Pulp Painting: Cairo Crowd

 Pulp  4 Responses »
May 152007
 

Pulp Cairo Crowd Painted It’s taken a couple of months, but I’ve finally got around to painting some of my West Wind Pulp Cairo crowd. These are the first three gentlemen, a water carrier, a rather ugly fellow and a lame old man. Of the three I think the old man with the green turban painted up the best.

It turns out to be a little harder to paint civilians than I thought because you have to make some more interesting colour choices than say with Zombies or German soldiers. Even so I find myself falling back to the typical earthy tones I enjoy painting.

Ah well, all these figures are just innocent bystanders, so their paint jobs don’t have to be that outstanding! I have another seven civilian figures to paint, but doubt I’ll get through all of them before we start playing Pulp .45 Adventure again.

 Posted by at 9:48 am

Poll Roundup: Do You Paint for Display?

 General, Polls  No Responses »
May 112007
 

Do you paint for display?

* 7% (10) – No, I game with bare metal and plastic.
* 46% (62) – No, I only paint for gaming.
* 41% (55) – Yes, occasionally I paint for display but mostly for gaming.
* 5% (7) – Yes, I paint for display exclusively, I don’t game.

Total Votes : 134

As I’m squarely in the “No, I only paint for gaming” category this was an interesting poll for me. Almost half of the respondents do display painting, and 5% of them paint exclusively for display. As you can probably tell from the recent post about 1:35th German Paratroopers I am interesting in trying some pure display painting, but to be honest I’ve got so much on the go I don’t know when I’ll get around to it!

I was surprised to see 7% of the respondents game with bare metal and plastic figures. I’ve certainly done that in the past (mostly for 40k and Warhammer Fantasy) but frankly playing war games with fully painted figures and terrain is definitely worth the effort it requires. I’m certainly looking forward to revealing a fully painted Cairo table to my players and see how they enjoy gaming over it. So I’d implore those gamers to either paint their figures, or try a system with a lower figure count!

This next poll is a bit of a random question: I’ve war gamed for around 20 years but have only attended a handful of tournaments and store games in all that time and usually as a spectator. For the rest of my gaming life I’ve played with a small group of friends either at their houses or at mine, so I’m curious to hear where other people game most of the time?

Although returning to the point about painted terrain, now I have all this painted Pulp terrain I wonder if I should offer to run some Pulp .45 Adventure demo games at local stores to try and recruit some more Pulp gamers!

 Posted by at 11:36 am

Review: Musketeer Miniatures Naffatun

 Ancients, Pulp  1 Response »
May 102007
 

Musketeer Miniatures Naffatun Shortly after I posted a link to Musketeer Miniatures excellent sculpting tutorial back in March I ordered a couple of their 28mm Naffatun figures from their Armies of the Caliphates range and some ProCreate epoxy putty.

Unfortunately my first order got lost in the International mail, but Bill from Musketeer was good enough to send me a replacement free of charge which reached me last week. I certainly appreciate that level of customer service and it was very kind of him considering the margins most independent figure manufacturers work with.

The figures are expertly cast with barely noticeable mold lines and a few tiny flash spikes from venting holes. It took me around a minute each figure to flick the spikes off and run an Xacto blade over the mold lines. The figures are cleanly sculpted and posed in convincing throwing stances. For people wielding naptha bombs they’re appropriately dressed in heavy robes, trousers and have covered faces. I’ve you’ve seen 300 recently you may recall Persian Naffatun appeared briefly before suffering an unfortunate accident with their stockpile of grenades.

Muskeeter have several interesting ranges that seem to be aimed at the Warhammer Historical rule set. These Naffatun figures come from the Caliphates range which I believe is designed as opponents for early Medieval Crusader armies around 1000AD. Their other ranges include early Saxons, from a similar period, as well as Russians and Swedes from the 1700′s.

However I’ll be using them as generic Pulp Hashshashins, throwing who knows what – could be naptha, or hand grenades, or pots of flesh eating scarabs! This is why I’ve placed a Copplestone Castings Pulp Hero between the two Naffatun above for scale comparison. As you can see they’re a perfectly good match for the 28mm scale hero and it’s something of a pity Museketeer only have two distinct Naffatun figures otherwise I’d have ordered more. These figures didn’t come with bases by the way, I’ve rebased them on the Games Workshop plastic bases I use for all my Pulp figures.

I summary I’m perfectly happy with the figures and impressed with the level of service I received from Musketeer, particularly since I placed such a small order. I also received a pack of ProCreate putty from Musketeer which I haven’t had a chance to try yet. I’ll review this in the future once I’ve sculpted something interesting with it!

