Saturday was sunny and dry...

Yes, the only saturday better than mr.saturday is a warm, clear, dry one.

Yes.  Its spray time!

Today I based and primed 149 minis.  The only reason I stopped is I ran out of superglue accelerator and superglue.  Nuts!

  Rather than facing my usual wall of unfinished minis to work on I decided to freshen everything up by raiding my storage tubs and giving me something totally fresh to play with.  I stopped enjoying the other ones so a little new-new shiney was needed for a morale lift.

In all that frantic work I did manage to do a few key things which I am excited about.  The main thing was a war on my procrastination.  I seem to have struck a good pace toward that end.  So here are the key achievements.

  One- I got all my oriental heroes and ninja collection well into the path of playable.  These have been sitting in a tub for years in an embarrassing state of just undercoated.  Not the biggest collection so far,  but its nice to see them finally based the same and progressing.  Its equally nice to know no more are lurking in my unpainted draws.  I don't know about you,  but I have a horrible tendency to buy doubles because I forget what's in my draws.  Ooh missus.

  Two- I got my part painted skaven tub rebased and mostly painted.  I still have a huge collection of unpainted metal skaven- but my Skulldred warband is well decked out for now.  They may have to wait.

  Three- my whole minotaur collection is assembled bar the skull faced minotaur lord, (a pinning nightmare I couldn't face without kicker or vodka) and is primed. Some even have color applied.  This is a huge deal for me- as its one of the areas of my collection that I have owned the longest and it was furthest from done.  A BIG morale boost.  Plus I do get a fair number of emails asking about them.

Threes a fair number, right?

Four- raided my Fiend Factory and monsters draw and got well and truly stuck in.  Everything from giant spiders, boars, snakes, assasin bugs and merbeasts got based and primed.  I still have a handful to go,  but its going to be good to have all these creatures playable instead of rotting in zip bags.

  This required a huge mental shift for me.

   You see I suffer badly from perfectionism- and its been holding me back horribly from completing my paint jobs.   I originally planned to have every FF and FA model on hand sculpted flagstone bases- but this would just take forever to do.   I had to negotiate with my brain and say- "look brain... stop eating that book on coding c# and come listen to me.  How about we just get them ff figs all done to an okayish standard on 25mm textured bases and worry about all that... brain... are you  listening to me?  Put down that abstract concept and.... BRAIN!  (Sigh) I dunno why I bother..."

So after that little tirade I did indeed go the simple,  quick basing route and tore through the lot in no time.  Satisfaction!

Perfectionism is a cruel affliction- one I am working on reducing so I can enjoy life more.  It goes beyond being finicky- it actually stops you doing stuff you enjoy because the anxiety of the outcome not being up to your unreasonable standards puts you off. Any advice is appreciated in the comments below.

I plan to have a full set of FF minis done and based for retro dungeon bashes at some stage.  Hence 1 inch rounds instead of my usual 30mm skirmish bases.  I picture using some of those pen and ink dungeon tiles you can get from rpg drive through for some seriously old school action.

Er.. Four.... no... Five.  Nurgle and Slaanesh warbands undercoated and some tzeench demons nearly colored.  Bet your itching to see that project roll off the line!  I sure cannot wait to finally have my classic Realm of Chaos skirmish board ready to play.  Some batreps perhaps?

Six... I kicked off my classic rogue trader figures with battle brother Orrinocco the comms officer from the first 40k relased marines (C100 predated release).  What chapter?  Crimson Fists of course.   And not the modern colors- that slightly purple toned grey blue from the cover art of 40K first edition.  This mob will be seperate to my c100 kill team Charlie project as the marines are all second generation. A set of space adventurers, mercs and iron claw pirates will join forces with them to battle ambulls, zoats, space orks and space elves surrounded by chocolate mousse tub buildings and red tipped giant cacti.  Zoatibixalicious!
I dropped using the brilliant Fenris resin bases for now, because I simply do not have the inclination or time to drill and pin all my 40k minis- plus some odd the rarer ones I want to keep the tabs on.   I highly recommend these bases- the sullaco ones are just fantastic... but for now I will set them aside in favor of discs with glued grit, just to get me roaring along into RT nirvana.

Lastly I managed to go through a great deal of my collection and start weeding out the doubles.  These will be ebayed off shortly, the dirty swines.  It's a pretty darn good haul- something for almost everyone.

Anyway,  glad to be back.

Undead assault pt2

Just a quick post whilst I am on my way to work...a quick and dirty smartphone snap showing the dwarf warband so far.

