Poll Roundup: How Many Unfinished Armies?

 General, Polls  2 Responses »
Mar 142007
 

How many unfinished armies do you own?

* 5% (7) – None, they’re all painted.
* 18% (25) – Just one army.
* 14% (20) – A couple of armies.
* 15% (21) – Three armies.
* 12% (16) – Four armies.
* 36% (49) – Five or more armies!

Total Votes : 138

Ah this poll sees me in good company. It seems collectively (well at least amongst the visitors here) hobbyists are an easily distracted lot. Or perhaps we’ve just got eclectic tastes and enjoy so many varied game systems that the majority of us have at least a couple of armies on the go at once?

I do feel a slight twinge of jealousy when I see some of us (5%) have either painted every army we own, or do have to fortitude to resist purchasing new armies until their current one is completed. Kudos to you!

Personally I’m glad there’s numerous excellent tabletop games available that use 15mm scale figures. I’ve found this scale to be a fine compromise between having detailed figures that are interesting to paint, and them being small enough that a simple three step prime/base/highlight scheme will suffice for gaming.

Larger scales seem to have diminishing returns, taking considerably more of my precious time to paint a single figure. Games Workshop figures are probably the worse culprit because they’re so rich in surface detail that I’m forced to try and do it justice. So a single 28mm GW metal can take me days of modelling time to paint.

This next poll is sort of related to that point. I game and I paint to game, and have done so on and off for 20 years. I recall having painted one figure purely for display, an old Grenadier DnD Knight, when I was 15 for some local painting competition. Display painting appeals to me though as an opportunity to expand your painting skills and try new techniques, I just never have enough spare time to do it!

So, onto the next poll: Do you paint for Display?

 Posted by at 10:09 am

Sculptors Do It With Small Tools

 Sculpting  1 Response »
Mar 132007
 

Prophet Minis recently announced their new ‘Sculptors Do It With Small Tools’ product which is a kit that contains enough materials to sculpt up to half a dozen 28mm figures. For the tools and materials supplied it looks to be pretty good value at $34.99us. Unfortunately I already have plenty of sculpting tools, dollies and green stuff littering my paint station.

However I noticed they also sell the sculpting tutorial included in the kit as a separate, downloadable PDF for a mere $7us. For that price I figure it’d be hard to lose so I grabbed a copy.

It’s not a bad tutorial at all. Most of the basics are covered included the working properties of green stuff, how to use and create your own armature dollies, various figure proportions and ratios (for men and women), dynamic poses and visual balance for figures.

The tutorial also contains some specific methods for creating hair, fur and thin sheets of green stuff for clothing and cloaks as well as a two page step-by-step on sculpting faces. Finally it includes a couple of handy reference pages giving figure ratios in various scales (54mm to 10mm) and front/back pictures of showing stylised male musculature.

There are a couple of gaps in the tutorial. For example I would like to see a step-by-step of an entire figure being sculpted and while creating faces is covered there’s no tips for sculpting hands which can be another problematic area in my experience.

Even so $7us well spent I feel and the PDF has been carefully filed into my ‘sculpting’ folder.

Update: According the to the Prophet Minis forums a tutorial for sculpting hands should be appearing on their web site in the future.

Via Tabletop Gaming News.

 Posted by at 9:55 am

Captured British 15cwt Lorries

 Flames Of War  No Responses »
Mar 092007
 

Captured 15cwt Lorries I’m attempting to finish up some of the odds and sods that have been cluttering up my paint station for months now. First off are these two British 15 cwt lorries I need as transport for my NZer 25pdr gun platoon.

As I also intend to use them as captured transports for my DAK Panzergrenadiers I embedded a couple of rare earth magnets in the bonnets and sculpted some simple green stuff aerial recognition flags. These flags are built around some cut down staples so stick quite firmly to the bonnets during gaming. However they can easily be removed by lifting with a fingernail to liberate the captured lorries.