 Posted by at 10:02 am

1:35th Dragon Fallschirmjager

 General  13 Responses »
May 082007
 

Dragon 1:35th Fallschirmjager I was at Gordon Harris in Newmarket this weekend picking up some cheap French curves and happened to drop into Modelair as well. As usual they had a sale table out the front and in a moment of madness I picked up a $20nz box of Dragon 1:35th Fallschirmjager.

On returning home my wife’s first comment was “you don’t need those”, which I thought displayed an alarming knowledge of the sort of toy soldiers I usually buy. My regular gaming mates are probably rolling their eyes about now too because I certainly don’t need these for gaming.

However since I started reading Model Military International last year I’ve been tempted to try painting something for display purposes in this slightly larger scale. For a crisp $20 note this boxed set of four figures seems like an excellent chance to experiment with this new scale. Particularly since, according to this review, the uniforms are accurately represented by the box art. I’m confident I can paint a reasonable light green cloth and there are a lot of handy 1:35th painting tutorials on the web.

Dragon 1:35th Fallschirmjager sprues Opening the box and I was met with no less than six sprues, a small etched brass sheet and some decals. From a parts count alone that represents pretty good value for money, particularly if you break the cost down by the figure count, meaning each 1:35th figure cost me $5nz.

From a modeling point of view it’s kind of an eye opener though, particularly when I examined some of the sprues in detail. I’m left wondering how on earth you get a tiny 1:35th grab handle off it’s sprue intact for example! Not to mention the incredible number of parts that must go into making up each of the four figures.

Dragon Box Details I was staggering around the garage in a daze wondering if I should just discretely pop the box up into the roof space (along with all my other incomplete projects) or put it up on TradeMe when I noticed the content details on the lid.

Ack! Over three hundred parts? For four figures? That’s 75 parts for each figure! It begins to dawn on me how dedicated 1:35th modelers must be. The age recommendation made me smile too – I’d hate to meet the 10 year old that is capable of doing models of this kind justice…

But heck, if some beardless youth is capable of assembling and painting these figures then surely I am too. Right?

Guys?

 Posted by at 9:59 am

Crescent Root 28mm Towers Painted

 Pulp  3 Responses »
May 052007
 

Cresent Root 28mm Middle Eastern Tower Painted I’ve painted the two Crescent Root Middle Eastern tower buildings I received late last month. They’ve been painted using the same quick dry brushing scheme that I applied to all my other Crescent Root buildings, both in 28mm and 15mm scale.

This involves basing them with Resene “Sandcastle” acrylic interior house paint and painting the exposed brick work with Resene “Root Beer”. Once that coat is completely dry I wash it with a mix of 50/50 water and Klear floor wax added to Kiwi Liquid Shoe Polish darkened with a little indian ink.

This is a cheap chestnut wash I use on a lot of my terrain. It has a similar effect to using a more expensive ink wash, plus has the added bonus of resulting in quite a hard finish once dry, with a manly shoe leather scent. I admit I was a little concerned about how colour fast this concoction would be, but the first buildings I painted with it over a year ago are fine, so I continue to use it.

Once the wash is dry, which can take a while, the buildings are then drybrushed with Sandcastle again, and finished with a light drybrush of Resene “Pearl Lusta”, aka White on the edges and corners and then varnished.

I now have ten painted 28mm Crescent Root Studios buildings and need to finish and paint one more medium piece to complete all the terrain I need for the next Pulp campaign. I have to admit I’m getting a little tired of the 28mm scale again and once we’ve played the campaign will probably switch back to 15mm for a while. I’m itching to get some paint on those Carthaginians!

 Posted by at 10:05 am

28mm Pulp Crates Painted and Stacked

 Pulp  2 Responses »
May 042007
 

28mm Pulp Crates Painted It’s been quiet on here this week, but I’ve managed to paint some of my singular resin 28mm Pulp crates. The basic crates are pretty easy to paint with some basic drybrushing, but the metal edged crates understandably required a little more effort.

I’m very happy with the results, although it turns out their surface is a little too textured to paint DAK palm tree stencil onto them. Hmmm, does anybody happen to know where I can get some good 28mm/1:45th scale WWII DAK palm tree transfers?

28mm Crate Stacks I’ve also mastered some crate stacks, molded and cast them in Ultracal 30 for quickly producing a large number of crates.

Unfortunately this isn’t the best photo to show the three separate crate stack masters I created – I shouldn’t have stacked them up so much! The fine detail isn’t quite as good as resin of course, but once painted and stacked I doubt they’ll be any noticeable difference between the two sets, particularly if you mix in a few single resin crates.

Once I’ve cast a few sets up and painted some demo stacks I’ll post them up for sale here with better shots of the individual stacks. I aim to do this over the weekend so stay tuned!

 Posted by at 10:57 am
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