Immortal Brush Entry 1: DONE!

Part 1 of my 3 part plan to enter Strategies Games & Hobbies Immortal Brush Tournament has gone according to plan (which is great because part 2 fell apart.. literally, more on that later).  I did some touch-ups and changed the colour of the body armour on 5 of my space fascists and I'm quite satisfied.

I added highlights to the eye-lenses on the gas masks, cleaned up the bases a bit and repainted the body armour a MUCH lighter shade of gray (Dawnstone vs Skavenblight Dinge).  The overall effect is quite striking but unfortunately doesn't photograph particularly well (still being multiple shades of gray).  This will now be my new paint scheme for my space fascists and when time presents itself I will be going back and bringing my other finished figs from this collection up to date with these colour changes.

I'm glad part 1 went well because as I mentioned part 2 fell apart, those Celt figures actually fell apart while they were sitting untouched on my painting table.  I had assembled 3 units last week (5 Celts, 5 Sanguinary Guard and 6 new Greatcoat troopers) and when I came home from work that night I found them standing stock still with various arms, weapons and upper torsos just lying next to them.  The culprit appears to be my plastic cement because all the damaged figures had globs of the stuff crusted on the busted joints but none of it appears to have actually melted and fused the plastic.

I'm undecided at this point if I'm going to build another 5 Celts using a different glue, or if I might just pick a different unit altogether.

Stay tuned and find out!

-Jay

Hobby Grab Bag - Painting Contest & Another Blood Angel!

Hi all,

I've been a bit scatter shot hobby-wise again but I'm doing 2 (maybe 3) projects with a hard deadline of October 1st.

I've decided to participate in the Immortal Brush Competition at Strategies Games & Hobbies in Vancouver BC.  I'll be entering 2 categories for sure (5 man squad sci-fi/modern and 5 man squad fantasy/historical) and hopefully a 3rd (one of the large model categories time permitting).

For my sci-fi/modern entry I've decided to go a slightly different route than usual.  I'm going to take some figs that I speed painted awhile back and fix them up to a higher standard of painting.  I'll be starting with 5 of my space fascists from Wargames Factory's Greatcoat Troopers box.  I've been planning on these multi-use figures standing in for Bauhaus in Warzone and Viridians in VOID/Urban War, they could also work as Imperial Guard in Warhammer 40,000.
The picture below is how they looked when I pulled them out of my figure case this morning...not bad but definitely not paint contest worthy.  They'll probably get finished first because they represent the least amount of work.

Next up are 5 Celt Warriors from Warlord Games Celts box.  I've wanted to do historical gaming of this era forever but the amount of stuff I would have to paint has always seemed quite daunting.  Lately a few of my friends have discovered some skirmish level games that might work so and old idea has become new again!  These will get done second because I do want to get them finished and I think my best shot in a paint competition will always be "unit" categories because that doesn't seem to be where the elite painters enter.

And last up I am 90% done my next Blood Angel, the Librarian from Space Hulk.  This is just a continuation of my ongoing effort to get an actual Blood Angels army done in 2013.  I might actually also use the large model category in the painting competition to get a larger Blood Angels model done (like a dreadnought) but if that's the case I'll definitely have to run out and buy one this week.

There you have it, bit of a mess but I'm enjoying it!

-Jay

Yet another source for Space Cops (atleast 1 space cop)

In my never ending goal to bring order to an assortment of dark futures I've collected alot of different space cop forces (Judges, Arbites, Enforcers, etc) but in almost every case those figure ranges tend to be smaller than normal for an "army" sized game.  This frequently leads to looking about through other ranges for figures that look like they fit in to fill rolls not already represented by miniatures.

As I've been working on my new Enforcers I've gone through my older figures looking for figs I had aquired with the intention of integrating them into my collection.  A few years ago there were a number of  fan written lists for Arbites armies in 40K and one of the character options that kept turning up was a Detective or Inspector of some sort.

The old VOID miniature range had alot of excellent models (I highly recomend checking it out if you're looking for sci-fi RPG figures) and one of them seemed perfectly suited to what I needed.  She's more lightly armoured than the main Arbites/Enforcer figures and her armour and bodysuit look a little more advanced than Imperial technology but I definitely think she works and until my conversion skills improve substantially she's as close as I'll get to a Shira Calpurnia miniature.

Oh, and don't forget; Dredd is out on Blu-Ray and DVD in 4 more days :)

-Jay

A futuristic female cop who DOESN'T look like Cassandra Anderson

 

More sci-fi RPG miniatures.

As work continues on miniatures for my upcoming Fallout game it's made me a little nostalgic for days gone by and I decided to dig out a few more figures I had done for RPG and skirmish gaming that do a great job of highlighting the fact that you can often find exactly the right figure when you look a little bit outside the box.

My first 3 figures were used in 3 completely different role-playing games.  First up was my character from a D20 Star Wars RPG game.  He was basically a military character who's background was that he had washed out of Stormtrooper trainning and was now a freelance merc.  The figure is from the VOID miniature line.  Due to an extremely lucky decision to purchase exactly the right item before the finale of our first game session he cemented his position as the combat master in our group.
The second character is a figure I painted for a friend of mine to use in a dark-gothic-future RPG setting.  I needed a female gang-member with an oversized pistol and this miniature from Wargames Foundry's 2000A.D. line fit the bill perfectly.  I had gotten her as part of a bundle deal from Wargames Foundry and always wanted to paint her but until this particular game never really had  use for her.
The final figure in our first group shot was my character from a different RPG set in the same dark-gothic-future universe.  He is a Heroclix model from the Giant-Sized X-Men set.  In his case all I really did was touch up the main body of the figure and repaint the head, other than that he was good to go right out of the package.

The second group is a batch of Heroclix re-paints/touch-ups I had done in preparation for a Gamma World game I was planning to run before my group requested that I run a fantasy RPG instead....so maybe there will be some fantasy RPG characters coming to the blog soon.....

Thanks for visiting

-Jay

Figures from; VOID, Foundry & Heroclix.  Re-purposed as RPG player-character models.

 

Still waiting for a game to use these in......