Freebooter's Fate Painting Challenge

First new post on here for a while, but hopefully there will be an increase in activity over the next month or so as I launch into a new Painting Challenge.

If you have read my Pulp Citizen blog (click for link), you may recall that I have gone in for a few Painting Challenges, and they are useful for focusing my wandering attention I find.

Well recently I have taken the plunge into getting some of the gorgeous Freebooters Fate minis (settling on the Brotherhood as I like the assassin aesthetic), and my main gaming buddy Rob has some Pirates - so the only left was to ensure we get around to painting them.

Consequently we have decided to set July as our Freebooters Fate Painting Challenge! The goal is simple: paint one mini per week to create a Crew of at least 4 minis by the end of the month. Now with the speed Rob paints at, I suspect he will be fine, but hopefully I will deliver on my end of the Challenge.

The deadlines are each Sunday - the 7th, 14th, 21st and 28th, so stay tuned!

Anima Tactician (shameless plug)

A quick shameless plug for one of my other blogs: Anima Tactician.

Anima Tactician (link) is Anima Tactics-centric; therefore the content is all about my forays into that game and related topics.

Anima Tactics is a tabletop minis game, using a pretty low model count, and clearly influenced by Japanese console rpgs such as Final Fantasy, Suikoden, Breath of Fire et al.

So far I have painted 13 minis for the game (having kicked off my painting in earnest late last year), and I hope to get that to around 30-40 by the end of this year - eventually I would like to have at least one painted example of every mini in the range.

So please come across and check out the blog as I stumble through what is for me a fairly new hobby diversion.

Modular Buildings and Ruins for Wargamers Kickstarter

I only stumbled on this Kickstarter yesterday, but it may be of interest to WWII/weird WWII gamers in various scales (15mm;20mm; 28mm).

Link

The demo video is here (just over 3 minutes; not the most polished video, but the project is explained and outlined):

Quarter 1 2013 Painting Summary

Click to enlargify

Just a quick post to summarize what I have painted so far this year. As you may recall, I did not paint much last year (24 minis in total), so one thing I wanted to do was get a lot more than that painted this year.

In the year before that I painted 32 minis. This year I want to do at least 40 minis, preferably closer to 50.

I have undertaken a couple of painting challenges already which has helped, and will no doubt be engaging in Zomtober with Rob and others (Brummie - you up for it?), so there will be at least 4-5 Zombies penciled in for October, so 50 does not sound impossible, but it can only be achieved if I hit a target of around 4-5 minis per month, and around 12-14 per quarter as a minimum. And thankfully, despite a lean February, I have hit that so far for Quarter 1!

Those minis (I used fotor.com to make the collage; nice and easy):
(clockwise from top left)
Lostaroth Marchosias (Anima Tactics)
Aqua (Anima Tactics)
Bella (Anima Tactics)
Sarah Reindhold (Anima Tactics)
Captain Hadron & Mini Hadron (Pulp City)
Hadrons (group shot)
Lorenzo (Anima Tactics)
Hendybadger (a friend's commission sculpt)
Wissenschaft Agent (Anima Tactics)
Drake (Anima Tactics)
Doc Cosmos (my commission sculpt)
Zombie (you can never have too many Zombies)

(centre)
Giant Hadron (Pulp City)

For a grand total of 13 minis - yay! Now onward into Quarter 2...

Another Zombie

Hey it has been a while!; another Zombie and it isn't even Zomtober (and no doubt there will be another Zomtober! Maybe I could make a suitable logo for Zomtober 2013? But I digress...).

Anyhow, I have recently been painting quite a bit of Anima Tactics (as can be seen on my Anima Tactics blog here) and a bit of stuff for Pulp City like my Hadrons (which can be seen here on my Pulp City blog), and I thought I needed to do something else.

Time for a zed then. Well I tackled one and found I am a bit rusty at painting my Zombie flesh recipe; I also tried a different wash (Army Painter Soft Tone; back to Devlan Mud for as long as my stash lasts...), and I was trying out my new Lava Orange from Army Painter. A great base orange, but I need to work out how to work with it, both shading/washing and highlighting. In the mean-time it is another Zombie done, and will have two more with the orange colour theme to continue my Zombie threesomes. Oo-er - that sounds worse than I meant it to!

The red around the neck wound is a mix of TCR and Secret Weapon ruby red; the glossiness will go (I hope) when the Purity Seal is applied. When the darn weather permits...

The mini is from Hasslefree, but not sculpted by Kev White as far as I know - not sure who the sculptor is. I prefer the Studio Minis ones generally speaking, but if I ever paint all my Zeds, at least they should be varied!

Stone Totem Head

This was kindly crafted by TWT (his blog is here), who bundled it with some other stuff for me.

I painted it to approximately match the big heads I got from my aquarium shop. Basically greys dry-brushed with a mix of washes in brown, green and grey.

I can see this (and maybe others, hint, hint!) as a warning totem in a remote jungle, perhaps on Resurrection Island.

The mini was from What The? and is used for scale (with 30mm base).

Thanks a lot TWT - very much appreciated!

Plast Craft Kits

Click to embiggen

I recently bought some kits from Plat Craft, a Spanish company that is producing gaming-terrain kits using foamed PVC (makes a change from MDF!).

These are the first things I bought and I thought I would briefly outline my initial impressions, with more insights when they are eventually built.

The kits I picked up were: (2 x) Torii Gate; Fukei Bridge 2; Sci-fi big container. It was the Torii gate that led me to Plast Craft as a manufacturer.

Pros/plus points:

• Cheap as chips. I think these are a bargain price as long as you understand what you are getting (see Downsides).
• Simple construction; they all have instructions which are clear.
• Quick turnaround of order by Plast Craft.
• Interesting ranges.

Downsides:

• Lack of surface detail; foamed PVC is not a straight alternative to MDF, so the shapes are plain (possibly die-cut?) and will need work by the modeler to add any sense of texture.
• Photographs of the finished and painted pieces can therefore be misleading - especially the planking grain on the Fukei Bridge which does not exist on the product as manufactured.

Click to embiggen

So what I would suggest is judicious consideration of the products available, and asking yourself that if a lot of extra work is required to add texture (for example the need to create the effect of planking on the Fukei Bridge), then how cost-effective is it really since other options may be as cheap or cheaper (e.g. scratch build), with the time factor being a big issue in decision-making.

Before building some of these, I would suggest that some represent excellent value for money, but anything that appears to have a lot of texture would probably necessitate a lot of work so buy with caution.