Wallpainting

I painted the first half of my walls (made another two in the evening last night, so I now have 6 total).
Here they are:

Painting was quite simple: I took basic black and white craft paint and mixed a dark grey colour. This I drybrushed on with a cheapo 2" round housebrush. After each pass I added some more white to the mixture and drybrushed again, until I reached the desired colour and contrast. That's it.
Before painting I undercoated the walls with a ever so slightly thinned 50/50 PVA and black paint mixture (the same black hobby paint) to primer and toughen the surface of the foam.
 Hopefully, tomorrow I can crank out the next three.

Until next time!

Shire Defense Force

I've known this Kickstarter was coming for a while now, and was really looking forward to it, and now it is finally here!
The Westfalia Miniatures Halfmen Army Kickstarter

 It's a project to fund and start a range of Halflings in a more professional military vein, rather than the quite pastoral and merry style usually seen.
Their armour and equipment of the pint-sized belligerents is styled after late 14th/early 15th century gear, which I really like the look of and coincides perfectly with the era I'm most interested in. It's the era which my setting/headcanon for the fantasy games I play is derived from. So you can see how I could not resist pledging! My collection of heroes and "good guy" warbands has been rather humanocentric so far (with the odd elf and dwarf thrown in), this Kickstarter will go a long way towards correcting that!
The sculpts are very good, nice and clean and the test sculpts sent out to some select wargamers for review have gotten very positive feedback concerning the resin chosen and casting quality.

 So, if you like Halflings and/or fantasy with a strong medieval flavour, go and have a look!
They're already well past funded and burning through stretch goals rapidly.

Walled in.

We, Gunbird and I, started playing Frostgrave sometime after Crisis 2015, and are now building up a local group of players (started at the two of us, now at 5, maybe 6) and getting the hang of the rules before hopefully launching into a campaign.

The "Wall" spell has turned out to be quite popular, but so far we've been making due with folded paper walls as placeholders. High time to do something about that! I didn't feel like painting today, after finishing the Maggot Family, so grabbed some tools, mdf and foam and started building.
Heres what I got done in an afternoon:

 The mdf bases are somewhat conspicuous, partly on purpose, so these can be identified as walls created by spells. Maybe I'll paint the edge of the base with some kind of runes or script to really drive the point home.
If they were to be regular scenery, I'd have carved the bases back into stones, or hidden them in another way, or simply used a significantly thinner material for the base.
They're each 6" wide, 3" tall and about 2/3 of an inch thick.
I know the walls generated by the "Wall" spell have no appreciable thickness, but I made my walls a bit beefier. For stability, but also so I can use them as regular walls in other games. I've got four finished so far, which should about be enough for a single game of Frostgrave, unless both players really go crazy with the spell. Maybe I'll make some more so we can use them when playing several games at the same time. Perhaps even try a different style of wall altogether?

These four still need sealing with (thinned) PVA-glue before I can paint them.


See you next time!

Move, you Maggots!

More Heresy Miniatures this time. His "lovely" range of maggots this time.
Here's the whole happy family:

 The paintjob was fairly easy, just a mix of washes and drybrushes over a fleshtone basecoat, leaving me to focus on choosing the right colours for maximum ickyness. : )
After that it was a matter of painting them all in satin varnish to offset the matness from the drybrushings, giving them the ever so slightest sheen and hitting the hard bits, like teeth and spines, with gloss varnish. A little dab of Tamiya Transparent Red over the bits of gore in one of the Maggotmen's hands and Bob's your mothers brother!
Because they are resin casts and the bottoms of the minis have plenty of contact surface for a secure glue bond, I painted the bases and minis separately and glued them together at the very last.
These will join the 5 giant maggots/grubs I already had, giving me a gross little herd to swamp heroes with!

Here are a few more closeups of the lot:

"Mother", the God-Grub:

(To give an idea of size, she's on a 50mm base.)

"The Keepers", servants of Mother and herders of the giant maggots and grubs:

(These are on 25mm bases)

"The Children", giant maggots and grubs:

(On 20mm round bases)

These nasty gribblies were all so much fun to paint!

See you next time!

That's a load of bull!

Highland bull, that is!
So, a double feature today, two posts within 24 hours! I managed to finish a second figure yesterday. After all, I had a whole day of nothing else to do but wait for the cable guy. I lost no time faffing about on the PC as I'd lose the internet connection the moment the guy started working, so I didn't bother switching it on in the first place and just kept painting.

Which means now I can present to you; the Highland Minotaur.
Like with the chicken-keeper from last post, it was to dark to photograph them by the time they were finished so I took pics today.
Here's the beast:

He's a conversion of Heresy Miniatures Snow Troll. I simply added horns, lopped off it's toes and replaced them with hooves. I hid any seams or connections by sculpting fur over them, to blend into the existing shaggy coat. Paint was a series of washes and drybrushes for the fur.

(P.S. the gritty texture on his left hand isn't a casting or sculpting defect. It's just me being a klutz and not noticing there was still some sand stuck on his hand until well after primering... Being on the underside/inside of the hand, and so not noticeable from tabletop angle, I opted to just keep it there instead of trying to scrape it of and potentially messing up the WIP paintjob or surface of the mini. Just so there is no confusion, Heresy's Andy his casting is impeccable!)

Poultry in motion...

Yesterday I had to stay at home, to wait for the cable guy to replace our connection (apparently the hardware in the wall was out of date, leading to connection problems), so I made good use of available daylight. The peasant maid that goes with the chickens got finished, so here they are:

As with the previous villager the lady and the chickens got a fairly basic paintjob, as these models are to be halfway between miniatures and scenery items in use, they aren't expected to take centre stage.

Like with pigs and pigherd, the animals are from War-bases and the villager is from Foundry.
Hopefully, over the Christmas holidays, I can build them a place to live in.

See you next time!

Some conversions in progress

With the stormy weather, the light isn't decent enough to paint ( I did manage to paint some chickens for the village on saturday, but I won't show these yet as I want to show them with the accompanying villager, and she's not finished yet.). So I decided to build some figures instead. The results are below: