Flapping

The last of the Drakons have now had their eyes dotted and their bases flocked thanks to a weekend largely free of movement problems. I'm quite pleased by these as I have managed to improve on my previous attempts. I have painted the highlights better and I have managed to hide the mould lines on the Drakons' bellies (which I failed to remove properly ... again!) using some vertical brush strokes. These also give a nice impression of texture too - an idea I stole from Golem's paint jobs on the ones they did for Mantic.



The only problem I have now is that I'm tempted to go back and do the same on the other Drakons too, however I still pave plenty of minis needing thier first layer of paint so I will have to resist for now.

Here's how they all look together:-



And if you look carefully you can see a scenery project I've started in the background.

The big one

Here's a not so little project that has been consuming my time recently - a Citadel Realm of Battle game board, all eight sections of it. I used the citadel scenery painting pack (which contains lots of paint but not enough flock or PVA) along with a tube each of white and black artists acrylic.

I got the final sections of flock on it in my lunch break yesterday and then emptied a can of purity seal on to them last night in the garage.

 

Hopefully all that effort was worth it and I will have some good games on these board over the coming years. If all goes to plan then they will be christened tonight in a 1250 KoW game against Daniel.

thigh bone

In a most unexpected development I have more painted stuff to show you. Maybe I was on a roll or maybe inspired by the bones miniatures or was it just that their stark whiteness in some way offended my sensibilities. anyway whatever it was here are three more of them painted up.



And also some more things I picked up recently - some Armorcast scenics. These are to be used during DnD sessions when we get some kind of remains in play effect. They are very simple but quite effective IMHO.

Fire


Frost/Water


Poison/Nature


Smoke/Shadow/Necrotic

The hip bone is connected to the ...

Bones! Reaper Bones! The nice chap over at Miniature Heroes decided to have a sale on Reaper miniatures so I decided to pick some up out of curiosity. For the price I have to say they are excellent, here are three I painted up yesterday - three ghosts for our current DnD adventure.



And here are some more I'm working on.



And here are those Dwarves I mentioned, still waiting to have their basing finished.

Its not as bad as it looks!

Okay so I've not updated things for a while but its not as bad as it looks. I have completed a nice units of dwarf infantry (pending photography) and also some more Mantic elves.

I was working well on the dwarves when I decided that I wanted to go to the Battlemasters tournament in Loughborough in October. My warm up games against Daniel suggested that I would need to make some changes to my list and I added another Drakon rider and two more bolt throwers.And here they are:-



I like the way the Drakon has turned out in red and I might need to add a few more highlights to my original drakon unit to match the effect I got with this one. There are three more drakons on the workbench and then hopefully its back to painting dwarves.

In other news I have now magnabased my Orcs and Goblins. I might do a posting about that one at some point.

And we're off again

Slowly but surely I have been picking away at the unit of Orc spears I have been working on for months. Due to the usual mix of lack of spare time and bouts of PNKD it has taken far far longer to complete this unit than I had hoped. On the plus side I am very happy with the result, the use of washes has yielded some good results, they weren't available in their current form when I painted the rest of my Renegade orcs. This is also the last "big" unfinished unit in the lead pile for my orcs and goblins which is something to celebrate.

 

In other news I finally broke my duck and bought some miniatures after a 6 month self imposed ban. I have gathered some more elves to tweak my army a little in advance of the Clash of Kings tournament in February. I have also bought in to the Kings of War and Sedition Wars Battle for Alabaster Kickstarter campaigns. The SWB4A should arrive later in the yeat and contains a pile of very nice looking miniatures, the KoW KS minis should arrive next year and will keep me very busy indeed.

I have also finally made a serious start on my KoW/WHFB Dwarf army. So far I only have a few more minis painted up but they were quick to do so I am hopeful of good progress as the year goes by.

The best laid plans

No progress on the orcs for a while, my movement disorder has been quite bad so I've not managed to find time to hold a brush when my limbs are under full control.

One thing I have been meaning to mention - so far this year I have managed to buy a grand total of zero miniatures (cue round of applause). I'm wondering if I can extend this period of abstention to 6 months or even a year, only time will tell.

Despite the halt in purchases I find myself in possession of more miniatures now than I had at the start of the year after a bout of trading over on TWF. I managed to swap a couple of army books and some GW plastic goblins (that I never really liked) for the following:-

10 Mantic ghouls
10 GW LoTR elves
16 GW Dwarf warriors
9 GW Dwarf miners

Not sure whether to count these as new purchases for the purposes of the pledge or not. As some were swapped for miniatures I already had that would count as 28 extra miniatures. Hmm.