Thursday, December 25, 2014

SANTA WAS HERE!!!!

Yep, the big guy in the red suit and his reindeer made an appearance last night and dropped off some wonderful goodies for the family.  My little one received the bike and keyboard she wanted and she was beyond excited.

Santa also left me some gaming goodies.  First off my Secret Santa gift exchange, which Chris Stoessen arranged.  Santa dropped off 3 bases of 10mm Carthaginians for my Punic Wars project.  THANK YOU SANTA!!!!!








Next up my family gave me some goodies.  They are GMT's Saints in Armor, X-Wing and the book The Brusilov Offensive.  Can't wait to dive into all three of these.




I hope you all had a wonderful holiday and were able to spend it with family and friends.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!!


MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!!!!


FROM MY FAMILY TO YOURS, WE WISH YOU A WONDERFUL HOLIDAY AND A JOYOUS NEW YEAR!!!!



Wednesday, December 17, 2014

New Painting Racks

For some time I've been trying to decide how to change the way I store my paints.  I have quite a mix between Folkart, Ceramcoat, Vallejo, Foundry, Winton Oils and Amsterdam acrylic tubes that it was starting to get out of hand.  The system I was using had 12 small plastic boxes with all of the paints sorted by color. I'm color blind and keeping them labeled helps me greatly.  
The biggest amount of paint I owe comes from Vallejo.  So after asking around on TMP and Lead Adventure Forum this company was suggested: Kraken Skulls.   Their painting racks hold 48 bottles of paint of the Vallejo size and are rather inexpensive at $15 a piece.  So I ordered 3 of them.
The racks come unassembled but are easy to put together.  You need to glue them together to help with keeping them rigid.   The other nice thing about them is the ability to hang them on a wall.  I've saved some cabinet space and can add some more terrain in there.





Friday, November 21, 2014

The Heroes are here!

After a few starts and stops, I was able to finish the heroes for my pulp action game I'm hoping to run soon.  Painting the heroes were a little harder to paint as each figure was so different.  Unlike the Scarlet League, I couldn't do the production line method.  Oh well, they are done now.

I do have a small issue.  I'm attempting to come up with a name for this group of characters to work under.  So far I've come up with this list.  Let me know which you think is a good one.
1. The Hawkwood 8
2. The Guardsmen
3. The Amazing 8
4. Spooky 8
5. Crusaders 8
6. Mockingbird 8
7. Gangland 8

Here are the Heroes with their names.

The Whip, Carmen Falcon, Guy Dixon

Rex, Miles Maxim, The Englishman

The Englishman, The Butler and Mr. White


Some closeups.




More random shots.

Saturday, November 15, 2014

The Scarlet League

So from my last post about using Gesso as a Primer, I have finished, what I'm calling, The Scarlet League.  I have not applied the matt varnish yet, I will do that once I'm done painting the heroes.  These figures were fun to paint.  What I most certainly enjoyed was not having to paint eyes on any of them.  I find that so difficult.  Enjoy the photos.  Also this is the first time I've painted anything larger than 15mm.  I guess they came out okay. 

Some henchmen.  The one of the right reminds me of an Oddjob type character.

Oddjob, The Big Baddie and his evil mistress.  I have no clue how to paint the Throne he's sitting on.  If anyone has any thoughts I would love to hear them.

The evil mistress, another henchman and two sub leaders of the league.

Sub leader and henchmen.


More henchmen.

Close up of the sub leaders.  My daughter helped me decide on what their clothes should look like.


Close ups of the henchmen.

Over all these were fun to paint.  I've got the heroes started in the back ground and will post photos of them when I'm finished.

Saturday, November 8, 2014

Gesso as a Primer

I have found an alternative to priming my figures with a spray primer.  I have found using Gesso a good alternative to spray priming.  This is not a new idea of course and I read about it on this blog: Priming_With_Acrylic_Gesso by Dakka Dakka.  The first part of his post kind of turned me off to doing this as it was rather labor intensive, with all of the mixing of thinners, colors etc.. that was until I read to the end where he had updated his post based on someone else's suggestion to use the Gesso right out of the bottle.  I have to say that it works really well.
One of the reasons for this change is up here in the Pacific Northwest, the winters are wet and cold and trying to spray prime outside doesn't always work.  This method allows me to prime inside at my work table and there aren't any toxic fumes.   

The liquitex Gesso is a non-toxic product so it is safe to use.  Also it cleans up with water.  It comes in three colors Black, White and Grey.  I bought the black and grey colors.  I will use the grey on my 10mm figures and the black on the 15mm and larger figures.

This bottle cost me about $9.00 at Blick Art Supply.



For this experiment I decided to prime my Pulp figures I purchased from Bob Murch. I want to do a 1930's style noir game.







The above photos show how wet and gloppy the figures look after brushing the Gesso onto the figures.  The bottle says to let it dry for 24 hours.  Most of the detail is obscured by the Gesso. 




Less than 24 hours later the figures are dry.


You can see some places where there is a little bit metal showing through. This can be touched up with the Gesso.


Once the stuff dried the details POP! rather nicely and better, I feel, than the spray primers I've used in the past.


The best part of this was the clean up.  The brush cleaned up with water and once the Gesso dried I was able to peel it out of the tray and throw the piece of Gesso away.