Continuing from the earlier Flames of War Painting Challenge post…

The painting challenge starts tomorrow on the 1st of Feb, so here’s my ‘before’ photo. I’ve changed my choice of platoon to paint a little from the last post, mainly because I didn’t want to paint five Panzer IIIj lates all at the same time. The photo shows the three platoons I’ll be painting for my mid-war DAK Armored Coy:

• HQ - Two IIIj lates in the foreground along with the massive recovery half-track. The stowage is glued to a piece of 1mm plasti-card cut to fit into the back tray. I’ve done this so I can paint all the barrels etc. and then just glue them into the painted vehicle.

• Combat - The other three Panzers IV Ausf F1’s and an F2. Heh, I’ve laid them out kinda funny too I notice.

• Div Support - Flak 88’s naturally. Although I’m tossing up swapping them out for a Tiger IE. Two emplaced 88’s and a command base + the transports. If anything gets dropped from my challenge it’ll be those three transports since I haven’t assembled nor primed the flak 88 gun carriages.

I’m hoping to get all five tanks and maybe those transports mostly finished in the first month using a production line, a couple of Tamiya spray cans (German Grey + Dark Yellow) and a technique similar to the one I used to paint my 28mm Opel Blitz and Sdkfz 222 Armored car.

I’ve also started a thread over on the official Flames of War forums about this informal challenge, which seems to have generated a mild interest there too. Hopefully we’ll see some people posting images of nicely painted models in a month or so!

We’ve just had a long weekend here in New Zealand, over which I attended King of Card’s Morningtide Sneak Peek Tourney. As I’m a Magic newbie this was my first time at an official ‘DCI sanctioned‘ tournament so I approached it with some trepidation. I generally avoid official war game tournaments because I play for fun and the type of high pressure players you can encounter at tourneys kills the game for me. Not to mention I’m often a mediocre general as I favor the painting and modeling side of the hobby more than the dice rolling.

However the rigid structure, well defined rules interpretations and fairly even playing field of a Magic ‘Pre Release’ Tourny attracted me. You’re all given the same number of cards and the same amount of time to construct a 40 card minimum deck and the option of tweaking your deck as much you like between opponents. So Saturday morning I wandered into King of Cards and plunked my $35nz entry fee down. The mix of players looked good, there were only twelve of us, not too many teenagers and only one child attending with his father.

Of course going into the tourney I had absolutely no expectations of winning a damned thing because I’m definitely a noob and the Morningtide release is part of the Lorwyn block in Magic which I’ve largely avoided to date. I’ve been playing Time Spiral and Tenth mostly. Lorwyn doesn’t really grab me with it’s creature heavy theme and natural tendency to limit your decks to one or two creature types. However Morningtide changes a lot of that because it carries the Lorwyn theme into creature classes as well like Rogues etc. This appeals to me more because I tend to play a lot of Rogues (favoring Black) and because class based mechanics don’t tend to limit you quite as much to certain Magic races.

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Tabletop Terrain has been encountering technical difficulties for the last 24 hours, so my apologies if you’ve noticed anything amiss. We’ve also lost a few of your most recent comments which I’ll hopefully be able to restore from backup over the weekend!

By the way once again I’d like to recommend A Small Orange if you’re looking for a web hosting company. They host all my sites and have flawless support, even for a humble little hobbyist blog like this one.

This post continues from the previous Cathedral post and I continue to make slow progress on putting this building together. The bottleneck is still the lack of enough 1″ x 1/2″ x 1/4″ flat pieces. I guess this is what the Cathedral instructions may be hinting at when they say “certain blocks may need an additional 20 casts or so”!

The photo shows another dry fit of the various pieces I’ve finished assembling. You can tell it’s a dry fit because if you look at the exterior low wall, you can see it’s leaning out of the base a little. Everything fits together reasonably well, but that’s all. I suspect some rather heavy sanding will be required on a few of the pieces to get them to glue together well - in particular the tall vertical pieces that go between the bell tower and walls.

I’ve almost finished assembling enough pieces to complete this first gallery + bell tower, except of course for those cursed gothic flats. I’ve also laid out the pieces for the two large central end walls and most of the second gallery. Looking at the plans and it’s obvious I’m probably a little over 1/3rd of the way through assembling this ‘Cathedral of the Damned’ for Mordheim as the centre of the building is basically just empty space.

