After last weeks rather dull post I am rather hoping this one will prove a little more interesting. If not then I apologise for misleading you last week.
I suspect some of you are familiar with the Frazetta Death Dealer painting. Here is an image of it.
A pretty cool painting by any standards in my opinion. Thanks to a news letter email I received from North Star Miniatures I picked up on their promotion of this Lucid Eye figure. At £18.00 it was far from cheap but I fell in love with it and decided I wanted to have it, and besides She Who Must Be Obeyed fell for the line that it only cost a fiver!
I’d like to think the base and my figure painting did an amazing sculpt justice but painting black and pretty much only black is always a challenge. Still it is done now and you can make up your own minds.
Initially I had planned for this to be a two part post under the banner of “Diorama Lite” but for that to have happened I really needed to have taken some work in progress photos! As it happens I did manage to take a couple but nowhere near enough to justify a second installment so I soldiered on and decided to complete the figure and post it finished instead.
The first of the two progress pictures I took shows the “tree” attached to the base and partly painted. Not exactly an inspired basing decision as I figured a Wood Elf needed to be positioned in the woods.
The next work in progress image is of the elf himself, a 28mm Reaper figure. I decided the back of his cloak warranted some work on it rather than just leaving it plain.
Thereafter the figure was just a paint job and the base itself was added to slightly. Some scatter was applied along with some tufts and I used some tea leaves on the tree to simulate ivy. Hopefully the overall image conveys a wood elf in the woods!
I’ve just realised this is my 100th Miniatures & Musings post. Some how it has just crept up on me, if I had been more with it I would have tried to present a better figure to mark the occasion. As it is this week, and I think I will be saying this for some considerable time to come, we have the next figure in my army.
This Baron’s War figure is one of the four figures which appears in the “Foot Knights Pack 2”. As much as possible I want to paint the shields with authentic heraldry, something which I have done here. The chap in question is one Henry de Percy.
More on the project below.
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Well It Made Me Laugh
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The Knights On TIM’s Modelling Table
The feedback I received when I announced my army project gave me much food for thought and over the last week or so I have made some decisions. Of course these will inevitably change!
First up my intention is to just let this army evolve naturally. As some have said, let it grow organically. I shall work my way through the 90 or more figures that I have flitting from pack to pack as takes my fancy and if more figures are released purchase those as I please.
Secondly, I want my knights and figures to be authentic for the period. For the knights this particularly applies to the shields where the heraldry needs to align to a true knight. I don’t know how easy that will be but I will do more research and see where we go from there.
Thirdly I have consider how big I want this army to be. From a gaming perspective you have given me some great numbers and should I ever sell this lot then such information will be valuable but I am not a gamer … yet! I say not yet only because one day I will be to old to paint so may be that’s when I’ll look at taking up that side of the hobby. My aim for a 100 figures is ambitious I know which is why my new target of 200 or more is even more crazy. I want the end result to blow my mind and any one else’s if that’s possible. For all the bravado I’ll probably call it a day after 25 or so but for now it is a very serious intention. This after all is a long term project. Well not that long, I’m getting to old for it to take that long and besides I have other stuff to do as well!
Fourthly I have settled on how the bases will be which is just as well as I have done two figures now. There might be some slight variation but generally what you see above is pretty much what you will see most of the time. My OCD will not allow me to deviate otherwise before I know it I will have two armies on the go!
I still need to think about the idea of a story line, an idea which I like but is somewhat alien to me. I also need to think how I am going to present these figures on mass in a display. A mat isn’t good enough and with the figures being individually based it wont be a diorama. The idea of tiles is something I think I shall start looking at and they will be easier to store.
All in all plenty to do and plenty more to think about as this evolves and takes over. The good news is I haven’t got bored yet!
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Give Me Five
This week I thought I would consider my top 5 sports films. I thought this would be easy but I have left some truly excellent films out. In no particular order:
Rocky (Boxing)
The Natural (Baseball)
The Damned United (Football/Soccer)
Chariots of Fire (Athletics)
Rudy (American College Football)
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This week TIM has been listening to …
“Brown Sugar” by the Rolling Stones. Call me naive by all means but when I sing along to a song (I can already hear SWMBO saying “please don’t!”) and even when I get the lyrics right, I barely take much notice of them. It’s all about the music, the beat, the tempo – the lyrics are just there almost in the background. I never analyse them and of course when I was a lad we didn’t have YouTube so we sung the wrong words for years!. This was very much the case for me with this track, one of my favorite tracks as well I might add. I don’t listen to the radio a great deal, only when I am in the car and due to lockdown it has been a while since I’ve been any distance of note so, given the lyrics of this song, I wonder if it is even played anymore. The track was never banned that’s for sure.
