QuickPic - Hundred Years Project

I just snapped this photo a few minutes ago of some 15mm Hundred Years War miniatures by Corvus Belli. These guys are for my HYW: English army for the fast-play historical wargame, de Bellis Antiquitatis. I have an element of four billmen almost fully painted and ready for basing, after which I'll have finished all of the support and optional pieces for the army. Not too shabby considering it's only taken me, um... 3+ years to get this far. :)

Next up will be six elements of deadly accurate longbowman who form the core of the army. I then plan on painting the three elements of mounted knights and their dismounted counterparts. Finally I'll wrap things up with a camp and possibly a separate element of camp followers, though I might model them as part of the camp itself. Since I'm saving that for last, however, I have plenty of time to think it over.

Happy painting and gaming... goodnight!

A Very Good Year

Welcome to the final posting of 2009 as we are now only about an hour or so from the new year. It's been a great year for me personally and I look forward to 2010 being even better still. I'm so happy and joyful in my life that I don't really know how things can improve, but I'm confident that the Tao will provide all that I could need or want in the coming year. Hopefully that will include lots of 40k madness and paint-splattering fun... but I'll wait until tomorrow before going into resolutions, plans, goals, and such. For now I just want to celebrate the year that was.

It was kinda frustrating for a while when I drifted away from painting for those several months, although I am thrilled to be back at it. I don't know for sure why I burned out yet again on the historical miniatures because I did enjoy painting my Hundred Years War army. Regardless, I am happy that I did not let my pride prevent me from returning to 40k, despite what must have been my third or fourth time swearing off Games Workshop, as it has been a lot of fun returning to the game that has sustained my interest for so many years. Considering the limited opportunities I get to actually play these games, it is certainly more rewarding to focus my hobby efforts on that which really inspires my imagination. I find history incredibly inspiring and is one of the true passions of my life, I've just never felt free enough with historical miniatures to let my imagination run wild the way it can with a fictional universe set 38,000 years in the future. With such wide open territory, it just feels like there's more room to make the hobby mine.

Even though it took a few tries, it feels good to have finally gotten into the actual painting of an army. I spent a lot of time assembling dudes for a number of different armies this year, ones which hopefully won't have too much longer to wait. Looking back I should have probably gotten painting them, any of them, months ago and not worried so much about building to a particular list. I am therefore thankful that my wife encouraged me to register for AdeptiCon as that really was the motivation I needed to get me going on my Dark Angels. The Dreadnought, by the way, is now fully assembled and primed. I even was able to get some painting done tonight and so that is now officially underway. Woo-hoo!

Okay, I think I'm boring the wife right now and had better be wrapping it up. Besides, I don't want to ring in the New Year with the sound of typing as I stare at my computer screen. Regardless of the quality of my year-end review, it's time to move on and prepare for what is still to come. All I'm really trying to say is that it's been a really great year for me, and I hope it has been for you as well. Happy New Year!

Return of the Dark Ages

This morning after rolling out the trash I checked the mailbox and inside was a box of miniatures. Sweet! The package contained my recent order of Old Glory 15mm Franks and Berbers. After some initial research I decided that my Andalusian army needed some Berber javelinmen to go along with the Arab infantry. With the pack that arrived I now have all the miniatures that I want to use for an all-option III/34ab Andalusian DBA army. Along with the packs of Carolingian Franks that I ordered, I'm now set for putting together my first matched pair of Dark Ages armies. I'm excited about delving into a new time period as I have never really spent much time studying and learning about the Dark Ages. I've always been such a fan of the classical period that anything after the fall of Rome held little interest for me until arriving at the later medieval era (Hastings was usually my point of return). Two years ago I read a book about the four years surrounding Charlemagne's coronation by the Pope, but otherwise I have read almost nothing about this tumultuous time in human history. I appreciate the way my interest in history and wargaming nourish each other in that way. I have thus found this aspect of historical wargaming so much more satisfying than fantasy or sci-fi miniatures and games.

Today I was able to make good progress on the billmen as I finished the cloth areas including the two helmet covers. I'm overall pleased with the covers but I had some trouble getting the red part smooth on one of them though. If you look closely it appears a little clumpy but I don't think it's too bad to worry over. I might try to straighten the separation of the colors a bit but I'm satisfied to leave them alone for now. I also painted their shoes which means I can't delay any longer returning to their padded armor suits. I'm far enough along with these guys that I can now start to see the direction they're taking. And so far I think they look pretty good! Maybe with it being Fathers Day weekend I might even be able to finish them up this weekend. Maybe, just maybe....

