28mm and 40mm scale painting and building, projects, tutorials and tips. Visit my links, too; Lots of good fun to be found on the Internet!
Well, these aren't exactly historically accurate but were inspired by 19th Century sail yachts/boats. They were fun to make, fun to paint, and look striking on the table -- they are about 70mm tall to the top of the masts. Made from scraps of bass wood, brass wire, and string. Waves sculpted from green stuff, and mounted on oval bases from Proxie Models. This isn't actually the entire collection;…
A polacca through it's first stages before basing, priming, and painting. A little houy. I finished assembling and rigging a few more ships including a little houy, a whaling brig, a polacca, as well as a a couple brigs and a frigate from Warlords Black Seas game. Up close, these models are obviously not detailed, but rigged and painted and put on a pretty base, I think they look rather nice on…
My wife and I picked up the then-unknown-to-us 3M game "Regatta" (1968) a few years ago at an antique shop. And after playing it, we instantly fell in love with it; movement is based on wind direction, the components are top-notch (metal boats and buoys, and great island terrain), it's a tiny easy-to-teach ruleset, and fun to play with larger groups (we bought a second copy and have had up to 10…
I haven't actually played it yet, but I've seen the videos, read the rules, and it looks fun. Not only that, but I already have a sizeable collection of painted samurai to use! The only problem is that Senjutsu is in 30mm and I have 40mm. No worries, I'll build my own terrain! The battle board was mapped out using isometric graph paper to set the grid, then it was cut out of a piece of 1/2" (paper…
I finished painting a few more civilian figures for my 40mm Japanese collection. These are, from left, a well-to-do traveller, and famous adventurers Yaji and Kita. Who are Yaji and Kita? They are the main characters if the story of Tōkaidōchū Hizakurige, a comic serial/novel written by Jippensha Ikku from 1802 to 1822. The stories of the duo take place during their pilgrimage from Edo to Kyoto,…
Test of Honour requires at least 2 or 3 buildings for many of the missions (and the core game does come with some flats to represent buildings and terrain,) but I game in 40mm, and there are not a lot of 40mm building options. So I build my own. Here are a couple new structures I've added. They were straightforward to build -- I used matt board with a pebbled texture (it was sold that way),…
We played a few more battles this weekend. Nothing to report, but here are a few images from that game. The miniatures, by the way, are from Steve Barber Models. Most of mine have been heavily converted, but even the out-of-the-box sculpts are great and easy to paint. They also make for a great-looking game. Mechanics-wise, we decided not to change the measurements (since the game is scaled for…
One of the things we lacked for our first Test of Honour game were proper group bases. In the game, you can take figures for your force as either individuals or in groups to help increase strength and durability. The game is meant to be played at 28mm, and there are pre-cut group bases available. But my games are at 40mm scale, so I needed to make my own. They were quite easy to make and only took…
A few years ago, I got the cool job of illustrating the tabletop wargame "Test of Honour" (2nd edition.) I found the first edition in a search of rules to use with my 40mm samurai collection from Steve Barber Models, which led me to the illustration job. Last weekend, I finally played the game and had loads of fun! My friend Adam and I were only planning on doing one -- maybe two -- battles, but…
Last Christmas, I couldn't resist getting some Star Wars Legion minis -- My wife and I don't play SW Legion, but we do play Zombicide Invader. So we've got these two teams (plus one more yet unpainted) to use as alternative survivors for the game (I still need to make custom cards!) My wife had fun painting all the Mandalorians (except Boba Fett who I got to paint), and I enjoyed painting the…
My wife and I painted up a couple new Dreadball teams to play! She did a great job with a full team of mechanites -- The Loose Cogs. I assembled them for her, and expected to help out painting a few, but she took over and did a great job. She did it all: She "built" each team member on paper; organized her strikers, jacks and guards; and chose colors to reflect that organization (mostly green are…
Like many people, I entered the hobby with Warhammer (for me, it was 40K first edition in the summer of 1987 -- the old Rogue Trader edition -- damn, I loved that book and don't know where it went.) Eventually, I sold my 40K Imperial Guard and Space Marines and switched over to Warhammer fantasy (using the old orange book.) I still have much of my Warhammer Empire army boxed up, still needing some…
Here are most of the minions from the Conan game. These also represent the first collaborative/assembly line-painted minis between my wife and me (with a couple exceptions, such as with the Aesir and frost giant ((by my wife)) and the Stygian assassins ((by me)).
