HAWKS

Chris Palmer

     This past week I painted the “Dark Elf Male Warrior” from the Bones 4 Darkreach Expansion in my continuing effort to concentrate on working my way through this Expansion.
     I prepped the figure in the usual way, soaking it in a dish of water with a couple drops of dish-soap added, then giving it a light scrub with a soft toothbrush, and then rinsing and drying it.  I then glued the figure to a brown-primed 1" fender washer with Aleene’s Tacky glue, and then placed the figure in my painting grip.

     I began by painting all the armor with Ceramcoat “Black”.  When dry, I drybrushed the armor with Folk Art Color Shift “Black Flash”.  I then painted the face and hands with Reaper MSP “Dark Elf Skin”.

     Next, I highlighted the cape with a mix of the base “Zinc” and some of the “Grey Sky”.  I then added a decorative stripe along the bottom edge of the cape using the “Cranberry Wine” highlighted with mixing in some of the “Tutti Frutti”.  After that, I highlighted his hair with Americana “Snow White”.  I then did highlights on the belt and scabbard with some of the “Zinc”, and highlighted the pouch with Ceramcoat “Territorial Beige”.  I also used the Territorial Beige to highlight the crossbow.  I then painted the binding on the crossbow with Americana “Khaki Tan”.
     After that I painted the sword, belt buckle, and the metal parts of the dagger and crossbow with Folk Art Metallics “Gunmetal Grey”. I followed with giving them light highlights with some Ceramcoat “Metallic Silver”.  Lastly, I painted the entire base with Americana “Mississippi Mud”.
      I let the figure dry overnight and the next day I gave it a coat of Americana “DuraClear Matte” varnish. I then used some white glue to glue some fine sand to the base.  When the sand was dry, I painted it with a coat of the “Charcoal Grey”. When this was dry, I drybrushed the sand with the “Mississippi Mud”, and then with some Apple Barrel “Rock Grey”; lastly I drybrushed it with a little Americana “Dove Grey”.
      Another overnight dry, and I sprayed the figure with Testor’s Dullcote".

     I’m really happy with how this figure turned out.  This was my first time using Reaper’s Dark Elf Skin Triad and I’m very happy with the outcome.

via All Bones About It http://allbonesabout.blogspot.com/2020/05/dark-elf-male-warrior-bones-4-darkreach.html
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Buck

Florida is starting to re-open in a big way, working to get life back to normal, so CINC Domicile is starting to push to get out of the house. The tremendous hobby throughput I have had during the plague panic will be slowing considerably in the next few weeks. But, this weekend, I completed a project that has been languishing for a while: science fiction tanks.

The project actually began many years ago by Greg. He has started to scratch build some GW-like vehicles from extra bits and plasticard. For some reason lost in the mists of time, he didn’t want to finish them, so I ended up with them. This weekend I broke out the plasticard and finished them. I also had a chance to get out the airbrush and do a little camo work; although, I am having a lot of trouble with water in the line, resulting in the occasional spatter of watery paint that screws up the paint job.

I started with some dollar store tanks that come in a bag with green army men. These are roughly M-48 or M-60 looking, but not quite. I cut off the gun and added a Company B Tesla cannon. I had a couple of bits left over from a Pig Iron kit that I used to put some sort of laser gun in the commander’s cupola.

The second project was a smaller APC looking vehicle (I don’t know what it was supposed to be in 40k), but I added a surplus Sherman turret and some additional details. I also had some rockets that I thought would look cool on the sides.

The last tank is really large. Again, I don’t know its intent in GW land, but I plan to use is as a lumber heavy tank or a tank transporter.

During the previous week, I had been picking away at the last few figures in my project box. These included some Pulp Figures characters from monster movies.

To guaranteed more longevity, I needed to replenish the project boxes. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, when I get back from a convention I usually immediately file, base, and prime the figures so that they are ready to paint when the muse strikes me or I have a couple of hours to spend. With the monster movie figures, I had pretty much emptied my project boxes, consisting of four 4L Really Useful Boxes. I was poking around and found a box of unpainted, unprepared figures that I must have just thrown in the box to get ready for the move. You can see that stack on the table getting ready to be prepared for painting. This weekend I filed, based, and primed this stack of lead and filled up three Really Useful Boxes. There are some odds and ends, like movie characters from Sally 4th, the recent Pulp Figures “dangerous dames” kickstarter, some dwarves that will eventually get duck heads, some Eureka French Revolution vignettes, and other odds and ends.

It wasn’t as productive a weekend as I would have liked. Next weekend, Friday through Sunday will be consumed with converting slides to digital files. I have about 30 carousels of slides that I have been meaning to convert. I found a place in town that will rent me the equipment to make high quality scans, so I’ll be cleaning slides and putting them into the machine while watching old black and white movies.

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Buck

In a previous post, I showed the tanks inspired by Leonardo da Vinci that we plan to use in a What a Tanker! game in the near future. It was planned for Historicon in July, but Pennsylvania won’t allow gatherings of that size by July. As I continue to empty my box of primed and ready-to-paint figures, I came across these GW figures that are a combination of gifts from my buddy Greg and flea market finds. I thought I would paint them up for possible use in the da Vinci What a Tanker! game as anti-tank guns.