Late Nights

Last night I painted for about ten minutes just before midnight. I had just made bottles for the night and as I was walking past my station little decided to put in some time with the brush before going to sleep. Even though it was less than fifteen minutes, my minimum daily goal, it was still productive time for me. I switched the base colors for one of the billmen's stockings and added the next layer of color to the red areas. It wasn't much but I'm happy that I didn't succumb to yesterday's funk and instead managed to find a way.

Concerning the aforementioned areas of red clothing, I am in fact a bit frustrated. I can't tell if they're brighter than when I painted the spearmen and crossbowmen. I have this nagging feeling that previously I had mixed some of the mid-color into the highlight rather than using the highlight color straight out of the paint pot. This is yet another reminder to myself as to why I need to not drift away from project. It is a timely warning too as I have found myself recently starting to think more and more about other armies which I want to paint. Don't get me wrong, I am thoroughly enjoying my HYW: English. It's just that my interests have shifted a bit since I first started them a year ago (and even longer than that since I first started researching them). Of course the cure for that would be a nice new book on the Hundred Years War to reignite my imagination a bit. As I am never one to scorn such prospects, I believe I have hit upon the right course.

Question of Color

I wasn't sure how much time I would have to paint tonight so I decided to focus on the cloth areas of the billmen. I thought it would be more fun to do something colorful rather than trying to paint thin black lines and muttering to myself in frustration. I ended up painting for thirty or forty minutes and am probably more than half done with them. I'm still trying to decide if I want to give cloth coverings to the two guys with the black helmets or if I should just make them metal colored. I'd go with metal if it weren't for the fact that I already painted some of the Gascon Brigans (1x3Sp) with covered helmets. It seems like it might look weird or out of place if that was the only base with brightly colored heads but I'm not yet entirely settled on it.

I've already simplified their color scheme as I had initially planned on painting the cloth areas in a more elaborate halved or quartered pattern. Instead I decided to just use solid colors but to at least vary them from section to section. For example, one guy now has one red stocking and one blue stocking rather than each stocking have both red and blue. Most likely I'll wait on making up my mind until the last possible moment so that I can get a better sense of how they'd look with or without the colorful hats. Right now though I feel like it would be a mistake to pass on colorful hats no matter the situation!

Zzzzzzzz

It's been a really long day and I'm exhausted so this will have to be a brief update. I started painting the billmen's padded armor this afternoon but I slipped up in a few areas and will have to blacken some of the recessed fold lines. Because of the tight space involved this means that I will then need to go back and repaint the base color of the armor again. Therefore this type of armor is kind of a pain in the butt for me to paint. I suspect that the next big batch of twenty four archers, all whom I believe are wearing this same sort of armor, could be a real challenge. Hopefully while working on these guys I will find a comfortable technique that makes it go a little quicker. Otherwise I'll just keep at it as I am now.

That's it. I'm going to sleep.

Billmen WIP and OG 15s

Painting is well underway with the English billmen as seen in the above photo. I overlooked the back half of two hilts but otherwise all the metal areas are done. This evening I spent time going back over the non-metal parts with black to clean things up for tomorrow's painting. Even though it can be a bit tedious, I feel that taking this extra step is really helping me achieve a much more defined look and crisper colors.

Yesterday my packs of Old Glory 15s arrived and it's been fun examining them. I've got to say that I am pretty darn impressed with them. I still think Corvus Belli and Xyston make better looking miniatures, but the Old Glory ones are certainly nothing at which to sneer. Most impressive so far is the variety of figures in each pack. Of the Andalusian Arabs that I ordered I've so far opened the Command and Arab Spearmen packs. The command bag has four different leaders and four different standard bearers, each consisting of two mounted figures and two on foot. There's even greater variety in the pack of spearmen which has nine different sculptures!

I'm confident that the Old Glory 15s are definitely good enough to justify purchasing an opposing set of Carolingian Franks which I am now planning out. Even though it's sort of impractical to assemble DBA armies with Old Glory packs, since you are likely to end up with a bunch of extra figures, it seems to me that they would be an excellent choice for other games like Big Battle DBA and FoG. Big Battle DBA for the Dark Ages sounds like it could be quite fun, not to mention a good use for my sixteen leftover Andalusian Arab Spearmen. But when I think about having to paint eighteen stands of Frankish knights, a total of fifty four men and the same number of horses as well, I still feel that normal sized DBA armies would keep me happy and content for this time period.

