Week 35 - Elven Progress Report #3

This week was a rather busy one, not in the good way. While things were off to a good start on Monday, (I got some time to paint!) that was also the only opportunity to paint until this evening. As a result I have only painted 8 elves this week. I did however finish assembling all the spearmen, which leaves me with just the bolt throwers, cavalry, drakons and archers to trim and assemble. I had a go at trimming the cavalry this week, it took almost an hour to do just one (blasted restic) so I will do the bolt throwers and drakons first I think.

Assembled but not yet painted.

Painted so far.

This weeks efforts.

I received my latest Lootcrate this week as well, photo below.

This one contained a glow-in-the-dark Groot Pop! figure, Leonardo TMNT figure, TMNT sunglasses, Sonic the hedgehog air freshener, the Flash shoelace lightning bolts, Deadpool magnet and some online download codes for digital items and a Steam game. Overall I'm not super happy with this crate. The Groot is cool, as is the Leo. The glasses aren't any use to me (I wear prescription glasses and don't use contacts) and the lightning bolts aren't great on black workboots. The sonic air freshener is really strong. The free game is kind of cool. Overall I've lost a little on this crate, which is why I decided to cancel my subscription. At least with a guaranteed shirt I knew I was getting my moneys worth, which is why I have swapped to Nerdblocks new Gamer box. Of course within hours of cancelling my Lootcrate they reveal next months crate theme: Galaxy, with an item from each of Firefly, Star Trek and Star Wars. It is another figure based crate too. Nuts. I may have to gift myself one...

Oh and my Relic Knights have shown up! Never thought I would see the day. I will update the Wall of Shame when I have gone through and counted everything.

Day 243
184/243 Painted/Days passed
184/136 Painted/Bought
Goals:
Build a permanent gaming table.
Build a Kings of War army for playing with.
Complete my entry for the terrain competition.
Build and paint a set of Deadzone battle groups.
Build and paint a full Malifaux crew.
Finish all of the Dreadball teams and MVPs.
Finish painting an Infinity group.
Make some headway on my Warpath fluff.

Week 34 - Elven Progress Report #2

Here we are at week two of my efforts to build and paint a 1500 point KOW army in eight weeks. This week I assembled another 30 spearmen and rebuilt my dragon. Painting-wise I have finished another 24 elves, mostly more spearmen. This brings me to a total of 66 painted elves with a further 56 assembled and undercoated. I have another 20 or so spearmen left before I get into the more time consuming models, the cavalry and bolt throwers. There doesn't seem to be any movement on my extra scouts from Mantic, so I may have to adjust my list. I will hopefully get my two drakons this week which could be suitable replacements. I have an idea on what I will do for the multi-bases, I just need the appropriate materials and a pair of horde sized bases...

This weeks contributions.

I also found some time to finish off the second Morat prototype, I kind of like this scheme but will do another test model before making up my mind. I have some blasted earth bases that I will do the Morats in once the colour scheme has been narrowed down.

So I didn't make as much progress this week as I would have liked but I am still relatively on track for completing my Elf army for the tournament. I can always take one of the pricier characters in order to pad things out if it comes to it. As for my other goals I may be able to find some time to finish them off while working on the elves. No guarantees though!

Day 236
176/236 Painted/Days passed
176/116 Painted/Bought
Goals:
Build a permanent gaming table.
Build a Kings of War army for playing with.
Complete my entry for the terrain competition.
Build and paint a set of Deadzone battle groups.
Build and paint a full Malifaux crew.
Finish all of the Dreadball teams and MVPs.
Finish painting an Infinity group.
Make some headway on my Warpath fluff.

Week 33 - Elven Progress Report #1

I'm now one week in to trying to build and paint a 1500 point KOW army in eight weeks. This week I managed to assemble 40 more elf spearmen and get them undercoated. I also managed to completely paint 42 of the elves that were already assembled. There are 3 more that are almost done, they are command models that need additional attention. The photos below show the painted models so far and close-ups on two of the completed units.

So if everything goes to plan I will keep up the current pace. This should mean that each week I will have 40-50 models waiting for undercoat while I paint up the 40 ish from the previous week. This will fall over in about two weeks time, when I start doing the more complicated cavalry models. I expect that they will take more time to build and paint (as they are plastic resin) but I only need 10 of them. I am also waiting for some models to be shipped to me, so I may have to adjust my army list to compensate. If I have time (or will) I may be able to do the leftover models once the army is done, leaving me with a fully painted set of KOW models, which would be pretty awesome.

I have also worked a little bit on my Combined Army Infinity test models and I have finished the first one. I'm not convinced that I will use this colour scheme, I need to see how the other ones come out first. I am working on a purple based one and need to decide on another base colour for the last test model.

It is a little rough around the edges but it conveys the general feeling of what I was aiming for. There will be some time between the next ones getting done, considering my primary project but I am still working on my goals in the background. I even have a test model under way for my DZC Scourge...

Day 229
152/229 Painted/Days passed
152/116 Painted/Bought
Goals:
Build a permanent gaming table.
Build a Kings of War army for playing with.
Complete my entry for the terrain competition.
Build and paint a set of Deadzone battle groups.
Build and paint a full Malifaux crew.
Finish all of the Dreadball teams and MVPs.
Finish painting an Infinity group.
Make some headway on my Warpath fluff.

Week 32 - March of the Elves

So there is quite a bit to cover this week. I have the individual team shots of last weeks Dreadball progress and the 40 new ones I finished up this week. I also have a mad little project to cover... Anyway, on to the pictures!

