Helbrute and Kranon nearly done

I keep finding little bits to touch up or tweak, but I'm pretty much as done as my skill will allow.  I'm quite pleased as long as I don't look at any of the Golden Demon winners again.

Painting large batches

I bought 40 Zidhe from 15mm.co.uk before Christmas.  The idea was to be able to play the Terminus scenarios from Barking Ironss (see my previous post for links). It actually calls for 60 enemies in one case, but knowing how soul-crushingly laborious  it could be to see that many, I thought I'd use some of the (already painted) chaos cultists I have from the Dark Vengeance box set.  OK, they'll be enormous giants, but it would do for a while.

I've been painting the Zidhe in batches. Each one has slight colour-scheme changes to cut down the repetition slightly when they're all together, but nothing major.  I'm on the last batch:

For the low, low price of £1

Stores that sell things for £1 (or 99p, or even 98p) are everywhere these days. I'm addicted to them, fascinated by them and generally pleased and disappointed in equal measure.

Recently, I bought a big bag of National Trust bird food for £1.  WIN!
I bought two rubber-foam-stuff kneeling pads for 99p. WIN! (these will soon become hills for the tabletop),
And I also bought a set of craft knives, in a box, for 99p.  EPIC WIN!  Oh, wait:

OK, maybe that wasn't such a good buy. That goes on the pile with the tripod that breaks under the weight of a (smallish) camera and the pliers that only open half a centimetre, the jaws of which don't quite fit together properly.

So, it's about 50:50 win/loss. But if you got odds like that at a casino, I'd maybe start gambling there, too.

Progress!

OK, so first an experiment.  The big (for 15mm) gun from Rebel Minis has been painted with Vallejo silver (I love the Vallejo metallics) and then gloss-varnished.  It will later be painted with beiges, greens and black which, when dry, can be scratched off to show the metal underneath.  Hopefully.

Also, some progress with the Helbrute and Kranon has been made tonight.  Before (high-contrast -- I thought it looked good):

After:

The metal is still bright, but that will be toned down with some artist inks next.  There are plenty of places that the bronze has run onto the black, too.  This is partly because of the very liquid nature of the Vallejo metallics and partly because I never seem to be able to clean my brush when using these paints and don't want to ruin a £4 fine paintbrush. I'll touch the black up later.  It's actually dark blue-grey but I will touch up with black, which should make a nice dark edge.

Some new minis...

I have a bunch of bits and pieces from Rebel Minis that arrived yesterday.  I have the "remote gun" basecoated and ready.  I'm most excited about the Saber (sic) class dropship and the VIPER, but want to see how painting the gun goes first.  There are a bunch of minis in there as well as some scenic odds and ends (shipping containers, barrels and crates).

I still haven't finished the Helbrute and Kranon figures from the WH40K Dark Vengeance set yet, either.  Too much to do!  I can only imagine how much time it must take if actually play these games, too.

Pennies

Why are some pennies not made of iron-ey  stuff?  I'm really annoyed that some of my penny-based figures can't be held in place with magnets. I'm going to have to add another penny underneath.

Plants from old Christmas decorations

We finally got rid of a garland/swag/thing decoration this year. It's something we've had for a long time and was always put across the fireplace.  As I was stuffing it into a black bin-liner, I realised it had a whole bunch of interestingly shaped bits and pieces attached to it.  I plucked them all off and kept them.

Here's what some of them turned into:

I mounted them on 2in squares of plasticard, modelled exposed roots with epoxy putty and added tendrils made of wire coming from the openings.  Painted, I think they look quite good.  I like the dotted lines that make some of the spheres a little melon-like.

I'm imagining them having special rules in some games.  Like this: you can use them for cover, but for every save made because of them, you have to roll another D6.  Should it be a 1, the bulbous gas-sac explodes and does template-based damage in a given radius. Maybe they could even be targeted  exploding on a penetrating hit.

More figures painted

I now have 23 figures painted.  That's 10 muster infantry, 2 muster heavy weapons, 1 muster commander and 10 Zidhe, all from www.15mm.co.uk.  That's enough to play the Terminus: Planet-Fall scenario from www.barkingirons.co.uk.

I kept the painting fairly simple.  Just a few colours for each army. I'm using mostly Vallejo Model Colour paints for miniatures and the 70p to £1.50 tubs/tubes from Hobbycraft/The Works/Hooties/etc for terrain.

For these 15mm models, I'm also not doing any shading (well, very little).  I'm using Army Painter Quickshade to add shading and a tough gloss coat.   I've tried quickshade on 28mm fibures in the past and not been impressed, but when compared to trying to shade endless squads of 15mm figures, it seemed worth another go.  Very lazy, but very quick and the results is pretty good. I'm leaving them gloss because I quite like it on these small figures, but you can get a mattifying spray.

I've also almost finished the hill I've stood some of the models on for the photo.  It needs a last highlight  on the rock (pale blue-white) and a few layers of greens on the grass.  I may add some tufts of grass to areas that models can't use, too.

Terrain, scenery, props

One of the things I've always enjoyed is making little bits and pieces of terrain/scenery/props. I like to make rather than buy for the most part.

I don't have any of the stuff I made as a kid.  Which is a shame, because I spent many hours putting tiles on roofs.  I've been going for sci-fi scenery so far.  I have some plants made from old Christmas decorations that I'm quite pleased with, but also I've been making things out of bits of packaging.

My favourites so far are the tomato-tray-buildings and the salad-lid-landing-pad.

Here's a tray that you get tomatoes in:

 And here's what you get if you use it as a mould for plaster-of-Paris.  Didn't shake it enough to get all the bubbles out.  I added some odds and ends.  I have this painted but no photos yet.

 My landing pad, made from the lid of a a Tesco salad box plus some plastic for the legs and left-over metal corners from an Ikea cardboard tray:

A 15mm figure (from www.15mm.co.uk) for scale: