An English tabletop gamer reminisces about years of gaming, documents his many future defeats and so it would seem, mainly compensates his lack of gaming with painting and modelling...
Yes, in the end I did decide to see if I could sell the Corvus Cabal on.
I'm not going to lie, they are not up cheap, I think they justify the price, and if I was charging based on minimum wage I'd be charging triple that to warrant the time investment.
But if you'd like to own them you can go look here:
Regulars will recall my Xmas present to myself. Well about a month ago I began the painting process. And now after four hours of assembly and basing, a couple of hours of clean-up and well over twenty hours of painting, they are finished:
The entire Warband
I'm not gonna lie, these were hard! More and more patient, difficult, intense painting was required on these than any other project I've carried out in the last few years. But the finished results I think really speak for themselves. I'm ecstatic with how they've come out.
I'm especially happy with the flesh tones. It was two even thin coats of a mid flesh shade, then glazed with a couple of passes of red-brown in Vallejo Glaze Medium. Then I reapplied the flesh, followed by a couple of highlights blended with a lighter flesh shade. Most of the work involved a mix of glazes and multiple highlights.
Most of the poses are constructed of four or more parts, with a handful of options. Computer modelling allows for incredibly dynamic and natural poses, but.... they are an absolute pigs to assemble and paint.
The female models in the set are great, anatomically believable, neither musclebound hulks nor struggling to move with the burden of unbelievable front bumpers!
The crow here is attached by one tiny leg joint. It broke four f***ing times in the painting! Nevertheless it is one of the nicest of the models.
This was the showpiece model that sold me on the set to be honest. I love the look of it.
Now the thing is, I don't even intend to play the game, or probably, keep these figures. I think they are going to go up on Ebay at pro-painted rates. If they sell for what I think they are worth I can reinvest in a whole new painting project.
Yes, I cracked. Lockdown got to me eventually. It is not as if I'm completely alone, me and the good lady have played a fair few boardgames, and she's become quite a fan of Magic: The Gathering; but by mid-May I was Jonesing for a miniatures game.
So I buckled and set up a simple 15mm Napoleonics game, to christen my Bavarians, and give my Austrians only their second run out.
Well I didn't want to fuss much so these old bones settled on the ground, and I laid out a 5x3 foot gaming cloth I made a while back. Onto this I set up two roughly equal forces, though with different compositions.
4 Regiments of Austrians in 8 Battalions with 4 regiments of Cavalry and two batteries of Artillery, faced 5 smaller regiments of Bavarions deployed en-masse with similar support to the Austrians. The Bavarians were tasked with holding the line.
I've never had a problem with being 'both sides' in a game, though it of course tends to mean each side plays equally smart/dumb, unless you go in with some form of written orders to work to. But that sort of thing is easy to do. Any way, I don't want to get too embroiled in that. Lets get to the action.
The Bavarians rashly led their cavalry against the Austrian left as it advanced on the village of Vilgertshofen. One Austrian Cavalry Regiment was quickly broken after a sharp fight.
The Austrian advance struggled to get going, and soon advance elements were becoming isolated.
Meanwhile the Bavarians had to do little, the onus being on the Austrians to attack.. Already however the Austrian left was turned by the Bavarian cavalry. Oddly the Austrians found themselves with the interior lines early in the battle.
On the Austrian right, some confusion led to Austrian cavalry attempting to charge the Bavarian Guns, without any real support. It went as badly as one might imagine. In the centre, Bavarian Light Infantry had advanced through the woodland in the centre, but savage fire from several Austrian battalions met them. They soon broke.
The Austrians began to form a more ordered line, and were able to repel the Bavarian threat to their Left.
With support moving through the woods, the Austrians advanced on the Bavarian choke point.
Here the battle came to a head, with a smaller but determined force of Austrians facing the Bavarian foe.
With initial success.
But the Austrians were suffering losses too and sustaining the momentum was becoming difficult.
Bavarian Artillery was able to smash the centre of the Austrian attack saving the rest of its line from the pressure. And by this point the Austrian forces were exhausted.
They had held off counters from the Bavarian cavalry attacks on each flank, and did their utmost to force the centre but with two Brigades spent they admitted defeat and began an orderly withdrawal.
A nice little game; not only solo, but with a set of one-page rules I wrote on the day as well. Essentially a stripped down blend of Black Powder and Rebels and Patriots, based on treating base elements as the core of operations. When I get round to it I'll write them up properly and put them out in the ether.
A pleasure to shove some models around, but if I can minimise the need for solo games, that's alright by me.
You may have seen 4D models floating around the internet, and some of them are pretty terrible. The tracked vehicles bear only a passing resemblance to tanks. But the couple of trucks they do are pretty good. I picked one up for a couple of quid from China to fill a niche in my WW2 Germans at a modest outlay, and to see if the kit was any good:
You're lucky if you get a box, to be fair.
