EDIT* I tweaked the brightness on the pictures a little to make the colours look a little better…they were just too bright.

This one is a bit of a repaint, because I just got the idea in my head to make a Napoleonic Wars Royal Artillery ‘command stand’. I’ll add more before I get them all based together, I think, but for now this chap was a quick starting point. So let’s start with how he was…

I decided to cover over what was that as the detail was still pretty good, and dug out some reference images. I’ve gotten pretty close, I think, but there is one definite inaccuracy and one probably inaccuracy. The definite one is merely a result of using an Infantry sculpt as a ‘stand-in’ as the Royal Artillery did not have square cross-belt buckles like this chap, they had oval ones, but I wasn’t going to try and fix that on a mini of this scale. The second probable inaccuracy are the turnbacks on the jacket tails. They did switch to red (as you can see below) but most of the pictures of Napoleonic officers in the post-1812 short tail coats and I suspect that the tails on the pre-1812 jackets would have had white turnbacks. I might fix that. I probably won’t.

And here’s what I ended up with!

All in all, and considering some painting breaks, this chap took me a couple of hours to get done. That is considering him being a repaint rather than a ‘ground up’ job, so there would be more time taken if I had to shade the trousers and such. I plan to combine this chap with a drummer and a mounted senior officer as a command stand at some point, but that’s a problem for later on. For now he’ll just go on the shelf of things I’ve finished…twice… I wish I could remove the Spring Clean Competition thing from my project because this hasn’t really turned out to be much about spring cleaning and more about painting what I fancy and have paints for at the time…

Anyhoo… Happy painting, folks!

Better…though not perfect… One day I’ll have a decent set up for mini photos…

Second time writing this, as it just completely failed to post before (I’m guessing the image gallery thing is still causing problems), but here we go again!

I’ve been wanting to do some experiments with various skin tones for several years now. Other than some Tau skin tones a LONG time ago I’ve never really branched out much from what I know and I decided I may as well learn some new recipes for more diverse tones. Still have some experiments I want to try, but I’ve got a couple of them sorted here.

First one is a borrowed recipe from Tuffyears that they used for some Zulus a few weeks ago (at least I think it was weeks…I lose track of time very easily these days…). I added a few extra steps and I may have highlighted a little high, but we’ll get to that in a bit. Second experiment is a Chiss skin tone (Grand Admiral Thrawn) partly in honour of Sundancer’s ever-lasting quest for Star Wars: Epic Legion and partly because I’ve been on a bit of a Star Wars kick myself recently. I suppose you could also use this tone for Tau as well, if you REALLY wanted to. 😛 That being said what I came up with is typically a bit darker than Tau tones are usually depicted, and possibly could do with some brighter stages for Chiss as well, or at least how Thrawn appears in Star Wars Rebels.

The minis I’ve used are Delaques from GW and Necromunda, and the lighting on the pictures is not the greatest. I was going to wait until the morning with the better light for final shots, but I’m afraid of forgetting what paints I used…because I’m an idiot… so here goes!

The basecoat here was Dryad Bark (GW) before being followed with an all over shade of Druchii Violet (GW). Something I did, but didn’t take a step-by-step picture for was to reapply the Dryad Bark basecoat to the top of the head and a little to the back of the hands, though this is not a necessity (definitely not if painting a mini with hair). Following on from that I applied an initial highlight of Gorthor Brown (GW) remembering to try and keep the paint a little thin and applying a few coats if needed. The main focus is on the facial structure, through the hands on these minis have quite well defined tendons as well and this chap, being bald, had a few wrinkles on the back of his head. This step was one of the longest (20-ish minutes) as the more careful you are the better the final look. The final spot highlight was done with Ungor Flesh (GW) and may have been a jump too high. For example this chaps nose looks rather bright. I’d advise replacing the Ungor Flesh with a darker tone like Cadian Flesh Tone (GW) just to keep that slight warm tone in the extremities. That being said, if you were to paint a mini with an outstretched hand the Ungor Flesh would work wonders for highlighting the palm to get that slightly brighter tone.

All in all this skin tone took me somewhere around 1 and a quarter to one and a half hours to finish, though if you cut that final highlight it will save you 10-15 minutes.

