My paint is failing me

I’m usually a black-primer guy for all the reasons miniature painters use black primer: hides mistakes, does the easy blacklining, can paint metallics without another layer, etc.  But lately I’ve been priming in white because the Marauders are fairly brightly colored, being mostly red and flesh colored.  But in the process I’ve discovered that paints that work great over black (like my dark brown and gray paints) look terrible over white.

I use a lot of craft paints for miniatures, because I’m not of the level of painter that really is hampered by the quality issues, but now they are starting to let me down.  When the paint looks bad, I get discouraged and stop painting, or at least let it fall by the wayside for a while.  So now I have two options–really try to work the cheap craft paints or overcome my frugal nature and invest in some decent paints.

My most likely course of action will be to “power through” the last Chaos Marauders (there’s 11 of them left) with the cheap paints, so they all match.  Then, take stock of whatever the next painting project will be, then make the decision.

A little gaming terrain math facts

A four foot by four foot table has 2,304 square inches.

For gaming terrain to cover 25% of the table, that would mean you would need 576 square inches of terrain.

If your terrain pieces are six inches square (and most of mine are, because I’m curiously compulsive that way), you would need sixteen pieces of terrain to make up 25% of the table.

For ruined fieldstone terrain, I have four, and a fifth on the worktable.

I have dreams of being able to one day field a gaming table for a skirmish game, one that would have serious terrain to play around.  Doing simple math like this makes me realize how much really needs to go into something like this.  I’ve seen some tables for Mordheim (and similar games) that have just under-decorated, and tables like that heavily favor missile weapons as a result.  I want a table where Chaos Cultists and Sisters of Sigmar have a chance against Reiklanders or the like.

Anyways, I’ll hopefully have piece number five up by the end of the week.  Stay tuned.

Speeding Painting a Chaos Marauder

I decided to try out the speed painting technique (just base coat and then dip in wood varnish) on something a little more complicated, in this case a Chaos Marauder.  Here’s the result:

Where the dwarf women at? I mean "elf"! Elf women...

I have to tell you, it surpassed all my expectations.  The paint job was dicey at best, and the varnish covered a lot of sins, not to mention doing a nice “blacklining” job.  I think I’ll speed paint my way through the whole unit, perhaps to use in the upcoming gaming club Warhammer campaign.

Small factoid: I used the Olympic Pecan varnish for the marauder.

Speaking of the gaming club, the first and largest item has sold, and my share is about $110, representing about $85 in profit from my initial investment.  That’s a good start to a New Miniatures and Molds Fund.  The second item is up.  Here’s the link.  It’s for 16 Lizardmen Temple Guard, the OOP metal ones.

Winning the Worst Way

When I play Warhammer, 95% of the time I’m playing the same guy, whom I frequently call my “arch rival” Vince.  Vince works for the local Fire Department, and we play over in the station break room.  It’s worth noting, for the purposes of this story, to understand that in my city, firefighters do double duty as EMT’s.  Vince is a captain, which means that he can send other guys out on calls, or at least the first one.

Vince and I have been the “captains” of two teams of players who have been butting heads all summer long.  My team, led by my Vampire Counts, have been keeping pace with my rival’s, led by his Bretonnians.  Most of my battles have been against Vince, with two factors generally making the difference in games: his blowing fear checks versus my miscasting.  His failing fear checks means his knights hit me peacemeal where I can pick ‘em off.  My miscasting usually means my 500 point special character goes poof.

In the most recent game, Vince had blown three fear checks and I was feeling it.  Then the first call came in: a toddler with a badly lacerated face.  Vince dispatched his first squad.  About twenty minutes later a second call: an eleven-year-old with a football-related neck injury.

Side note: about ten years ago the OSU Buckeyes were playing Penn State when a Penn player named Anthony Talliafaro (sp?) suffered a very serious spinal injury.  I happened to be working as chaplain at OSU Hospital that year as a way to earn a little side money while in seminary, and was on call that day.  I met Anthony’s father, his family, and both head coaches, and got to sit with all of them as they heard Anthony would never walk again (they were wrong).  But these kinds of injuries always give me a chill.

“I have to go,” Vince said.  ”You win.”

“You sure?” I asked, glancing at the table.  A few fickle die rolls and the game would tip in his favor.

