VSF Free Irish Fire fighters!

 

 

Finally finished off these eight figures, another one of those "had them for a couple of decades' stories. They have been on the shelf, partially painted for most of that time. They had their pants, jackets and hats painted all this time and their faces but they were pretty much just base coated. Apparently they were waiting for contrast/speed paints and a decent wash.

 

So enter the modern age. The guns, tanks, hose were all done with contrast paints as was their hair and shoes. Very much a quick pant job when you have the right products. The wash came courtesy of Sonic Sledgehammer and his 'juice' an equal mix of AP Dark tone, GW Reikland flesh wash, and GW Lahmian  medium. It did the trick. I could have gone back over them with some highlights, but they are a flamethrower unit and should be dirty/sooty.

 

Priming day today, 22 items primed!

 

Okay, for those of you in warmer climes this may not seem all that exciting, but those of us in snow bound Canada where the temperatures have been sub zero for many months now, a chance to go out into the garage and get some stuff primed in above zero temperatures is just too great an event.

WIP Aphid and Locust under construction

 

Aphid

So, I have had these models for a few years now and they have remained boxed all that time. But this year I have finally got around to them. The are from Things from the Basement by way of 4Ground. As per many 4Ground models they are pre-coloured so limited painting will be required. However unlike 4Ground they were a breeze to build! The instructions lack a lot of words but lots of pictures. For the most part it really was very easy to build these. This set also came with 3D printed guns and cord for the railings.

So, this is mostly done, all that is left is to paint the guns and add the railings. Also I will need to do a bit of weathering/touch ups. I think I will have to wash the deck to add some depth.
 

Also in the shipyard is this Locust class gun boat, a variant of the Aphid but with extra weapons. There is another 4 pounder on a platform aft of the bridge and 2 Hales rockets mounted forward.

Been doing a bit of model making lately

 

So, I am taking advantage of some new found inspiration to tackle the back log of unfinished kits that I have accumulated. Now some of these items were pretty simple builds, 4 walls and 2 roof sections. But, they were items that had just been lying around gathering dust so really needed to get unboxed and built! Some of these items were a more intense building experience like the small black flyer, it was not a lot of fun to build.

As you can see it is quite a mixed collection of stuff from VSF to medieval to 1930's pulp. Right now I have to content myself with building these things as it is a trifle to cold outside these days (-14C to -20C) to prime. I am waiting for a warmer cold day to prime.  

So for now lets see how much I can assemble!

WIP courtesy of a recent Hobby Day

 

Some ghostly hounds

So, we had a Hobby Day this past weekend. Six of us got together in my basement to work on various projects, with very little overlap. I was not very focused but I feel I was fairly successful. I managed to make some progress on some barrow downs, some Dwarf leader figures for Fantastic Battles and even started painting some new Ninja warriors.

3D printed barrows

Contrast/Speed/Xpress paint experiment.

 

So they are done. These were mostly painted with contrast/speed/xpress paints. A few more conventional paints were used, the banner poles and the metal weapons were done with regular paints.

The banners came from the old GW ship to ship game Man o War. They were to have been placed on small scale ships but worked fine here.

As I look at the pics I see that I forgot to apply a wash over the fletching on the arrows. Anyways I think the contrast style paints worked out well, and was quick to do. I particularly liked how the faces worked out with so little effort.

New year new project(s)

Currently working on refining my Fantastic Battles Dwarf army. Last year(?) I finally got around to painting some very old RAFM Roman Dwarves. These fellows really did not fit with my existing Dwarves for Warhammer so they were a perfect choice to be dedicated figures for Fantastic Battles. So I had painted them in three easy to identify colours and based them on 60mm x 60mm bases.

Well I knew then that I was not done with that army, but it has taken me a while to get back to it. As it stood there were only a bunch of foot troops and some heavy weapons stolen from the Warhammer army. It was time to correct this. This past Saturday some friends and I had a hobby day, a chance to get together to chit chat and work on stuff. So while I did spend some time building some Halfling forces for a future project I did trot out some Dwarf light archer fast infantry. This will be a better representation of a light troop for my Roman Dwarves, they will be auxiliary troops.

So I plan to have only 4 stands of these that can be field as 4 individual company/units or more likely as 2 units of 2 companies. The figures are Oathmark from Northstar. They are really nice simple figures, not too much extraneous details and so far have painted  nicely.

These have mostly been painted with contrast paints. I kind of like the bright colours but I will no doubt do a light wash on them at the end. Again the figures are quite nice and really convey the idea of light fast infantry with quite a few running poses.

 The box also has other weapons so I will be making more stands of light infantry, nut not fast light infantry.