This is by far our (the wife and me) largest project -- the Conan board game by Monolith. We've been painting the figures on-and-off among our many other projects since the game arrived the same year my wife and I met. We've completed all the minis in the core and King's pledge boxes. We're still working on figures form the expansions. By which I mean I'm still working on figures from the…
Okko is the most recent game that we have started painting. By "we" I mean Elizabeth -- my wife. I got lucky finding her. She is a monster (in a good way) at the painting table -- with a better paint-work ethic than me. We've divided up the figures between us to lighten the load, and she has finished most of hers from the previous games mentioned earlier on this blog -- so she's moved on to Okko,…
Hate was a game I didn't think my wife would enjoy. It was one I had been waiting for since it was announced during the Zombicide Black Plague kickstarter campaign. My original intent was to get the core game so I could use all those barbarians in Black Plague (as well as forces for various fantasy skirmish games.) "But, Carmen, Hate IS a skirmish game!" Yep -- and my wife and I played it…
Zombicide Invader was the first Zombicide Kickstarter my wife and I decided to get, and the painting seems to have gone a little faster with this one. We have a majority of the survivors finished, but still have plenty of xenos and abominations to complete. This isn't everything, just the most recently finished figures. I've also included the bots, sentry guns, and some custom objective markers…
This was the first Kickstarter game my wife and I chose together. She was into the Victorian theme whereas I just enjoyed the sheer freakiness of the whole ensemble. We're still painting it on and off; we haven't played it in a long while, but I think we're getting close to finished with it. I already posted a huge array of what we finished in our first bout with the game a couple years ago (3…
My wife, Elizabeth, and I have been painting'a'plenty these past few months. And since I've started (trying to) return to this blog, I've lost the habit of photographing everything we paint. But I had a freee day today and spent the time photographing a hell of a lot of stuff -- not hundreds, but enough to make a few posts. The next few posts will be simple gallery posts -- one for each game the…
When you buy one of these, you get all of this! Such a great figure from Steve Barber Models, this one kit can be used to build several variations of a jousting knight (at the 40mm scale). I commissioned this piece a year or two ago and was not disappointed with what Steve sculpted for me. (By the way, need a mini sculpted? Steve Barber has a commission service that has very reasonable prices, and…
My wife and I have quite the board game collection, as well as a few tabletop miniatures games. She always says, rightly, that we shouldn't buy new games until we've played the old ones. So I've been looking through the old collection and finding all kinds of fun games that I have played (and that have graced this blog before), but that we BOTH have yet to play together: Space Hulk, Blood Bowl,…
I've owned Dreadball since the beginning, having backed the first Kickstarter campaign in 2011-12. I even posted some blog entries here as I painted the teams. I played it for the first time a couple weeks ago. When I met my wife, I learned that she loves co-op games, and enjoyed competitive games, but not necessarily "take-that" or fighting games. So I figured she wouldn't like Blood Bowl or…
Painting 5 o'clock shadow is easy: Paint the affected area gray. If you wish to highlight the shadow area, add a little bit of your base flesh color. Boom, Bob's your uncle... Hey, I actually do have an uncle "Bob." This technique can be used for 5 o'clock shadow as well as shaved heads (such as the pate on a samurai or the short growth on a monk.)
My wife wanted a painting to hang in her office, something grand, something big to fill a large space on one of the walls, something with a lot going on, or at least some details to be discovered. So I settled on a Mouse Guard theme, a series we both very much love. For our honeymoon, we went to Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario, and fell in love with the scenery, so I chose a vista from the…
This is old stuff, but I wanted to re-post it since I took a new photo of all of my terrain objective pieces together. I won't get into how I made all of these, but I believe the base sizes are 120mm, if you were thinking of having a go. I haven't added much to the collection in the past couple years, except for a couple new travellers, a samurai and a couple ashigaru, all of whom need to be…