Summer Thunder

There's a strong thunderstorm heading for me so I might not be able to get all of this posted tonight should it knock out our power or internet. Therefore please forgive me if I have to finish this up tomorrow morning. I'm writing on my laptop so I'll be able to keep this up for as long as my battery lasts, I just don't know if I'll be able to post it right away.

Today I finally decided it was time to glue the group of archers to their base. For some reason I've really enjoyed just looking at them individually and, now that I'm painiting before gluing, I get a little nervous that I'm not going to get the arrangement right and therefore hesitate. My curiosity as to how they would look together became too strong however and I went ahead and took the plunge. Below is a photo of the archers, or 'Welsh bowmen' as I have decided to refer to them in order to distinguish them from the large block of archers that I still have to paint. Despite my worries, I continue to be very happy with how this element of the HYW English army is turning out.

As for painting, I was able to get most of the metal areas finished yesterday and will do the final highlight of silver today. I've noticed some areas of junk on the blades of their weapons that I believe to be due to poor conditions when I sprayed them with the black primer. Using spray paint has been a challange me for as long as I have been using it for applying the primer coat to my miniatures. I've lived almost my entire life in areas of high humidity and I've never seemed to work out through trial and error the best time to use spray paint. There has been improvement over the years but I still worry everytime I go to prime figures that I'm going to ruin them. If I ever figure it out I'll be sure to pass along any information or tips that I manage to gather, but until then I'm certainly open to advice.

It Could Be Good

Today I read the first 50 pages of the Field of Glory rulebook. So far I'm surprised by how much more I'm enjoying the book this time around and the rules system is genuinely intriguing. Although I haven't gotten to the combat mechanics, it seems to me that FoG may be the game that I had wanted DBM to be. I think it could be a lot of fun but I'm still not sure if I would want to commit myself to collecting these sized armies. However I can see how the collecting and army lists aspects of the game appeal to that area of wargaming that has so occupied me in the past with Warhammer and WH40K. If FoG helps permanently wean me off of Games Workshop then I think that would be a significant net positive.

I was on duty as parent for much of the day and the baby was intent on having lots of fun time with daddy. There's not much painting to report although I did get the base skin tone completed on the billmen. If I have extra time tomorrow I'd rather read more of the FoG book so I don't expect to do much painting, but of course I never seem to know.

My New Approach

This morning I was able to paint for what seemed like quite a long time uninterrupted, maybe around two hours or so. All that time I spent putting more color on the 25mm guy, but I now don’t think I’m going to continue with it any longer. I’m really not feeling the paint scheme and some of the detailed areas appear to be disappearing under too much paint. I still want to make a Barker Marker for my HYW army but I have decided that I can come up with something better than this.

As for the HYW English, I started work on those mold lines earlier tonight and was able to clean two of the four billmen before dinner. I imagine I should be able to get the other two prepped without too much trouble and (weather permitting) spray on the primer as well. In the past I think one of the things that kept me from being able to paint as much as I would have liked was preparation fatigue. My custom was to do all preparation work that I could for an entire army of figures in one go before I would be willing to start painting them. By the time I was finally ready to paint, far too often I was already burned out on the whole project. It was all that time cleaning off the mold lines… Agghhh!!! MOLD LINES!!!

Whoa, sorry about that. I’m alright now.

Okay, so I just wanted to say that I’m trying a different approach with this current army that I’m painting. I’m not doing any prep work on the figures until I am ready to paint them. I like the results so far as I’m getting to paint without sacrificing anymore of my sanity in the process by spending days on end scraping and filing. Also I don’t know if this will make it easier or not to dabble in side projects but I’m hopeful about that too. Whatever the case may be, I’m painting now and having fun so I must be doing something right.

Woo-Hoo!! Painted Archers!

Tired And Burned

The baby was very cooperative and took a nice long nap in the middle of the day, but instead of painting I went swimming again. Now I've got a nice pink burn and I've got that dazed, tired feeling you get from being in the sun. However I did squeeze in some painting this morning and a few extra minutes this evening. Not quite there but oh well. I still need to finish the belts and add one more highlight to the metal areas. After that I'll tidy things up and then be done. I might use a wash on the metals but I don't recall if I had been doing that on the earlier pieces, but I'll deal with that tomorrow.