British 15cwt Lorries Look closely at the left flag and you’ll see it doesn’t wrap around the bonnet that well, that’s because it was sculpted over the front of a British Quad gun tractor. I’ve a couple of Quads left to paint and thought I might as well make them ‘captureable’ as well.

Also if you look closely at the right lorries’ bonnet you’ll spot the botched job I made of patching the hole I dropped the magnet into. Ah well, it’s only really visible because of the over scale photos.

Once I’ve painted the two Quads I’ll be able to limber my NZ four gun 25pdr platoon and drive them all over the desert, as well as have mechanised transport for my DAK Panzergrenadier platoon – err when I get around to painting them!

 Posted by at 10:05 am

So Much for Resolutions

 Pulp  2 Responses »
Mar 082007
 

Obelisk Miniatures Hyena After two months of sticking to my 2007 New Year’s resolution of not purchasing any new figures and simply painting what I have, I’ve finally cracked. Frankly I found that by stopping my figure purchases I seem to have killed a good part of the enjoyment I get from this hobby: ie. shiny new toys arriving in the post regularly.

So this week I’ve placed orders with:

Obelisk Miniatures for their ‘Darkest African Fantasies: Wildlife Deal 2′ which combines their Baboon and Hyena packs.

These great little figures should give me plenty of dangerous wildlife for Pulp adventurers to stumble across in ruined Egyptian temple complexes. For some reason unleashing a troupe of unnaturally savage Baboons or a pack of chuckling Hyenas on the players strikes me as great fun!

Via Old Glory from WestWind’s Chaos in Cairo I’ve also ordered: The Servants of Set, Cairo Civilians and Cairo Civilians with cart.

I’ve been looking for some suitable Cairo civvies for a while now. They’ll be useful as plain civilians in a busy city street for those Indiana Jones style crowd scenes, plus as assorted untrustworthy guides, pick pockets and rogues to harass the players with. The Servants of Set I picked up on a whim really, just because they look like great cultist figures. The scale of these figures looks a little smaller than the Copplestone Castings heroes and Artizan Design Germans I already have but that’ll be fine since the heroes and villains should be ‘larger than life’ anyway.

At any rate that’s the end of my Pulp spending. I’ve got plenty of wildlife, heroes, villains and vehicles to paint up and game with. I intend to try putting together another little mini Pulp campaign later this year.

 Posted by at 10:07 am

THQ to Create 40k MMO

 Warhammer 40k  6 Responses »
Mar 022007
 

I couldn’t let this story slide past: THQ (creators of Dawn of War) have extended their license with Games Workshop to produce a Massively Multiplayer Online game set in the 40k universe.

After seeing the Warhammer Fantasy MMO (from another publisher) dead in the water it’ll be interesting to see how this pans out. Personally I think if anybody can pull off a decent 40k MMO it’s THQ as they’ve already proven they can treat the 40k IP appropriately by creating the excellent Dawn of War RTS series of games.

Game balance will be interesting though, considering each faction in the 40k universe essentially represents the pinnacle of their particular race’s warrior class and of course everyone will want to play ‘The Emperor’s Finest’! Details of actual game play at this point are nil – the Gamespot article above includes an ‘interview’ that is essentially a bunch of PR boiler plate.

 Posted by at 1:43 pm

Pulp Heroes

 Pulp  3 Responses »
Mar 012007
 

Copplestone Castings Pulp Adventuress Despite the fact I planned to paint in 2007 I seem to have spent the bulk of my modelling time mastering 15mm terrain so far – and it’s March!

Ah well, I have at least painted two 28mm Pulp Heroes from Copplestone Castings. Here’s a poor photo of the dame I painted. I’ve also finished a double pistol wielding chap who looks an awful lot like Brendan Frasier’s character from The Mummy, but you don’t get to see him because I took an even worse photo of that figure alas.

I have a couple more heroes to paint and I’ll have enough done to foil the plans of those Germans I painted in 2006. Then it’s on to the 1:56th vehicles and Baluchi Zombies still cluttering up my gaming cupboard.

 Posted by at 10:04 am
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