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This week TIM has been watching …
“The Truth About The Harry Quebert Affair”. I read the book a good while back and loved it. Very well written and very different too. Twist and turns along the way made it hard to put down. Then I discovered the book had been made into a mini series so it became a must watch bit of TV. On balance it was a good series and kept true to the book as best I could recall but as you do when you read a book you form a mental image of the main characters and the actors cast, as good as they were, just didn’t align to my image. Still enjoyable though.
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Remember …
If you sneeze and fart at the same time your body takes a screen shot.
I very nearly didn’t post this article but then I realised I had nothing else to put up so then decided what the hell. Part of the problem is flitting between various projects, not least of all my Knights Army one.
So, how do I make a dull post even slightly interesting? Well my only shot of doing that is by telling you that the figure which will go on this base when painted is very, very cool indeed and it wouldn’t surprise me if one or two of you were keen to buy one of your own in due course.
OK, exciting bit over, onto the dull bit. No matter how good the figure is it needs a base. The problem with this base is it needs to be very basic and very dark and dead looking and as a consequence the end result will be dead and dull looking!
First up we have a couple of images of small pieces of plaster board being stuck to a 40mm x 40mm base. The pieces were then trimmed back and carved a bit hear and there to make things look a little more rock like.
In the back ground of this next image you can see that I have added some slate chippings from my garden and mounted the MDF base onto a 40mm x 40mm oak cube. In front you can see various pieces of twig. In actual fact they are bits of root from an unknown plant but they have a great texture and so I thought I would try using them to make a very basic bit of dead tree. The only problem I had was none of the various bits and pieces were any good in their own right.
To get round this I decided to combine different twig pieces by drilling and pinning a couple together. If I can find the right plant roots in future I think I might prefer this approach to making trees rather than using wire. Thinking about it further a combination of the two approaches might be the ideal. I’ll file that idea away for the future.
A little while later and things began to take shape.
Another piece to add and it will be done and then I can add some Milliput to fill the gaps and mount it in the base ready for priming an d painting.
For some dead looking flora I thought I’d try painting some tufts black. The image below shows I have started.
Unfortunately due to incompetence, the excitement of painting the figure which will go on this base and the distraction (a welcome one, I’m not complaining) of wanting to paint my Baron’s War figures I made little more by way of progress and failed to take any more photographs! I am beginning to realise I will need more discipline when it comes future posts of this kind. Either that or I will have to put all my efforts into one project at a time. We will see what gives in the course of the next few weeks .
For the first time in quite a while I came close to missing a blog post. Having been fully absorbed by my army project I became completely side tracked and suddenly Saturday was almost upon me and I had nothing to offer. Fortunately I remembered that I had an almost completely painted dwarf which I had set aside and the day (well post in this case) was saved. Ho-ray for dwarfs!
The figure in question, Borin Ironbrow by Reaper, was originally bought for my recent Diorama Lite post but in the end I decided to go with a different figure. Although I liked the figure I didn’t think he was the right fit for my little diorama. Now he has been lovingly given a little base of his own.
The figure is from the Reaper Dungeon Dweller range and is a very crisp and clean casting. Compared to some Reaper figures the level of detail is relatively plain but it was none the less a nice little one to do.
The biggest challenge was getting him completed in time for this post, a problem I think I will continue to experience with other figures which aren’t part of my army project. In an ideal world I would like to produce something each week for Diorama Lite on Monday, a mid-week figure for my medieval Knight army and a figure from another genre for my Saturday post. It is clear that balancing this through the spring and summer is going to be a challenge. What this week has taught me though is that modelling and painting time is becoming stretched, mainly due to the time of the year and my release back into the wild following Covid lockdown. Add into the mix my desire to do more and more on my army project and it is becoming clear that three posts a week is going to prove a significant challenge, at least until the return of the winter months. For now I will continue as I am doing, if only to clear some of the lead pile, but I suspect blog changes are a foot.
This weeks miniature is the first in what is sure to become a very, very recurring feature of my Wednesday posts and maybe some Saturday ones too, a figure painted and based which goes towards my medieval army project. All the figures are from the Footsore Barons War range and this is one of the four figures which comprises the pack titled “Foot Knights 1”.