“No, it’s cool.  I’ll have to go transport to the ER on this call.  See you at the final battle.”

Just not the way to win, and I’m feeling a distinct lack of victory thrills.

Lizardmen Army on the auction block

The first (and biggest) item is up on eBay.  Take a look.

And here are some pics of the army:

The entire army

Lord on Carnosaur

Slaan Mage-Priest

Saurus Warrior and Skink Priests

Salamander hunting party

The Remnants of a Hobby

Yesterday I drove to a neighboring town to buy the entire miniatures collection of a friend of mine.  He’s getting out of the hobby on account of the “Three W’s”: work, wife, and World of Warcraft.  I’m not knocking these reasons; a new baby and a pretty demanding job are good reasons to set aside your hobbies.  World of Warcraft, on the other hand…

Anyways, some friends and I from my WHFB group went in together to buy his collection.  We’ll probably keep what we can use and sell or trade the rest.  Unfortunately the collection was a huge, jumbled mess and I’m going to be days sorting through all of it.  To keep track, I’ve started a page called “Bazaar” at the top of the site (next to “About”) where I will be listing everything I come across that isn’t a half-empty sprue.  Most of what is on the list will end up being auctioned off, but if you are interested in making me an early offer, email me

Speed painting and dipping Space Rangers

Recently I was looking at the website The Army Painter which sells fast-painting supplies for miniature painters.  Basically their stock consists of “specially developed” spray paint and wood varnish, all for a pretty hefty price.

Well, I’m all about frugal wargaming so I wanted to see if I could make a dent in some of the miniatures that I already own and not sink a ton of money into new painting supplies when off-the-shelf spray paint and wood varnish might work as well.

I have, buried deep in the pile, a box of ICE Space Rangers.  These figures are now available from em4 miniatures.  They are plastic, and have an odd, glossy chrome-like finish.  They come in five varieties:

1. short, stubbly weapon (bolter) guy
2. zappy ray-gun (meltagun) guy
3. long las-rifle guy
4. generic long weapon (missle launcher) guy
5. sergeant with pistol and sword

The box holds over thirty of these guys, so I’ve got plenty of guys to waste experimenting.  Good thing too…

For varnish, I already owned a can Olympic All-in-One Varnish “Special Pecan” but I thought it was pretty light so I bought a can of Minwax “Bombay Mahogany,” the darkest one available because everyone I read said darker was better.  Later I learned that you can still get the premium option “Tudor” at Ace Hardware.

I owned lots of cans of spray paint, although most are glossy.  But I figured I’d be able to come up with something.

My plan for speed painting was simple.

1. Prime the miniatures white (to cover the chrome-gloss plastic)
2. Spray the miniature the base color
3. Paint the guns, armor details, visor, and base
4. Dip the miniature
5. Spray with matte varnish
6. Add static grass

For my first outing, I went with red spray paint and the Bombay Mahogany varnish.  The red turned out to be a little glossy, and the Mahogany seemed a little dark.

Hell's Own Space Ranger

I thought it might look good for a later Chaos Space Marine army, and my son really liked it, but I wanted something a little more traditional.  So I went with gray primer and mahogany varnish.

A member of the Exxon Valdez Space Ranger chapter

Big mistake!  I don’t know what happened here but he looks like one of those ads for getting your oil changed in a timely manner.

Finally I went with gray primer and the Pecan varnish.  Here’s the result.

Not a Space Marine. Really.

Much better.  Here’s the whole squad.

My friend Artemi asked about mess.  Frankly, I think dipping is a lot like cooking–it’s as messy as you let it be.  I tried to keep things neat and tidy and while I did shake the miniature over newspaper in my gravel driveway, it wasn’t splattering all over the place the way I’ve heard some tell it.

Let’s be honest, dipping isn’t going to give you high-quality paintjobs, but the fact is that I could probably bang out ten Space Rangers in a day if I wanted that’d look pretty fair on a gaming table.

More WIP of the Normandy farmhouse

When last you saw this project, I had measured, cut, taped, and assembled the foamcore walls for the Normandy farmhouse I’m building in 28mm scale for a friend’s Napoleonics and WW2 wargaming table.