The pictures here are a little out of focus…my apologies for that…bad lighting is always a problem and I’m not a fan of the flash…

Basecoat here was Kantor Blue (GW) You could use Macragge Blue (GW) for a bright basecoat or even Stegadon Scale Green (GW) if you want a more green tint to the overall look. Over this I shaded with Druchii Violet (GW). Again, Drakenhof Nightshade (GW) is another option for a more blue look however over a basecoat as dark as Kantor Blue I tend to find it is not as visible as Druchii Violet. As I was going for a Chiss look (and the eyes on the Delaques are very buldging) I decided to go for painting the eyes. After the shade had dried I took the opportunity to paint the eyes with Mephiston Red (GW) and then layered Alaitoc Blue (GW) onto the skin. This is done to brighten the tone up so apply this more broadly, just avoid deeper recesses. I found this coloured worked well thinned more than usual and slowly built up in a few layers. This adds time to the scheme, but the final result is a little smoother. Over this I highlighted with Hoeth Blue (GW) and picked out the center of the eyes with Evil Sunz Scarlet (GW). If you wanted to push the highlights a little further, you could also add some Fenrisian Grey (GW), though I didn’t here.

This scheme took a little less time, as I didn’t have to be as careful with the Alaitoc Blue, but if you do choose to push the highlights to Fenrisian Grey it’s take about the same time as the other tone above. If you don’t go that far, this took me a little over an hour.

It both these cases, be aware that if you have larger areas of skin, or add your shade a little thicker than I did the timings could take longer due to the drying time of the shade paints. I was being fairly careful with my shades here so that cut down the drying time a bit.

Hopefully tomorrow I can add some extra pictures of the finished skin tones with better light. I might add them as a new entry or I might just add them to the end of this one, we’ll see. Happy painting!

So the plan for the next mini was something other than Bolt Action… Primed a Space Marine and everything…then realised that I actually don’t have the paint for his armour because it dried up and I had to chuck it. I was not impressed.

Anyhoo… I do want to get a playable force of Brits for Bolt Action done though at the moment painting batches is not that simple of a task what with trying to move but also not actually having a place to move to yet, so I sort of get stuck with individual minis when time allows, so here is my officer for my platoon.

There’s a few things here that I’d like to go over in terms of accuracy, so if you’re not as into that sort of thing as I am bare with me for a bit.

First thing to discuss is the boots because I’ve made a little boo-boo with recent minis, but it’s not a big deal so I won’t go back and fix it. Long story short, the regular soldiers were issued with black boot, whereas officers had brown. Imagine Captain Mainwaring telling Sergeant Wilson he’s got the wrong coloured boots on because he’s not an officer. Now I’ve only made this mistake with some of my minis so I’m just going to say that some of the chaps in the platoon have managed to ‘acquire’ some nicer boots from somewhere and put it all down to the ‘use what you can get’ adage that so often occurs in war.

The second ‘inaccuracy’ is the fact that this chap has the full kit; pack and all. Now TYPICALLY officers were not prescribed such things in their uniform which is why many officer minis you see are not wearing packs. That being said, if only one chap isn’t wearing a pack he sort of stands out so it stands to reason that an officer who wants to last needs to blend in with his men a little bit more. In this case, I have two explainations: 1. The Sergeant has taken it upon himself to make sure this Rupert makes it home so has given him spare kit to help him blend in. 2. He’s a soldier been promoted up from the ranks and just kept his old kit because it’s cheaper than buying new.

On the subject of Regimental badges or unit patches (the curved band above the square division badge) they can be left off easily enough as well for those who aren’t fans of decals or freehand work. If anyone decides to be a FARB (otherwise referred to as a dick) because ‘yOu DoN’T hAvE tHe RiGhT BaDgE’, then just tell them your chaps decided to go the whole hog in preventing unit information getting to the enemy. Remember, if you’re captured it’s name, rank, and number you give.

