Category Archives: Work in Progress

From the Painting Desk #4 – Gorillas, Elves, Zombies and Scenery

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So with the paint enthusiasm seemingly on the go right now – for another couple of days at least – here’s the stuff I’m working on right now. You’ll notice that those bloody Mantic Ogre Shooters have been temporarily put to the side. The lack of pleasure I was getting from painting them certainly affected my enthusiasm, so I figure a short break from them should help me come back to them somewhat refreshed in a little while. Once those six are finished, I’ll be able to start on the FUN Ogre stuff! Or the Chariots. Those are less fun.

Axis Gorillaz (feat. Damon Albarn)

Anyway, finishing the DUST Zombies recently got the next few boxes of DUST stuff opened – Axis Gorillas! That’s another three boxes disposed of (cleaned up!)

Swordmasters of Hoeth WIP on a temporary regiment base.

My recent games of Kings of War (BetRep to follow sometime in the next week, hopefully-maybe, caused me to start on a unit of Swordmasters of Hoeth, which I guess would be Palace Guard in the KoW Elf army, but is standing in for Twilight Kin Darksome Guard right now. Whatever. They’re Elves! The best part of these (so far) is that they were completely unpainted just a week ago. At the glacial pace I paint, getting to this point is pretty amazing. The basing has set me back 2 or 3 days, since it’s slow, unfun and tedious. (Hi, Cash!)

Basing almost complete. Then crests and boots!

I’m painting them up a little different to other High Elf armies I’ve seen. I’ve had a small collection of unpainted WFB High Elves for 15-18 years, but never had the enthusiasm or a reason to paint them. Ever since The Burning Crusade was released for World of Warcraft, I knew how I wanted to (eventually) paint my High Elves – as Blood Elves rather then the typical White/Blue/Silver with Gold & Red accents most HE armies are painted in. So I’m going Red/Yellow/Gold with Silver and Green accents. It’s giving them a nice autumnal feel, as well as regal & rich – though obviously the colours are highly saturated.

Zombies!

Next up we have some zombies from WarZone, circa the early 1990’s. These would have been purchased during the file sale phase after WarZone 2nd Ed managed to kill our local enthusiasm for the game, and Heartbreaker started to crash and burn. I never actually played Dark Legion, but regardless was willing to pick up a couple of blisters (I’m guessing 2 or 3, since I have 10 figures here?) on closeout. I basecoated the flesh on these about 8(?) months ago when I started assembling my Studion Miniatures IGG KS figures, but like so many projects over the years, (Ogre Shooters!) they got shoved to the side. The initial plan was to use Army Painted dip on them (and the others) but since the DUST Zombies went together just fine and quick using the AP washes, I’m going in that direction with these instead. They have more details and individuality than the DUST figures – and lots more exposed skin, bone and viscera, but I’m still hoping to have them finished in a couple of days. Again, these are more likely to see the tabletop in 40k working alongside Typhus then a WarZone game, but painted is painted, and they can work across several games.

Some DUST Campaigns

Also inspired by wanting to clean stuff up, I decided to unbox these two of my DUST campaign box expansions. Seelowe because of the Character-model Gorilla inside (who you can see above in the background of the Gorilla pic), and Icarus for the Quonset huts, which I figured I could paint reasonably quickly. All of the rest of the contents got shovelled into the DUST Core box set.

Quonset Huts from DUST.

Considering that these have only been out of their box for about 14 hours, (including my sleep overnight) they’re not doing too badly. Hoping to finish them today, and varnish overnight/tomorrow. I might even buy some more, since they’re good looking, cheap and effective!

And that’s it for this quick WIP post. I’ll update again when some of it is finished!

The Games Room – An Unexpected (that it’s finally happening) Journey

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The Room, she is filled with the junk!

Aside from the big spring cleaning in summer project we’ve been doing here, the other thing that we’ve been working hard on was to turn the shed from a junk room filled with boxes and random shit into a games room – which was a long-term aim of the space from when we moved in. In the last two weeks, and with a bit of help from a friend, we’ve done an awful lot towards that goal. (Including putting that trellis up outside!) Regular readers might recall this pic from a couple of posts ago:

So rather than rattle on with talking about, I’ll just show off the efforts of the last couple of weeks (the heatwave set us back about a week through lost daytime worktime, exhaustion and lost sleep)

Still lots of Junk…

See what I mean?

See that board on the left?

Too bloody right! That’s shelving, me lad!

Yep, that’s the games table (top)!

A dry run – to see how it looks.

The Lord and Master – Leonard approves.

Moved some furniture around. Gamer’s Fridge FTW!

An almost cosy space…

There were a couple of transformative steps in the process so far. The first and most obvious one was when we got the shelving up on the right side of the room, which just sucked up a bunch of the large boxes that need to be kept off the floor (as well as a ton of stuff from inside the house). The second was after clearing much of the floor when I laid down the medium-sized rugs. Really warmed the room and made it almost cosy. We’ve since bought a large pile of cheap carpet tiles, which is going to require a fun full day of laying them while playing furniture Tetris. We also got some 6′ bookshelves to replace the shitty falling-apart MDF one we’ve had for about 20 years and a blank space. After that, one more shelf to go up to long-term store the detolf boxes (those long, 6′-odd cardboard boxes you can see on the left) and a couple of bike hooks on the wall to get them out of the way. Later there’ll be two more of the shelving units you can see in the above picture to replace a couple of cheap & nasty metal ones that want to slice open your hands.

Other than that, the desk at the window still needs to be cleared off and out so it can be used as a workbench for drilling and large terrain-type projects.

At that point it becomes about creature comforts. Maybe an old TV? A decent fan (or heater, once the weather turns), some speakers. Maybe some plants since I quite like the way they looked when we brought them in to shelter them from the direct heat(wave) when I took those pics. If there’s any space left after gaming junk storageland finishes, we might even be able to put a couple of nice things on display. Star Wars Kotos perhaps?

I’ve only done the smallest bit of painting. Started a few DUST Zombies, and did a little bit of work on some Dark Elves as well as painted some Secret Weapon scenery pieces. I even got to play a game in there! More to come on all that shortly.