Wargaming Girl

As predicted, this submission took me very close to the wire yesterday - it was just before midnight that I finished writing the post, six hours before the deadline. If I hadn't stayed up working through Saturday night I wouldn't have got it done in time. Of course, if I hadn't spent so much time working on that backdrop then I wouldn't have been in such a rush at the end.

Full post here

Backdrop

Cargo

Figures

Small Scale Ships

Spirit of Camberwell

As you can see, I went a bit overboard with the weathering. I started off just trying to obscure the white edges of the decals and maybe add a couple of damage chips, but realised that some of my sponge dabs were a bit too large and heavy. So, I needed to add lots of smaller, lighter dabs to obscure the heavy ones. Then I tried softening them with a thin airbrush coat of the orange base colour and airbrushed streaks with a dark brown...

...and completely forgot to do any weathering on the landing gear!

Still it doesn't look as bad as I thought, and at least the orange isn't quite so lurid now. Mind you, I could probably have got that with just the dark brown streaking.

My 9th entry in this year's Challenge was this crate, which I had painted up in the style of Piet Mondrian for the "Arthouse" studio. The crate itself is a 3D print scaled up to 200% of the original size - it measures 2" x 42 x 2". As it counts as terrain, it only scored 1.5 points - fortunately the 20 bonus points for the studio made up for that.

Full post here

This entry also meant that I had completed the four Blue Zone studios I needed to enter the Director's Chair studio, where Curt will set me some fiendish task...

 I didn't get quite as far as I'd hoped to this week, but still managed to get two entries submitted. Only three figures, but next week should see a much bigger points grab.

Entry # 4 - Ralph & Rosie

This pair of bold adventurers are from Artizan's Thrilling Tales range, and were submitted for the "High Adventure" studio, completing the four studios I needed to visit to move onto the Blue zone.

Full post here

Entry #5 - Rebecca Cameron

This is another Thrilling Tales figure which I submitted for the Westerns studio, my first in the Blue zone.

Full post here

The next studio in the Blue zone is "Swords & Sandals" - I should have the figures done for that this week - rather a lot of 15mm cavalry. If all goes well, I might also have an entry in for the studio after that - Fantasy.

You may remember me telling you that I'd been printing some sample figures for the guys from the podcast to try out. I decided that I might as well paint up one of them myself, and picked the Celt warrior (the other options were a Roman legionary, a Greek hoplite and a Persian kardakes). There is a separate shield that goes with the figure, but I decided to leave that off.

Oh, and I didn't notice the blue paint on his left wrist/hand until I was resizing the photos for the blog - not when I was painting it, not when I varnished it and not when I was taking the photos!

Because of the layer lines, washes weren't going to be an option - they'd tend to pool in the recesses. With that in mind, I primed the figure black, then did a white zenithal prime to help me identify the highlights and shadows for the next step - applying a purple pre-shade to the shadows and pale flesh to the highest highlights of the flesh.

I then built the flesh up using thin layers. I did also do a bit of wet blending to smooth out the transitions from the deepest shadows.

The trousers were also done by layering. For the metals, I decided to have another go at non-metallic metal - it didn't come out too badly, but I need a lot more practice to get it right; the steel certainly looks better than the gold/brass/bronze.

And they're done. That's the last of the Waffen SS figures for now. I suppose at some point I will get around to finishing off the bases (and those of the British Airborne at the same time).

Senior Leader

The original highlights on the leather coat looked a bit too stark, so I toned them down with a black glaze.

I've started work on the last two (for now) Waffen SS figures. They should be quite quick to paint as they don't have any of the fussy details that the grunts did. 

Should be - but not having to paint all the camo and all of the different bits of equipment has allowed me to focus some extra attention on the leather coats.

3D Printing

Drinks machines, Portaloos (2 scales), restaurant booths, vehicle chargers

Hover car, jet bikes and a very small ship

As you can see, I've been quite busy with the 3D printer. With the portaloos the initial set I printed seemed too small, so I resized them to 130%. At least I thought I had - it turned out that I'd only resized the closed ones. I then did another run with them all resized.

I also finally managed to print the three jet bikes at 150% size to fit in better with Judge Dredd minis.

These ended up taking me a few days longer to finish than planned. For a start, I've had a really bad cold which made me not want to paint for a couple of days. I've also been having an issue with my 3D printing - my current roll of filament seems to have been very badly spooled and keeps tangling, which means I have to keep checking on it to clear any tangles before they cause a failed print.

But done they are, so here are the pics:

MG42 Teams

Riflemen

And a final photo of the squad with their NCO (painted a while ago):

This leaves me with just two officer figures to paint (for now) plus the AFVs to finish off.