I started by painting an old GW war wagon and a kit-bashed rat-powered vehicle. I don’t know what forces, sides, factions, or races these belong to in Warhammer, but they are cool looking vehicles. In the background are some Reaper Bones civilians watching the “parade” pass them by.

I am not 100% sure that Don will be able to use these in the What a Tanker! game. I figured these wagons could have the stats of an open-topped tank destroyer, like the ones built on Pz 38(t) chassis by the Germans in the early part of the war. As What a Tanker! is focused on tanks, I don’t even know if there are rules to anti-tank rifles, but I’m sure someone has come up with home rules for them that we can leverage.

I started making the cannon, because some of the figures I was painting looked like artillery crewmen to me.

This gun should be like an 88mm or at least a 76mm in the game, but again, we’ll see how Don wants to stat things our or whether he wants to use them at all.

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Buck

This weekend I recorded a number of short videos that I have stitched into three longer videos to share.

The first is a video of us conducting a virtual play test of Wars of Ozz via Zoom. This is a two-hour video that takes the game from start, through clear conclusion, to post-game kibitzing. See it here: https://youtu.be/jUIIVap_vR8

The second is a brief rules overview of Wars of Ozz. The production values are not the greatest, but they provide a reasonable overview of the activation, movement, shooting, and melee mechanics of the rules. I am, of course, biased, but I think they have a somewhat old school feel with streamlined and elegant mechanics. Games are quick and decisive. See it here: https://youtu.be/CDsfgoS32-Y

The last is a brief rules overview of Feudal Patrol™. I recently received the product quality cards for the Activation and Action decks. I used them in the filming of the videos. Again, the production values aren’t swell, but I think they provide a reasonable overview of how the game plays. See it here: https://youtu.be/SlpLbMdgVv8

I hope you find the videos informative, if not riveting.

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Norman Dean This past weekend, I finished reading Naomi Novik’s Uprooted, about a girl who is taken from her village by the wizard who rules her valley. A large part of the story is the ongoing conflict between the protagonists’ homeland and a mysterious and insidious magical forest known as the Wood, which the wizard is guarding against. As I got to the end of the book, I found myself pondering the mix of forces on both sides. This seemed like a perfect opportunity to revive an occasional feature of this blog, where I take a look at building Hordes of the Things armies based on a particular book or other work of fiction.

POLNYA
The main setting of the story, Polnya seems to control a fair amount of territory besides the valley that contains The Wood. It has a significant border with its rival Rosya, which also borders on The Wood. (In fact, as the story goes on, it becomes apparent that the Wood is stoking the rivalry between the two nations for its own purposes.) The two countries have a bit more of an Eastern European flair than your typical fairy-tale fantasy countries. As the name suggests, Polnya seems based on Poland – it even has an monarch that seems to be elected (or at least acclaimed) by the ‘Magnati’ nobility, where as Rosya is presumably Russian. Cannons make an appearance, but I don’t recall any references to personal firearms, so a 15th or 16th-century level of technology seems appropriate. A Polnyan army could include:

• A Hero General (Prince Marek) or a Knight General (if led by his more sensible brother Prince Sigmund)
• A Magician (one or more of the court wizards like the Dragon or the Falcon.)
• A Cleric (Either a priest with holy relics, or Agnieszka, whose magic seems to be notably different from that of the court wizards.)
• Artillery (Early cannon, but firing enchanted cannonballs.)
• Knights and/or Riders (Heavy or light Polish-style cavalry, though there’s no mention of anything like the famous winged hussars.)
• Spears (Infantry armed with pikes.)
• Blades (Infantry armed with axes for venturing into the Wood.)
• Hordes (Peasants with torches and agricultural implements.)

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Chris Palmer

     This past week I painted the two translucent “Killer Fungi” from the Bones 4 Darkreach Expansion.     I had been holding these back since I painted the rest of the Darkreach mushrooms, in hopes that I could figure out some way to illuminate them, without having to include a huge base to hide the battery & electronics; but I finally abandoned that plan because I was tired of them sitting in my waiting-to-be-painted shelf.   This also led me to decide to start making a concerted effort to work my way through the remainder of my Darkreach figures since I had painted a lot of them already.

     When the washes were dry, I drybrushed the conical one with some Americana “Margarita” to help it pop.  I then drybrushed the domed one’s tentacles, underside, and roots with some of the base “Apple Lavender"  mixed with some Reaper MSP "Breast Cancer Awareness Pink”.   After that, I highlighted the ends of the domed mushroom’s tentacles with some Ceramcoat “Opaque Red”.
      I let the mushrooms dry overnight and the next day I gave them and their bases a coat of Americana “DuraClear Matte” varnish.

