Week 31 - Back at the Desk

Its been a little while (again) since I was able to get some painting done, but I have another commission so I needed to clear a path to get some work done. I have another 10 circle models on the books to complete so they have had a bit of attention the last couple days. I also got the last couple details on my Dreadball Xtreme Ada-Lorana team. These guys were pretty easy since they were cast in transparent blue, I tried to accent the transparency while also not letting them look too flat. I tried anyway...

I'm hoping to get the commission wrapped up in a couple weeks but that depends a lot on life. I just unloaded a pile of models on Trademe, including almost all of my Undead and a lot of my Robotech. I've just about emptied my big box of sprues now, which means I can gather up some of the other boxed items to cram in there. I should be able to start moving freely through my work-space soon! It has been a long time since that was ever possible. I've also fallen behind on my target again, hopefully it wont take too much to get back on track.

Day 214
209/214 Painted/Days passed
Goals:
Commission models - 10
Finish painting Infinity Morats - 11/11
Paint all DZC Scourge - 36/46
Paint Xtreme Ada-Lorana - 9/9
Paint all Directorate - 44/44
Finish all of the Dreadball teams and MVPs. - 4/4
Build and paint remaining KOW Elves - 68/83
Paint all Toxic zombies - 14/37
Paint all Berserk zombies - 0/37
Build and paint a full Malifaux crew - 12/16

Week 21 - Putting Brush to Plastic

It looks like weekends are starting to free up again, yay! After spending the last couple months with only limited free time I am just starting to get time painting models again. I have a photo of the last 4 dreadball models (technically done last week) and the last Scourge model. As an added bonus I also finished some of my Arcanists for Malifaux. Pictures below.

This means I have finished all of the original Dreadball models, wrapped up my Scourge (so far) and have a good start to my Malifaux. I've been busy unloading stuff on Trademe so have managed to get rid of my Kirai crew and some of my Robotech as well. The Kirai crew no longer played the way I wanted and doesn't fit with the rest of my Malifaux stuff so was easy to let go. The Robotech was surplus to my needs and was easier to move than I expected, a nice bonus.

So I have been pretty lucky that my work earlier in the year has kept me ahead of schedule during this down time. I will keep working on the Arcanists stuff over the next couple weeks but I will have to find another project to focus on pretty soon. Maybe I will finally finish those Elves!

Day 144
179/144 Painted/Days passed
Goals:
Commission models - 10
Finish painting Infinity Morats - 11/11
Paint all DZC Scourge - 32/32
Paint all Directorate - 44/44
Finish all of the Dreadball teams and MVPs. - 4/4
Build and paint remaining KOW Elves - 68/83
Build and paint a full Malifaux crew - 9/16
Build and paint all Deadzone Enforcers - 0/34
Build and paint all Deadzone Plague - 0/21

Week 49 - Entering the Final Rush

Sorry for no post last week, a sudden death in the family caught us all off guard. You will be sorely missed Gordon.

I happened to have a day to myself yesterday so spent it as productively as I could, painting Robots, Elves and building Mars Attacks terrain while watching cartoons. A good day indeed. The fruits of my labour are shown below.

That is my last 9 robots and another 39 elves all painted up and ready for basing. Which leaves me just 4 Dreadball MVPs to paint to finish both my goal of completing Dreadball and painting 365 models this year. I have also undercoated my first 5 Martians and am about ready to start on them.

I received another Arcade block this week, the contents are: A Mario dissected T-shirt, Assassins Creed Pop! vinyl, Minecraft hanger (Zombie Pigman,) Star stressball, TF2 wrapping paper and a DOTA 2 bandana.

The shirt is cool (hopefully this one gets the wife's approval!) as is the Pop! figure. I had been planning on grabbing some Minecraft merchandise at some point (surprised it took this long to get one) and I had been wanting a stress ball. The TF2 wrapping paper is cool but I don't know anybody who would appreciate it, may have to get my presents wrapped in it I guess...

Day 341
361/341 Painted/Days passed
361/Too many! 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 47 - Mad Dash for the Finish Line

With the year wrapping up I have launched into it, painting up 28 elves and 3 robots. I'm pretty happy with how the robots are progressing, they aren't what I intended (Non-metallic metal gold) but they also don't take forever and I really want to finish all my Dreadball this year, before Xtreme ships. The elves didn't take long either and I have another 40 or so to work on this week, which will just about cover what I need to do for the year with the rest of my Dreadball stuff.

I would really like to finish my elf dragon before the year is out which shouldn't be too challenging. I played my first game of Mars Attacks this week. I played as the Martians and Knightwolf took the role of Humanity. I lost but it was a great game and quite close despite the first scenario being weighted to the Human force. I have 10 Martians lined up to do before the year ends, all things going well at least.

Day 327
313/327 Painted/Days passed
313/414 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 38 - Elven Progress Report #5

Posting a day late, but better than never! A few developments in the last couple weeks, the first being that the KOW tournament has been postponed to November, meaning that Knightwolf and I can go again, yay! This also means that I have to get the Elves finished but with a bit more time... So with this revelation I made a point of working on some more, finishing up another 6 spearmen this week. I've also got down to the last half dozen elves to assemble for the tournament and started to work on the multi-bases.

I also spent a bit of time working on my Dreadball models, finishing up my Human team. This was very quick as the scheme is the same as my Corporation (being the team sponsor) and all they need now is hex bases and player numbers. Next I need to figure out a scheme for my Robots team, sponsored by the R&D part of the same Corporation sponsor.

This brings my total for the week to 20 models, which isn't too shabby. I've restocked my spray paint supply, which will let me get the rest of the elves ready for painting and let me work on some of my other models. Deadzone wave 2 arrived this week, adding a large number of models to my 'to do' pile. This kind of sinks the 'paint more than you buy' counter but never mind...

The next development of the last couple weeks was that I now have a DSLR camera for taking photos! Not only that but it has a macro lens, which will let me get some better close shots. When time permits I will be able to re-shoot some finished models for the gallery page, probably over the Xmas period.

The last thing to happen was I got asked to paint some models for somebody else! Admittedly it is because I sold them some models and they have since added to the units, so want the models to match. Works for me anyway! So they are high priority on my painting table, they still need some trimming before I can start on them.

Day 265
204/265 Painted/Days passed
204/279 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.

Week 29 - Productive Procrastination

So I have 99% finished my terrain competition entry, I just have a final little finishing touch for the buildings. As a result I won't post pictures of the final products today, I will take photos of everything together at the competition instead. The competition was postponed another week (to tomorrow,) giving me time to finish... Yay.

As the post title suggests I wasn't exactly focussed these last two weeks. I do find it funny that I was procrastinating hobby stuff by finishing other hobby stuff. For my efforts I have finished up the two sentry guns for my Deadzone Enforcers, the rest of a Plague starter (also for Deadzone) and a prototype for my Human Dreadball team. Photos are below.

This means that I have finished two more goals this month. Which isn't too bad for just over half way through the year, in my opinion anyway! Behind the scenes I have been working away on the other goals; I have assembled and undercoated the rest of my Haqqislam models, been assembling the rest of my Dreadball models and assembling the rest of Kirais crew. I still hope to finish these goals by the end of the year and so far I think it is still possible. The Dreadball models will be the real test...

Day 201
35/201 Painted/Days passed
35/65 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.