Now, I’m adding brick to the outside using molds from Modellers Moulds and Accessories, also sometimes called Keebler Studios or A&K Molds.  The bricks come in sheets of a variety of sizes off the molds, and mold #6 will enable you to create pretty much whatever basic brick pattern you want.  I’ve also got #1, which is handy for covering large amounts of surface, but isn’t as effective here where I have so many narrow surfaces.

Side wall bricked over

Another side and farmhouse front

Hopefully you can see from the pictures how the bricks are being applied.  To make up for my own inaccuracies in cutting foamcore, I’ve had to do a little trimming of bricks here and there to make it as flush as possible.

The Normandy Farmhouse, part one

As I mentioned earlier, I am building a Normandy farm house that will do double-duty on a friend’s Napoleonic wargaming table and his World War II wargaming table.  Today I had the day off and made some serious headway on the project, and I thought I’d go into some detail about how I’m building this piece of terrain.

First, I’m building it primarily out of foamcore, which for the uninitiated is 3/16″ styroam sheets sandwiched in-between paper.  It’s too bad most places sell it at 3/16″ and not 1/4″, but thems are the breaks, as the say.  Anyways, I drew a 1:1 scale blueprint on graph paper first to figure out how large it would really work out to be, calculate things like floor thickness, etc. and then with my trusty metal ruler marked out the walls on the foamcore.

Walls drawn onto foamcore

As a small side note, my father used to be an old-school draftsman, a tradesman who drew blueprints for engineers with paper and pencil (CAD essentially ruined his career).  I think some of that rubbed off on me.

Cutting foamcore is a pain, no two ways about it.  You have to use a very sharp knife and regardless of how good a job you do measuring and cutting, it never really works out exactly right.  In any case, I cut out the walls and then used masking tape to cover the foam edges around the windows and the door.  This will give it a better appearance and protect it should I decide to use spray paint on it (the spray paint will dissolve the foam).

To glue foamcore I use a product called “Hold the Foam” which is sold in craft stores.  It’s formulated to adhere to the plastic foam better than white glue or Aileen’s.  It’s very thick so you’ll have to smear it around with your finger.  To hold the walls together while the glue dries I use straight pins nicked from my wife’s sewing box

Creating the joints

Here, you can see the first floor put together.

the ground floor of the farmhouse

Now here is where it gets a bit off the beaten path for me.  Recently I acquired two molds from A&K Studios, both part of the “tiny brick” line.  Both “A” and “K” are friends of mine, and I wanted to see how the molds worked.

The “tiny bricks” are actually 1/4″ by 1/8″ long, and actually appear to be “scale” for 28mm miniatures.  I know they include lots of them, but the single bricks don’t seem nearly as useful as the larger blocks of bricks.  They are also 1/8″ thick, which is thinner than a floor tile for Hirst Arts, so you have to be gentle removing them from the molds.  The molds themselves are of a more pliable silicone rubber than Hirst Arts, so I’m being a bit more gentle with them.

Tiny Brick molds 1 and 6

My plan is to cover the outside of the foamcore with sheets of the brick.  I can tell you now that the inaccuracies in cutting the foamcore are now become very, very apparent, and in the future I think I’ll save this technique for buildings that don’t have detailed interiors so I can just do fake windows rather than cutting real ones.

More to come.  Comments welcome.  If you by chance end up getting some A&K molds, tell them you heard about them here, okay?

What I am doing next

Sometimes, you just need the right spark to get something going.  In this case, it was my friend Tyler over at The General’s Tent.  He is starting playing WWII along with Napoleonics, and was wanting to put together terrain for his table.

Well, that’s right up my alley, so we talked and I’m going to build a Normandy farmhouse in 28mm scale.  Today I did some research on the relevant architectural styles.  Normandy farmhouses are built using the “golden ratio” which is 1.6, meaning that a farmhouse that is 10″ on wide would be 6.25″ deep.  After making a paper diagram of that, I realized that it would be really large, so I went with 8″ instead.  That works out to be exactly 5″ deep, which is much easier to manage from a construction standpoint.

My plan is to build foamcore walls and floors, then face the outside with bricks cast from Modellers Moulds and Accessories.  For the roof I’ll use Hirst Arts wood shingle mold.  The final piece will have two stories with an accessible interior.

What do I like about this, aside from the fact that I won’t have to house it?  It’s a new time period, and a new building style.  I like the challenge of making something look like the real original but still be viable for a gaming table since a scale would be three feet long.