I watched ‘Outpost’ over the weekend and thoroughly enjoyed it. Given the cover art and the tag line of ‘You can’t kill what’s already dead’ I don’t imagine I’m giving away a lot when I mention Outpost may or may not involve WWII zombies!

I thought it was nicely executed for a B-grade horror with interesting cinematography and passable acting throughout. The zombies that star in the film are also a lot more malicious than your average brain dead corpse, they’re more like evil zombie ghosts if that makes any sense. Not to mention the hokey WWII back story was pure Pulp!

It has got me thinking I should finish my Pulp Tramp Steamer and dust off my Pulp .45 Adventure rules sometime this year. I can imagine all sorts of fun could be had on the Steamer with a hold full of WWII Nazi vampires or something. Who’s seen ‘Nosferatu’!

This post continues and completes the earlier part of the tutorial. Once again, I’m not an expert painter but always try to speed paint to a reasonable tabletop quality. If you recall we left the half painted Anglian Miniatures Moroccan drying after applying a chestnut brown ink wash.

This left the figure looking rather dark and very shiny because of the wax in the Klear floor polish I used. That’s fine though because once the wash dries you’ll have a very stable, hard coat you can easily paint over.

5. Painting Over the Magic Wash. The point of the chestnut ink wash was to define the folds and edges in the figure. In a sense the quick ink wash provides a similar effect to the ‘black lining’ others paint with. This is where you prime your figure black and build up the colours over that while leaving thin black lines between the various areas of the figure.

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Matakishi’s Tea House has an excellent tutorial up showing you how to quickly create these fine looking WWII airbase buildings. They’ve built largely from cork tile, cardboard and matchsticks. Put together they make a great table for all sorts of Pulp gaming.

The rest of Matakishi’s site is top notch too, and if you’re a Pulp gamer you’ve probably already seen his cork-tile inner-city buildings in the past.

Via Rattrap’s Speakeasy.

The first thing I’d like to say is I am by no means an expert painter. As I’ve mentioned in previous polls I paint solely to get figures onto the gaming table as quickly as possible. With that self deprecation out of the way, here’s the second of three posts regarding painting Pulp figures for a North African desert setting. This post is a continuation from the previous 28mm Desert Basing tutorial as once you’ve based your figure, you’re ready to paint it.

For this tutorial I’ll be painting up one of the Anglian Miniatures Moroccan Spanish Civil War tank hunters from the basing tutorial. As I’ll be using him for generic Pulp gaming I’ve made no attempt to adhere to historic colours so apologies to any Spanish Civil War buffs out there!

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As I’ve purchased a few more rounds of 28mm metal figures for Pulp gaming it’s time I started working on them. Some time ago a reader expressed curiosity about the way I speed paint my Pulp figures for the gaming table, so I plan to put together a couple of tutorials around that.

Of course, before you paint a 28mm figure you’ve got to base it! So I’ll start the ball rolling with this tutorial on basing figures for the Egyptian/North African desert setting we game in.

1. Assemble your materials. I use Selley’s ‘Permafill’ wall repair product for basing my figures. Applying and clean up is easy because it’s water soluble, and it also dries to a very hard surface. I use the Permafill for a basic smooth sand effect, to add a little variety I scatter small rocks across the bases too. Primarily I use a mixture of three different sizes of Woodland Scenic’s Model Railway ballast and fresh kitty litter - that’s the white stone you see. For larger rocks I use pieces of cheap green marble scatter from the local gardening centre.

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The informal Pulp Tramp Steamer competition over at the Lead Adventure forums closed a couple of days ago, with my ship being one of the three that were submitted at the end. Here’s bow and stern shots of the steamer as of last weekend with 28mm figures and crates for scale.

I haven’t added much since my previous post because it was my eldest son’s 4th birthday last weekend as well. I did manage to make some ladder-work made from cut and filed chicken wire. As well as simple fore and aft deck cranes make from dowel, cut bamboo skewers, sewing thread and a few brass ship building bits and pieces. Finally I applied some 1mm plasti-card around the wheelhouse windows to represent framing.

What I’d still like to do is master and resin cast doors and portholes to fill those blank spaces in the cabin walls. The steamer also needs at least one anchor which I can attach with some brass jeweler’s chain I have in my bits box. The whole vessel also has to be painted after that too which could be interesting!

Overlord and Neldoreth (the other contestents) managed to get more detailing done on their ships and I’ll be happily borrowing some of their ideas to complete mine! I’ve also nabbed a few of their photos from the forum for later reference as I often find forum posts often fade away after a while, leaving you with nothing but dead links.

Rich from Rattrap Productions was also kind enough to actually offer up prizes for the contest! Apparently he’s sending out a pack of Brigade Games ‘Tramp Steamer Crews’ to each entrant which is damned generous of him imho! Thanks Rich!

Anglian Miniatures are a UK firm producing 28mm scale metal figures. Their first range is for the Spanish Civil War which seems like a rather niche theatre to work in, however each to their own!

I recently picked up their MOR2 and MOR4 packs of Moroccan Nationalists because the fez and turban wearing figures would be excellent for the Pulp Egyptian/North African setting I game in. So here’s a quick review of these packs.

They arrived in two baggies inside a bubble-wrap padded envelope, which is understandable given the small size of my order. One hopes that larger orders are boxed however as this isn’t the best method of shipping metal figures via air mail. Several of the figures required some careful bending to get their weapons straight after unpacking.

The figures themselves are excellent, with no flash at all and mold lines that are barely visible. They could be painted straight out of their bags, however I’ll probably file a few of their metal plates down a touch during basing. The figures themselves don’t come with bases from Anglian, in the photos you see the standard Games Workshop bases I use for all my Pulp figures.

Sculpting wise they’re very well done with plenty of detail like ammo pouches, bed rolls and slung rifles. Their poses are all quite naturalistic and believable as you can see in the photos. There’s also a nice mix of action and more static poses in the MOR2 set, with a couple of gentlemen reloading while the others fire.

The MOR4 pack includes two prone figures firing a light machine gun. I grabbed this pack really because of these gents, although the other two ‘tank hunters’ are fine figures too, one of which is armed with a crowbar!

Scale wise here’s a comparison shot of them against an Artizan Designs DAK German in a similar pose. The Moroccans are a little slighter generally than the Artizan figures. Their weapons are also a little more finely sculpted than Artizan’s. Overall though they’re an excellent match and the ranges will happily mix. Particularly since you’d except a Moroccan fellow to be a little more wiry than a Teutonic soldier.

In summary I’d happily order from Anglian again as their figures are very well done, so into the blog-roll they go!