A couple of days ago an art gallery up on K-Rd installed a piece of art that interested me. Usually this gallery displays a lot of incomprehensible modern rubbish…you know, the usual giant doll’s heads etc. However this piece caught my eye for a number of reasons.

First, the yellow shapes are from a common plastic children’s toy - one my own child has in fact. Second, the shapes are on ’sprues’ - suggesting industrial mass production. Third most of the shapes are removed from the sprues and scattered around except for two stars.

Not sure who the artist is or what they’re trying to say, maybe a comment on the uniform nature of children’s toys, are all kids having the same ‘mass produced’ experience? Are we raising kids in an industrial manner with day-care and working parents? Seems odd to me that the stars remain on the sprue…maybe the kids that excel in our society are expected to fit a certain pattern? Is the artist saying society favours a narrow fixed role for it’s ’stars’? Oh hell I don’t know, makes you think though eh?

Wonder what the work is titled? That might give you a hint of the artist’s intentions.

You can see some more of the artist’s work in the back of the frame, although urinals on a plastic sprue just seems like a slightly wanky reference to Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’ to me… or are those toilet training seats?

Messing around with the digital camera last night. Here’s an experimental snap of some FOW vehicles in progress. Still wondering how the devil to base that 25pdr gun. White balance is a bit off in this photo as it was taken under a table lamp without a flash - the vehicles aren’t really that pinkish. Also wondering what I’m going to use to make that Stuart ‘Honey’ a radio aerial. Apparently black nylon scrubbing brush bristles are the thing to use.

The photo also shows the new cutting matt I picked up from Gordon Harris in the weekend. White primed 5 Zombies and 5 Ghouls to paint for WHFB as well as the FOW Humber Mk II armored car. Checked those 40k Cadians that were painted with the French ink and they still look pretty good. So might keep using that ink for them. Possibly because the ink wash is applied over a brown toned base the fading is less noticeable?

Broke out the GW inks and inked/based/drybrushed the Stuart ‘Honey’ - came out quite nicely. Also progressed the 25pdr gun + carriage and another Universal Carrier. GW inks aren’t effected by the Clear floor wax and give a nice ‘hard-coat’ to paint over. Just remembered I painted some of those new Cadians with the French ink so will have to go back and see if they’ve bled/faded. Picked up another can of Helmar’s Matt Spray varnish from good old Warehouse Stationary in Newmarket. They charge $12.99 for a can and I’ve seen up to $19 at Paper Plus!

Picked up a Canon Powershot S50 digital camera from a parallel importers in the weekend as well. $949 for the camera plus 2 x 128MB memory cards. Amused ourselves most of the weekend by taking AVI movies of our baby boy doing various things (hand clapping, talking, emptying the contents of kitchen drawers). Haven’t tried it for miniature photos yet.

Painting competition on at GW that closes on the 28th. My wife reckons I should enter a few pieces. I’m only really interested in entering if there’s prizes of any sort. But might hand in a few spare painted figures I’m currently not gaming with out of curiousity. Oops! 28th is today! Ah well, maybe I’ll enter the *next* painting competition they run then…

Three more Zombies assembled. That gives me 20 Zombies in total to paint. Picked up some paint as well as a selection of inks (Flesh Wash and Chestnut Ink) from GW last night. They look like they’ll do the trick. Considering the volume $4.50 isn’t a bad price for the inks. Whitcoulls in the city used to charge around $8 for a smaller glass bottle of Windsor & Newton ‘Chestnut Ink’. Might dig out the FOW vehicles and try them with an ink wash tonight.

Three more Zombies assembled. Marvellous how well the WHFB Human Militia and Zombie sprues mix. Three more Zombies and I’ll have another 10 assembled. Then I’ll patch them with green stuff and start painting them up a rank (five figures) at a time while assembling the last 10 as well. Hopefully that will give me 30 painted Zombies by the end of this year. They’ll be pretty handy actually. They’d be great for a Mordheim Undead warband not to mention general “Dawn of the Dead” or “Diseased Mob” type scenarios in Mordheim as well as my Vampire Counts WHFB force of course.

Assembled 2 Zombies last night from a combo of WHFB human merc and zombie parts. Resurrecting my old Mordheim Zombies. Will strip them back and start repainting them for WHFB. Eyeing up the Ghouls for some easy painting too. Put together a 1000pt WHFB roster. Definitely have all the figures required, just have to paint another 45 figures of various sizes. Probably get that done by the end of this year I reckon.

Discovered that the cheaper ink I’ve been using from the French Art Shop in Ponsonby has two problems with it. First, it bleeds through acrylic paint slowly but surely. Second, it’s not colour-fast! Don’t know if the ink is just crap, or the floor wax I’m cutting it with (to get a harder coat) is effecting the pigments. For example the chestnut ink I’ve painted all of the Undead force with is slowly fading to a purple-red! After experiments on paper with uncut ink I think it’s just cheap pigment in the ink.

Fading to purple-red isn’t actually bad on the Undead. Skeletons gradually get a bloody-purple tinge in their recesses which looks quite nice and the Grave Guard are based green so it fades to a blackish colour. The annoying thing is I’ve painted three FOW Universal Carriers and two Quad gun tractors with this ink and I suspect they’re going to bleed down to a purple colour! So they’ll have to be stripped back and re-painted and I’m chucking away that ink and going back to Windor & Newton chestnut. I can’t find any locally so might have to resort to using the GW chestnut ink. Games Workshop paints are just re-badged Windor & Newton anyway so hopefully it’ll be the same consistency.

Bit of a wasted effort on those FOW vehicles, but they’re easy to repaint. In the interim I should concerntrate on painting FOW infantry as I’m not using inks for them - and I am trying to build a Rifle Company! Lent Ben the FOW rule-book to peruse so we’ll see what he thinks.

Played a couple more games of WHFB with Griff last night too after my wife’s birthday get together in the afternoon. It was one each again so we’re both two for two (although technically Griff did win the first game as well but he didn’t press the issue). We both discovered a few things:

- The Banshee is worthless against Brettonians. She needs low LD troops to scare and the peasants are always going to be close enough to Knights or Generals to have access to a decent LD stat. So it’s back into the gaming cupboard for her.

- Small unit sizes and specialist units are brittle. My Ghouls fared a lot better when there was 14 of them rather than 7. The Grave Guard continue to do poorly as there’s only 10 of them. They’re particularly bad at receiving Knight charges but fare much better on the charge.

- The core units are actually pretty good. Griff fielded a core unit only BP list and caused me a lot of grief with two units of Knights dashing around. I anticipate he’ll stay with that list for a while and I need to paint up a big horde of Zombies! I can field ~20 in a BP force with 16 Skellies and 4 Fell Bats which isn’t bad. Sigh, back to the painting table!