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!