Other Stuff in the Collection

 What a month February has been!

Hope everyone survived the winter blast we had here in the US. I think I saw at one point that the central US was the coldest place on the planet for at least two days, including the arctic and antarctic. Wow. Just Wow!😲

We were shut down here for 7 working days due to excessive snow and then the city water main breaks causing low pressure and a boil water alert. That cold weather is not very conducive to clear coating or priming either.

So this post is going to be old pics of minis already done.

Here's part of my fantasy orc horde.

It's a mix of several manufacturers. Mostly these are Reaper.

And most of these were painted I'm guessing 7-8 years ago at least.

This pair are definitely Reaper minis. 

One on the right is part of an army pack so he has a few clones in the group.

Another Reaper mini. He's actually an Ogre in the catalogue but I painted him up with the orcs.

Many years ago - we're talking before high school when my painting first began - I had Ral Partha paints that was Orc Flesh. Since that pot is is long dried up - I may still have the actual pot somewhere - I've come up with my own orc flesh recipe I use on all my orcs now. My attempt at duplicating the Ral Partha color. It's some olive green with a bit more brown mixed in. Shading is a wash of dark green with a similar amount of earth brown mixed in.

I like it.

Speaking of Ral Partha, This is one. The orc rider is closer to 25mm than the Reaper 28mm figures.  This guy along with the next one (also a Ral Partha) are ones I picked up in a dusty old hobby shop somewhere outside Phoenix 19 years ago. The paint job is not much younger.

So here are all my "heavys"

I do have one Hasslefree mini in there:

 I really like the Hasslefree minis.

I've got quite a few of them, been buying them for years.

There is another Hasslefree mini that goes really well with this guy, Tiriel.

He & she go together in the display case when they're not on the table top.

And I'll finish up this post with a few more pictures of Tiriel.

She's been painted up for about as long. I wasn't much in to doing eyes back then. And I got all three versions.

That's it for this month.

Hopefully in March I will be able to get more recent projects photographed. I should be finishing up my February project in the next few days if the USPS ever catches up and delivers the last pieces I needed.

If the weather stays nice I can clear coat and photograph some other projects. I've got one from last August that I realized I never did shoot any pictures of the finished deal. I got some from the build but never did document the final bit. 

Maybe that will be next. 

So until next time...

Thanks for stopping by.

It's a New Year

 Well here we are in a new year. Hope everyone survived what was 2020 with your sanity intact.

If anything it has given me more time to spend on the hobby. And I've been a little more motivated to get some things done. What else ya gonna do stuck at home?

I haven't done much picture taking of the projects, I've been focused on doing the projects. I need to be more vigilant on that. I do have a stash of pictures taken earlier last fall of already completed minis to get things rolling for this year.

I got this guy a long time ago. He went missing for a little while - more than a year - maybe 7. Then he was found in mini-me's Lego box. How did he get in there? Only he knows - but he did get painted this past summer so he can now join his friends:

The rest of his crew were all painted up at least 5 years ago. I really need to start marking my minis on when I get them completed. Then maybe I can gauge and see if any of my painting techniques and such improve. Not likely but it may be neat to compare some. In this case I was trying to match #1 up with the rest so that they go together for reals.

#2 cultist is really cool. I did some free hand scribbles in his tome that from a distance don't appear all that bad. 

#3 obviously

and #4

And finally number #5

Being mainly D&D players, not real sure how I can work #4 & #5 into a game with guns and flamethrowers. They can still make good stand-ins anyway. I'm sure I can figure some way to get them on the table. 

Well that's my one of my cultist crews. 

I also painted up two not-Comissars to go with my not-Imperial Guard troops.

I can't remember where they came from. I do remember I was looking for other minis or something and they popped up in the ebay suggestions and I guess it was late and had already been working on a bottle of 19 Crimes which made it that much easier to Buy it Now.

MASK UP! IT'S A PANDEMIC!

And lastly I finished up a wolf pack that has been in my mountain of lead for a couple of years and had made one unpainted appearance in a game.