It was actually, ok. A lot better than buying a resin model arguably. And when you go to the trouble of excessive detailing you can really make it look pretty damned nice.
Text: 'Smoking Forbidden'
So as you might know from prior models in my WW2 German project, a lot of detailing was done here. Broadly speaking; Airbrush, oil paint filter surface, add hand painted lettering, tires, oil panel line wash, chipping, rust - including full exhaust system, dust, mud splatters, fresh mud, silt stains, fresh water marks. Yeah, something like that. Oh and the base was done separately, the interior was painted before fitting and the windows were custom made to replace the clunky fish tank in the kit.
No small amount of work, but it's all good fun and each model seems to improve over the last.
This fulfills a rules-requirement for a dedicated supply truck. Giving me everything I need for a core game in my rules of choice.
One of the many figures still lurking in my Reaper Bones pledge box of shame (there's still well over a hundred mini's in it) was one of the biggest items of the original launch:
Presently retailing for about £37, I felt like this had gathered dust long enough and needed getting out the way, it also seemed an ideal piece for trying new techniques on. But first we needed to do some assembly and clean up.
Step one
Lots of superglue and Green stuff was required first off. I made the decision though to leave the wings and head unattached, this would make painting much easier. The model as assembled was clearly a bit unstable, so I cut a larger wooden base for it from MDF and used Das Pronto clay to fill and blend the plastic base into the whole.
I freely admit I rushed and forgot to trim some fairly horrendous mould lines, but hey ho. Next stop, several layers of green paint through the airbrush. With this applied I crudely masked off the model for the next stage.
Step Two, note parts on separate painting 'handles'
I wanted the extremities to subtly blend to an uncomfortable fleshy tone, so out with more spray. Working from the base green with various cream, fleshtones, and ultimately purples added. The key seems to be light coats starting further back than you think, to leave room for the transitions to be gradual.
Step Three
Now this alone reflects an awful lot of the painting done, but I gave the entire model a good glaze of dark grey-green (almost black) next.
Now I wanted to try something new, and had been inspired by a video on one of my favourite painting channels,, the Freehand wing effects here cried out to be tried:
Once I'd done with that I kinda rushed the last few details, and gave the base a simple - 'Bottom of the Ocean' finish. With that I called it done, as the main effort was about getting practice with some new approaches.
Here's what I ended up with:
I'm ready for my close-up
Above, for those who skipped past the video, the new technique can be seen. Progressive layers of a white pattern of veins, stretch marks and scar lines, were interleaved with glazes of green and initially violet ink. The inks pushing each layer into the background for the next layer. At the end, after I think four passes with white details, a couple of final layers were added to unify the whole.
On reflection the violet ink was an error, and just green would've looked better, but it is a learning process!
Overall, I'm really happy with how this gigantic model came out, even if I don't really have any use for it!
Stan, the 28mm man, for scale.
The main point here was to try some new things, and even if not perfect, they were all great learning experiences. Painting in the same old way all the time may hone one style but it will not let you become more rounded. If you see painting models as a chore that gets in the way of gaming this may not matter to you, but then again you could easily be missing out on the methods to shorten that chore. And if like me you enjoy painting, you really owe it to yourself to expand your techniques. Trick and tips can all help, and learning keeps it fresh.
Time for another sweeping update, as we are still mainly indoors and painting continues. I'll keep a couple of specifics back for their own posts, but here are some odds and ends from the last few weeks:
Lavender Hill Mob
At times it's almost felt as if I was running out of things to paint, but in truth there appear to be a good thousand or more mini's hiding about the apartment. Still I'm getting close to the end of the Imagi-Nations project, for now, with the addition of two more infantry regiments and a pair of Artillery limbers.
Scarlet Pimpernels and Limbers
Similarly on it's last hurrah, is the Conan Board Game. With the finishing of the bits below there are only a dozen or so mini's to go.
Bosonnian Guards
Both the Guards and the Skeletons below were essentially one session each.
Undead
The skeletons in particular were largely drybrushed over a basecoat of brown and then extra shades of brown filled in. Incredibly simple.
Speaking of simple:
Vroom, Vroom.
I added some more road, specifically curve sections , to my Gaslands etc. track. just an hour or so with some craft paints, but the result is tolerable.
The biggest effort in this post, went into the 8 gentlemen below.
Splitters!
These are Jewish revolt slingers. Auditing the stocks, I found these part built and in need of some love. I added mantles (their traditional cloth 'scarves') and sling-stone bags with Green Stuff, and then gave the whole a decent paint job. It is a nice change to work on small, simple units like these, and again progress was relatively quick.
Quite the Smorgasbord. Variety is stimulating I find, as I am then never bored of just plodding out the same old uniforms or colour schemes, or using the same technique. Always having a few options that should not take long is good to keep motivation going.
Next up, something unspeakably big, with some new effects tried on it...
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