If you do want to add them, then the simple rules are red for infantry, blue for artillery, green for Rifle regiments, and (I think) yellow for armoured. I’m not sure on that last one, though…

The only thing I have done in the past few days on these chaps is to re-colour the webbing using the methods below…the Tommies themselves have been painted for years… Though I would like the opportunity to remind everyone out there that using a palette really can help…I was too lazy to get mine out and I may have put on too much in places. Some of them even needed some matting down because the shade when on a bit shiny… Patience is a virtue, and I’m just not that virtuous…

Hopefully something non-BA will be worked on next…but things are a little tricky with not really being able to keep too much stuff out while I get ready for moving…

So I did mention before that I had a bunch of beige webbing on other Tommies that needed changing, so I thought I’d go over some of my experiments to re-colour them rather than just re-paint the whole chaps. Here I’m doing it using washes from Citadel but I would think that similar paints from other companies would also work. I would advise against the Contrast paints, unless you thin them down just because of the coverage you get. As you’ll see, the ability to add a few coats to subtly change colours is really useful. And while I have used this for webbing, you can use similar ideas to shift with all sorts of colours. You want your old beige minis to have some yellow panels? You can do that with these same ideas.

The first experiment I wanted to try was to try and tint the Sniper to be a bit more green, so I got some Biel-Tan Green shade that is a much more green shade rather than the brown-green colour of Athonian Camoshade. Using a shade means that the colours below will show through a bit so I can keep some highlights I did earlier. I also had to remember what I had done before with the Athonian Camoshade and discovered that I must have used two coats of the paint to reach the colour previously on the Sniper.

And so the final result looks a pretty good match and was quick and easy to re-colour using only two paints. I could possibly get away with just the Biel-Tan Green, but I like the slight brown tint I get this way…

I might put up a post related to some research for the Archer SP 17pdr that I was doing earlier…but I might not be painting my tank for a while, so I might save it for when I get ready to paint. No more webbing posts now, I promise.

So if anyone is a little confused with me saying Cheshires when I talked about Hampshires before, don’t worry about it. The Machine Gun regiment for the 50th Division were the 2nd Btln. of the Cheshire Rgt. I know probably no one is concerned with that bit of info, but still. Anyhoo…

The MMG team is all finished and ready for the fight! You’ll get to see the difference dulling down the brighter webbing had here and as I suspected it’s not quite the same as my new chap with the darker paint job, but it’s close enough. Let’s just say the Cpl. knows how to put the blanco on better, shall we?

There will definitely be a Universal Carrier coming for these chaps in the future, along side some small changes to other Brits I have already painted. Maybe even the crew from my 6pdr will get repainted to match my NW Europe chaps; they need repainting anyway even if they are still going to stay with my Forgotten Army chaps… So there’s some stuff coming. Might deviate from Bolt Action for a bit, and things might slow down while I’m prepping to move in the next month or so, but things are coming.

Slightly poor lighting here, but I haven’t attached this chap to the base yet and I wanted to take the opportunity to go over the webbing a little.

For anyone not in on the jargon, ‘webbing’ is the term given to the ammo pouches/packs/assorted accoutrements that the Tommies carried. The name comes from the material it’s made of, but the subject here is the colour. The webbing was a beige colour, but the British used a substance called Blanco to protect the belts and is turned them to a green colour. Now I think there’s variation in this colour, but my original colours on the loader and gunner were far too bright, so I dulled them down with some Agrax Earthshade. For the Cpl. of the section I decided to paint it a bit less bright. Annoyingly this is what I did on the Sgt. I painted a while ago…but forgot about…

Hopefully the weather will be less overcast tomorrow and I can get some better pictures. I should also have all three chaps on the same base…even if I haven’t got the basing on by then. 😛 May the 4th be with you, you mad buggers!

Well seeing as I got this double post and based on the last little comment on the loader below, I thought I’d use the space now. Once I finished the last post (and the comment about proper vehicle markings for 1st Hampshires) I decided while it was in my head to do a little research. Luckily for me, it seems I was right about the vehicle marking that I put on my Jeep several years ago, which is comforting, but also in the research I was reminded of Machine Gun Battalions. Seems like an odd thing to be reminded of, but I’m an odd person…

Let’s start with some basics of vehicle markings in WW2. There are several main ones and a lot that apply only to tanks and armoured divisions (which I won’t touch on too much here), but the basics of unit identification fall within two badges; the division badge, and the ‘unit’ badge (can represent a regiment or a battalion, usually). Here’s an example from my collection:

The brightness is a bit high there, but the badges to look at here are the 68 is a brown square and the red double T’s in the black square. The division badge is the double T, in this case denoting the 50th (Northumbrian) Infantry Division. There’s lots of other badges like the ‘Triforce’ badge of the 3rd Division or the red rat of the 7th Armoured (Desert Rats). These badges are unique to a division, whereas the ‘unit’ badge is shared across all divisions of a particular type (Infantry vs. Armoured being the two most obvious ones).