In the photo below you can see an example of a finished (i.e., fully painted and based) element for the 15mm Hundred Years War - English army, the single unit of spearmen included in the army's list. I'm not sure exactly when I painted it but I believe it was around last October. A few days ago I decided I had to fix that stripe running down the guy on the right's helmet, but otherwise I haven't done anything else to them since I took this picture. I'm a lot happier with the corrected paint job as the stripe was supposed to just help delineate the separation of colors, but instead it seemed to me to assert itself and became a focal point. I'll take new photos of all the finished elements and I think the improvement should be pretty obvious.

Gascon Brigans

I'm really pleased with how well the bases have turned out so far. In particular I'm happy that it looks like their standing on the ground instead of each of them perched on their own little boulder. I've tried a lot of different ways to disguise the metal base that 15mm figures come on and this is the first one that has actually worked. Personally I think these guys look pretty sweet, but of course I am biased.

That's it, I'm tired and my body hurts. I'm going to sleep.

Any Day Now

Those archers are so close to being done that it's driving me nuts. All I've got left to paint are just a pair of belts and some small metal areas, although I will need to go back and tidy up some patches of skin and clothing. Oh yeah, and one dude's hair. That's it!

Now I just hope the baby is willing to cooperate tomorrow and snooze a bit. So please be very very quiet....

Cheap Paint Stands

Last summer while shopping for craft-type items for our wedding, my wife and I spent a fair amount of time searching through the mass of stuff at A. C. Moore, a large art-supply chain. I couldn't help but also check the aisles for anything that might be useful for painting miniatures or wargaming. As luck would have it I came across a bunch of these little paint pots sold in packets of a dozen. Inspiration struck me as I looked at them... they would make perfect stands for use in painting miniatures! I purchased two packs for I think less than a dollar each and set about looking for some sort of temporary adhesive to use with them. I've tried regular double-sided tape but was not impressed as it seemed to lack the strength needed for metal miniatures, even those as little as the 15mm scale ones. Fortunately I found some Scotch brand double-sided poster mounting tape that looked more rugged and thought it would at least be worth giving it a try. As it turned out the paint pots and mounting tape have worked out perfectly. That tape has a foam-like center so you can really jam a miniature's base tab down into it. The adhesive sticks very well to both metal and plastic but you can easily pop the figures off once they're complete.

It was the success of this method that really gave me the spark that I needed to begin painting again in earnest. In the past I painted 15mm miniatures (almost exclusively for DBA armies) after I had already glued them onto their base, typically in groups of two to four miniatures. This was mainly due to my desire to start playing even before I had things painted, although it also provided a nice handle for painting. However a few years ago I finally decided to try painting them separately and worry later about coming up with a workable way to texture and paint the bases. This was stymied though when I couldn't find a good way of holding onto the little buggers well enough to be able to paint them. But now that I'm using the paint pots and have a suitable basing method, I doubt that I will ever go back to my old ways. The quality of my painting has improved and even their bases look better too.

Even though they've appeared in my earlier Work-In-Progress photos, I have included two more shots of my painting stands in action as further illustration. I want to take new photos of my finished HYW English elements and so thought these shots below could in the meantime serve as a preview of the painting I did in the Summer and Fall of 2008.

Irish Kern and Gascon Crossbowmen

English Bombard and Crew

Archers WIP

Above is another WIP shot of the archer group, this one taken at the end of yesterday's painting. I had started off wanting each of the figures to have both individually colored shirts and hoods, but halfway through I decided it was too much. It seemed to me that if I had continued with that scheme that there would be simply too many colors in too small of an area, especially once I had based them together only a few millimeters apart. I therefore repainted the hoods on the figures with the red shirt and the green shirt to match that of the guy in blue. I'm happy with the change as they are still individualistic but also now look like they are meant to be together.

Right then, time to finish these chaps up!

1st Work-In-Progress Photo

This is my first ever Work-In-Progress photo!! These are the bowmen that I've been painting over the last few days. They're taking a bit longer than I had expected but I'm happy with how they look so far... not crazy about the red-shirted fellow's face but viewed in person doesn't look so bad. I will most likely finish them tomorrow, although I am not planning on basing them until I am ready to base the billmen as well.

I have some photos of the other elements which I painted for the HYW:English army last fall and will get them posted soon.

That's it for now, time to go to sleep.