     I’m pretty happy with these two fungi.  I’m glad I went ahead and got them finished up.

via All Bones About It http://allbonesabout.blogspot.com/2020/05/killer-fungi-bones-4-darkreach-figure.html
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Buck

The focus of this weekend was another Wars of Ozz play test game over Zoom. Chris and Greg were the opponents, and I was the game master. This time we recorded the entire game, and I have posted a video on YouTube. See the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUIIVap_vR8 This is a full, three-turn game that reached a decisive conclusion. Three turns doesn’t sound like a lot, but since every unit activates twice per turn and since you do a lot of things during your opponent’s activation, it feels like a lot more than three turns of activity occur in three turns.

After the game ended, I stitched together the video that Chris recorded and the video that I recorded to make the video that I posted on YouTube.

Before we started the game, while I had the table setup, I also filmed a short rules tutorial video that I posted to YouTube. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDsfgoS32-Y The production values are poor, and I will have to reshoot them later for the Kickstarter, but this will give folks an idea of how the game works.

After replacing all the door handles in the house to satisfy CINC Domicile, and three hours of work for work, I did have a chance to do a little painting on Sunday.

I finished three regiments of 10mm Prussian dragoons that I had sitting around primed and ready to paint for a couple of years. All of the 10mm Napoleonic figures in my backlog are painted and ready for action. With my focus on Combat Patrol, Feudal Patrol, and Wars of Ozz the past couple of years, Dave has used my 10mm Napoleonic more than I have.

I am really scraping the bottom of the barrel to find things to paint after two months of government-forced captivity. I don’t enjoy painting the early Bones figures at all, but these were sitting in the project box calling to me. (When I get new figures, I typically file, prime, and base them immediately so that they are ready to paint when the muse strikes me. They go into one of four 4L Really Useful Boxes, called my “project boxes.”) I tried the contrast paints that worked so well on the Wars of Ozz figures, but there is something about the mushy detail on the early Bones figures that made them turn out poorly. Anyway, they are just waiting for flocking to be “done.” I think these GW figures will be fun to paint, and I intend them to be very colorful to go along with the tanks I built (see previous post). These really won’t have a role in the What a Tanker! Leonardo DaVinci game, but they will look good on the table. This week I’ll plink at these figures a little each night and hopefully finish them next weekend. Then I have about 90 Vikings and Anglo Danes to assemble and paint.

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Rob Dean

During the current  difficulties, I have been keeping in touch with the hobby by playing games remotely.  Happily, years of practice left us ready for this.  Yesterday, my sons had their turn, as I hosted a game for the two of them, separately remote.  Since younger son William acquired DBA 3.0  fall, we have had a resurgence of interest in the game, and older son Norman and I (well, mostly Norman) have been at work reshaping and extending an earlier 1/72 Bronze Age project to cover more of the possible armies of the 13th century BCE.  For yesterday’s game, we pitted the ancient Libyans (DBA Army I/7b) against the New Kingdom Egyptians (I/22b).

 I set up the iPad on a tripod, having recently acquired a tripod mount for it, and laid out the reversible 3×3 ground cloth on the desert side.

via The Sharp End of the Brush http://sharpbrush.blogspot.com/2020/05/death-on-nile-in-remote-dba.html
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Norman Dean As mentioned in my last post, after a couple months of pushing hard on the Bronze Age I was ready for a change of pace. Most of my (unchronicled) miniatures work in the past couple of years has been on Reaper Bones 28mm fantasy figures – some for a couple of Ghost Archipelago campaigns that were going on in our club, but also with the longterm goal of building up a pool of figures for D&D or other skirmish or roleplaying games. I still had several sitting around primed and ready to go, so I switched over to that for a while.

First up were some orcs – I’ve been doing these in a medium gray, as I wanted to avoid human flesh tones and also distinguish them from my 20mm orcs, who are green. I had three already, and I added three more this go-round – one with a spear, one with two swords, and one axe-wielding orc who appears to be left-handed.

Next up was Alahazra, Iconic Oracle, who could be either a D&D character or a Wave or Wind Warden for a future Ghost Archipelago campaign.

After that, I finally took care of a Cave Bear that had been languishing on my desk for a while. This ended up being pretty quick once I finally buckled down to paint it – almost all dry-brushing.

Finally, I painted up a Bones version of Aletheia Edair, Duelist, which I guess must have come from the most recent Kickstarter. It looked to me like she was wearing a slashed doublet under her armor, so I decided to go with a colorful, vaguely Renaissance theme.

Having had a nice break, it’ll be back to my fourth Bronze Age DBA army – the infamous and enigmatic Sea Peoples…

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Buck

Sunday involved a fair amount of Mother’s Day activity, Saturday my daughter wanted me to teach her how the change the oil in her car, and Saturday night was virtual D&D. I also needed to sort through all my pulp figures and reogranize them from five Really Useful Boxes to six to make it easier to find figures I needed for a specific game. All of that limited my painting time.

I also made a good start on several regiments of Prussian Landwehr cavalry figures in 10mm. I hope to finish them this week and post pictures. When I complete them, I’ll just have two regiments of Prussian Dragoons to finish up all the 10mm Napoleonic figures that have been staring at me for a couple of years, filed, primed, and mounted on sticks for painting.

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