The paint job was pretty straight forward and as I have no plans to use decals and have never had success with masking tape all my work on shields will be freehand. The aim will be to try and get more adventurous but I will be driven by heraldry as I learn a bit more about it. As much as possible I want my knights to be authentic. As far as basing goes, whilst there may be some slight variation this will be the standard.
More on the project below but in terms of completed minis we’re up and running.
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Well It Made Me Laugh
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The Knights On TIM’s Modelling Table
As headings go it’s not a great play on “The Knights of the Round Table” but it was the best I could come up with. So, an update on the project.
Firstly a big thank you to those of you who very kindly provided encouragement for this project along with words of advice and valuable details on figures and numbers for an army. I have taken it all on board but for now I thought I would focus just on painting, specifically for now foot figures. I have every intention of doing mounted Knights but that will come later. Whether I do the whole Baron’s War range of mounted figures remains to be seen. I’ll see how the range grows because it appears to be expanding quite fast, by which I mean quicker than I can paint. For now though and with Footsore offering a 20% discount when you spend over a hundred pounds I thought I would take advantage of the offer while it it lasted. After almost no deliberation whatsoever I piled straight in and pretty much bought the lot.
As things currently stand I have purchased packs of Levy’s, Crossbowmen, Spearmen, Bannermen and Musicians, Bowmen, numerous Knights and various Character figures giving around 90 figures to paint. Whether they all make it in to my army remains to be seen. Although I will make the effort to clean and prime all the figures in one hit the painting will not be in batches. I don’t enjoy production line painting, regardless of time efficiency, so I fully expect to adopt a random approach.
Here’s a quick look at some of the figures on parade.
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Give Me Five
Not sure what inspired me this week, nothing I can recall watching or listening to for sure, but I decided to try listing my top five movie villains. Not an easy choice but after some deliberation I settled, in no particular order, on the following:
Darth Vader (Star Wars Franchise)
The Joker (Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight)
Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins, Silence of the Lambs)
Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes, Schindlers List)
Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes, Harry Potter Franchise)
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This week TIM has been listening to …
“Voodoo Child” by Jimi Hendrix. In response to my Give Me Five music intros in TIM’s Miniatures & Musings No: 97 my brother kindly emailed a couple of links to some classic tracks of which this was one. Well worth a listen to on a high volume and after a few beers.
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This week TIM has been watching …
“Red Joan” starring Judi Dench. A good film “based” on a true story with an interesting justification for being a spy and giving away official secrets.
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Remember …
If you are having a bad day things could always be worse. You could be a Siamese twin attached to a gay brother whose on a date and you’re the only one with an arse.
This week was an easy week in the sense that I really only needed to paint the figure. He’s a nice little 28mm Reaper mini with quite a lot of detail and he had a pretty good pose for a chap standing outside his doorway before he goes off to hit some poor unfortunate over the head. Dwarfs I am given to understand can be a bit like that.
I had already left a suitable whole in the base for positioning the figure so other than some minor adjustments and a few touch ups there was very little else to do. Overall I am pleased with the outcome but I hope over time my imagination will inspire greater things but you have to start somewhere. For me identifying nice figures holds the key and I have a few already lined up so we will see where we end up. For now though the journey has begun.
I mentioned in last Saturday’s post that I am attracted to figures which I consider have a nice pose. Of course this is a personal thing but this is another figure which ticks the box as far as I am concerned. I like the casual stance of Ulfred. It’s simple but effective and he has a “don’t mess with me” feel about him, he exudes calmness and complete control.
I went mostly for muted colours as theses seemed appropriate. The wolf head on his tunic was embossed so no claims to freehand on this one. Base wise I went for a simple bit of landscape comprising of a a couple of slate chippings, a bit of a twig to form a small broken tree and some Milliput and plaster board dust to complete the groundwork. Bits of grass tufts were added to the 25mm base to provide some much needed colour.
This weeks miniature is again from Hasslefree and goes by the name of Dakota. Originally I bought her to go with a zombie theme I had running around in my head but then I lost my way. Just to many ideas right now which in some ways is a nice problem but on the downside I find myself losing focus. I’ll put it down to age. In the end I settled for a quick and simple base job with an old rusty barrel hopefully conveying a bit of an industrial and post apocalyptic feel.
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Well It Made Me Laugh
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Time To Build An Army?