Using the example of my Jeep, and cross referencing to the details given on that site we find that a brown square with a 68 is the middle infantry battalion of the Junior Brigade. In this case it matches the 1st Hampshires, but as has been stated on a recent forum post, it’s best to have several sources that agree, so here (http://www.classicjeeps.co.uk/military-vehicle-signs-50th-northumbrian-division/) is another source with the same information. So that’s the basics covered.

“But what the hell has this got to do with machine guns?” I hear you cry. We’re getting there, I promise. Have a  Lloyd shot of a tank to help you calm down a bit.

Since WW1 the British had arranged their Machine Gun units as part of the Divisional or Brigade units. That’s an odd way of saying that regular infantry battalions didn’t get machine  guns and they were kept at the brigade or division level and dished out to the units in the field where they were needed. There are badges that would denote this on the uniforms, but I just stick to division badges on my chaps but for vehicles they would need to be identified. Just as today, a brigadier would not want his truck for carrying his big guns to ‘disappear’ while the PBI have ‘found’ themselves a nice new set of wheels. So let’s go back to our badges and the legend on the website.

At the divisional level we see an entry for ‘Divisional Support Battalion’ which handily describes itself with Machine Guns and Mortars (heavy mortars in this case) and links to a black square with a 64 in it, and so we have our correct badge! Luckily the Warlord kit does have that decal in the transfer set, so maybe in the future it may make an appearance?

Should be noted that this is a level of detail that some people might find a bit off-putting or intense, and that’s cool. Not everyone is in to such maddening levels as I can be sometimes, but finding these details can be a little problematic sometimes so this is here to help anyone else interested. Here’s a few links to some site I found in my research for anyone who wants a bit of a jump start into their own research:

Infantry Div. Markings: http://britmods.freehosting.net/infdiv.htm

WW2 Infantry Battalion Organisation: http://www.kerynne.com/games/BritishInfantryBttnTOE.html

Machine Gun Battalions: https://vickersmg.blog/in-use/british-service/the-british-army/divisional-machine-gun-battalions/

And the loader is done! I decided to try a darker backdrop for the pictures this time round, but I don’t think I like it as much as the lighter grey one I was using yesterday. Once I actually move the whole set up will likely change anyway.

Back to the loader, however, he’s basically painted the same was the gunner with the big difference being the helmet and the ammo. The helmet is based with Castellan Green, then randomly pick out the burlap strips in Mournfang Brown and Zandri Dust before shading with Agrax Earthshade. After that, picking out the brown strips with Skragg Brown and the beige with Ushabti Bone. The ammo belt was a little trickier because of the sculpt. I suspect that the way a Vickers gun works wasn’t considered, but the cloth belt wasn’t actually sculpted on and there is a flat ‘thing’ sculpted on the bottom. It’s not a big issues, I just painted a band of Zandri Dust along the centre of the rounds to imitate the belt and he’s close enough to the ground that you don’t see the underside (possibly why they added the thicker bit to help strengthen the mini).

Just the spotter left…but I need to do some work on him first. I’m not a fan of metal minis. I know that’s a bold statement to make, but I find them difficult to work with and annoying to paint (though that last part is more a problem with single piece minis in general, but metal usually has some blocky recesses…). Hopefully I can get him done soon enough, then base the team properly. I was planning on building and painting a Universal Carrier for the team, but suddenly realised that the way the division system in the British army works is actually a little complicated when it comes to vehicle markings…I wanted to have these chaps as the 1st Btln. Hampshire regiment…but I need to know which battalion in that Infantry brigade they were (first, second, or third)… The last time I did this I obviously came up with them as the 2nd…but I’m not not sure. More research is needed!

Decided to put up a post of this chap by himself rather than waiting for the whole team to be finished. He has the Vickers Gun, after all. That’s the important bit, right? and who knows, that box he’s sitting on might actually have all the ammo in it. The paint job is the same as other WW2 Brits I’ve done in the past, though that was in another project log now. 😛 As I use the GW paint range (sometimes I question why myself, but I know the range and that helps so I stuck with it) the colours are usually not as straight forward. No GW paint is called ‘British Uniform’, for example. So here’s a simple run-down of the main colours I used here.