I’ve developed something of a love/hate relationship with this building. It’s starting to come together nicely, but I’m still not entirely sure the amount of effort required to build the thing will justify the final result, nor the amount of game play it’ll see since my gaming group has basically given up on Games Workshop games!

My regular gaming group has got back into Flames of War in the last couple of months, so it’s time to paint some of our outstanding 15mm forces.

To motivate ourselves we’re putting a friendly painting challenge together: Each person has three months to paint the following:

• Three platoons - preferably an HQ, Combat platoon and Support Platoon, but any three outstanding unpainted platoons will do.

Or

• 750 points of figures, or vehicles or platoons.

The idea is to paint the core of a new army, and three platoons or 750pts is half of a 1500pt army! If you’re painting three platoons that also means you can aim to finish one each month of the challenge.

To give people some prep-time for assembling and basing their figures prior to starting the challenge we’re starting the challenge on the first of February. I’m also posting the challenge up here on the blog as an open invitation to any Flames of War gamers visiting to join the challenge.

One thing we will need from anybody that does want to join in is documentary evidence in the form of digital photos. We really only need two photos - one of your unpainted forces at the start, and one of the painted forces at the end! But I’m always keen to see in-progress photos myself.

Personally I need to get some paint on my assembled and mostly primed DAK Armored Company, that’s what you see in the photo above. I’ll be painting the following three platoons:

1. HQ: Two IIIj Late Panzers.
2. Combat: Three IIIj Late Panzers.
3. Support: Divisional Heavy AA Gun Platoon (88’s!). Unlimbered only although I should get their transports painted too.

I’m considering throwing in a few prizes to motivate people if they’re interested. I was thinking either one of our 15mm straight trench kits, or a 15mm 1930’s building facade. Would that help people complete the challenge?

So who’s in?!

I’ve seen FOW: Art of War book a couple of times since last year in various hobby stores I frequent around Auckland. However I’ve only just recently picked up a copy myself after reading Tankred’s review on his Unfinished Armies blog.

I have to agree with his review, this is a great little glossy book and fine value for money at $21nz locally. Personally I didn’t find the hobby tips contained within to include any great revelations but they certainly cover all the bases. What I did enjoy was seeing other modeler’s figures and vehicles so nicely displayed. The modeler’s featured were wisely chosen too, covering a range of different painting styles and armies.

In particular I enjoyed seeing Antti Heiskanen’s collection as my method of painting FOW figures is somewhat similar to his, although Antti’s style is much more extreme in terms of shading. I’m quite tempted to bust out a few spare bases of NZer infantry and try out his suggestions regarding painting and highlighting.

Also if you’re relatively new to Flames of War, or thinking of picking it up then I’d definitely recommend grabbing a copy of this book because it’s packed full of useful information regarding preparing and painting 15mm WWII figures.

As an aside I’m a little out of touch regarding Flames of War at the moment because frankly I can’t stand their new web site. Both forums and the web store seem to have become a lot harder to navigate!

I’ve made some progress on the side gallery of the Hirst Arts Cathedral since 2008 started, however further progress has been stymied by a distinct lack of gothic flat half-bricks. Looking back at my last Hirst Arts casting post (almost two years ago) it’s obvious I’ve still got a fair amount of casting to complete before I can do much more building.

Casting is by far the most onerous part of building the Cathedral and now I have a few walls in place I was really starting to get into the swing of things. Damn it! Time to bust out the molds and add more plaster dust to the garage floor. I wonder if Hirst Arts mold #201 produces flat gothic half inch wide bricks that match those in the Gothic Church mold? No doubt somebody on the Hirst Arts forum can tell me that.

I’m happy to see the pieces I have built fit together well and appear to be fairly straight. Everything you see in the photos is dry-fit with no glue holding anything to the Cathedral floor, before I do any gluing I’ve got to ply a few more pieces of 3mm MDF together to form a thicker base.

I also have various other components for the gallery near completion including all four walls of the first bell-tower, except for those pesky missing gothic half bricks!