I really tried to get  a 'realistic' coloring on these instead of just some straight gray/blackwash/drybrush painting on them. Didn't turn out too bad for their small size - I think.

I still have a couple of larger dire wolves in the mountain of lead so we'll call this attempt practice.

That's some of the stuff I did this summer. I've got more. I just need to take some pictures of the finished products. 

Until then here's a sneak peek at the WIP Apocalypse Scooby Gang I finally finished up this summer:

I know you've seen Fred and maybe some of the others waiting in the background on other posts.

Thanks for stopping by.

Have a safe, happy, healthy new year!
 

Happy Halloween!

 

I finished up a new Halloween decoration!!!

I've had these figures for about two years. It was supposed to be a finished project for last year. But of course that didn't happen the way I planned. You may have seen some of the little guys on the work bench in other posts. 

I'm finally getting the base built.

For those interested....here's a few shots of the build.

Concept drawing for the cottage.

I made it out of foam core and matte board. Pretty simple. The hardest part was figuring out the angles for the roof and gable. I made an actual wood door with craft stix and the head of a push pin. The porch and gable supports are plaster bricks.

The base is some thick press board that came as packing material in our new TV earlier this summer. I have a few others which will come in handy in other projects. 

Save that packing material!!! Reuse!! Recycle!!

The roof was some textured, model railroad, styrene sheets.

Now for some landscaping using wall spackle for garden mounds, ground coffee and sand mix for dirt, and some natural stones.

Primed

Painted

Then add the foliage.

Cottage built, complete with a cat in the window, ready for the figures.

Thanks for stopping by.

Happy Halloween!

🎃🎃🎃🎃🎃🎃

The In-Betweens

 This post isn't a project per-se just a display of what's been going on in between projects.

This first bit happened during my Tale of Two Planes. Christmas happened during that project. My boss lady, being of Nordic descent, had recently come back from a trip to Norway and brought us all little gifts. One night I'm browsing miniatures and think, Hey, she might like a valkyrie. So this happened.

It also gave me a chance to try out some snow basing. She's a big Broncos fan so I tried to come up with an orange & blue motif with the shield emblem.

And I couldn't ignore her husband, great guy, so he got one too.

Made a pretty good matched pair. 

Merry Christmas!

************************************************

Well this got me on a Viking path of thinking and my YouTube browsing popped up some longboat construction so I tried my hand at that.

I started with cutting out foam core board for main deck and marked it off. Then using the thinnest coffee stirrer sticks I could find and some square balsa dowels I put the wooden deck down.

Trimmed it up nice and neat and got ready for the sides. Here's where the matte board came from. This is the same stuff I used for the shutters in the Panzer III diorama. (I originally got it for this project.)

The idea was to measure and cut out and assemble the sides and then they would just slip over the deck nice and easy. Needless to say it wasn't that easy.

I drew the planks out on the board then cut each one out and glued them all together with a slight overlap on each one. Made it look almost realistic with each individual strip instead of drawing/painting the separate plank lines.

I managed to get it to fit with minimal additional cutting on the deck, but it wasn't easy.

The toughest part was getting the prow and stern to come out. Tacky glue and clothes pins stuck it all together. Then a good, thick couple of coats of decoupage to fill in gaps and give it some strength and it was time to work on the mast head.

This process all came from a YouTube video I watched. I can't remember the exact link but I'm sure it will pop up if you search. There are several out there. Anyway the way it's constructed I can make several mast heads and sails and by mixing and matching I can have several different ships.

I came up with several ideas and decided I was just going to build two of them for now.

AND this is how it turned out:

I googled Viking shield and found a bunch of files out there. So I selected a few, resized them and cut them out. Then added a dollop of hot glue for the center boss, as suggested in the video.

Also the only material I had at the time was this plaid pattern so that's what it got. The dragon symbol on the sail is another version of my own design. You might recognize it from my Elric figure several posts ago.

But that's not all my in-betweens. I have more but I'll save them for the next post.

Leave some nice comments if you like. 

Thanks for stopping by.