After much deliberation I have decided to do something I have never done before, I’m going to paint an army. I’ve never been against the idea but I couldn’t settle on an historical period. I had other concerns too. Would I get bored? What would I do with the army once complete? How would I store it? How would I display it? In truth I don’t have the answers to all those questions but have decided to build one none the less and I’ll figure things out as I go along.
So what has changed my mind? You may well ask. The answer is several things. Nostalgia, Table Top World, freehand painting and Ebay.
Nostalgia — some of you may recall from past posts that I have mentioned Britain’s Swoppet Cowboys and how they played a part in getting me into modelling and dioramas when I was a kid. Well Britain’s also did Swoppet Knights but these were much more expensive (they sell for a small fortune on Ebay as collectors pieces these days) so I never had any. As much as I loved the cowboys I would have loved a castle full of battling knights. An army of cowboys isn’t really a thing but an army of knights is.
Table Top World – If you haven’t seen it they do an amazing Castle. It costs a fortune, it’s huge and being modular can be made as big as you like. How cool would that be? In truth I will probably never find out because I have nowhere to put it but I am going with the Field of Dreams approach, “If you build it they will come”. I’ll build the army first and see where I go from there.
Freehand – Heraldry provides a great opportunity for some freehand and I would like to see what I can do on that front from time to time. There is also a great deal of freedom when it comes to the use of colours too. I’m not sure I could ever paint a modern army, I think I would find it far to dull and repetitive.
Ebay – I see this as my escape clause. If all else fails and I never finish the project or have no idea what to do with it when it’s done I can sell it. In short what is there to lose?
Obviously you will have gathered my army will be one of Knights but it will also feature Archers, Levy’s, Crossbowmen, Spearmen and whatever else exists now and in future releases in the Footsore Barons War range. Those of you who liked the knights I had previously done have a lot to answer for. If you get bored with this project before I do you only have yourselves to blame!
So, does this signal the end of painting Knuckleduster Cowboys, Reaper, Hasslefree and other figures? Not at all. My army is just another project to dip into but one I am looking forward to doing.
I do however have one question for you and would welcome your wargaming thoughts. How many figures would I need to paint and base before I could claim it’s an army? In my head I have settled on a nice round figure of 100 but do I need more or less?
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Give Me Five
In keeping with the tone established above I thought I would select my top 5 films within the broadly speaking medieval genre. Not quite so tough this week but for me all now essential viewing and research. As usual in no particular order:
Excalibur
Kingdom of Heaven
Braveheart
King Arthur
The Name of the Rose
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This week TIM has been listening to …
“She’s Got The Look” by Roxette. There’s a lot to like about this track and video but I was particularly drawn in by the lyrics. 😉
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This week TIM has been watching …
“Keeping Faith”. A thriller series set in Wales (that’s Wales the country just to be clear!). Having binge watched series one and two I am now on to the final series. Not the best of some of the great TV shows currently available but well worth a watch in my opinion.
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Remember …
Even if you are useless you can be used as a bad example.
Welcome to the first Diorama Lite post. The concept of this series is to feature based figures which offer a little bit more than a typical wargaming style base, a micro diorama if you will. Whilst the work involved isn’t in the same league as a larger diorama churning these little models out on a daily or weekly basis simply isn’t going to happen. I anticipate each one taking a couple of weeks to do on average. Slower in the spring and summer perhaps and maybe quicker in the winter when more time is spent indoors may become a factor in the fullness of time. Without further a do let’s get under way.
The featured figure for this model is as the title indicates a Dwarf. All being well you will get to see him next week in part 2. The concept for the base is a simple affair. Our hero dwarf is simply standing outside his front door. Now that’s got you excited hasn’t it?
First up there was a need to make a door. Wooden coffee stirrers, a bit of polystyrene, lead foil and pin heads for the hinges and wire for the door handle were all used.
Slate chippings from the garden were used to create steps leading to the door. The model is being built on a 40mm x 40mm MDF base which will then be mounted on a 40mm oak cube plinth.
A piece of plant root was used to make a small tree.
I made a couple of giant toadstools using Milliput mounted on top of pin heads.
Thereafter it was pretty much all about adding some filler to the polystyrene and once it was dry painting and weathering everything followed by a little bit of assembly. A mixture of paint colours and paints were used – acrylics and oils. Finally some plant life was added.
Some touching up here and there will be needed once the figure has been positioned but for now the scene is pretty much set.
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The Imperfect Modeller 