Asterians

Cheerleaders

Free agents, Zees in pairs

More free agents

Zzor knockdown tokens and two giants

Judwan free agent and knockdown tokens

Marauders

MVPs

Nameless

Teratons

So that effort leaves me with three giants, one MVP to do via the dip method (the ones that had their paint melt last week,) a human team (able to do both kinds) and a robots team being done properly. This is a much more reasonable point to try and finish the Dreadball goal from.

In other news there is a KOW tournament, mid October in Auckland that KnightWolf and I are thinking of attending. It is a 1500 point event, which of course neither of us have enough assembled to even get close to playing. So I/we can either a) borrow one of the spare armies available or b) try and get ~1500 point of KOW models assembled and painted in just two months. So of course the only sensible option is b!

Rather than just blindly start throwing stuff together I did a little maths. The obvious starting point would be my 600 points of Abyssal Dwarves that were already assembled. I drafted up a list from what I had available and ended up needing 50 more models built. Not too bad, until I realised that about 40 of those were Mantics plastic resin, which from experience takes about an hour to trim and assemble just one large or complicated model. This would take too long, not to mention the colour scheme, archive photo below.

So instead, for a laugh, I worked out an elf list, seeing as I had quite a few and that they are plastic (not plastic resin.) It worked out that I needed about 200 of my elves to make a 1500 point list. Which is even less possible, surely? Well... As it turns out (I tested this) I can trim and assemble about 10 elves in an hour.  So in a working week I can get 1/4 of my elf army built, the next challenge is the paint job. After a bit of thinking I came up with this:

Now it may not be pretty, but it is quick. This was done with just a white undercoat, two paint colours and three wash colours. With how simple this paint scheme is I think I can batch paint a weeks worth of models in just a few hours. From there it will just be getting them on a set of multi bases and doing the details on those. There are some advantages other than just speed with this. The paint scheme is easy to touch up, I can improve things when I have more time like adding detail colours or highlights. The other advantage of this is that when unit based I only have to focus on the models on the edges, the middle ones should have enough colour to conceal the lower paint jobs. I'm also pretty keen on having another 200 models done!

So that was a lot of talk, how about some results? Here is what I have got done so far on the elves. I'm just waiting on some pinning gear to get the wings back on my dragon...

Day 222
109/222 Painted/Days passed
109/114 Painted/Bought
Goals:
Build a permanent gaming table.
Build a Kings of War army for playing with.
Complete my entry for the terrain competition.
Build and paint a set of Deadzone battle groups.
Build and paint a full Malifaux crew.
Finish all of the Dreadball teams and MVPs.
Finish painting an Infinity group.
Make some headway on my Warpath fluff.

Week 31 - When the Cat is Away...

The mouse gets some painting done! Or something like that... So this week the Wife and Child went out of town on a day trip to help a friend with wedding dress shopping. This left me home alone for most of a day so (since I had some warning) I spent the week building as many Dreadball figures as I could and laying down some undercoats, all in preparation for busting out as many playable quality (dipped) models as I could. (I emptied 5 cans of spray paint this week!) The end result was 34 painted of the 95 I had ready to go. Not as many as I had hoped to do (all 95) but not a bad effort nonetheless. Unfortunately I had four more ready to go but the dip caused the spray undercoat to melt on the first two... So now I have to strip them back. Anyway, an overview photo is below, close-ups to follow when they are fully dry.

This makes me feel a lot more comfortable about finishing the Dreadball stuff off by years end. I have since then got another 22 ready to dip, I just want to get the last 9 models assembled and the remainder painted to go with them first. I then have about 30 that will get a proper paint job (well, speed painted anyway) to finish everything up.

Also, as promised, I have some photos of the Malifaux board I entered into the competition the other week. There were only two people who entered and unfortunately I lost (it was 13 votes to 15) but maybe next time... The 8ft long snow table definitely had me on terrain quantity so looked rather impressive.

I played a good game of Malifaux on the board and got some feedback from a veteran player, I need a bit more terrain in the middle of the board to stop ranged crews from dominating but otherwise it is good. I'm thinking maybe a rail station and/or a stable would be a good idea...

My July Lootcrate came through, this month was Villains. I got another shirt, fridge magnet, key-chain, socks, comic book, a Villains DVD and a pair of prints. I'm pretty happy with this one, my key-chain had just broken, the comic was funny and the shirt and socks are awesome. I also really like the prints and hope the DVD is cool. Next month is Heroes, with an exclusive Pop! figure, which sounds good. This will be my first crate without a shirt so I hope it is good.

So one more thing this month is that I was accepted into the MightyApe referral program. Rather than let ads be plastered all over my blog this will hopefully be a bit less intrusive (whoever designed those auto-playing video ads with sound needs a good flogging) and maintain some of my integrity... The deal is that by clicking on the links I post (like the Dreadball one here and above) you will be taken to the MightyApe store page, if you buy something from MightyApe in that window I get a small commission. That will let me buy more things (I have my eye on a Dust Allied Starter...) and in turn let me post about more on my blog. The Wall of Shame will have the relevant titles updated with permanent links and generally there will be one or two links in my weekly (~ish) posts. Hopefully this won't upset too many people or change the function or operation of the blog. Of course if you are shopping at MightyApe anyway if you click through one of my links I still get some commission...

Day 215
69/215 Painted/Days passed
69/73 Painted/Bought
Goals:
Build a permanent gaming table.
Build a Kings of War army for playing with.
Complete my entry for the terrain competition.
Build and paint a set of Deadzone battle groups.
Build and paint a full Malifaux crew.
Finish all of the Dreadball teams and MVPs.
Finish painting an Infinity group.
Make some headway on my Warpath fluff.