Uniform:

Basecoat of Steel Legion Drab, shade of Agrax Earthshade, re-layering of Steel Legion Drab on some of the flatter surfaces/knees/elbows, edge highlight of Tallarn Sand.

Webbing:

Basecoat of Loren Forest, shade of Biel’Tan Green, layer of Elysian Green, edge highlight of Ogryn Camo.

Green Metal (helmets/gun mounts):

Basecoat of Castellan Green, shade of Agrax Earthshade, re-layer Castellan Green on some areas (dome of the helmet here, though with netting on the helmet you needn’t worry about this step), edge highlight Loren Forest.

The loader is on his way; he missed the bus. The third man will be after that, then we can look at basing before saying my heavy firepower is finished. Stay tuned!

It’s been a while…almost a month, in fact, but school is done for now and I found some time to paint. Back to A Song of Ice and Fire Miniatures for this one with Walder Frey, that lovable rouge from The Twins! A big part of this mini is his chair, and I wanted to try and make it look as good as possible for that reason. I did consider painting the carved details in the Frey colours, but that would have meant painting the wood grey and I didn’t fancy that. I decided that a good, solid wooden chair would suffice and decided to start with a coat of Wyldwood Contrast over the Mechanicus Standard Grey primer. Normally that’s too dark for the contrast to work it’s magic (particularly one as strong as Wyldwood), but it gave me a nice base to work from and that was the goal rather than a one coat paint job. Over this I drybrushed some Gorthor Brown to pick out the planks, though the detail is not always too deep on this mini. After that I did some recess shading with watered down Wyldwood just to add some darker spots of old wood. After that I drybrushed with Ushabti Bone which might seem a bit stark, but was mainly to set up the final colour of a coat of Seraphim Sepia across the wood. It’s a subtle tone, but mixed with the Ushabti Bone it can add that slightly yellow tint to worn, old wood. I think it came out alright in the end.

The colour choice for Walder himself was based on the Frey colours of blue and grey, with the green shirt thrown in as just something muted for Walder to have lying around. The only really ‘rich’ colours he has is the blue trousers and red bag of NOT Lannister gold. The skin is something I’m not 100% happy with. He does look a bit like a zombie in a chair…which I consider a good thing…but the shallow detail does blur things a little bit. I also decided to try and add liver spots to the skin, but I may have gone a bit too big with them…and also a bit too stark. I did glaze over them to blend them a little better, but they are on the large side. Still, all in all I’m quite pleased with him. He’s looks like the pale, old, grumpy bastard that he is!

I’m curious if CMON will actually add some House Frey Bannermen to the neutral faction, like the Boltons. It’d be neat to see some more of the lesser houses represented here and there. But first I want to get my hands on the new Greyjoys… Too many minis and not enough pennies…

Hopefully I can upload with a bit more consistency at the moment, though I will be moving at some point soon, which could make that a bit tricky, but we’ll see. Not sure what the next project will be, yet. I still have to finish one mini for the Murder Girls Underworlds team, so maybe her? My Khorne Red is looking a little sad at the moment, though…

Well technically not space. Necromunda is a planet, after all. Anyway, final update on my Escher Lady. After several years of being primed and used for colour experimentation she is finally completed!

That’s all for now. I might be able to get more painted in the next few weeks, but I make no promises. At least I won’t promise to keep any promises I made…that is somehow worse…

Just a quick update post while I’m taking a quick break from writing a paper, but here’s some of the extra colours! She’s not done yet, but she’s getting there. I’m very happy with the colour scheme here, and with the ancient tablecloth!

Welcome to the new (and hopefully a little faster) project! Out with the old, in with the new, right? Well, kind of. Just for a laugh, I thought I’d start this project with the same mini that I started the last one with. I am so efficient at painting minis… For those who remember, a whole year ago I tested out painting purple hair on one of my primed Eschers from GW. You may also remember her from my colour experiments with British WW2 Jungle uniforms because she was there, well we’re back again though this time I do plan on finishing her completely…when time allows… Hopefully I can get back to more in depth project logs where I can go through steps and research again, but for now I’m still a little strapped for time with school…and then maybe field trips…but empty promises are so in right now, so I should be good. Right?

More to come at some point from now in the temporal continuum! I still have some bits and pieces from the old project to finish off like the schurtzen from my Panzer IV and the last team member of my Murder Girls. That is my official name for my Shadespire team. Happy Hobby everyone!