The double handed weapon adventurer is not in the best condition as his sword is mostly missing and he was very tarnished so I still need of a replacement.

Behind the sally port door you can just make out the dwarf thief that is pictured on the watch tower in a tasteful floral green number.

Sneaking in on the right is the Tom Meier Wraith that was zapping the door.  The figure is dated 1976- which if I check my own base... yep... its as old as me.  Its one of the first dynamically posed models as far as I can tell, and a masterclass in drapery.  This puts it firmly in the most influential minis of all time in my opinion.
  It, like a handful of the undead minis pictured are Ral Partha imports.  Citadel handled the license in Europe at the time.  You can still buy these from the pleasantly perky folk at iron wind metals.

Which reminds me... must find a broken Jabberwocky too.  I already have one done up in the same colors (previously blogged) but a submerged undead munchy one would be brilliant.

I am thinking I should make some 40mm multibases of undead, and make sure my bridge and arch can take that width.

Thanks all for the support so far!

Skulldred Raid Project part 1

First up I have to apologise for the camera work this post.  My proper camera is not charged and I have only a short window to blog- buts since this stuffs all work in progress, it will do for now.

The gaming project I have decided to work on first is my Skulldred family battle board- the one I play my wife on.  I decided to complete everything associated with that core game first.  That means some choice scenery items, player models and tokens for things to rescue and loot.

So the project kicks off with a baggage train for adventurers to protect and raiders to raid.  My pack mule collection was rather thin- especially since I picked up a boxed set Bill the pony without reading the text and found, well... something out of The Cell.  Turns out the boxed set was incomplete by one half of bill.  If you ever list things on ebay that are incomplete, I think its polite to write that in the title for lazy people like me in general and specifically for me.  :)

Citadel packhorses- adventurers boxed set and bill the pony... uh, make that half a bill.

Fortunately for our little Demi-Bill I can rebuild him.  I have the technology.  A pointy implement, paperclip and some epoxy putty.
That leads me to a great tip... I have been using 5 minute epoxy putty to do armatures and building understructure for bases.  Its like having a slightly smelly, milliput that understands my patience is limited and behaves accordingly.  The brand I use is Knead-it.  Though it should be called Knead-it-wearing-gloves-or-you-get-a-nasty-rash.  Great stuff.
Once I get some sculpting time (commissions at the moment) I am going to place the model in front of a mirror and sculpt the B side using a bit of green stuff.  I probably will stick my tongue the corner of my mouth whilst I do so, just to enjoy the cliché.

I also started tacking down some resin treasure items to poker chips, but think I will post them once their are done.  Besides, I ripped them off from Phreeds treasure tokens on his blog.  ;)

The Adventure Ends
Citadel FS28 Slain Adventurer, Grenadier Death Giant, Citadel WF6 Aggressive Aardvark (Cerebus)

Last to begin but first to finish is my slain adventurer token, played here by a citadel FS28 slain adventurer.  The cause of his situation is Citadels, well, shall we say blatant 'omage to Cerebus.  I have decided to rebase him.  I realised he really should be on a bar room flagstone base standing on a pile of dead folk and spilt tankards.  I am also going to strip and resurface him like I did the pack mule above -he is just too rough and will look great with smooth blending and some properly defined fingers.  Still, no time for that right now, so I will leave him be- and perhaps get some Skulldred sessions in with the little guy first.
The Grenadier Death statue is is inspired by the recent Citadel Garden of Morr statue.  I realised I had just the thing for my scenery, so a quick repaint later and voila!  Again, it needs rebasing on a stone plinth methinks.  I find many of these figures on ebay that are broken.. thinking I may make a bunch of these at some stage for the table if I can get these cheap enough.

Now the progress on the main stars.  I am going to do myself a bandit warband, though since I do not have the figures I need, I decided to finish off the small Realm Of Chaos warband I started so I can game with them.

Kats Amazons rebases.  A mix of Reaper and Citadel figures
Daves Chaos raiders:  Mainly converted and Augmented Citadel 1980's chaos champion figures

So these are the best ones so far- rebasing them took the majority of time here, but I have pushed the painting along a little on my team, and scratch sculpted a chaos shield for the horned champion and blended in the new Reaper weapon swap for Big Bertha.  Lots to do still.
A spike backed chaos warhound arrived the other day, which I think will make a great addition to the team.

Well thats my hobby time all used up.  Back to sculpting figures for other people.  Hope your enjoying the blog so far.