The most wonderful time of the year!

I've been very scatter shot on my painting for the last couple of weeks (lots of Suicide Squad coming soon though...) but I wanted to show some non-painting I've been doing.

Last year in the late fall I first got into Frostgrave and joined a number of Frostgrave groups on Facebook.  One of the things that really stood out with the Frostgrave groups was how much they re-purposed non-miniature products as scenery.  Everything from birdhouses to aquarium features to Christmas village dioramas got used for Frostgrave.  Some of it wasn't great and it was obvious that the main appeal was that it was cheaper than conventional hobby scenery but some of worked really well.

The other day a friend of mine posted some street lamps that he had gotten and it made me think I should bust out some of the stuff I've acquired the past few months and share what (in my opinion) cool stuff can be had on a budget.

First up the thing that really got me to start considering this a year ago; trees.  There are loads of retailers that carry trees for Christmas village dioramas this time of year and last year I made the mistake of waiting too long to get some and by the time I circled around to it they were sold out everywhere.  This year my wife remembered that I had been trying to get some and one one of her trips to Michaels to get yarn got me a bag of trees.

This bag was $29.99 sticker price but basically went on to the shelf marked at 50% off so it actually cost $15.

Here are all the trees spread out and to give you some idea, those small trees in front are basically 1" tall so this is a lot of trees for the money.  I'm pretty sure that anything short of a full forest on a 3'x3' table can be done with one bag of these trees.

Also given that I play the undead for most fantasy games I figured Halloween clearances might have some options for me and they did not disappoint.  Again Michaels was the big winner with coffins, headstones and a cemetery fence (not shown).  Unfortunately I left the fence (which is really cool) at a friend's house so I don't have it to show off.

These packs were $5.99 at full price but by the time I bought them they were 60% or 75% off (I can't remember) so for some scatter terrain they're pretty good.

The only downside with the Halloween pieces is that they are a little big (only just a little) and they're unique looking enough that buying multiple packs isn't as appealing as for the trees.

Last but not least back to the place I started.  When I saw Tod's street lamps and I had just gotten the Suicide Squad starter for Batman which means I need a pile of street lamps.  Unfortunately by the time I decided to grab some my local Michaels was sold out but my daughter wanted a few things from the Dollarama and they had some lamps that look perfect to me.

These were $2 per pack (so super cheap!) and to be honest the reason I only bought 5 packs is because they only had 5 in-stock.  When I'm on the road over the next week or two I'm going to hit up other Dollaramas in my area and see if I can find more.

Well there you have it.  I think this stuff works great and it was really inexpensive which leaves more money for toy soldiers.

-Jay



  

My first figures for Wolsung SSG

Today I painted the starter box for the Inventors faction for Wolsung SSG.

Wolsung is a steampunk-fantasy-skirmish game that I would say falls halfway between Malifaux and Warmachine in terms of being low vs. high fantasy.  Wolsung feels a lot more grounded than either of those other systems but also includes 'classic' fantasy races (elves, dwarves, gnomes...especially gnomes, etc).  I just downloaded the free rules from Micro Arts Studio's website so I don't know much about it mechanically yet but I know it looks cool.

I started off by painting the Inventors starter box and that's probably exactly what I'll use in my first game.  I have three more single figures (and another one on order) I can paint once I've had some time to digest the rules and figure out what next should look like.

The leader of my inventors team is Thorvald Nielsgaard.  As far as I can tell the two most important things about Thorvald are that he has a giant punchy-fist and that he's Scandi-weigan.

Next up is Alice Tinkerly.  What's funny to me about Alice is that when you collect miniatures you buy a lot of similar stuff (I own multiple lines of space cops for example) but usually that's because it plays to one of your interests.  Somehow unintentionally I've ended up with at least four different steampunk-lady-mechanics for four different systems.

There is also an unnamed lab assistant who seems to be posed like a left-handed baseball pitcher.  The lab assistant also allows me to bring the purple-drank into another one of my miniature collections.

Last but definitely not least are the models that made me choose the Inventors as my starter; the lab golems.  To be honest when I first looked at the box I assumed they were Tuxedo-bots which just seemed like the coolest thing ever.

The other thing I'm stoked about with the Wolfsung figures is that some of my friends keep talking about playing Through The Breech and all of these figures would work for that as well.

It's super-humid outside today so my next choice of paint project will be based on whatever is already primed on my desk.

-Jay